As artificial intelligence reshapes work, culture and decision-making, two pontificates converge on a deeper concern – not technological progress itself, but the risk of reducing human life to efficiency, calculation and control.

In the handover between Pope Francis and Pope Leo, one theme stands out as genuinely decisive – perhaps more than is apparent to those who focus exclusively on ecclesiastical affairs.

At the heart of a moment that seems to be sliding toward an increasingly automated reality, Francis left his successor an open question that cuts to the core of our contemporary imagination: artificial intelligence. In this transition between pontificates, a conversation unfolds that concerns technology only indirectly. Its real subject is the meaning of being human in an age of thinking machines.

In their words – and those spoken during the first eight months of Leo’s pontificate – are already telling. There is no nostalgia for a lost world, no demonisation of progress. What emerges instead is an effort to think critically about the landscape now taking shape. To look inside the machine and ask who, in the end, truly occupies its centre of gravity.

Pope Francis brought into the global public debate a reflection on AI that was neither narrowly technical nor purely moralistic. From the outset, he acknowledged its positive potential. For him, artificial intelligence was not merely a threat; it was also a possibility.

For example, AI offers the potential to ease the burden on human labour, democratise access to knowledge, and foster encounters among people and cultures through automatic translation, data analysis, and neural networks capable of processing billions of pieces of information per second.

Toward the end of his pontificate, Antiqua et Nova, an important note on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, was issued jointly by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education.

Francis repeatedly insisted on one essential point: AI is not neutral. It is a........

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