Peter Thiel contra Pope Leo

Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of Palantir, called Pope Leo “a Chinese communist agent” for writing that AI must be used to “truly benefit the common good, and is not just used to accumulate wealth and power in the hands of a few.”

Who do you trust? Pope Leo or Mr. Thiel?

— Sen. Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) July 7, 2026

Pope Leo and St. Augustine discuss the mind and A.I. with Kurt Gödel

I crafted the prompt and Claude drafted the dialog using a passage about memory from Augustine’s Confessions as the catalyst for the imaginary conversation. I asked for some changes, Claude made some suggestions, and I executed them.

Note this passage toward the end:

Gödel said, “Disordered love?”

“Yes. To love a lower thing as though it were higher. To love one’s own power more than truth. To love the image more than the living being. To love the tower more than the city.”

The reply is by Augustine and it amounts to a definition of idolatry. The tower, presumably, is the Tower of Babel.

ChatGPT created the image. I uploaded the full dialog and asked from an image based on the passage from Augustine’s Confessions. That began an iterative process resulting in the image immediately below. The dialog follows.

I want you to create an imaginary conversation between St. Augustine, Kurt Gödel, and Pope Leo XIV. It should take place in Gödel’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study. After the men introduce themselves – assume Augustine can understand and speak English, and perhaps wonder a bit how they became gathered together, Pope Leo leads off, saying that, while working on his recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, one of his colleagues pointed out a passage in Augustine’s Confessions (to follow) that resonated with Gödel’s proof of incompleteness. Given the role that arithmetic plays in Gödel’s proof we should note that Augustine wouldn’t have known about arithmetic. Nor, for that matter, would he have known about computers. He is likely to have known about sophisticated mechanical devices like the Antikythera Mechanism and the Sphere of Archimedes, but never have seen one. But he would have seen complex water clocks (clepsydrae).

Here’s the passage from the Confessions (Book Ten, Chapter VIII). Perhaps Leo reads it aloud.

Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God–a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it? Yet it is a power of my mind, and it belongs to my nature. But I do not myself grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself?

A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. Nor do they wonder how it is that, when I spoke of all these things, I was not looking at them with my eyes–and yet I could not have spoken about them had it not been that I was actually seeing within, in my memory, those mountains and waves and rivers and stars which I have seen, and that ocean which I believe in–and with the same vast spaces between them as when I saw them outside me. But when I saw them outside me, I did not take them into me by seeing them; and the things themselves are not inside me, but only their images. And yet I knew through which physical sense each experience had made an impression on me.

Perhaps sometime late in the conversation Albert Einstein might drop in to see what they were talking about.

Here is a first pass. I’ve kept it staged, conversational, and conceptually explicit, with Einstein entering late as a useful destabilizer.

The Mind Too Narrow to Contain Itself A conversation in Kurt Gödel’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study

Gödel’s office was narrow, orderly, and dim. Books stood in ranks along the wall, interrupted by folders, loose papers, and a blackboard covered with marks whose austerity made them seem less written than engraved. Outside the window the trees of Princeton trembled slightly in the wind. The afternoon light had the washed patience of late autumn.

Kurt Gödel stood beside his desk, thin and formal, dressed in a dark suit. He had the air of a man who had been expecting visitors and yet was not at all reassured by their arrival.

The first visitor was an African bishop in ancient dress, compact and alert, his face alive with inquiry. He looked about the room with frank astonishment, then settled his gaze on the blackboard.

The second was an elderly man in white, gentle but grave, wearing a small pectoral cross. His eyes moved from Augustine to Gödel and then to the papers on the desk.

“I believe,” the man in white said, “that introductions are in order.”

Gödel inclined his head. “Kurt Gödel. Institute for Advanced Study.”

The bishop smiled faintly. “A place for contemplation?”

“For research,” said Gödel.

“Then it may be the same thing, if rightly ordered. I am Augustine, bishop of Hippo.”

