What does the new pope think of artificial intelligence? Curiosity led me to ask the technology itself, in this case a program called Perplexity. Here’s part of its answer, at least on an afternoon in early June 2025:

I find AI-generated prose deadening in its blandness and neutrality, but in this instance, I don’t mind it, not least because the entity is presenting a view critical of its very existence and purpose. But who knows what this same program might yield if I ask it in an hour, a day, a week? We might call this evidence of AI’s dynamism, of its constant growth, of its capacity not just to replicate or compete with human thinking but instead to enact its own distinctive cognitive activity. But this is also a changeableness that attests to its inconstancy and inconsistency—a lack of reliability, durability, and stability that can’t be measured and trusted for more than a moment, never mind for millennia.

For thinking that provides the latter, look to the Catholic Church. For many, this is exactly evidence of the Church’s regressive presence in twenty-first-century life. But when it comes to our ongoing ambivalence about the reach and potential of AI, Catholicism offers an abiding clarity drawn from its own resources in advocating for human dignity, identity, and purpose. While the Church has both promoted and interrogated the goods of technology for centuries—yes, there was the Galileo affair, but the Church has also been directly involved in astronomy and cosmological research since the late sixteenth century—it’s doing so in fresh and needed ways in this present moment. That’s because the most-discussed new actor in global affairs, Chicago-born, one-time undergraduate math major Robert Prevost, might have been inspired as much by Catholic traditions as he was by the rise of AI in the very name he chose as pope.

Shortly after the new pope was introduced to the world, a Vatican spokesman explained that the former Cardinal Prevost chose his papal name to signal his fidelity to Leo XIII, who served from 1878 until his death in 1903. Observers wondered if he was also invoking another predecessor: Leo I—Leo the Great—whose papacy from 440 to 461 left a profound mark on the Church and the wider world. But in his first remarks on the matter, Leo XIV only confirmed the official association. By many accounts, the new pope is a reserved and humble man; it’s no surprise he’d demur from any link with a pope called “great,” never mind as the first American pope, during this chaotic, incoherent, ongoing era to Make........

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