A Papal Document That Uses AI to Say Something Older
Pope Leo XIV has released his first encyclical, and while artificial intelligence dominates the headline framing, the document’s actual argument runs deeper than any single technology. The text positions AI as a diagnostic tool – a contemporary example through which the Catholic Church examines concentrated power, the erosion of democratic institutions, and a technology elite that has gained extraordinary influence over how modern life is organized. The encyclical does not dwell on chatbots or image generators. It dwells on who controls them, and to what end.
That distinction matters enormously.
Papal encyclicals carry weight beyond their immediate audience. They establish moral frameworks that filter into policy conversations, academic discourse, and public ethics debates for years – sometimes decades – after publication. Leo XIV’s choice to anchor his first major doctrinal letter in the AI moment signals that the Vatican views the current technological concentration not as a passing trend requiring light commentary, but as a structural condition requiring formal theological response.
The Actual Argument Inside the Document
Strip away the AI framing and the encyclical’s core concerns are recognizable from prior Catholic social teaching: power should not concentrate in the hands of a few, democratic accountability should not be circumvented by private actors, and economic systems should serve human dignity rather than extract from it. What makes this document distinct is the specificity of its contemporary application. The “tech elite” is named not abstractly but as a category of actors who have, in Leo XIV’s framing, shaped global systems to reflect their own interests rather than the common good.
This is pointed language for a Vatican document. Earlier Church engagements with technology tended toward cautious optimism mixed with general warnings about materialism or distraction. Leo XIV’s encyclical takes a harder structural line – closer in tone to the Church’s critiques of unchecked industrial capitalism in the 19th and early 20th centuries than to anything resembling a tech ethics white paper. The parallel is deliberate. Leo XIV chose his papal name in direct reference to Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social dislocations of industrial labor. The echo is not subtle.
The document’s treatment of eroding democracy is perhaps its most politically charged section. Rather than cataloguing specific platforms or regulatory failures, the encyclical frames democratic erosion as a consequence of allowing technological development to proceed outside meaningful public deliberation. When private actors build systems that govern access to information, financial participation, and social organization, those actors accumulate a form of sovereign-adjacent power that elected governments increasingly struggle to check. The encyclical does not propose specific legislation, but it does name this dynamic as a moral problem requiring moral response – not merely a policy problem requiring technical adjustment.
Why the Church Is Weighing In Now
The timing of Leo XIV’s encyclical reflects a broader institutional calculation. Governments across the European Union, the United States, and various Asian economies have spent the past several years attempting to construct AI governance frameworks, with uneven results. The EU’s AI Act represents the most comprehensive legislative attempt to date, but enforcement mechanisms remain contested and the pace of model development continues to outrun regulatory language. Into that governance gap, the Vatican is inserting a moral vocabulary – one that does not depend on jurisdictional authority but carries cultural and institutional weight in regions where Catholic social teaching retains significant influence.
There is also something to be said about institutional self-awareness here. The Catholic Church has its own complicated history with concentrated authority and the suppression of dissenting voices. Leo XIV’s decision to frame the encyclical around accountability and democratic participation invites comparisons that the Vatican must know will be made. Whether that tension strengthens or undermines the document’s reception will depend largely on how commentators choose to engage it – as an ethical argument to be assessed on its merits, or as an exercise in institutional deflection.
What the encyclical does not do is offer technological prescriptions. There is no endorsement of open-source development, no critique of specific companies by name, no position on AI safety timelines or alignment research. The document operates at a higher level of abstraction, which is both its strength and its limitation. As a moral framework, it provides language for critiquing the conditions under which AI is developed and deployed. As a practical guide for engineers, regulators, or investors, it offers very little that is actionable.
Reading the Encyclical Against the Current Moment
The release lands at a moment when public skepticism toward large technology companies has grown considerably across multiple political orientations. Conservative critics in the United States have focused on perceived ideological bias in content moderation. Progressive critics have emphasized labor exploitation, surveillance infrastructure, and the consolidation of market power. Leo XIV’s encyclical, by grounding its critique in concentrated power rather than partisan cultural grievance, attempts to address both audiences simultaneously – a difficult balancing act that Catholic social teaching has historically tried to maintain by refusing alignment with either left or right as conventionally defined.
It is also worth noting what kind of document an encyclical actually is. This is not a press release or a policy brief. Encyclicals are formal letters addressed to bishops and, through them, to the broader Church – but their audiences have always extended into secular intellectual life. Rerum Novarum shaped labor law debates far beyond Catholic institutions. Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical on environmental ethics, became a reference document in climate policy conversations at the United Nations. Whether Leo XIV’s AI encyclical achieves comparable reach depends on whether secular audiences find its structural critique more persuasive than the AI-focused framing suggests.
The document’s most durable contribution may not be its analysis of AI at all, but its reassertion that questions of technological power are inseparable from questions of political power – and that both remain subject to ethical scrutiny regardless of how quickly the underlying systems change. Leo XIV’s encyclical frames the tech elite’s accumulation of influence not as an innovation story but as a governance failure, one that older institutions, including the Church itself, are now scrambling to articulate a coherent response to. Whether the Vatican’s moral vocabulary carries enough weight to shift that conversation, or whether it arrives too late to shape the structures already in place, is a question the document itself cannot answer.
