Pope Leo XIV on Monday released his first encyclical, a 42,300-word document titled Magnifica Humanitas that calls for the “disarmament” of artificial intelligence, condemns autonomous weapons and political deepfakes, and accuses a small number of corporations of monopolizing a technology the Church now classifies as a second industrial revolution. He presented it at the Vatican himself, departing from the customary practice of delegating the rollout to cardinals, and he did so flanked at the dais by Christopher Olah, co-founder of the A.I. lab Anthropic.
The staging was the message. Olah’s presence was, in Time’s reading, a symbolic gesture of dialogue between the Church and the industry the document seeks to constrain.
Signed on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the encyclical binds itself explicitly to the 1891 text in which Leo XIII confronted industrial capitalism. The current pope’s choice of name was deliberate, and the document doesn’t pretend otherwise: in his address to the College of Cardinals, Leo XIV framed the present moment as belonging “to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence.”
Organized in five chapters grounded in Catholic social doctrine, Magnifica Humanitas advances a central analytical claim: “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” From that premise the document moves into harder territory. Just-war theory, the pope declares, is “now outdated” in an era of autonomous weapons; legitimate force is restricted to “self-defense in the strictest sense.”
The Washington Post called the encyclical “a broadside against AI companies,” drawing the obvious parallel to Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s 2015 climate document, and noting the text’s invocation of the universal destination of goods against the concentration of A.I. capacity in a handful of firms. Leo XIV also turns the lens inward, apologizing for the Church’s historical role in legitimizing slavery and naming the structures still to be purified: “inequality, lack of transparency and abuse of power.”
That last phrase is where the document’s strategy becomes legible. By auditing the institution before auditing Silicon Valley, Leo XIV preempts the standard rebuttal that ethics lectures from Rome carry their own historical liabilities.
“The time to talk about AI is now. It is urgent,” said Anna Rowlands, a theologian at Durham University who spoke at the launch.
Leo XIV anticipated the predictable counter as well. “calling for prudence, rigorous evaluation and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI does not mean opposing progress,” he writes, but is rather “an exercise of responsible care for the human family.” It’s the encyclical’s quietest sentence and its most strategically placed one: the Vatican has decided that deceleration is a moral category, and it has chosen the 135th anniversary of an industrial-age document to say so.