The Pope Issues a Formal Teaching Document on Artificial Intelligence

In a 42,000-word encyclical, Pope Leo XIV warned that mass unemployment from AI could become a 'social calamity,' called for governments to regulate private AI companies, and argued that human dignity cannot be measured by economic usefulness.

Pope Leo XIV published an encyclical on artificial intelligence today titled Magnifica humanitas. An encyclical is the most authoritative kind of teaching letter a pope issues, addressed to the whole church and, in modern practice, to everyone else as well. At about 42,000 words, it is a substantial document, and it is the first time the papacy has devoted one entirely to a technology.

Its central warning is economic. The pope argues that mass unemployment caused by AI adoption could become a "social calamity," and that the harm would not be merely financial: work, in Catholic teaching, is part of how people participate in the world and understand their own worth. A society that removes work from millions of people without answering what replaces it is, on this argument, doing something graver than making them poorer.

The document calls for governments to regulate private AI companies rather than leaving the pace to the companies themselves, and for protections for workers whose jobs are threatened. It insists that human dignity cannot be measured by economic usefulness — a direct response to an argument sometimes made in Silicon Valley, that people displaced by automation will find meaning elsewhere.

The pope chose his name partly for this. Leo XIII, in 1891, wrote the encyclical that founded modern Catholic teaching on labor, in response to the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. The new Leo has been explicit that he sees AI as the comparable disruption of this century.

Whether it changes anything is a separate question. But it adds an institution with 1.4 billion members and a long memory to a conversation that has mostly been conducted by technology companies, economists, and governments — and it lands on the side that has been least represented: the people the technology is done to.