Catholic League Report: Pope Leo XIV's Encyclical

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]Hi, I'm Bill Donnu, president of the Catholic League. Welcome to Catholic League Reports. Today I'm joined with Mike McDonald. He's the director of communications. Sean Le, he's a policy analyst. We're not going to keep you for too long. We're going to talk about Pope Leo's encyclical, which I read, and I'll let the guys come right at me. Go ahead.

[00:00:19]>> Um, so for Pope Leo, this is the first full encyclical he's written. I know last year he put out uh something started by the previous pope, but I just wanted to ask you how you would compare his writing, the structure, the content compared to some of the previous popes you've read in the past.

[00:00:33]>> Well, I do think that Pope John Paul II, St. John Paul, uh and and Pope Benedict uh were a little bit more intellectual.

[00:00:41]This is more of a think tank kind of uh report. Uh they were philosophers and it had more of that intellectual richness to it. But this is very detailed. He's not simply winging it. So I I I give him a lot of credit for that.

[00:00:54]>> Now, Bill, one of the things that I found kind of interesting is, you know, one of the things they promoted when it was Pope Leo the 14th that it was is going to be sort of a reflection of Pope Leo the 13th, uh, and really focusing in on this period of social change that we're in. Uh, but if you read a lot of the media pieces on the encyclical, it it gives off a lot of negative vibes. It makes this pope sort of seem like he's uh some sort of lite who's just anti- AI, anti- technology. Is that a fair portrayal of what he has to say or?

[00:01:23]>> No, I think the media have been very unfair to him. He's he's concerned about AI getting to the hands of unscrupulous, unethical people, where there's a concentration of power, where there's no pursuit of the common good as we understand it in in Catholic tradition.

[00:01:37]Uh quite frankly, uh I don't know why the media are doing this. They're just plain ignorance. Uh that that could be uh or or there's a certain malice there that that's involved here. He has basically said, look, technology is there to do good or ill. AI has no conscience. It's not a human being. It can't it can't cry. It can't love. It can't do any of that. And he and he's very good at at bringing that out. So, no, I think what he's saying is this. In the right hands, AI can be a force for good. But his concern is the concentration of power. And when you don't pursue the common good, where does this leave us?

[00:02:13]>> Um, okay. kind of going off of that, there is a section in cyclical where Polio talks about warning humanity on uh AI potentially turning this into a new form of slavery. I was wondering what you thought about this wording if it was applicable to what we see going on in AI and if this is something Catholics should fear uh with with AI growing and >> I think I think it goes beyond even Catholics. I mean, any anybody who's a parent has got a young kid, you see what social media is doing, okay? Sleep deprivation. You're talking about pornography. You're talking about cyber bullying. You're talking about uh a lacking a control of your emotions.

[00:02:51]You're talking about a a bad attention span. So, there are a lot of things there that I think that it concerns everybody. Again, he says, "Listen, I'm here not to disarm AI in the sense of abolishing it. we have to disarm the people who actually have bad motives who are involved in it. So he's not anti-technology. Uh God knows the Catholic Church is responsible in large part for the scientific revolution. Uh so I I I I don't want to let the media kind of drive that kind of narrative.

[00:03:20]But he is concerned about uh a number of ethical problems and I think the scope of this is going to reach well beyond the Catholic community.

[00:03:28]>> Right. And just kind of dovetailing off that a little bit, uh it seems like a lot of these people behind the AI, which Leo kind of sets most of his uh sight on, uh are promoting this transhumanism, uh posthumanism, uh and it seems like, uh we've been dealing a lot with this over the years, uh from the the transgenderism nonsense, that's all part of this thing. Why is there so much of this going on? And what is what can the average Catholic, the average person do to resist this? That's a good question. I mean, I my my feeling, Mike, is basically you've got a very strong secular streak in American society. It's entertained largely by the elites and they're the ones who make the decisions. They believe in immortality.

[00:04:12]They believe that you can create this superhuman kind of person. Uh that's because they don't believe in God. I mean, if you believe in God, you understand the limitations of the human condition. That's why we call it original sin in in the in the Catholic tradition. Uh they don't believe in that. they're going to go right past that. And what you're going to do is the pope warns is what happens to the people who are not perfect if you don't get that perfect human being. We know that we some of the people involved in the World Economic Forum uh Uvel Harrari has said, "What are we going to do with all the useless people?" Now, in in the Catholic tradition, there's no such thing as a useless person. We're all children of God, no matter who you might be. And the idea that we can talk about useless people, that's what the Pope is warning against. this quest for for for per perfectability here on earth. It it it's a mad dash. It's never going to work. So, let's kind of wrap it up here, fellas. Any any closing uh comments you want to make?

[00:05:08]>> Yeah. Uh you know, Bill, you had a lot more to say about this uh today in a news release that we have up on our website right now at catholic.org. We'll have a link in the description below. Uh so, definitely check that out there. Uh we cover some of this stuff, but go into a little bit more detail about a lot of other things. It was a long encyclical, so that we just kind of scratched the surface here. So, uh, check that out and, uh, be sure to stay up to date with us on YouTube and, uh, the rest of our social media platform. You can find all of those in the description below. And we'll see you soon.

[00:05:38]>> Thanks so much. Thank you.