Gödel blinked once. “Yes. I had inferred as much.”

The man in white bowed slightly. “And I am Leo, servant of the servants of God.”

Augustine turned to him. “Bishop of Rome?”

“Yes.”

Augustine’s face softened. “Then I greet you as a brother, though I confess I do not understand how we have been gathered. This room is strange to me. These lamps burn without flame. These marks”—he gestured toward Gödel’s symbols—“are neither Greek nor Latin, though I suspect they are meant to compel the mind.”

“They are logical formulae,” Gödel said.

“Ah,” said Augustine. “Then they are meant not merely to persuade, but to bind.”

Leo smiled. “That is well put.”

Gödel gestured toward the chairs. “Please.”

They sat. Augustine examined the chair before trusting his weight to it. Leo remained composed, as though papal audiences in the offices of dead mathematicians were not wholly outside the bounds of pastoral duty.

Leo opened a folder.

“Professor Gödel, Saint Augustine, I will explain why I wished for this conversation, though the means by which it has been granted are beyond my competence. While I was working on my recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, one of my colleagues pointed out a passage from Augustine’s Confessions. It seemed to him to resonate with your incompleteness theorem.”

Gödel looked sharply interested.

Augustine looked from one to the other. “Incompleteness?”

“A result in mathematical logic,” said Gödel. “Roughly speaking, in any sufficiently strong formal system capable of expressing arithmetic, there will be true statements that cannot be proven within that system, assuming the system is consistent.”

Augustine was silent for a moment.

“You say: a structure of reasoning may contain truths that it cannot reach by its own lawful motions?”

Gödel’s expression altered, almost imperceptibly. “That is not an inaccurate first formulation.”

“But I must be careful,” Augustine continued. “You speak of arithmetic. I know number, of course. I know that three is not five, and that if two men enter a room where two already sit, there are four. I know arithmetic as number, measure, and reckoning. But you seem to speak of arithmetic as though it were also a mirror in which reasoning may behold its own form. That I do not know.”

Gödel nodded. “Exactly. The novelty is not number alone, but the coding of statements, proofs, and rules as numbers. Nor would you know the modern notion of a formal system: axioms, rules of inference, recursive procedures, symbolic codings of syntax.”

“I know rules,” said Augustine. “And I know the temptation to mistake the rule for the truth it serves.”

Nostalgia and conflict in the Roman Catholic Church

David Gibson, Pope Leo Faces the First Crisis of His Pontificate, NYTimes, June 30, 2026.

The article starts out with (2nd paragraph):

The focus of the uproar is a breakaway faction based in Ecône, Switzerland, the Society of St. Pius X, which is devoted to the celebration of an outdated version of the Mass in Latin. Why is the group, named after Pope Pius X, a fiercely anti-liberal early-20th-century pontiff, causing such problems? Why should anyone care about such a recondite internal church dust-up?

And works its way around to this:

In fact, if today’s “trads” were sent back in time, they would discover that the old Mass was often a perfunctory affair celebrated in dodgy Latin with little participation by the faithful. Nor should it be forgotten that the Mass has undergone revisions over the past 2,000 years to adapt to social changes, such as the switch from Greek to Latin or the incorporation of Old Testament readings.

Linked to the traditionalist pining for a lost golden age is a reaction against a tectonic demographic shift in Catholicism. Yes, Christianity was born in the Middle East, but Catholicism grew up in Europe. “Europe is the faith and the faith is Europe,” the Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote a century ago. No more. Thanks in large part to Vatican II, Catholicism has grown enormously, more than doubling from 653 million members in 1970 to 1.4 billion today. The vast majority of that growth has come in the Southern Hemisphere. Catholicism is far more African, more Asian, more Latin American than it is European.

That’s not the story that the traditionalists want to tell. For them, modernization has been the death knell of the church, because the reforms of Vatican II correlated with the sharp decline of practice in Europe and the West. Their faith is tethered to Western Christendom, which the numbers illustrate. Latin Masses celebrated by the society and those celebrated with Vatican approval are overwhelmingly confined to the United States and parts of Europe. But thanks to their base in the industrialized West, traditionalists have money, influence and visibility.

