Just days after the new pope, Leo XIV, took up his position as head of the Catholic Church, he started talking about artificial intelligence.
In his first speech to the press, he recognized that AI has “immense potential” but emphasized that we need to “ensure that it can be used for the good of all.”
And in his first address to the cardinals, he explained that he actually chose the name Leo XIV because of AI. The name is a reference to a previous pope, Leo XIII, who held the position during the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century. That former pontiff weighed in on how rising capitalism and the new technology of the day risked turning workers into commodities. The Catholic Church, he argued, should stand up for workers’ rights and dignity.
The new pope signaled that he thinks the Church must once again step into that role.
“In our own day, the Church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor,” Leo XIV said.
On the surface, AI and Catholicism might seem like a strange combination. Since when is Silicon Valley supposed to take marching orders from the Vatican?
But when you take a look at Catholic history, you realize that AI is exactly the sort of thing the pope should have strong opinions on. The Church’s past suggests that technology is something for it to actively engage with — cheering it on where appropriate, criticizing where necessary, but never just disengaging. AI in particular is forcing big questions about the meaning of human life, and it’s important to have spiritual thinkers weigh in on those instead of just letting technologists run the show.
The Catholic Church was the Silicon Valley of the Middle Ages
Nowadays, a lot of people think of the Catholic Church as technologically retrograde. It’s known for its negative views on abortion and contraception. And well before that, during the Renaissance, it was known for persecuting forward-thinking scientists like Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei because they challenged church doctrines, like the idea that the Earth is at the center of the universe.
But go back to the medieval period and you’ll see that the Catholic Church and technological innovation once went hand in hand.
That’s because Christian thinkers in the Middle Ages developed a radical idea: Technology, they theorized, could help us restore humanity to the perfection of Adam before his fall from grace. If part of what it meant for Adam to be formed in God’s image was that he was a creator, a maker, then maybe the key to human redemption was to lean into that aspect of ourselves.
Even in the midst of the so-called Dark Ages, this idea took off in monasteries, where the motto “ora et labora” — prayer and work — circulated widely. Some of these monasteries became hotbeds of engineering, yielding inventions like the first known tidal-powered water wheel and impact-drilled well. Catholics also gave us everything from metallurgy and mills to the widescale adoption of clocks and the printing press. To this day, engineers have not one but four patron saints in Catholicism.
“Overall the Church has been very positive toward technology in the past,” Brian Green, a Catholic professor who focuses on technology ethics at Santa Clara University, told me in 2018. “But as humans have become more powerful, the Church has felt like it has to say no to more things,” particularly technologies that it perceives as hindering human life, like birth control or nuclear weapons.
How Pope Francis paved the way on AI
The problem for the Church is that opposing technological innovation risks making it seem more and more at odds with modern life. The late Pope Francis recognized that the Church needs to engage with tech if it wants to stay relevant.
To discuss how tech can be used for good, in 2016 he met up with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Eric Schmidt, then the executive chair of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. He had the Vatican serve as a venue for a hackathon as well as a climate tech competition. And in an encyclical, or papal letter, called Laudato Si, he enthused about tech’s potential to reshape humanity’s future.
But he also warned that AI development couldn’t be a reckless free-for-all. He called for international regulation. At a Vatican event last year, he emphasized that AI should be used to “satisfy the needs of humanity,” not “enrich and increase the already high power of the few technological giants.”
Francis also insisted that we shouldn’t look to AI as if to a perfect, God-like decision-maker — that would be idolatry. Instead of outsourcing our agency to machines, Francis advocated for “a renewed appreciation for all that is human.”
The Church, which valorizes divine revelation, hasn’t always embraced humanism, the view that humans have the agency and abilities to figure out the truth and improve the world through their own reason. But Francis called on his followers to adopt a new Christian humanism — to assert their agency and decision-making abilities while still drawing on religious sources for pointers in the search for meaning.
“The Sacred Scripture,” Francis said, “offers us the essential coordinates.”
Why Catholicism — and other religions — should weigh in on AI
Pope Francis, and the 19th-century Pope Leo XIII before him, were making a key point: The Catholic Church can and should express opinions on the big technological developments of the day, because they relate to moral and spiritual questions.
The AI revolution is raising a lot of these pressing questions: How can we stop power from becoming concentrated in the hands of a few? How do we make sure the economic spoils are fairly distributed to everyone? Which kinds of labor and which choices should we outsource to AI, and which should we keep for ourselves because they’re ennobling or essential to human agency? Should we allow AI to take over artistic creation? What is a human life for, anyway?
These kinds of questions are the bread and butter of religion. So it’s entirely appropriate for religious leaders to weigh in on them. Failing to do so would mean missing out on perhaps the biggest moral tipping point of the century.
That’s not to say religion has all the right answers. But, as Francis suggested, we can think of it as a compass. Over the millennia, it’s had the chance to identify some of humanity’s “essential coordinates” — our fundamental psychological needs. And it’s developed mechanisms to meet them.
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII offered an example of this in Rerum Novarum, an encyclical laying out his views on the Industrial Revolution. He observed that people will sometimes consent to things that are actually terrible for them — for example, working seven days a week. So their interests need to be protected. That’s why there’s a religious obligation to observe a day of rest, the pope explained: We need to keep people from allowing themselves to become commodities.
The new Pope Leo has a powerful opportunity to bring that argument into the 21st century.
