The Pope’s Defense of Humanity

Pope Leo XIV has just issued his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which states the Catholic Church’s position on the threats posed by AI. The subject Leo chose is highly symbolic. Pope Leo XIII is best remembered for his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which sought to reconcile the Church with modernity and the arrival of rapid industrialization. Like his namesake, Leo XIV sees the ethical questions raised by technological change as a central concern.

Magnifica Humanitas presents AI as a profound new challenge to human dignity, justice, and economic security. To confront these challenges, Leo invokes foundational Catholic social teachings about the importance of human dignity and human rights, the common good, and the principles of universality, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice. Though he acknowledges that AI can be a “valuable tool,” he warns that it must be “disarmed … freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, or death.”

Notably, Leo considers the entire life cycle of AI, from the exploitation of people and nature in the extraction of raw materials needed for AI hardware to socially and environmentally destructive design choices and end uses. “Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical,” Leo writes. “Every seemingly immediate and flawless response is the result of a long chain of mediation, involving vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure, and, above all, people.”

It is people, not technology, that are at the heart of Magnifica Humanitas. “A significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities,” Leo continues, “such as data labeling, model training, and content moderation, often involving disturbing material.”

Such exploitation, he notes, “deeply challenges the moral conscience of our time.” If AI depends on and produces “new forms of global subordination, it stands in contradiction to the fundamental principle of human dignity.” Ultimately, “The fight against new forms of slavery is a decisive test for the ethical discernment of AI and digital transformation.”

Leo does not shy away from explicitly calling out injustices and reprehensible economic practices that are already widespread in the AI industry. He sees colonialism taking a new form. “It no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information.”

Consider the implications for public health and biomedical ethics. As AI labs hoover up medical, epidemiological, and demographic data from vulnerable regions, they come to “control the health data of entire peoples–often collected under the pretext of aid, research or innovation.” The result is a form of “structural leverage over the future, for they can shape needs and markets. They can also decide, before others, to whom medicines, investments, and protections will be allocated.”

Leo then outlines measures needed to ensure that AI serves not just a few multinational technology corporations, but all humans, as well as our planet. He repeatedly calls for global regulation of AI and independent, effective oversight, thus continuing down the same path as his immediate predecessor, Pope Francis, who supported concrete proposals from my own research: human rights-based global regulation of data-based systems and the establishment of a new agency–an International Data-Based Systems Agency–at the United Nations to enforce it.

Leo outlines in detail what needs to be done to govern digital devices and “social media” (better understood as “anti-social media,” given that they were designed from the outset to turn users into atomized addicts). He sees a need for age limits, accountability for service providers (“rather than shifting the whole burden of control onto families”), and stronger specific “protections against all forms of online sexual exploitation and violence.” Likewise, he calls for greater efforts to teach “children, adolescents, and young people how to recognize manipulation, defend their dignity, and respect that of others in digital environments.”

The pope is absolutely right to celebrate the grandeur of humanity, to criticize and reject transhumanism and posthumanism, and to emphasize the essential, categorical, and insurmountable difference between humans and machines–which do not have freedom, moral agency, or emotional and social intelligence. Magnifica Humanitas calls everyone–believers and non-believers–to the cause of safeguarding human dignity and working together toward a humane, sustainable present and future.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026. www.project-syndicate.org