By: Matthew Walther - Mr. Walther is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a contributing Opinion writer Published by: *The New York Times* Date: May 26, 2026
Leo XIV is not quite what Sylvia Townsend Warner once called an “old harmless pope,” but he certainly has a way of keeping headlines innocuous. He’s from Chicago, he likes the White Sox, he’s against the war in Iran — a year into his papacy, this is more or less what people know about him. The mildness extends to his theological views. Unlike his recent predecessors John Paul II and Benedict XVI, Leo is not an academic theologian. Temperamentally, he is more cautious than Francis was. The questions that seem to interest Leo most are practical and pastoral. He is suspicious of grand, programmatic approaches even to the most serious questions — including that of artificial intelligence, the subject of his first encyclical letter, “Magnifica Humanitas,” which was presented on Monday. Even by the standards of modern papal encyclicals, with their uninspired phrasing, frequent auto-plagiarism and stultifying length, “Magnifica Humanitas” is disappointingly measured and cautious. (The least guarded language in the document — Leo’s dismissal of just war theory as “outdated” — has nothing to do with A.I.) Despite voicing concerns about the dangers that A.I. poses to humanity, the encyclical nonetheless seems to envision a world in which it is simply a tool, rather than an evil that all people should reject. The text begins with the arresting image of the Tower of Babel, perhaps the greatest biblical symbol of technological hubris, but seems to miss the point of the story, which is not that the tower’s builders should have been more ethical by incorporating feedback from a more disparate assemblage of stakeholders. The moral was: Don’t build it! Otherwise “Magnifica Humanitas” comes off as uninspired and unfocused. There are far too many unmemorable quotations and references to papal speeches. Out-of-context lines from “The Lord of the Rings” and Hannah Arendt elicited groans from at least one reader. I found myself wishing that Leo had engaged with more recent and incisive critics of technological modernity, such as the Catholic philosopher Byung-Chul Han (the author of “The Burnout Society”) and Anton Jäger, the historian of political thought whose “hyperpolitics” thesis anticipates many of Leo’s concerns. This is not exactly the Unabomber manifesto. One is even tempted to call it naïve. The encyclical certainly does not live up to its billing as the A.I. equivalent of “Rerum Novarum,” the revolutionary text on the Industrial Revolution with which his predecessor and namesake Leo XIII inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching in 1891. The presence of Christopher Olah, a founder of the A.I. firm Anthropic, at the presentation of the encyclical on Monday rightly raised eyebrows. (Imagine if Leo XIII had invited John D. Rockefeller to hear him speak on the dignity of labor!) For those of us who see the rise of A.I. as unambiguously evil, Leo’s emphasis on its ethical use is a nonstarter. He seems to underestimate A.I.’s ability to exacerbate existing crises and to accelerate processes of cheapening and redefinition. The encyclical says nothing, for example, about how A.I. abets the replacement of medicine as a humanistic profession with an algorithmic conception of health care justified by the language of “access.” In perhaps the most telling passage, Leo contrasts the dangers of a myopic, self-aggrandizing “idealism” with what he calls “authentic realism,” a clearheaded outlook that “does not give up on changing the world” but rather, “by clearly identifying interests, fears, constraints and power dynamics,” is able to “determine what can be achieved, and the measures needed to achieve it.” (This, perhaps, is an implicit rebuke to technophobic critics.) The pope’s sanguine attitude should not surprise anyone who is familiar with his personality. Unlike Francis, a well-known Luddite, Leo is an internet user, a quaint phrase that describes roughly six billion of us. We know that he has a smartphone, that he texts, that he uses social media, that he plays Wordle. His relationship with digital technology is, in other words, typical of many people his age, for whom digital technology really is a tool rather than an atomizing, attention-span-destroying augmented reality from which it is almost impossible to escape. It’s easy for him to be upbeat. Indeed, a few months ago, in a message Leo delivered to a gathering of A.I. developers in Rome, his words were optimistic. He envisioned a world in which A.I. could be “a profoundly ecclesial endeavor,” a technology that could serve “Catholic education,” “compassionate health care” and “creative platforms that tell the Christian story with truth and beauty.” Leo’s accommodating approach in “Magnifica Humanitas” also reflects his pragmatic attitude toward his office and the limits of the Roman Catholic Church’s authority. Whatever one thinks about A.I., it is not going anywhere. Even a much more thoughtful book-length document would not make an impression on people who are too distractible to watch a feature-length film or finish a short news article. The days when papal encyclicals meaningfully affected public policy — for example, in the interwar period, when they helped to shape the New Deal — are long gone. In theory, the church could use its juridical authority to fight A.I. But here, too, Leo is relatively powerless. A papal bull excommunicating ChatGPT users or placing Silicon Valley under interdict would be enormously amusing, and perhaps even justifiable. But what would it accomplish? More than half a century after Paul VI issued “Humanae Vitae” in 1968, only 15 percent of American Catholics affirm what the church teaches about birth control. A new teaching about A.I. that was rejected by the faithful would not only fail to achieve its stated object; it would also further undermine the very idea of the church as a teacher and lawgiver. This is not to suggest that the church has nothing to say to the world about A.I. For years now I have believed that, in the face of the technological destruction of human relationships, literacy and contemplation, the church may well become the only guardian of humanistic values, even for secular people. But it will not fulfill this role by publishing encyclicals or issuing sterner disciplinary measures, but simply by staying true to itself. Catholics are able to bear witness not only to the power and beauty of holiness but also to forgotten habits, practices and values, to the importance of craftsmanship and deliberation, to the past as a worthy and even delightful object of study rather than a catalog of forgotten barbarisms. They are able to present truth as something immutable and transcendent rather than contingent and self-constructed, and to speak to the value of liberality, magnanimity, filial piety and countless other shabby neglected virtues. How exactly the church’s message will reach a distracted world is unclear. But it will almost certainly not be a top-down endeavor, dependent upon the actions or personal charisma of a pope. What seems more likely is that in the decades to come we will see the emergence of a distinctly Christian cultural movement that defies standard political categories but is united against technological utilitarianism and the subsuming of human life into digital frameworks. At the heart of this resistance, I suspect, will be the Mass. With its grand symbolic gestures, its hieratic language and profound silences, the liturgy exists outside the framework of ordinary human experience and even of time itself. The sacraments are impervious to technological improvement. And I suspect that in ways that previous generations of Catholics could not have guessed, the sacraments will continue to “effect what they represent”: a world in which the humble elements of water, wine and oil, along with ancient words betokening promises and mercy, are more powerful than any machine. Matthew Walther is a contributing Opinion writer for The New York Times and the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal.
