Can the Pope save Humanity from AI?

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:15]When Cardinal Prevost took the name Leo the 14th, the world understood that he was signaling his desire to become the heir to one of the most extraordinary popes of the modern era. That was Pope Leo I 13th. He combined an astute metaphysical awareness, remember his prayer to St. Michael and his experiences about the threat of evil, with a determination to confront the raw power of political and economic development with the conscience of the church that he embodied in order to defend those at the bottom of the political and economic heap who are being discarded by a particular economic revolution that took place at the end of the 19th century.

[00:01:02]Publia the 14th has now produced the encyclical we were expecting Magnifica humanitas which immediately sets the present crisis before us in the form of competing anthropologies and competing esquetologies in the conviction that the human heart has been shaped by God to long for God more than any other desire.

[00:01:22]The Pope has a duty to speak on God's behalf to the hunger of the human heart in order to awaken a deeper and truer perspective amidst the competing aspirations and temptations that every culture and every human life throws up.

[00:01:38]There's little doubt that the Pope was right to offer his analysis of the dangers that the AI revolution presents.

[00:01:44]But we're still left with a pressing question. Who's going to listen to him?

[00:01:48]And how and can any response now change a direction that's already been set in motion by the software engineers?

[00:01:56]We might say the church has a role in speaking truth to power. Of course it does. For the church neither manufactures weapons nor writes software programs nor runs corporations.

[00:02:08]Instead, one of the tasks of the church is to tell the truth about the human person and invite society to recognize the truth, to listen, and to change.

[00:02:19]But who is going to listen? And how might we change? Enough articles have already been written summarizing the pope's concerns. The most interesting aspect of the encyclical's presentation, however, seems to me to have been the presence of Christopher Ola. So he's co co-founder of anthropic and he spoke at the Vatican presentation on May the 25th.

[00:02:40]It really was a stroke of political and pastoral genius to invite him in the face of the hubristic ambitions of the AI industry. Its extraordinary present achievements and the promise of almost unimaginable advances in the near future. Ola offered reasons from within the industry itself that mirrored the pope's critique from outside it. Well, I think it's worth pausing to consider which reasons Ola chose to highlight.

[00:03:08]First of all, given that AI threatens to displace human labor at scale and so weakening the connection between human dignity and meaningful work, he raised he realized that it raises profound questions about the value of human beings in society and about the relationship between work identity and economic competence. And these are not values that software engineers are particularly at home with.

[00:03:33]Secondly, he thought it raised the questions where our moral imagination concerning genuine human flourishing can still find authoritative guidance because again software engineers are not really at home with the creative moral imagination of the best of human thinking.

[00:03:55]Thirdly, Ola openly acknowledged the mysterious nature of AI models themselves. Systems he said that even the researchers who build them find deeply unsettling and don't fully understand.

[00:04:09]Pope Leo had charted the territory with his encyclical. Adola accepted his map adding further details. He presented here be rocks and here be further dragons beyond those the pope had drawn our attention to. We need to listen to him.

[00:04:25]But one of the most alarming parts of his speech was his realistic warning that every frontier AI laboratory, including his own, operates within a system of what he called incentives and constraints that conflict with doing what is right.

[00:04:46]Think about that for a moment. Digest it. It's terribly important.

[00:04:52]Whether geopolitical, commercial or researchdriven, these incentives push the industry res relentlessly towards further development. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of OA's contribution was his admission that many engineers inside these laboratories don't really understand what they've created.

[00:05:13]We had a novel that described that process. It was called Frankenstein. And it may be that the software engineers neither know nor care particularly where the controls to what they've created are.

[00:05:30]Ola said, quote, "I'm a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models, what's actually happening inside them.

[00:05:39]And I'll be honest, it's full of mysteries.

[00:05:43]We keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling.

[00:05:49]Well, we're unsettled by to hear that.

[00:05:51]He went on to note the researchers are discovering structures within these systems that he said bear remarkable similarities to patterns identified in human neuroscience. He said, "We find evidence inside AI of introspection.

[00:06:09]We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. I don't know what it means, he said, but I do think it would be wrong not to pay attention.

[00:06:24]Well, thank you for that. Thank you for Pope Leo for helping them pay attention.

[00:06:30]How will we know if they paid attention?

