New Things, New Questions: Pope Leo XIV and the AI Revolution
Part One: The Road So Far

Matthew Neugebauer

Monday, August 18, 2025

Digital art of a human hand outstretched toward a robotic hand, their pointer fingers touching.

New Things, New Questions: Pope Leo XIV and the AI Revolution

Part One: The Road So Far

Pope Leo XIV. Just over 100 days into his papacy, we can start to see what kinds of issues he’ll focus on.

We got an early glimpse at a likely priority topic in his first Address to the College of Cardinals. He explained that he chose his name “mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question [the Church’s response to social, political, and economic issues] in the context of the first great industrial revolution.”

He followed this comment by stating that “in our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice, and labour” (emphasis added).

By raising this issue, Pope Leo shows that he's clearly paying attention to our daily lives in 2025. He’s pointing to things that can both threaten and improve the way we work and our personal relationships. It seems like we hear of those new developments in AI technology every day, especially how it’s integrated into our smartphones. Anecdotally, I often see a lot of people on social media raising concerns over the way AI-generated artwork can reduce opportunities for skilled artists, and how its ability to do complex tasks like language translation and data entry mean that the jobs of people who do them are now at risk. On the flipside of this, that same ability to quickly make dazzling calculations can make it enormously helpful for practical tasks involved in environmental protection, education, healthcare, and many essential services.

Over the next four articles, I’ll explore some aspects of how Leo XIV might develop Church teaching on AI. In this article, I’ll comment on the direction this development might head in, as well as where it’s come from already. In Part Two, I’ll say more about why the time might be ripe for a definitive papal statement on the issue. In Part Three, I’ll go into some of the challenges that Pope Leo might be referring to, and in Part Four I’ll conclude by mentioning some possible benefits as well as the Church’s increasing openness to new technologies.

A Narrow Path

In his choice of name, Pope Leo XIV has signalled that he will provide a comprehensive ethical reflection on the use and development of artificial intelligence. I think he might take a relatively moderate track that encourages the development of AI for the betterment of humanity, while warning us of its threats to human dignity. He suggested as much in a recent message to the Second Annual Conference on AI: “In some cases, AI has been used in positive and indeed noble ways to promote greater equality, but there is likewise the possibility of its misuse for selfish gain at the expense of others, or worse, to foment conflict and aggression.”

He’s in good papal company: I would argue that the Magisterium has often sought a middle ground that incorporates the insights of various movements, ideas, and even ideologies, by welcoming a “legitimate variety” of perspectives and experiences and incorporating it in its pronouncements. At the same time, Church teaching often rejects the more extreme views of these movements, which make it harder to find areas of agreement and cooperation. As Lumen Gentium affirmed, “the Chair of Peter…presides over the entire assembly of charity, and protects…legitimate variety while at the same time taking care that such differences do not diminish unity, but rather contribute to it” (#13, emphasis added).

As I described in a previous article, popes named Leo have given us important examples of the way Church teaching can chart a middle course through the defining issues of their times:

At the very heart of our faith, St. Leo the Great on the Divine and human natures of Christ, in a Patristic period defined by faith's "quest for understanding" the Triune God as revealed in Jesus

St. Leo III on the privileges and duties of the Holy Roman Emperor and the privileges and duties of the Medieval Papacy

Leo XIII on the rights and duties of capital and the rights and duties of labour (also see my standalone article on Rerum Novarum)

St. John Paul II continued the legacy of Rerum Novarum in his 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens. At the height of the Cold War, he skillfully navigated between the capitalism of Western democracies and the socialism of the Eastern bloc. He sharply critiqued the way both ideologies could exploit workers in different ways, and praised the democratic pursuit of liberty (see #7, 11). At the same time, he reminded the western world that socialism began as an organized push for the common good, even though the Soviet Union had fallen into authoritarianism (#14). Like Leo XIII, John Paul II celebrated the advocacy work of unions (#20), and called for government policies in which “the objective rights of the worker are fully respected” (#17).

Parts Three and Four will together look at the possibility of Leo XIV continuing this moderate approach, as I consider both the pitfalls and promises of AI.

AI in Francis’ Papacy

When it comes to AI, Pope Leo is picking up what Pope Francis started and is running with it. The late pope and his Curia began to address the challenges of AI in earnest over the last year, most publicly in June, 2024 when he appeared before the G7 Leader’s Summit at the invitation of Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni. In his address, he referenced 2020’s Rome Call, the result of a partnership between the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Italian government’s Ministry of Innovation, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, IBM, and Microsoft to develop an ethical framework for the development and use of AI.

This past January, the Dicasteries for the Doctrine of the Faith and Culture and Education published Antiqua et nova, an extensive 117-paragraph “Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.” In his reflection on the document, our Rome-based producer Julian Paparella highlighted Antiqua et nova’s reminder for AI users to retain their moral responsibility. We can’t give up our ethical requirement to make humanity and the world better, because we will always have the agency, creativity, and ability to do so. We need to diligently remember our agency and responsibility, because we might fail to uphold them if we believe AI technology can learn and respond to new situations more efficiently than we can.

Pope Leo XIV is set to build on the legacy of Catholic Social Teaching and on both the reflections and actions taken by Pope Francis and his Curia in response to developments in AI technology. In Part Two, I’ll consider what form Leo’s contribution might look like, and why the time is ripe for it.