Just two days ago, in the morning of May 25th, something absolutely unusual happened in the Vatican's Synod Hall. HH. Pope Leo XIV walked into a room filled with cardinals, diplomats and also some top guys from the AI industry, and personally presented his first encyclical. That fact alone was historically unprecedented as it was the first time in history when a Pope himself attended the launch of his own documents. The encyclical was called Magnifica Humanitas ( Latin for "Magnificent Humanity"), and he said was addressed not just to Catholics but to "every person of goodwill"
The timing was most probably not accidental when we realise that, despite not having been widely commented, Leo XIV signed it on May 15th, the very exact 135 anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the landmark 1891 encyclical in which his predecessor and namesake Leo XIII responded to the dehumanization caused by the Industrial Revolution.
The message embedded in that date is impossible to miss, and drove the minds of everyone to the fact that we are right now living through another revolution of equal magnitude, and the Church has something urgent to say about it.
The document was written originally in English and to read it in that language was specially interesting as the powerful message was better perceived, as it happens when we, non native english speakers, watch an American movie in its original version. It's opening words set the tone with strong clarity, saying the following: "Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice, either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together"
That is not a metaphor chosen carelessly, because what Leo XIV most clearly argues throughout Magnifica Humanitas is that technology is not our enemy (the encyclical is explicit that AI is neither "a force antagonistic to humanity" nor "inherently evil"), but it is equally explicit that technology is never neutral. It takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it and finally use it, which means that the question is not whether AI is good or bad in the abstract.
The question is what vision of the human person is embedded in the data, the models and the decisions being made right now, mostly by a very small number of people and at extraordinary speed.
This is where the encyclical becomes specifically important for those of us who build technology for a living.
The Pope argues that "a more moral AI" is not enough if that morality is determined only by a few. He calls for active political and social involvement capable of "slowing things down when everything is accelerating". Not to stop progress but to ensure that communities still have the chance to participate, ask questions and shape the future that is being built in their name.
Sitting in that room at the Vatican, listening to the Pope, was Christopher Olah, one of the founders of Anthropic which as we all know is one of the most powerful AI companies on earth, and a man who describes himself as not a believer. After the presentation, Christopher said he was grateful to the Church for "taking this work of discernment seriously" and even issued his own call: "We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend"
That sentence, from an AI engineer at a Papal encyclical launch, says something profound about where we are.
For anyone building software, developing AI systems and making the daily decisions about what to optimize for and what to leave behind, Magnifica Humanitas is a reminder that every technical choice carries a moral weight because the human being on the other end of the product is not just a user metric. They are, in the Catholic tradition, made in the image of God. Unrepeatable and irreducible to simple data.
Despite its probable errors, nobody can deny that the Church has been thinking about human dignity for two thousand years. It was thinking about it way before the algorithm, before the chip, before the first line of code was ever written. That continuity of thought, and the insistence that no amount of efficiency justifies the erosion of what makes us human, is exactly what AI development needs more of right now.
And the Pope showed up in person to say it. That, only in itself, is very worth paying attention to.
Sources:
Full text of the encyclical:
https://www.ncregister.com/cna/full-text-magnifica-humanitas
Vatican News
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html
EWTN:
https://ewtnvatican.com/articles/pope-leo-xiv-unveils-magnifica-humanitas-ai