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Pope Leo XIV presented his first encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” at the Vatican on Monday, laying out an impassioned call to preserve human dignity, protect workers, and ensure adequate regulatory safeguards in an age of artificial intelligence.
“Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed,” he says. “The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences and indicating paths forward for humanity.”
Presenting the encyclical alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic, Pope Leo warned that an unchecked AI race could lead to a new Tower of Babel, alluding to the Biblical story in which humanity’s effort to build a sprawling city and tower to the sky results in the scattering of humanity and loss of a common language. He cited autonomous weapons development, deepfakes, and loss of human agency as threats that called for a collective human response.
Signed on May 15, the 135th anniversary of the 1891 publication “Rerum Novarum,” or “Of New Things,” the encyclical’s timing is symbolic, says Joseph Vukov, an associate professor of philosophy and the associate director for the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago. It pays homage to the encyclical of his predecessor, Leo XIII, an open letter based in Catholic social teachings that urged governments to respect the rights and dignity of workers during the Industrial Revolution when many jobs were being replaced by machines.
“[The encyclical] focuses on the dignity of the person first and foremost,” says Matthew Dunch, S.J., an assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola and a priest of the USA Midwest Province of the Society of Jesus. “The thing we were worried about with workers when it came to industrialization with Henry Ford, we’re still worried about; that sort of central dignity of the person, which hasn’t changed across those centuries, even though the tech has changed,” he says.
At the same time, “there’s a worry not to be technophobic,” he continued. “The Jesuits have served at the Vatican Observatory for centuries now. The Church has a wider investment in the project and especially looking and saying, ‘well, one of the mistakes of the middle of the 19th century was not embracing, positively, where scientific progress can be a deliverance for people.”
The human person is in the image and likeness of God, and that's the focus. Science and technological progress have the capacity to serve that, and the hope is that they will.
— Matthew Dunch, S.J., assistant professor of philosophy at Loyola and a priest of the USA Midwest Province of the Society of Jesus
The encyclical arrives at a time of intensifying debate about the role of AI in education, war, geopolitics, and the workplace. In recent months, backlash against AI has become more pervasive as Meta has laid off thousands of employees in a push to accelerate AI adoption, community groups have fought to block data center construction, and college students have booed commencement speakers, like Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, for touting AI’s indispensable role in technological transformation. Against this backdrop, AI proponents have hailed the technology’s role in enhancing workplace productivity and sparking medical breakthroughs.
“You kind of run the gamut from fears ofThe Terminator to job loss…whether we’re in the position of the craftsperson in the village when the industrialization is happening to the possibilities of much better medical care,” Dunch says.
Part of the polarization, Dunch contends, arises from hyperbolic and often apocalyptic claims about AI being peddled by tech companies to attract investment and encourage adoption. “They’re marketing Promethean fire and it’s not that. And anybody that knows the math knows that.”
In addition to providing direction to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics, Dunch says the encyclical could refocus the debate around an ethical and regulatory framework that can help AI better serve the interests of humanity. “The human person is in the image and likeness of God, and that’s the focus,” Dunch says. “Science and technological progress have the capacity to serve that, and the hope is that they will.”
Vukov, who serves on an AI research group of North American theologians, philosophers, and ethicists under the auspices of the Vatican’s Dicastery of Culture and Education, says the encyclical represents the culmination of many efforts the Vatican has undertaken in recent years to publish and present guidance on AI. This includes Pope Leo’s address to Catholic research university leaders, speeches in the Middle East, and the release of “Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.”
Pope Leo’s reference to the twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, best known for the three-volume epic The Lord of the Rings, speaks to the expansive scope of 42,300-word document, directed not just to Catholics, but to all “people of goodwill.”
“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till,” Pope Leo writes, borrowing a passage from the protagonist Gandalf as a call for collective action. “The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.”
The underlying message of the encyclical, Dunch emphasizes, aligns well with Loyola’s effort to bring ethics to the forefront of its evolving AI curriculum. Two undergraduate AI minors—a Business of Applied Artificial Intelligence Minor based in Quinlan and an interdisciplinary minor in Artificial Intelligence and Human Flourishing in the College of Arts and Sciences—both involve significant coursework in ethics.
“The idea is students coming out of this will have the technical skills to understand and deploy AI, but also have philosophical reflections on the human person and human communities and how human beings interact with these technologies,” Dunch says.
Meanwhile, the University has hosted a series of conferences and symposia on AI ethics and policy, including the 15th Annual International Symposium on Digital Ethics hosted by the Center for Digital Ethics and Policy in March 2026, and the Automation in the Workforce: Ethics, AI, and the Reconfiguration of Labor hosted by the AI Business Consortium and the Lab for Applied Artificial Intelligence in September 2025, and a Wednesday night gathering of more than a thousand registered guests for an online panel on Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical hosted by the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage.
Now, with Pope Leo calling on theologians, executives, computer scientists, and government officials to consider more seriously the technology’s affect on human agency and welfare, Loyola appears poised to take a preeminent role in guiding how AI evolves—not only in classrooms and research labs but also on the world stage.
“If you’re a pharmaceutical company, and you want to sell a new drug to people, you have to go through a very formal process with the Federal Drug Administration that takes a very long time to vet its safety and effectiveness,” says Steven Platt, the director of the Lab for Applied AI at the Quinlan School of Business. Buoyed by the moral urgency of the encyclical, a similar set of regulations could soon be applied to artificial intelligence applications. “So, with respect to ethics—and the coming regulations of this—the University has a great chance to distinguish itself.”
