VATICAN CITY — Pope Leo XIV has established an in-house study group on artificial intelligence and signed his first encyclical, which is expected to argue for an ethics-based approach to the technology that prioritizes human dignity and peace, the Vatican announced Saturday.
The encyclical, signed on May 15 — the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s landmark “Rerum Novarum” — is likely to frame the AI question within the church’s social teaching tradition, which also addresses labor, justice, and peace. “Rerum Novarum,” meaning “Of New Things,” responded to the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution and became the foundation of modern Catholic social thought. “There are almost a billion and a half Catholics in the world, so that alone is reason to pay attention,” said Thomas Harmon, a theology professor at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. “But beyond the numbers, the Catholic Church has a deep and sophisticated tradition of thinking through what it means to be human.”
In his first address to the cardinals after his 2025 election, Leo told them the church owed the world the “treasury of its social teaching” to confront AI’s challenges to “human dignity, justice and labor.”
Meghan Sullivan, a philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame who directs its ethics institute, said the church is positioned to be a leading voice. “I think that the Catholic Church in many ways is going to be the adult in the room on some of these debates about how we are going to integrate AI into the rest of our society,” she said. “For sure, the pope is going to be one of the most forceful advocates for human dignity in these discussions.”
The Vatican has a record of AI engagement. In 2020, it launched the Rome Call for AI Ethics, which drew signatories including Microsoft, IBM, and Cisco, and outlined principles such as accountability, impartiality, and privacy. Pope Francis, in his final years, called for an international treaty to regulate AI and, in a 2024 address to the Group of Seven, insisted that politicians must ensure AI remains human-centric and that decisions about lethal force remain under human control. Francis also urged a ban on lethal autonomous weapons, or “killer robots.”
Leo XIV, a math major who has warned priests against using AI to compose homilies, has emphasized the danger of deepfakes and generative AI’s threat to the search for truth. In a June 2025 speech, he acknowledged AI’s contributions to healthcare and science but questioned “its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, on our distinctive ability to grasp reality.”
He has also called for monitoring AI’s use in warfare, pointing to conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. “What is happening in Ukraine, in Gaza and the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon and in Iran illustrates the inhuman evolution of the relationship between war and new technologies in a spiral of annihilation,” he said this past week at La Sapienza university in Rome.
The Vatican’s push comes as the Trump administration pursues a sharply different course. The United States has rejected international regulatory efforts to constrain AI and has removed bureaucratic hurdles to domestic development. President Donald Trump’s May 16 trip to China included AI business discussions; traveling with him on Air Force One were Elon Musk, whose platform X features the Grok AI chatbot, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Nvidia recently won federal approval to sell its H200 AI chips to Chinese customers.
The Vatican has also flagged the environmental cost of the AI race, noting the “vast amounts of energy and water” consumed by data centers and computation.
The announcement caps a series of Vatican initiatives aimed at shaping global AI norms. The United Nations adopted a governance architecture last year, and the European Union implemented its AI Act in 2024, but both efforts remain largely nonbinding or face resistance from major AI powers. The upcoming encyclical is expected to inject the church’s moral authority into those debates.