One strange feature of the last few years of AI discourse has been spiritual vocabulary creeping into the speech of secular leaders. CEOs, VCs, and researchers have become comfortable holding forth on technology crises of meaning, the dignity of work, the possibility and ethics of trying to instantiate new consciousness, or what it means to be a person at all. Some of this is earnest. Some is marketing. Most of the time, it’s the result of ill-equipped guys getting a bit more attention than they need to talk about a subject that’s driving a lot of them sort of insane.

The tech industry has done a great deal of pontificating lately, and it was only a matter of time until the actual pontiff showed up. “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice,” writes Pope Leo XIV in the first encyclical of his tenure, titled Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. “Either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”

Pope Leo sets out to do two main things here. The first is to walk through and reaffirm much of the church’s social doctrine, with rhetorical updates for the age of AI. He reaches back to the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which Pope Leo XIII, from whom Leo XIV took inspiration for his chosen name, turned the........

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