[00:06:33]How will we know if anything changes because they paid attention?

[00:06:39]Acknowledging this mixture of ignorance and power, he added with some notable humility. If we want this technology to go well, it's enormously important that there be people outside these centers, people who care about the things going well, who are paying attention, who are willing to say hard things, willing to be earnest, thoughtful critics. Well, he was of course describing and acknowledging Pope Leo I 14th and so must we. The philosophical background, however, to the debate launched by Pope Leo involves two very different anthropologies and two very different esquetologies.

[00:07:15]The Christian vision rooted in Genesis warns humanity there is a perpetual flaw in the balance between human aspiration and human competence. Humanity repeatedly stretches beyond what its wisdom can manage and overbalances itself. One of Christianity's most important contributions to our civilization is the question that comes from Genesis. Quote, well, it's not a quote from Genesis.

[00:07:45]It's a quote from me. Just because you can do something, are you prepared or even able to live with the consequences of choosing to do it?

[00:07:56]Usually the answer is no. On the other side of this moral and philosophical fissure stands the determined optimism of the enlightenment. A most science scientists seem to have adopted the optimism of the enlightenment in a softer version inherited from Rouso. It expresses a perpetual confidence in human self-improvement. In contrast to its unfounded optimistic optimism that humanity is born as a blank slate capable of infinite improvement, history has repeatedly exposed that confidence as dangerously naive. Frankly, just wrong. The 20th century ought to have buried that kind of optimism beneath the evidence of its catastrophes.

[00:08:39]Yet somehow the optimism survives it.

[00:08:41]Worse, the harder version derives from nature where power and will become dominant forces unconstrained by any shared moral order or ethic.

[00:08:54]We are therefore confronted by the possibility that the trajectory of AI research may become increasingly niche, driven by capability, what can be done rather than wisdom, what ought to be done. by achievement rather than by a restraint. Under the influence of ever more powerful forms of machine agency, technological growth, competence, speed, and ambition, these things may accelerate beyond our capacity to govern them where are the controls and unrestrained by ethics that are neither concrete nor shared nor enforcable.

[00:09:33]The result threatens to be the displacement, dimmonition, and eventual marginalization of the very human beings who invented the technology in the first place.

[00:09:46]Pope Leo rightly insists that human beings are never means to an end. We ought never to be disposable. Indeed, human flourishing depends upon the exercise of human agency and cooperation with God, constrained by the character and will of God in a manner that safeguards the integrity of the gift of human nature itself.

[00:10:06]We are left with two questions at this juncture. Who is listening to Pope Leo?

[00:10:11]Who is listening to Christopher Ola?

[00:10:15]The constituencies driving artificial intelligence into the future may not easily be persuaded to restrain what can be done by our or the Pope's appeal to what ought to be done. In the future of artificial intelligence becomes if the future of artificial intelligence becomes governed entirely by capability and no longer by moral responsibility, the damage done to human beings may prove to be unimaginably severe. Yet, Pope Leo ended the conference on a hopeful note. What a great sign of hope it is that despite our differences, we can listen to one another. This interchange, he suggested, speaks to the possibility that wisdom and power need not become enemies. The fact that the Pope and the head of Anthropic are willing to initiate a conversation in which the software industry is at least prepared to half turn and pay attention to a voice offering both critique and restraint is undoubtedly a good sign.

[00:11:10]But before we can answer the question of whether the pope can either represent or exercise sufficient moral authority to influence a civilization increasingly in the grip of technological power and possibility. We need first to identify who actually holds the power in the context of software development. The difficulty is power is diffusely held.

[00:11:32]It's distributed across investors, corporations, governments, researchers, legislators, and international institutions. Because it is so widely dispersed, it may lack the capacity to respond coherently to the questions Pope Leo has rightly articulated and placed in the public domain. But what the pope has achieved through his encyclical is to offer investors, software engineers, governments, legislative agencies, international regulatory bodies an opportunity to pause, to think, to listen, to reflect, perhaps to act.

[00:12:06]Catholics can take quiet pride in the fact that no other figure on the world stage possesses quite the same combination of resources, wisdom, and moral authority required to open such a conversation as our pope. The conversation has at least begun. Whether it deepens, whether it reaches the people who most need to hear it still remains an open question. It is, however, thanks to Pope Leo, the right question to be asking.