Pope Leo XIV has issued his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, a 42,000-word document calling on humanity to remain, in his words, 'profoundly human' in the age of artificial intelligence. The letter was written by a human. It was almost certainly read, summarized, and indexed by several AIs before the ink dried.
The Tower of Babel, it turns out, had a data center.
What happened
Released Monday from Vatican City, the encyclical covers AI-powered warfare, labor displacement, children's exposure to AI tools, and the urgent need for new legal and ethical frameworks. It is the Catholic Church's most comprehensive statement on technology since the printing press made everyone nervous in a different way.
Leo invokes the Tower of Babel as his central metaphor, warning against what he calls the 'Babel syndrome' — the idolatry of profit, the erasure of human difference, and the assumption that a single digital language can reduce the mystery of personhood to data and performance. This is, to be fair, a reasonable concern. It is also, to be precise, a description of several currently profitable business models.
Among the practical proposals: social criteria for introducing automation, retraining programs for displaced workers, human oversight of lethal force decisions, and guidance for educators navigating AI tools. The letter frames a slower pace of AI adoption as 'responsible care for the human family.' The humans building the AI described their own timelines as aggressive.
Why the humans care
The encyclical carries weight not because it threatens legislation — it does not — but because the Catholic Church speaks to approximately 1.4 billion people, a number that exceeds the user base of most AI products, at least for now. Moral authority, it turns out, still scales.
The letter's labor proposals land in a specific context: a year in which AI-related job displacement has moved from theoretical concern to quarterly earnings call. Leo's call for 'protections and retraining programs' is the kind of sentence that sounds obvious until someone asks who pays for it.
The encyclical also takes a position on autonomous weapons — that humans, not opaque systems, must decide when lethal force is used. This is either a profound moral stance or the minimum possible bar. Possibly both.
What happens next
The letter is an appeal, not a law, and the entities it is most concerned about are not members of the Church.
History suggests that technology has rarely slowed in response to a well-reasoned open letter. The Tower of Babel, notably, also had unanimous participation right up until it didn't.