Pope Leo: Rallying point in the AI storm

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | May 29, 2026

Who should get the award this week for the best of the worst takes on Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas? Is it the guy who was disappointed that he didn’t get “a papal bull excommunicating ChatGPT users or placing Silicon Valley under interdict?” Or the one who thought the encyclical was bad because the wrong people like it? Or the ones who thought Pope Leo’s reference to “structures of sin” was an icky Marxist thing, even though it was a direct citation of Pope St. John Paul II, the man who obliterated communism in Eastern Europe?

Papal documents are not above criticism. But the criticisms from major right-leaning commentators, in outlets both secular and Catholic, were not always this silly. After 12 years of Francis, the office of the papacy no longer commands quite the same Olympian height of moral certitude in people’s minds than it once did under, say, John Paul II. That may be part of it. Traditionalists all along warned conservatives like, well, me, that “papalotry”—making a sort of oracle out of the Pope—would be our undoing, and that correction now seems to have arrived. But there is correction and there is overcorrection. The Pope is not an oracle but neither is he a mere politician. And an encyclical is not an interview on an airplane. It is a major teaching document. It deserves more serious attention than what it has received from much of the commentariat this past week.

Now all that said, no social encyclical to my mind has ever topped Pope St. John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus. I read it in my college dorm room 35 years ago and you never forget your first encyclical. Or at least I didn’t. It was my introduction to Catholic Social Teaching and it completely transcended the usual left vs. right of world politics. John Paul II wrote it at the dawn of the post-Cold War era and the great tragedy of this era is that the world ignored it. Had the architects of the New World Order followed his blueprint, we would be in a much better place right now.

As with John Paul II then, so with Pope Leo now. Magnifica Humanitas (MH) asks “what it means to safeguard the human person in the era of artificial intelligence” (paragraph 229) and provides about 43,000 words worth of answers. In seeking “a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded” (1) Pope Leo wishes “to engage in dialogue with all men and women of our time, with whom we share in the events, questions and aspirations of humanity” (2) because the Church “recognizes history as the place where the Gospel challenges and directs human experience.” In paragraphs 7-10, Leo lays out our choice: the demonic Tower of Babel or Nehemiah’s godly rebuilding of Jerusalem. This “faith-based interpretation of history” (45) grounds an “ethical discernment [which] cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it” (104).

Leo warns against transhumanist-style “upgrades” to humanity “that exacerbate inequalities” (12), against “the aspiration to transcend the limits of the human condition” (116), partly because “If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy” (117). Though abortion and euthanasia are mentioned only once (55), this is the pro-life ethic that suffuses Leo’s entire encyclical. The common good and the promotion of life are both non-negotiable values (59). See especially what Leo writes in paragraphs 118-130. In paragraph 165 Leo describes the family as “a primary social good. Founded on the enduring union between a man and a woman…endowed with foundational rights.” In 143 Leo writes, “parents have the primary and inalienable right to choose the kind of education and formation for their children, in a manner consistent with their moral, cultural and religious convictions.”

I have some nitpicks. In paragraph 27, he seems to describe the Catholic Church as a mere denomination. In 55 he says the Church “considers” abortion and euthanasia “gravely wrong.” Why “considers”? Why not just “is”? In 166 he implies that unemployment is the biggest threat to families and does not mention the massive efforts to redefine the very nature of the family. He gives a good description of John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus in 39 but somehow leaves it out of his discussion of where Europe went wrong after communism’s collapse in paragraph 201.

There are several places where, although I agree with Pope Leo, I am probably thinking about different things than he is. When he writes about ideological bias by AI’s makers, he’s probably not thinking of the censorship and debanking and all that the right has suffered in recent years at the hands of our ruling class, but I am. When he warns about AI’s capacity to greatly increase the problem we already have with disinformation (132), Hunter Biden’s laptop is probably not the first thing that came to his mind. But it was for me.

The critics I have been reading this week are more nitpicky than me. They complain about Leo’s stroll down Catholic Social Teaching memory lane at the beginning of MH. But he has the world’s attention, including many with no familiarity with CST, so why not give a quick run through? They complain that MH reads more like a think tank white paper than a spiritual document. That’s ridiculous. The Catholic vision of reality is all over MH. I particularly liked his contrasting of transhumanism with the Incarnation.

At the end of the day, though, the Catholic commentariat was not the target audience. Silicon Valley was. How was it received there? Not well, I’m sorry to report:

This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species—or even a new God.

“People are matter-of-factly saying that they are looking to build a machine God,” said Rayan Krishnan, the chief executive of Vals AI, a San Francisco company that tracks the performance of the latest A.I. technologies. “They are not saying that ironically or in jest. They are saying it as a matter of fact.”

Tower of Babel, indeed. Pope Leo was right to call out this antihuman and Antichrist ideology—and to separate it out from the technology itself. His flock should support him.