Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on May 25, a 40,000-word document that warns the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence without ethical guardrails poses a threat to democratic societies. The text — “Magnifica Humanity: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” — argues that when truth loses its value and pragmatism replaces principle, democratic life weakens and societies can drift toward totalitarianism. Citing the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the pope wrote that totalitarian regimes require citizens “for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie, the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
The encyclical criticizes what it calls a “growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm” that risks “reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.” The warning comes as Silicon Valley and the Trump administration have embraced rapid AI deployment with limited federal oversight.
Beyond technology, the pope has emerged as a vocal critic of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. The pontiff has opposed the U.S.-Iran war and condemned the use of religious justifications by Trump and his supporters to defend the conflict, according to a column published Wednesday in The Guardian by Arwa Mahdawi. Trump responded by describing the pope as “WEAK on crime,” and Fox News host Sean Hannity questioned whether the pope had read the Bible, the column reported.
Pope Leo has also pressed for humanitarian access to Gaza, a priority of his predecessor, Pope Francis. In November 2023, Francis described Israel’s assault on Gaza as “terrorism” and sought to send a popemobile converted into a health clinic for children, which Israeli authorities have not allowed into the territory. Leo has reminded the world that “the people of Gaza are still not receiving humanitarian aid,” according to the column’s account of his remarks.
The encyclical’s release marks a further step in the Vatican’s growing engagement with AI ethics. Last month, the Vatican created an AI study group, and the pope has warned that AI-driven weaponry could lead to a “spiral of annihilation.” The new document seeks to place the protection of human dignity at the center of the technology’s development.