Pope Leo’s first encyclical offers a vision in which human dignity and relationships guide technological development rather than people becoming slaves to technology.

Pope Leo XIV has just released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“The Grandeur of Humanity”), which addresses the rise of artificial intelligence and thereby enters one of the defining debates of our time. While AI is the immediate focus, the deeper concern is not technological innovation itself but the changing conditions through which human beings understand themselves and experience reality.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII, published Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”). That encyclical confronted the alienating conditions born of the industrial revolution. Like that earlier document, the current encyclical addresses a moment of profound technological advancement and asks what kind of social world is being built around these new forces. Pope Leo XIV has described this challenge as “not technological, but anthropological”: the central question is not simply what AI can do, but what kind of human beings it may be helping to create.

The consequences are already visible within education which, Pope Leo argues, is not merely the transfer of information but human formation. He warns that “the speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask........

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