Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on Monday. The 42,000-word statement is being described by major media outlets as centering on the rise of artificial intelligence and the moral, spiritual, and social challenges that it poses to modern society. Even the encyclical itself says that its topic is “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.”
While AI is indeed the central focus of Leo’s writing, it is also a reckoning with the unchecked power of Silicon Valley and the American tech industry, as well as with the Trump administration’s cruel and un-Christian foreign policy. Read deeply, it is a direct challenge to the political and economic might wielded by American tech oligarchs.
Encyclicals are commonly referred to by their first few words in Latin; this one translates to “the magnificence of humanity.” That name draws a vivid contrast to what Leo describes as the “new Tower of Babel,” which he juxtaposes with the Augustinian city of God. The other emphasis is on Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, which outlined the church’s teachings on social justice amid the Second Industrial Revolution, or what Americans would understand as the Gilded Age.
Leo XIII focused on the plight of workers in a rapidly modernizing world. He rejected both socialism and communism as well as unconstrained capitalism, calling upon countries and governments to ensure fair wages, the right to unionize, and to preserve the dignity of work and labor. The current pope signaled his affinity for Leo XIII from the outset. At his first post-conclave meeting with cardinals last year, Leo XIV explained that he had adopted his name as a tribute of sorts to the earlier pontiff’s work. To that end, he told the cardinals, “offers everyone its heritage of social teaching to respond to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence, which pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and work.”
“While many of the historical conditions described by Leo XIII have changed,” Leo XIV explained in Magnifica Humanitas, “at least two insights remain highly relevant today: the primacy of human labor over any mindset focused solely on finance or productivity—with the consequent attention to the people and families most susceptible to exploitation—and the inseparable link between proclaiming the Gospel and pursuing a more just social order.”
On AI itself, Leo correctly noted that there is a common “misconception” about the technology and that it can only “imitate certain functions of human intelligence,” lacking actual sentience. “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean,” he explained. “Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.”
Leo called for AI to be “disarmed,” not in the military sense—though he did address that elsewhere in the encyclical—but rather to be “freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death.” The logical implication is that AI currently serves those ends. Leo also rejected ideologies like transhumanism and posthumanism that “seek an enhanced and almost disembodied humanity” in the name of technological “progress.”
Though the pope did not identify or quote these ideologies’ adherents directly, it is not hard to find them. Silicon Valley’s tech oligarchs are often obsessed with anti-aging technologies and immortality itself, hoping to stave off the inevitability of death by shoveling billions of dollars into radical solutions. The world’s most famous transhumanist is Elon Musk, who has an entire company devoted to interfacing the human brain with computers. Among his stated goals is allowing human beings to “achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence.”
AI evangelists also often speak of the imminent arrival of “the singularity,” a hypothesized future event where artificial intelligence becomes genuinely sentient. Musk, who loves to overpromise and underdeliver, claims that we are in the “very early stages of the singularity right now.” The fear of death quietly stalks much of Musk’s worldview, from rockets to AI: He claims to want humanity to become an interstellar civilization that consumes entire suns’ worth of energy to survive forever.
“It is one thing to integrate technology within a human-centered, relational vision; it is quite another to be guided by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of ‘salvation,’” Leo wrote. He explained at length that mortality is a necessary feature of the human experience, both in Christian terms of salvific grace and in other senses as well. “Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others,” Leo wrote. “Indeed, precisely because we experience limits—vulnerability, suffering and failure—we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.”
In more specific terms, Leo expressed concern that AI would accelerate what his predecessors called a “crisis of truth,” with dire consequences for societal well-being. “The search for truth is an essential element of democracy, which is itself a means of contributing to the common good,” he warned. “When questions about what is true lose their appeal, and a pragmatism takes hold that is content with what appears useful or effective, then democratic life is weakened.”
This is hardly abstract in a world where digital misinformation spread through American tech products is corroding political norms and institutions around the world. “After all, democracy does not consist of rules and procedures alone, but above all of a solid concordance with the facts and a genuine commitment to the good of individuals and society as a whole,” he explained. “Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism.”
Not every aspect of Leo’s critique of Silicon Valley falls along the familiar partisan fault lines. He described the dangers of exposing children to social media at a young age, which can “negatively impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions and relationships, especially during the most vulnerable stages of life.” He denounced grooming, deepfakes, and other forms of online sexual exploitation toward the young, as well as cyberbullying and algorithms that bombard users with violent and sexualized media.
Other aspects of the document are a direct challenge to the tech oligarchy’s worldview. Silicon Valley’s right-wing leaders crave an economy where workers and their skills are devalued by AI, robbing them of bargaining power and personal dignity. They hope to build a digitally enforced hierarchy where access to knowledge production and information, however flawed and hallucinated it may be, is readily attainable through their pay-per-use chatbots. Nobody will need to think anymore; they will just pay Claude or Grok or ChatGPT to do it for them.
Leo’s encyclical welcomed technologies that can “relieve humans of arduous, repetitive, or dangerous tasks” or “provide intelligent support for human activity.” But he rejected the techno-feudalism to which Silicon Valley currently aspires. “The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs, because the human person is an end, not a means, and the economic order must remain subordinate to human dignity and the common good,” he wrote, calling for an economy “that values dignity.”
