ROME | Pope Leo XIV is moving artificial intelligence to the center of the Vatican’s moral agenda as the Catholic Church prepares for his first encyclical.
The Associated Press reported that Leo has created an artificial intelligence study group as the Vatican prepares to release his first major teaching document. The encyclical is expected to address AI through Catholic social teaching themes including human dignity, labor, justice, peace and truth.
That framing matters because it treats AI as more than a technical tool. For the Vatican, the core questions are human questions: Who benefits? Who is harmed? What happens to work? What happens to truth when synthetic content becomes easier to produce? What happens to relationships when machines mediate more of daily life?
AP noted the historical parallel to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical that addressed labor and capital during the Industrial Revolution. Pope Leo XIV appears to be positioning AI as a similar civilizational test for the modern era.
The Vatican has already engaged AI ethics through the Rome Call for AI Ethics and through public concern about lethal autonomous weapons, misinformation, bias and environmental cost. A papal encyclical would give those concerns a deeper theological and social framework.
The story also has a political edge. Governments and companies are racing to build, deploy and monetize AI. Some leaders emphasize growth and deregulation. Religious institutions are more likely to ask whether speed is being confused with wisdom and whether technological power is being matched by responsibility.
Serena Tao’s weekend Religion & Spirituality frame is that this is not only a Catholic story. The questions Leo is raising are shared across faith traditions and secular ethics: how to protect human dignity when machines reshape work, speech, education, warfare and community.
For readers, the most practical issue may be trust. AI can generate text, images, voices and analysis at scale. That can help people learn and create. It can also confuse truth, weaken accountability and make manipulation cheaper. A moral framework will not solve every technical problem, but it can clarify what society should refuse to normalize.
Additional Reporting By: Associated Press