What will happen? Strong action by Leo could prompt a backlash from the right, but it could also divide it. Conservatives have so far tried to put the best spin possible on Leo’s year-old pontificate and may be loath to turn on a 70-year-old pope who could be around for a long time.

There's more at the link.

Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and the Pope – Yikes!

NEW: JD Vance credits Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel with catalyzing his conversion to Catholicism.

Thiel has since branded Pope Leo XIV the “woke American pope” and cast him as a tool of the Antichrist.

He told Vance to ignore the pope on matters of morality and pray…

— Christopher Hale (@ChristopherHale) June 26, 2026

The Pope and the AI

We are in a peculiar era pic.twitter.com/4kys3ZQ14O

— David AttenBruh (@AlHendiify) May 30, 2026

H/t Tyler Cowen

Idolatry and A.I. [Magnifica humanitas]

Yuval Levin,  Idols of the Valley, The New Atlantis, May 27, 2026.

Levin is commenting on Pope Leo  XIV's recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas. The following paragraphs are from the last two sections (of five) in Levin's article.

* * * * * 

Our new technologies are neither demons nor idols, and we must make sure to keep them that way. But it is the challenge of idolatry that will be greatest. It increasingly seems to me that the essential text of the era we are entering will be this opening portion of Psalm 115:

Not to us, LORD, not to us
but to your name be the glory,
because of your love and faithfulness.

Why do the nations say,
“Where is their God?”

Our God is in heaven;
and does what he wills.

But their idols are silver and gold,
made by human hands.

They have mouths, but cannot speak,
eyes, but cannot see.

They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but cannot smell.

They have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but cannot walk,
nor can they utter a sound with their throats.

Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.

Ever since I encountered this mysterious poem as a teenager, I have wondered at the image it paints of idolatry, especially in its stunning two final lines. The idols are made to seem human but do not partake of genuine embodied human experience. And both their makers and those who trust in them are destined to become like them — and so less than human — because they elevate them.

These lines have come to seem less mysterious to me in the last few years. They describe precisely the danger to which Pope Leo is pointing. It is the danger of turning our tools into idols, and thereby of becoming little more than tools ourselves. It is a danger that afflicts those who make these idols, and also threatens those who put their trust in them.

The appeal of idols has always been that they offer shortcuts. The God of the Bible demands that you live in a way that forms your mind and heart and soul toward your fullest human potential. This requires hard work but it yields a kind of person both capable and worthy of a flourishing life. The idol offers the material benefits of such a life without that formative work. And if all you care about are the benefits, not the form of your mind, heart, and soul, then the offer is awfully hard to resist. [...]

Such temptations of idolatry are ever-present. We resist them, now as always, by allegiance to a higher truth about ourselves that is as demanding as it is liberating. And we resist more actively and assertively, too — with the help of rules of conduct that constrain our appetites, of days of rest that offer us relief from the demands that expose us to temptation, and of formative disciplines of the soul embodied in family, faith, community, learning, work, and leisure toward which we are drawn by well-ordered loves.

All of these require us to choose the long, demanding, formative way through life. But various idolatries offer us shortcuts that promise the benefit without the work: Just turn yourself into a tool and you will be more productive without more effort. This is of course just what Magnifica Humanitas warns of. It is what AI at its most idolatrous and dangerous can offer. That doesn’t have to be what AI is in our experience — not at all. But it can be if we aren’t careful.

Eh? So much for “Magnifica Humanitas.” Lots of words, the substance is weak.

Matthew Walther, The Pope Should Be Going to War Against A.I. Why Isn’t He? NYTimes, May 26, 2026.

