VATICAN (OSV News): Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, will be published on May 25, addressing artificial intelligence and the protection of human dignity, the Vatican announced on May 18.
The encyclical, the title of which is Latin for “Magnificent Humanity,” was signed by the pope on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s foundational 1891 social encyclical on labour and capital written during the first Industrial Revolution.
In an unprecedented first, Pope Leo will be present in person at the Vatican press conference to mark the publication of the social encyclical, along with a tech founder from one of the world’s fastest growing AI companies.
Christopher Olah, co-founder of the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, which developed the AI large language model [LLM] named Claude, will speak on a panel presenting the document at the Vatican’s Synod Hall on May 25.
Also joining the panel will be Anna Rowlands, a British theologian specialising in Catholic social teaching who helped organise the Synod on Synodality, and Léocadie Lushombo, a professor of theological ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University. Víctor Manuel Cardinal Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Michael Cardinal Czerny, prefect of the Dicastery for Integral Human Development, will also take part in the press conference. Pope Leo and Pietro Cardinal Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, will give speeches at the end of the press conference.
[By] simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, [AI systems] encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships. Pope Leo
The pope has expressed interest in the issue of artificial intelligence and the dignity of work since the first week of his pontificate, telling the College of Cardinals days after his election in May 2025 that he took his papal name partly in honour of Pope Leo XIII, whose landmark encyclical, Rerum Novarum, has shaped the Church’s social teaching for more than a century.
“In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labour,” Pope Leo XIV said two days after his election.
The first American pope and a former mathematics major, Pope Leo has returned to the subject of AI again and again in speeches, messages and interviews in his first year, leading Time magazine to include him on its 2025 list of the world’s most influential people in artificial intelligence, with the magazine describing him as a spiritual counterweight to Silicon Valley.
The pope has addressed the issue of AI in venues ranging from a sports stadium packed with teenagers, whom he told to use AI “in such a way that if it disappeared tomorrow, you would still know how to think,” to a gathering of legislators from 68 countries, where he insisted that artificial intelligence is a tool meant to serve human beings, not replace them. The pope has also warned priests not to use chatbots to write their homilies and expressed concern for AI’s potential effect on children’s “intellectual and neurological development.”
In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labour
Pope Leo XIV
The pope’s 2026 message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications, published in January, has been his most robust document on AI and protecting human dignity to date. In the papal message, he underlined that “our faces and voices are unique, distinctive features of every person” that reveal “a person’s own unrepeatable identity” and that by “simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship,” AI systems “encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships.”
Pope Leo also warned that AI systems “have increasingly taken control of the production of texts, music and videos,” putting “much of the human creative industry at risk of being dismantled and replaced with the label ‘Powered by AI,’ turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without ownership or love.”
In a December speech to participants in an AI conference, the pope said, “The ability to access vast amounts of data and information should not be confused with the ability to derive meaning and value from it. The latter requires a willingness to confront the mystery and core questions of our existence.”
He said, “It will therefore be essential to teach young people to use these tools with their own intelligence, ensuring that they open themselves to the search for truth.”
