Pope Leo XIV released a sprawling 42,000-word encyclical Monday calling on political and corporate leaders worldwide to impose strict legal controls on artificial intelligence, warning that unchecked AI development threatens to destroy jobs on a mass scale and make autonomous warfare dangerously easy to wage.
The document, titled "Magnifica Humanitas", Latin for "Magnificent Humanity", marks the first major teaching letter of Leo's papacy. It lands squarely in the middle of a global debate over how fast governments should move to regulate AI systems that are already reshaping labor markets, military planning, and everyday life.
And it puts the Vatican on a collision course with Silicon Valley executives and political leaders who have resisted heavy-handed oversight of the technology sector. Just the News reported that the pope's encyclical explicitly demanded "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility."
The encyclical's central argument is blunt: AI is moving faster than the institutions meant to govern it, and the consequences will fall hardest on ordinary workers. Pope Leo XIV warned that a society built on AI-driven automation risks leaving most of its citizens behind.
In the pope's words:
"A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment."
That is not an abstract theological musing. It is a direct challenge to the business model powering the AI boom, one that promises efficiency gains for corporations while offering few guarantees to the workers displaced by those gains.
The pope also took aim at the concentration of power among a handful of AI developers. "A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few," he wrote. The line reads like a rebuke aimed at the small circle of tech executives and engineers who currently set the ethical guardrails, such as they are, for the most powerful AI systems on the planet.
The New York Post reported that Leo XIV compared unchecked AI development to the biblical Tower of Babel, framing the choice facing humanity in theological terms: "The primary choice is not between a 'yes' or 'no' to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem." The pope presented the encyclical alongside Chris Olah, co-founder of AI company Anthropic, which is itself in a legal dispute with the Trump administration.
The encyclical's sharpest language concerns military applications of AI. Pope Leo XIV warned that "the growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more 'feasible' and less subject to human control."
That framing carries weight at a moment when multiple world powers are racing to develop AI-guided drones, targeting systems, and battlefield decision-making tools. The pope's position is unambiguous: machines should not hold the power of life and death.
The Washington Examiner noted that the encyclical states flatly, "It is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems." The pope further insisted that "the chain of responsibility must be identifiable and verifiable; those who design, train, authorize and employ technology must be held accountable for their decisions."
The Vatican's stance on AI regulation has already drawn attention from those tracking foreign influence operations targeting U.S. artificial intelligence policy, a reminder that the global AI governance debate involves far more players than just the Vatican and Washington.
Beyond regulation, Leo XIV urged labor unions to build broader political coalitions with government and corporate leaders to protect employment from AI-driven automation. The call reflects a Catholic social teaching tradition that has long emphasized the dignity of work, but it also reads as an implicit criticism of political leaders who have treated AI displacement as an inevitable cost of progress rather than a policy failure to be prevented.
The pope did not name specific countries or leaders. But the encyclical's demand for political leaders to slow down and assert control over AI development cuts against the grain of the current policy environment in Washington, where both parties have largely deferred to the private sector on AI timelines and deployment.
The pope called for "a more active political involvement that is capable of slowing things down when everything is accelerating." That line, quoted in the New York Post's coverage, amounts to a direct plea for governments to stop treating AI companies as partners and start treating them as entities that need to be governed.
Alongside the AI encyclical, Pope Leo XIV issued a separate communication offering a formal apology for the Roman Catholic Church's historical role in slavery. The pope acknowledged centuries of institutional failure, and institutional complicity.
"Already in the early modern period, the Apostolic See of Rome, responding to the requests of sovereigns, intervened several times in order to regulate and legitimize forms of subjugation, and, in certain cases, including the enslavement of 'infidels.'"
Leo XIV did not soften the admission. He said the Church could "neither deny nor diminish the delay with which both society and the church came to denounce the scourge of slavery." The historical period he referenced, the 14th through 16th centuries, covers an era when papal authority actively sanctioned forms of enslavement tied to religious conquest.
The pope framed the apology in terms of sorrow and accountability: "It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord." He concluded: "For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon."
The timing of the apology, paired with a forward-looking document about technology, appears designed to position Leo XIV as a pope willing to reckon with the past while asserting moral authority over the future. Whether the combination strengthens or dilutes either message is a question the Vatican will have to answer in the weeks ahead.
The encyclical does not exist in a political vacuum. Pope Leo XIV has already clashed publicly with the Trump administration on multiple fronts. The pope declared he was "not afraid" of President Trump during a dispute over Iran policy, and the Vatican recently appointed a veteran diplomat as its U.S. envoy amid what observers described as strained Holy See-Washington ties.
The Washington Examiner reported that the pope's AI stance could restart tensions with the administration, particularly given existing disagreements on foreign policy. The encyclical's insistence that technology is "never neutral" and that developers must face accountability is a framework that sits uneasily with the administration's lighter-touch approach to tech regulation.
Newsmax reported that the pope urged AI developers to put humanity before profit, a message that, whatever its moral force, carries no binding legal weight and asks corporate leaders to voluntarily constrain the very systems generating their revenue.
The broader Vatican-White House friction has also drawn in European leaders. Italian Prime Minister Meloni sided publicly with the pope in one recent exchange, prompting a rebuke from President Trump.
For all its length, 42,000-plus words, the encyclical leaves significant questions unanswered. It does not propose a specific regulatory framework. It does not name the companies or governments it wants held accountable. It does not explain how labor unions should build the coalitions it calls for, or what enforcement mechanisms would give its principles teeth.
The document also does not address whether the Vatican's own moral authority extends credibly into the arena of technology governance, a field where the Church has no institutional expertise and no regulatory power. Breitbart characterized the encyclical as a manifesto pondering the future of humanity, a framing that captures both its ambition and its limits.
Pope Leo XIV is the first U.S.-born pope, and his willingness to wade into policy debates, on AI, on immigration, on foreign affairs, has made him a more politically visible figure than many of his predecessors. Whether that visibility translates into influence over the governments and corporations he is addressing remains an open question.
Conservative readers should take the encyclical seriously without taking it as gospel on public policy. The pope is right that AI-driven job displacement is a real threat to working families, and that autonomous weapons systems raise profound moral questions about human control over lethal force. Those are concerns shared across the political spectrum.
But the encyclical's instinct, to call for more government regulation, more oversight bodies, more political control over private innovation, is the same instinct that has produced bloated bureaucracies and stifled economic growth in other sectors. The answer to AI's risks is not necessarily the creation of new international regulatory regimes staffed by the same class of technocrats who have failed to govern existing technologies responsibly.
The pope asks political leaders not to "abdicate responsibility." Fair enough. But responsibility also means not handing unelected regulators a blank check to decide which technologies get built and which do not.
A 42,000-word encyclical can diagnose a problem. It takes accountable, elected leaders, not papal letters, to solve one.
