Pope Leo XIV telegraphed his intention to write a document on AI upon his election. The very selection of his name was meant to hearken back to his predecessor who expressed the church’s reservations and guidance about the dawning of the industrial era.
This has made Magnifica Humanitas perhaps the most widely anticipated church document since at least the Second Vatican Council. The AI industry itself has actively engaged Rome for years. Anthropic cofounder Chris Olah has consulted with the Vatican, calling the questions raised by AI “bigger than the AI community” and asking for religious, academic, civic, and governmental participation. Anthropic hired a Catholic priest and former software developer to draft its constitution.
This is an astonishing phenomenon in itself and worth comment. Church documents at Vatican I, or Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae, were widely ridiculed beyond the church; they were held to undermine the authority of the church in a West that was rapidly leaving behind the faith of its fathers.
And yet, in 2026, despite scandal and defection, perhaps no institution other than the Catholic Church is felt to have the philosophical depth, commitment to humanity’s true welfare, historical perspective, and moral authority to comment adequately on this. No panel of eminent professors, no conclave of other religious leaders would be offering more than another set of opinions. A new moral question has transfixed the powers of the West, and all eyes are on the See of Peter.
And that is what makes the publication a slight disappointment. At 42,000 words, Magnifica Humanitas is an especially lengthy document for the church. Its ambition is evident in a section that attempts to recapitulate the entire body of Catholic social teaching from the papacy throughout the centuries.
Importantly, Pope Leo declared that “human beings, created by God, can never be replaced by machines, no matter how intelligent they become,” and warned against “equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings.”
At the same time, the document acknowledges that technology is a glorious part of humanity’s God-given capacity for creation and invention. It rejects the Luddite view that tech is “antagonistic to humanity.” But it warns that “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”
We find ourselves unable to resist the temptation to point to the small irony that a pope who has been outspoken against immigration enforcement chose as his biblical example of technology used for godly ends the building of the walls around the city of Jerusalem.
The pope correctly identified the major danger points, that AI’s creators and promoters too often imagine that its rise must mean the creation of a post-work underclass. The pope warned against the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few. In particular, Leo singled out autonomous weapons, insisting that responsibility for killing must remain human. Finally, Leo asserted that the truth itself is a common good, and that the internal constitutions of AI firms or governments cannot be considered as definitively settling the duty of men to conform themselves to the moral law. Taken together, the church has offered a correction to the business model some frontier companies seem to be pursuing: rent-seeking monopoly and opacity.
Ultimately, the strongest point is made most beautifully in the conclusion, which is a reflection on “Mary’s Magnificat.” If technology carries the biases of those who make, sell, and regulate it, then far too much time is being spent imagining or dreading how AI will enhance the power and prestige of incumbent powers. Far too little effort and imagination have been put into how this technology will benefit the least among us.
What gives this document weight and ties it back to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum is the church’s insistence that no new system or technology can justify reducing human beings, made in God’s image, into mere cogs of a larger machine. Humans are ends in themselves, and have their proper end defined by a God who “casts down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly.”