When a head of state warns about artificial intelligence it is policy. When the Pope makes AI the centrepiece of the founding document of his papacy, it is something closer to a verdict. On 25 May 2026 Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), and devoted much of its more than 40,000 words to a single argument: the world is adopting AI too fast, and should slow down and regulate it before it reshapes humanity in ways no one chose.
Why a pope, and why now
The choice of name was always a signal. As the National Catholic Reporter notes, Leo XIV took his name from Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum set out the Church's social teaching in response to the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution — workers' rights, fair wages, the dignity of labour. Magnifica Humanitas arrives almost exactly 135 years later and casts AI as "another industrial revolution" demanding the same kind of moral response. The framing is deliberate: this is the Church positioning itself, again, against a technological transformation it sees as outpacing society's ability to govern it.
What the encyclical argues
The document is not a blanket rejection of technology. Its central move is to insist that AI systems, however capable, are not moral agents — they "do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain," in the Pope's words — and therefore cannot be handed decisions that belong to human conscience. From that premise it builds a case for caution, evaluation, and in places a deliberately slower pace of adoption, which Leo frames not as opposition to progress but as responsible care for the human family.
Five ways AI could warp humanity
As Axios summarised from the text, the encyclical groups its concerns into five threads:
| Concern | What the encyclical warns |
|---|---|
| Human judgment | Instant answers erode discernment, creativity, and the patience to seek truth |
| Artificial empathy | Systems simulate care without relationship, so vulnerable users mistake it for genuine connection |
| Inequality | Data, compute, and regulatory influence concentrate among a few powerful actors |
| Democracy | Amplified disinformation blurs fact from fiction and weakens self-government |
| Warfare | Lethal decisions get faster and more distant from human responsibility |
On jobs, the text reaches for a concrete figure, citing an MIT estimate that around 11.7% of the US workforce could be displaced by AI — a rare instance of a papal document leaning on a specific economic study rather than moral generality.
The starkest line is about weapons
The sentence drawing the most attention is also the bluntest. On autonomous weapons, Leo writes that it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems — distilled by Axios to the line many headlines led with: "No algorithm can make war morally acceptable." It is the point where the encyclical moves from caution to prohibition, and where its language is least open to interpretation.
Why it matters beyond the Church
Leo frames the goal as learning to "disarm" AI — which, he is careful to say, does not mean rejecting technology but preventing it from dominating humanity. Whatever one's faith, the intervention lands at a specific moment: governments are still drafting the rules, the EU AI Act is mid-rollout, and the largest labs are raising tens of billions to accelerate. A 1.4-billion-member institution telling its followers — and, pointedly, the policymakers among them — to slow down is a weight on one side of a debate that has so far been dominated by the people building the systems.
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