I read the Pope's 42,000-word AI encyclical so you don't have to
Okay, so AI is kind of my whole personality now. I build with these tools every day for work, I make content about them, I genuinely love what they can do. So when news broke that the Pope had released a 42,000-word document specifically about artificial intelligence, I had two reactions: one, I need to know if I'm about to get side-eyed by the Vatican. And two - I'm reading it so I can tell you what's actually in it.
Quick context so we're on the same page. This isn't a tweet or a press release. It's an ENCYCLICAL - the most formal, heavyweight kind of teaching a Pope can put out. It's Pope Leo XIV's FIRST one, which makes the choice of topic a statement in itself. He signed it on May 15, 2026 and released it on May 25. The title is Magnifica Humanitas - Latin for "Magnificent Humanity." Keep that title in your back pocket, because it's basically the entire thesis.
PLOT TWIST #1: HE IS NOT ANTI-AI
I went in bracing for a lecture. Instead, the very first move is the Pope refusing to treat technology as the villain. He presented the document standing next to a co-founder of Anthropic - one of the biggest AI labs on the planet. That's not the energy of someone trying to ban your tools.
❝ Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity. ❞ — MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS, § 4
But - and this is the hinge the whole document swings on - he draws a hard line between the tool and the people steering it. Tech, he argues, is never neutral, because it absorbs the priorities of whoever builds it, funds it, regulates it, and uses it. In other words: the model isn't good or evil. The incentives behind it are the whole ball game.
❝ technology is never neutral ❞ — MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS, § 9
PLOT TWIST #2: THE REAL FEAR ISN'T ROBOTS, IT'S US
Once efficiency becomes the only thing we measure, we start treating people - ourselves included - like products to be optimized. And the second you're optimizing humans, it gets dangerously easy to decide some of them are less "useful" than others.
He frames the whole thing around two building projects from the Bible. The Tower of Babel: one language, one system, built on pride and the urge to dominate that collapses into chaos. Versus Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem: he listens, hands everyone a section of the wall, and rebuilds together. AI, in his telling, can go either way. He calls the bad version the "Babel syndrome."
❝ the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak ❞ — MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS, § 10
And then he does something I did not expect from a tech document: he defends weakness. He argues our limits - getting sick, getting older, being vulnerable - are not bugs to be engineered away. They're part of what makes us human, and we often grow through them. Which is a direct shot at the "upgrade yourself into a god" pitch you hear in certain corners of tech.
❝ the splendor of which no machine can ever replace ❞ — MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS, § 15
PLOT TWIST #3: THE BIAS, DISCRIMINATION & SLAVERY PART
He goes straight at algorithmic bias - not as a vague worry, but as a justice problem. When opaque systems decide who gets a job, a loan, or access to services, the people who get quietly penalized are almost always the ones with the least power to push back.
❝ opaque algorithms that perpetuate prejudice and discrimination ❞ — MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS, § 80
He explicitly ties today's tech harms to history's ugliest patterns - naming the wounds that real justice has to reckon with, AI era or not.
❝ wars, colonialism, racial or gender discrimination ❞ — MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS, § 79
And yes, he goes there on slavery - not just as a metaphor. One whole section is literally titled "Breaking the chains of new forms of slavery." In it, the document points to the human cost buried inside our supply chains: the people who mine the rare-earth minerals that power our devices, described as worn down and broken by that labor. The tools in our pockets, he's saying, can quietly rest on exploitation we never see.
PLOT TWIST #4: FOLLOW THE POWER
This is where it stopped feeling like church and started feeling like a markets memo. His sharpest structural point: the power to shape society used to sit mostly with governments. Now it sits with a handful of private, often transnational companies whose resources outrun those of entire countries. That concentration is the thing that actually keeps him up at night.
So his asks get specific. Data, algorithms, and platforms shouldn't be hoarded by a few players with zero accountability. He calls for real regulation, transparency about how these systems work, independent checks, and a way for normal people to push back when an algorithm gets a life-altering decision wrong.
PLOT TWIST #5: "BUT IS IT CONSCIOUS?"
He takes on the sentience question directly, and his answer is blunt: don't confuse artificial "intelligence" with the human kind. A system can imitate language, analysis, even empathy - but imitation isn't understanding. There's no body, no conscience, no actual moral responsibility behind the output. That's his line in the sand on the whole "AI is basically a person now" discourse. (This lands hardest in the back half of the document; I'm summarizing his argument there rather than quoting it.)
MY HONEST TAKEAWAY
Near the end he basically hands you a gut-check for your own AI use: does this help me stay honest, keep learning, stay genuinely close to real people, and treat others fairly? Or is it just making me more efficient at outsourcing my own judgment?
That's the part that stuck with me. As someone who literally builds with this stuff, the document didn't make me want to use AI less. It made me want to be more intentional about why and how - and way more suspicious of "efficiency" as the only metric that matters.
It's not "AI bad." It's: don't build an empire on people and call it progress.
SO, SHOULD YOU CARE?
If you touch AI at all - building it, using it, or just doomscrolling about it - this is one of the most serious attempts yet to ask what it's actually for. You don't have to be Catholic, or religious at all, to find that question useful.