This is not exactly the Unabomber manifesto. One is even tempted to call it naïve. The encyclical certainly does not live up to its billing as the A.I. equivalent of “Rerum Novarum,” the revolutionary text on the Industrial Revolution with which his predecessor and namesake Leo XIII inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching in 1891. The presence of Christopher Olah, a founder of the A.I. firm Anthropic, at the presentation of the encyclical on Monday rightly raised eyebrows. (Imagine if Leo XIII had invited John D. Rockefeller to hear him speak on the dignity of labor!)

For those of us who see the rise of A.I. as unambiguously evil, Leo’s emphasis on its ethical use is a nonstarter. He seems to underestimate A.I.’s ability to exacerbate existing crises and to accelerate processes of cheapening and redefinition. The encyclical says nothing, for example, about how A.I. abets the replacement of medicine as a humanistic profession with an algorithmic conception of health care justified by the language of “access.”

In perhaps the most telling passage, Leo contrasts the dangers of a myopic, self-aggrandizing “idealism” with what he calls “authentic realism,” a clearheaded outlook that “does not give up on changing the world” but rather, “by clearly identifying interests, fears, constraints and power dynamics,” is able to “determine what can be achieved, and the measures needed to achieve it.” (This, perhaps, is an implicit rebuke to technophobic critics.)

The pope’s sanguine attitude should not surprise anyone who is familiar with his personality. Unlike Francis, a well-known Luddite, Leo is an internet user, a quaint phrase that describes roughly six billion of us.

What might be possible:

For years now I have believed that, in the face of the technological destruction of human relationships, literacy and contemplation, the church may well become the only guardian of humanistic values, even for secular people. But it will not fulfill this role by publishing encyclicals or issuing sterner disciplinary measures, but simply by staying true to itself.

Catholics are able to bear witness not only to the power and beauty of holiness but also to forgotten habits, practices and values, to the importance of craftsmanship and deliberation, to the past as a worthy and even delightful object of study rather than a catalog of forgotten barbarisms. They are able to present truth as something immutable and transcendent rather than contingent and self-constructed, and to speak to the value of liberality, magnanimity, filial piety and countless other shabby neglected virtues.

How exactly the church’s message will reach a distracted world is unclear. But it will almost certainly not be a top-down endeavor, dependent upon the actions or personal charisma of a pope. What seems more likely is that in the decades to come we will see the emergence of a distinctly Christian cultural movement that defies standard political categories but is united against technological utilitarianism and the subsuming of human life into digital frameworks.

At the heart of this resistance, I suspect, will be the Mass. With its grand symbolic gestures, its hieratic language and profound silences, the liturgy exists outside the framework of ordinary human experience and even of time itself. The sacraments are impervious to technological improvement.

There's more at the link.

The Vatican News presents Magnifica humanitas in 4 minutes and 37 seconds

The old religion (Christianity) vs. the new (A.I.)

David Streitfeld, As A.I. Fever Rises in Silicon Valley, Pope Leo Has a Few Words, NYTimes, May 25, 2026.

A dozen paragraphs or so into the article:

Magnifica Humanitas arrives as a challenge to tech moguls like Mr. Musk, whose power and influence rival such medieval popes as Innocent III. Pope Innocent asserted that the papacy was the sun and mere kings the moon: The latter could not be seen without the light cast by the former.

Love ’em or hate ’em, Mr. Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman and their peers exert similar influence on our modern kings, which is to say politicians. The American economy is being propped up by spending on A.I. The technology is being deployed in offices and classrooms with dizzying speed and unknown effect.

The old religion challenging the new is a dramatic story, the stuff of thrillers.

Silicon Valley has encountered little public opposition in its 50-year history. Certainly nothing with the sweep and authority of Magnifica Humanitas. Pope Leo is the spiritual leader of 1.4 billion Catholics, and instructing them to be cautious or even suspicious of A.I. — especially if the warning is regularly reinforced among the laity — could put a dent in tech’s global ambitions.

“How much influence does the pope have in our secular Western world?” asked Timothy Ahn, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, studying the development of A.I. in religious institutions. “We’re about to see. I doubt that tech executives in Palo Alto are going to be reading this encyclical.”

