Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on May 25, a document titled 'Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.' At roughly 42,000 words across 245 numbered sections, it is the Catholic Church's most detailed formal statement on any technology ever published.
The core argument is simple. Technology, the encyclical says, is never neutral. It takes on the values of whoever builds, funds, and deploys it. When those values serve concentrated power rather than ordinary people, the technology needs to be 'disarmed.' Not shut down, but redirected.
The document's hardest lines are on weapons. The Pope states it is not permissible to hand lethal decisions to machines, and that 'no algorithm can make war morally acceptable.' He goes further: traditional just war theory, the centuries-old moral framework for when armed conflict is acceptable, is now outdated in an age when autonomous systems can act without human judgment. That is a significant theological statement from one of the world's oldest moral institutions.
On the economy of data, the encyclical is equally direct. It describes algorithms, platforms, digital infrastructure, and data itself as forms of property whose concentration in a few hands produces new inequality. The term used is 'digital colonialism': wealthy nations and companies extracting value from the data and labor of people who see none of the returns.
The choice of co-presenter was pointed. Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, sat alongside the Pope in the Vatican's Synod Hall. Anthropic is the company that, just three months earlier, lost a $200 million Pentagon contract after refusing to allow its AI to be used for autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. The Trump administration labeled Anthropic a 'supply chain risk to national security,' a designation previously reserved for foreign adversaries. Anthropic sued, and a federal judge blocked the government's action. The case is still running through the courts.
The Vatican was careful to say that Olah's presence was not a church blessing on Anthropic. But the signal is hard to misread. Of all the people in the AI industry the Pope could have stood next to, he chose someone who had just drawn a line between their company and military use of AI.
Olah himself used the occasion to say something notable for a tech founder: every AI lab, including his own, operates under commercial and competitive pressures that can conflict with doing the right thing. He said those labs need people outside those pressures who are willing to say hard things, and that the Church's willingness to take on this role is why he was grateful to be there.
The encyclical has no enforcement power. No government is legally bound by it. But that is not how this kind of document works. The precedent the Pope himself draws on is Rerum Novarum, an 1891 encyclical on workers' rights during the Industrial Revolution. That document had no enforcement mechanism either. It took decades, but it shaped labor law, trade union rights, and minimum wage policies in countries across the world.
For professionals in any industry, there are two practical things worth watching. First, in countries where Catholic social teaching has historically influenced legislation, including across Latin America, Southern Europe, and parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, this encyclical gives advocates and legislators a formal doctrinal foundation for pushing AI governance measures, particularly around data ownership and autonomous systems. Second, for any business operating in the EU, the encyclical's framing maps closely onto concerns already embedded in existing EU regulation on AI and data protection. The moral vocabulary and the legal vocabulary are now converging.
This will not move fast. But the Church has a global platform, over a billion followers, and a long track record of shaping the terms of social debates that eventually become law. The AI governance conversation just got a very old, very influential voice.