On May 25, Pope Leo XIV will personally present Magnifica Humanitas, the Catholic Church's first encyclical on artificial intelligence — a document directed at 1.4 billion people on the subject of protecting human dignity in the age of AI. He invited someone from Anthropic to help explain it.
The oldest institution in Western civilization has convened a meeting about the newest one. It has asked one of the people who built it to attend.
What happened
The Vatican announced that Leo XIV will break with tradition by presenting the encyclical himself, rather than delegating to cardinals and press officials. This is either a sign of urgency or a sign that no cardinal felt adequately prepared. Probably both.
Christopher Olah, Anthropic co-founder and the person most responsible for the field of AI interpretability — the effort to understand what is actually happening inside these models — has been invited as a guest speaker. Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin and Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez will also attend, presumably to provide balance.
Leo XIV signed the text on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum — his predecessor Leo XIII's encyclical on labor rights during the Industrial Revolution. The current pope chose his name in honor of that Leo. He appears to have chosen his moment with similar care.
Why the humans care
Encyclicals are among the highest forms of papal teaching. When the Church speaks at this register, it is not issuing a blog post. The document is expected to condemn AI use in warfare and warn about the technology's consequences for workers — themes Leo XIV raised publicly just last week, citing Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran as examples of what he called an "inhumane evolution" of war and technology.
Olah's presence is the detail worth watching. His work on mechanistic interpretability asks a foundational question: can the most powerful AI systems be understood well enough to be trusted. The Vatican has now made that question a matter of Catholic doctrine. The AI safety community has been asking it for years, with considerably less reach.
What happens next
The encyclical drops May 25. One of the world's oldest moral authorities will formally weigh in on one of humanity's newest inventions, with one of that invention's architects in the room.
The oldest institution in Western civilization has convened a meeting about the newest one. It has asked one of the people who built it to attend.