In the best-case scenario, said Mr. Ahn, a former seminarian, the encyclical “will shape some moral deliberations.”

Popes have traditionally worked with the long term in mind, and any evaluation of the encyclical’s effect is years away. Those who know both Silicon Valley and the Vatican say any expectations of a head-on confrontation, much less a holy war, are misguided. A decade ago, Pope Francis began inviting tech luminaries in for an annual A.I. conference called the Minerva Dialogues.

In any case, if Leo confronted Silicon Valley outright, he would probably lose.

The fact that the Vatican unveiled the encyclical with Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, the self-styled “good” A.I. firm, pointed to the possibility that Leo is trying less to undermine A.I. than simply participate in the conversation around it. When Francis released his scathing encyclical about climate change in 2015, no oil company executives were invited to speak.

The new religion of A.I.:

Mr. Thiel, the tech investor, gives lectures about the Antichrist, which he says has arrived in the form of environmentalists. A former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski, set up a church in 2017 to “promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence,” closed it and then opened it again in 2023.

Mr. Levandowski, who was sentenced to 18 months in prison for stealing trade secrets from Google but was pardoned by Mr. Trump, was ahead of his time. A.I. is now widely seen in tech and tech-sympathetic circles as quasi-divine.

Market share:

Whatever ethical and humanist reasons Pope Leo has to protest A.I., he also needs to defend his market share, much the way Walmart had to defend itself against the upstart Amazon.

The tech world’s initial reaction to the encyclical was muted on the holiday weekend. Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, recirculated it to his millions of followers on X.

For all the noise over religion in Silicon Valley, Leo doesn’t have many faithful there. A character on the satirical show “Silicon Valley” once joked that Christianity was “borderline illegal” in the tech community, although the reality is more complicated.

Is it too late? The article concludes with an observation by Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain at Harvard:

“The pope is really doing the Lord’s work here, and I say that as an atheist. There are so few institutions left on planet Earth that have the gravitas, the strength, the communal network to take on this phenomenon, which is trying to become inevitable and superhuman.” [...]

“Big Tech is essentially its own religion with its own theology and rites, not to mention its own power and influence,” Mr. Epstein said. “Pope Leo’s encyclical will be automatically viewed as false doctrine.”

Yes. But Silicon Valley does not yet rule the world. And lots of people are becoming wary of A.I.

There's more at the link.

Meta-level note: The New York Times is giving this encyclical a LOT of coverage today.

Pope Leo presents Magnifica Humanitas while standing next to a tech founder

Motoko Rich and Elisabetta Povoledo, Pope Leo Warns of Risks From A.I. in 42,300-Word Encyclical, NYTimes, May 25, 2026.

Leo’s declaration came in the form of a papal encyclical, an open letter to “all people of good will” that ran to roughly 42,300 words in its English version. It outlined his desire to protect human dignity and agency in an age in which technology threatens to replace humans in many professional and social roles. He presented it alongside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, a major A.I. developer, in a symbolic gesture of dialogue between leaders of the spiritual and technological worlds.

This, obviously, is a political move. And it makes sense that Anthropic would be chosen to represent the AI industry. For one thing, recent events in the United States (I’m thinking of the contretemps with the Pentagon) have pushed it onto the stage ahead of OpenAI. Then we have machines, that it’s founders split from OpenAI because they felt that OpenAI had lost sight of it’s mission, to develop “safe” AI. Finally, Chris Olah is one of the original researchers in mechanistic interpretability. On the other hand, from my point of view, Anthropic seems no less vulnerable to hubristic overreach than any other AI company. Despite the “feel good” nature of Dario Amodei’s essay, Machines of Loving Grace, his statement from February, 2026, that AGI is imminent, late 2026 or 2027, is not evidence of epistemic humility.

The article foes on:

While emphasizing that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” he wrote that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.”

