Leo XIV, the first American pope, issues the Catholic Church's most authoritative teaching on AI and names civil society and AI builders as the cast that must fill what Washington left open.
Pope Leo XIV has issued the first encyclical of his papacy, dated 15 May 2026, and for the first time in church history the Vatican's most authoritative form of teaching turns on artificial intelligence. The document, Magnifica Humanitas, Latin for "magnificent humanity," argues that AI must be "disarmed" before it reshapes war, work, and human dignity, and it names who must do the disarming: civil society, frontier-AI builders, governments, and multilateral bodies. Read as theology, the document is a critique of profit- and power-driven AI development. Read as governance, it lands in a specific power vacuum: Washington has pulled back from AI safety multilateralism, and the Vatican is filling it.
The encyclical's central contrast is between Babylon's tower and Jerusalem. The first is the hubristic project of building AI for profit and power, with human cost concentrated on the weak; the second is the slower, decentralized work of rebuilding human community under pressure. Pope Leo calls the first "Babel syndrome," his term for the dehumanization that follows when persons are treated as data, performance metrics, or targets to exploit. The critique is aimed less at AI as a tool than at the market and political incentives that decide what gets built. The full Vatican text is published here.
That critique is paired with an explicit standing offer. The encyclical is addressed to the Catholic Church's 1.4 billion members and to "everyone," and it asks each of those audiences to act, including AI builders directly. NCR reports that Pope Leo plans to present the encyclical alongside an Anthropic co-founder, making the Vatican's engagement with frontier AI a public, co-staged event rather than a moral appeal at arm's length from the industry that builds the models.
The U.S. government has retreated from AI safety multilateralism, and the encyclical singles out the U.S. specifically. Maryann Cusimano Love, writing in the Arms Control Association, argues the encyclical is a response to "the abdication" of U.S. leadership on AI safeguards, with civil society and the Vatican picking up what Washington has dropped. A CSIS analysis frames the Vatican's move in similar terms, arguing that Leo XIV has put moral and ethical guardrails on the global agenda while U.S. policy lags the conversation it once led.
The diplomatic reception backs the diagnosis. The U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See has publicly said Washington "welcomes" Vatican input on AI regulation, according to EWTN Vatican. That is acknowledgment on the record from the government the encyclical singles out for criticism. Even Washington now treats the Vatican as a counterweight in AI governance.
The Vatican has engaged AI ethics for years, and Catholic security scholarship has worked through the moral grammar of autonomous and military AI in some detail. A War on the Rocks essay by a Catholic security scholar maps that lineage. The encyclical changes both the form of the engagement and the cast. An encyclical is the Catholic Church's highest tier of teaching, and the document names civil society and AI builders as actors with standing in AI governance, where previous Vatican work had left the cast unnamed.
Magnifica Humanitas is normative, not regulatory. A papal teaching does not bind a frontier AI lab's deployment schedule or a multilateral body's agenda. It can reframe who counts as a legitimate interlocutor, and Magnifica Humanitas attempts exactly that: the text reads less like a moral appeal than like an invitation list, with civil society and AI builders now formally in the room beside governments and multilaterals. A NICFAB analysis of the encyclical makes the same structural point.
The next concrete step is the encyclical's public presentation alongside the Anthropic co-founder. If the staging reads as a working session between the Vatican and a frontier AI builder, it is the first concrete test of the standing the document claims, and the answer to whether Magnifica Humanitas becomes governance architecture or stays teaching.