AI poses new moral questions. Pope Leo says the Catholic Church has answers.

Artificial intelligence might not seem like an obvious focus for a new pope taking over the world’s largest Christian church. AI is developing faster than most people can keep track. The church measures change in centuries.

But Pope Leo XIV, the newly elected pontiff, has established AI as an early focus of his papacy, raising the topic repeatedly in public remarks, including those explaining why he took the name Leo. He has signaled that the church is poised to mount a spiritual response to the challenges posed by AI for human justice and dignity.

We will require “responsibility and discernment” to deploy AI’s “immense potential” to benefit rather than degrade humankind, he said Monday in his first news conference as pope.

The previous Pope Leo — Leo XIII in the late 19th century — helped the church navigate the aftermath of the industrial revolution — in which the new pope said he sees a clear analogue.

In remarks to explain his choice of name, Leo XIV recalled Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” on capital and labor, which elevated the sacredness and dignity of workers amid political and social change. People shouldn’t stray away from their humanity and soul as they toiled and sought riches under capitalism, he exhorted.

Now, it’s AI that threatens the dignity of workers and the human soul, Pope Leo XIV has warned. But he seems to see his church as particularly equipped to meet the moment, offering “the treasury of her social teaching” in response to “another industrial revolution.”

This emphasis should come as no surprise, said ethicist and Trinity College Dublin Ecumenics professor Linda Hogan, “As anybody looking at the current situation we’re in would ask: Well, what are the pressing issues?”

Ethicists, including those working from a religious perspective, see the development and deployment of the cluster of technologies known as AI as one of the most consequential developments in a generation, Hogan said. It has implications for social justice and human rights, workers and creativity, bioethics and surveillance, bias and inequality, war and disinformation, and more.

For the church, Hogan said, the core question is: Does this new development serve human dignity, or violate it?

While Leo XIV, who has a mathematics degree, has given the matter particular emphasis in his tone-setting initial moments as pope, AI is of long-standing concern to the Vatican, including the late Pope Francis.

The church is “always wanting to guard the human person,” said Ilia Delio, an American theologian specializing in science and religion. “In other words, we’re made in the image of God, so anything that might violate that image of God, or distort it, or try to eradicate it, becomes alarming and a cause of concern.”

In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI warned scientists that placing too much trust in artificial intelligence and technology could lead them to the fate of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun.

In 2020, under Francis, the Vatican and tech giants IBM and Microsoft signed the “Rome Call for AI Ethics,” a document of AI principles that follows what the Vatican calls “algorethics” or the ethical development of algorithms.

The Rev. Paolo Benanti, a Franciscan friar who advised Francis on AI, is on the United Nations’ Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence.

Last year, Pope Francis — who reportedly did not use computers and wrote by hand — at age 87 became the first pope to attend the Group of Nations summit, addressing world leaders on the dangers of artificial intelligence. After opening his talk with a recitation from the book of Exodus, he warned of a “technocratic paradigm” that may limit our worldview to “realities expressible in numbers and enclosed in predetermined categories” — and of the technology’s absence of wisdom in decision-making and its potential to be used to kill. He worried about the “loss, or at least an eclipse, of the sense of what is human.”

“We would condemn humanity to a future without hope if we took away people’s ability to make decisions about themselves and their lives, by dooming them to depend on the choices of machines,” Francis said.

Late last year, the Vatican City State issued its official guidelines on artificial intelligence, which forbade using AI systems that create social inequalities, violate human dignity or draw “anthropological inferences with discriminatory effects on individuals.” It also created a five-member Commission on Artificial Intelligence for the city state.

In January, the Vatican released “Antiqua et nova,” meaning “Ancient and new,” an extensive document reflecting on the differences and relationship between artificial and human intelligence.

“By turning to AI as a perceived ‘Other’ greater than itself, with which to share existence and responsibilities, humanity risks creating a substitute for God,” the document states. But, as a “pale reflection of humanity … trained on human-generated material,” it is “not AI that is ultimately deified and worshipped, but humanity itself — which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work.”

Artificial intelligence raises questions that the Catholic church has been thinking about for centuries: What does ethical action, personally and socially, look like? How can we foster our own humanity? What does it even mean to be a human being?

In the Catholic intellectual tradition, there’s a much richer understanding about what it means to be human than the simple ability to compute things, said Joseph Vukov, an associate professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. The church espouses a fundamental human dignity, and holds that our humanity is embodied, and has a relational quality, he said.

Overuse of deeply integrated technologies — doom scrolling and overdependence on AI to think for us — can be spiritually damaging and dehumanizing, Vukov said. People might be asking their friends less for recommendations for a new book, instead relying on what the algorithm provides, he said. They might replace more face-to-face meetups with digital ones, or lose some of their creativity or critical thinking, or lean on AI to write a thank-you card. “We all kind of know that that’s not a human way to live,” Vukov said.

People are hungry for moral wisdom and frameworks of understanding to make sense of it all. “It’s a gift the Catholic Church can offer the rest of the world,” he said.