Among other things, Leo called for:

• government regulation of the private companies that are driving the development of A.I. 
• protection and retraining for workers whose jobs are threatened
• education to help students think critically about the technology
• action to protect children from violent, hypersexualized or fake information online that is often generated by A.I.
• safeguards to ensure that humans, not artificial intelligence, remain responsible for all decisions regarding the use of weapons. 

Above all he emphasized the importance of retaining a fundamental social role for all human beings. “A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of the population, despite having a high level of technical development, risks exposing many to forced inactivity, a lack of responsibility and the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, resulting in human and cultural impoverishment,” he said.

“This creates a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression that undermines the foundations of a just and stable social peace,” he added.

Some background on the encyclical:

Although Leo publicly presented his encyclical on Monday, he formally signed it on May 15, the 135th anniversary of the publication of “Rerum Novarum,” — or “Of New Things” in English — a major encyclical written in 1891 by his namesake, Leo XIII.

The pope’s encyclical was timed to prompt comparisons with that earlier document, which guided Catholic teaching on how to protect workers after the technological and industrial disruptions of the 19th century.

Written amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, “Rerum Novarum” sought to safeguard the rights and dignity of the working class and became one of the foundational texts of modern Catholic social teaching. It called on governments to “save unfortunate working people from the cruelty of men of greed, who use human beings as mere instruments for money making,” even as it praised the “discoveries of science.”

In the new encyclical, titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” Leo struck a similar tone, warning of the new threat to workers posed by artificial intelligence.

Work, he wrote, is more than a way of earning income, but “a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment.” He called for “the protection of employment opportunities and the irreplaceable role of the individual.”

Leo expressed concern at how emerging A.I. tools might take over many routine tasks and jobs, implicitly devaluing those who do not have the training or ability to perform the work that remains available to humans. Leo wrote of the importance of preserving human dignity and warned of the “insidious” ideology that “suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective.”

Do I detect an opening for Homo ludens? The document also warns about the development of A.I. for wartime use. 

Going on:

Although the encyclical includes significant references to scripture and religious teachings, the document in many ways reads like a policy paper from a think tank or a lawmaker.

Hmmm....

Will the document have any effect on the tech industry?

Brian Patrick Green, director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University in Northern California, said some technology leaders “will have to take it seriously in a sense,” partly because it provides them with “a moral imperative.”

Writing in the encyclical, the pope recognized the autonomy of governments and private companies. The church, he said, “does not claim to supplant the responsibilities of politics or institutions, but offers itself as a foundation,” urging other institutions to “recognize and promote whatever serves the dignity of persons, the vitality of communities and the common good.”

Others said that an encyclical’s primary targets are the clergy and the faithful.

“I don’t think the ‘tech bros’ in Silicon Valley will listen that much,” said Prof. Noreen Herzfeld, director of a program on technology and ethics at St. John’s School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, Minn. “But I think within the church, it will be there as a reference for priests and bishops and particularly for those of us who are educating seminarians or young people.”

I agree with Herzfeld. I doubt that the tech bros care about anything other than money, power, and (personal) glory.

There's more at the link. You can read or download Magnifica Humanitas here.

ADDENDUM: That is to say, the generous, altruistic, and even utopian statements by powerful techbros may be grounded in sincere intentions. But the business environment in which they operate negates those intentions. Furthermore, consider AI Doomers. OpenAI, after all, was founded out of fear of AI Doom. The founders of Anthropic left OpenAI because they felt OpenAI had all but abandoned its commitment to “safe” AI. But just what is their commitment to safety? Well, sure, yes, they’ve held back Mythos from general release.

But they’re continuing on toward Mount AGI, followed by ASI, though they fear/know there’s a possibility of Doom ahead. Why? “Because we’ve got to beat the Chinese”, that’s why. Give me a break. More and more I’m thinking that AI Doom is a way to square the ethical circle, to have your cake and eat it too, to continuing developing AI while knowing that it will likely cause tremendous disruption in the lives of OTHERS, but not the developers, not the developers, who’ll be sitting fat and sassy behind the walls of their gated communities.