Another target for critique is cryptocurrencies, the digital tokens whose proponents once championed as alternative currencies. In recent years they have primarily become a vehicle for financial speculation and so-called pump-and-dump schemes. Leo quoted from past papal remarks about how “finance for its own sake,” once shorn from moral principles, has produced “manifest abuses and injustices” as well as “systemic and worldwide economic crisis.” Those words carry even greater weight as the Trump administration abandons any regulatory restraints on the crypto industry, prediction markets, and other forms of pseudo-financialized gambling.
Leo’s apology in the encyclical for the church’s historical role in slavery and the slave trade drew immediate headlines around the world. Though it might seem out of place at first glance, the pope’s remarks were grounded in an awareness of the broader systemic harms of the tech industry. The average user often experiences tech’s output—a computer, a website, an algorithm, an iPhone—in sterile, stylized terms. Leo called attention to the suffering behind the minimalist designs and sleek interfaces.
“A significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities, such as data labeling, model training and content moderation, often involving disturbing material,” he explained. “In many cases, these workers are young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages.” The pope also recounted the grueling and dangerous conditions in which rare-earth miners work in developing countries.
“The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly,” he vividly observed. Leo describes this dynamic as “new forms of slavery” driven by Silicon Valley’s dehumanization of people at every point they interact with the tech industry—whether as producer, user, or consumer. That they are not legally slaves is immaterial.
“At the root of these problems lies a technocratic and post-humanist mentality that tends to regard the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit,” he wrote. “What prevails is efficiency, rather than respect for freedom and human dignity. Some post-humanist currents even go so far as to envision ‘second-class’ human beings, subordinate to the interests of elites who consider themselves superior.”
Leo’s critique of AI in warfare has received plenty of attention, but it also came as part of a broader critique of the world’s shift away from diplomacy, international organizations, and peacebuilding. He rejected what he described as a nihilistic “realism” that views peace as an irrational fantasy and treats warfare as “an inevitable part of human nature,” and thus should not be avoided or constrained.
“Religious extremism and identity-based fanaticism ally themselves with irrational economic policies, while politics often turns to misinformation and ridiculing opponents, and systematically cultivating fears and resentments,” the pope warned. “Thus, diversity is increasingly perceived as a threat, which fuels a desire for possession, a will to dominate, hegemonic ambitions, abuses of power and a fear of those who are different, thereby creating an environment in which new conflicts can develop almost imperceptibly.” Leo does not even need to say the president’s name, because he is as much as symptom as a cause.
Since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, popes have often framed their encyclicals in terms of collegiality and civil discourse rather than as taciturn dictums from Rome. Leo’s writing style evokes the same tone and voice, and his own remarks express a desire for collaborative discussion and humble contributions from the church’s own social teachings. “I therefore invite all members of the Church and of the human family: let us learn to listen to one another, face the present challenges with courage, and cooperate in building a more human and fraternal society,” he said when issuing the encyclical.
But the deeper message of the encyclical is much less convivial than the press has imagined. The pope does not seek to build bridges with American tech companies per se, but with those affected by their decisions and with those able to constrain them: parents and educators, diplomats and researchers, civil-society leaders and elected officials, governments and nations. Leo is not making passive observations, but shedding light on manifest injustices and those responsible for them. There is steel in the shepherd’s crook.
The encyclical should also be read in the context of Leo’s actions during his first year as pope. His predecessor’s tenure was defined by deepening divisions among the church’s bishops over Pope Francis’s statements on church doctrine in matters of sexual ethics, whether it be communion for divorced couples or pastoral care for LGBTQ Catholics. Francis’s efforts to suppress the Tridentine Mass among traditionalist Catholics was seen as a direct blow to a conservative element that, in the eyes of Francis’s supporters, sought to polarize the church.
Leo, by comparison, appears to be redirecting those energies outward rather than inward. Though similar to Francis in many ways, he has extended olive branches to bishops like Cardinal Raymond Burke, an American critic of Francis who was allowed to celebrate a Tridentine Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica last year, and other conservative leaders like Cardinal Robert Sarah. The Vatican’s renewed emphasis appears to be the Western world’s drift toward authoritarian nationalism, and more particularly the crimes and abuses of the second Trump administration.
The pope has encouraged U.S. bishops to challenge the administration’s mass-deportation policies and sharply criticized the wars against Venezuela and Iran. (Trump, in response, proclaimed Leo to be “weak on crime.”) In a friend-of-the-court brief in Trump v. Barbara, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops rebuked a major Trump policy by aggressively affirming that the constitutional principle of birthright citizenship was part of the Western legal and cultural tradition. Dismantling it, the bishops warned in strong terms, “would undermine both the legal and moral foundations of American society.”
Until Pope Leo XIV’s election last year, the consensus among Vatican experts was that the cardinals would never elect an American pope, to avoid concentrating too much worldly power in the world’s last superpower. But rather than exalt American hegemony, Leo has sharply challenged and criticized it within the teachings of the church. Magnifica Humanitas is about not just AI and other Silicon Valley inventions, but the damage they have wrought upon us all.