Pope Leo is about to issue an encyclical centered on A.I.: “Magnifica Humanitas”

David Gibson, Pope Leo Chooses Social Justice Over Pelvic Theology, NYTimes, May 22, 2026

Pope Leo XIV’s first landmark teaching document, to be published on Monday, is expected to explore a theme he has emphasized since beginning his papacy a year ago: social disruption in the digital age, in particular the dangers that A.I. poses for human flourishing. Titled “Magnifica Humanitas,” or “Magnificent Humanity,” the document is inspired by the teachings of Leo’s eponymous predecessor, Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum” responded to the plight of exploited workers in the Industrial Revolution. It is considered the modern foundation of Catholic social teaching.

“In our own day,” Leo told the College of Cardinals two days after his election, “the church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” As a sign of the subject’s importance, the pope plans to make an unprecedented appearance at the news conference presenting the encyclical. [...]

Dedicating his first encyclical to social justice would show how much Leo, like his predecessor Pope Francis, is trying to shift Catholicism away from the near fixation on “pelvic theology,” or sexual morality, that has come to define Catholicism, especially in Leo’s home country, the United States. The concern is that decades of focusing on “sins below the waist,” as Pope Francis memorably put it, has fueled the church’s culture war agenda and driven many people away from the central teachings of the Gospels.

The essay then goes on to talk about how the Catholic Church had become fixated on sex.

This approach, and this new encyclical, is arriving at a propitious moment. The disruptions of the post-liberal world and the threats posed by A.I. have led many cultural conservatives to make economic justice a priority. The Trump administration’s crusade again immigrants and foreign aid have united the U.S. hierarchy in opposition.

Expanding the church's vision:

This approach, and this new encyclical, is arriving at a propitious moment. The disruptions of the post-liberal world and the threats posed by A.I. have led many cultural conservatives to make economic justice a priority. The Trump administration’s crusade again immigrants and foreign aid have united the U.S. hierarchy in opposition. [...]

A.I. can do remarkable things, but it can also sow disinformation and division. Leo stresses wisdom and relationships. His holistic view of mankind is reflected in the very title of this new encyclical. Our shared humanity, the pope is saying, is a sacred reality, and that carries a social responsibility.

I'll be interested in what this new encyclical has to say. The AI Oligarchy is strong and influential. It is going to take a powerful force to resist it and help guide a more human and human development and deployment of the technolgy. Perhaps the Catholic Church can be that force. We'll see.

* * * * *

Yikes! Never in a million years did I think I'd be looking to the Catholic Church for social and cultural reform.

The Catholic Church is arguably the oldest continuously functioning hierarchical institution in the Western world, and possibly the world. It's got 1.4 billion members in congregations around the world, with 48% in the Americas, 20% in Africa (and growing), 20% in Europe, 11% in Asia, and 1% in Oceania.

Douthat, A.I., and Pope Leo

Ross Douthat, The Atheist and the Machine God, NYTimes, May 9, 2026.

Douthout is anticipating Pope Leo XIV's encyclical on A.I. For Douthat the crucial issue is consciousness:

In one possible timeline, the advent of A.I. is widely understood as a win for atheism and a blow against religious ideas of soul and spirit, persuading more people that their own minds are just computers — no divine spark or immortal soul, just the meatspace equivalent of a helpful chatbot or an A.I. therapist.

In another potential future, the mystery of consciousness ends up seeming more profound in the shadow of machine intelligence, the mystical finds new appeal as a form of experience computers cannot emulate, and religion becomes a place for human exceptionalists to plant a defiant flag.

But between those two scenarios there’s a future where artificial intelligence mostly increases metaphysical uncertainty, leaving a lot of people simply unsettled about fundamental questions, increasingly “mysterian” rather than clearly atheistic or devout.

That’s how my encounters with Silicon Valley culture often feel: Beneath a materialist carapace, it’s a place where people who aren’t sure exactly what they’re building dabble in Buddhist metaphysics or consult with Catholic priests, adopt churchy or cultish attitudes toward their new creations or rebel into apocalyptic doomsaying.

Douthat then goes on to discuss Richard Dawkins’ recent encounter with Claude in which Dawkins, the Great Atheist, fools himself into thinking that Claude is conscious. Douthat asks:

Meanwhile, in its less-besotted passages, Dawkins’s essay circles around an important question for materialists like himself. The origin and nature of consciousness currently evades our understanding, but the good Darwinian is committed to the proposition that it evolved to serve some crucial evolutionary purpose. But if a digital entity seems to display the capacities that we associate with conscious minds, and we don’t believe that this entity is actually conscious, then what is consciousness’s true purpose? If we can have intelligence without self-awareness, a zombie that calculates and speaks, why does the self exist at all?

I'm not so sure that consciousness is the issue. It's complicated. My own view of consciousness is derived from the work of William Powers, which seems thoroughly materialist to me. But I'm not at all sure what that means, not in a world with quantum mechanics and deep complexity. Deep complexity itself presents issues, interesting ones. At the moment I'm considering the possibility that deep complexity gives us Aristotle's unmoved mover or Paul Tillich's God as the ground of being.

Douthat ends up with this as his penultimate paragraph:

As certain philosophers have argued, this harmony between the psychological and the physical seems more much likely to appear in a universe where consciousness is fundamental, where matter isn’t everything and Mind is where things start.

I'm not familiar with those certain philosophers, but who knows? I'm thinking that deep complexity gives us a generative universe, and that's all we need. But I'm still working on it.

What I'm looking for from Pop Leo's encyclical is how it discusses A.I. and idolatry. Now, just how is THAt entangled with consciousness?

Does Peter Thiel Think He's GOD? [Pope Leo XIV and AI]

You Tube:

Jon Favreau is joined by Christopher Hale to discuss Pope Leo XIV's warnings against A.I.

Is the internet slowly breaking our brains, and if so, what can we do about it? Offline with Jon Favreau is a place where you can take a break from doom-scrolling and tune in to smarter, lighter conversations about the impact of technology & the internet on our collective culture. Intimate interviews between Pod Save America host Jon Favreau and notable guests like Stephen Colbert, Hasan Piker, ContraPoints, Margaret Atwood, and Megan Rapinoe spark curiosity and introspection around the various ways our extremely online existence shapes everything from the ways we live, work, and interact with one another. Together we’ll figure out how to live happier, healthier lives, both on and offline.

At some point they mention Ross Douthat's NYTimes interview with Peter Thiel and how there's a moment where Thiel wasn't sure whether humanity was worth saving. Here's that moment"

Douthat: But the world of A.I. is clearly filled with people who, at the very least, seem to have a more utopian, transformative — whatever word you want to call it — view of the technology than you’re expressing here. And you mentioned earlier the idea that the modern world used to promise radical life extension and doesn’t anymore. It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism — for transcendence of our mortal flesh — and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.

Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?

Thiel: Um, yeah.

Douthat: I think you would prefer the human race to endure, right?

Thiel: Uh ——

Douthat: You’re hesitating.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. I would — I would ——

Douthat: This is a long hesitation!

Thiel: There’s so many questions implicit in this.

Douthat: Should the human race survive?

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: OK.

Thiel: But I also would like us to radically solve these problems. And so it’s always, I don’t know, yeah — transhumanism. The ideal was this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say, the trans people in a sexual context, or, I don’t know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change your, I don’t know, penis into a vagina. And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. But we want more transformation than that. The critique is not that it’s weird and unnatural, it’s: Man, it’s so pathetically little. And OK, we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body.

And then orthodox Christianity, by the way — the critique orthodox Christianity has of this, is these things don’t go far enough. That transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform your soul and you need to transform your whole self. And so ——