The Pope Gets It. Do Our Governments?

Let's make AI political, before it's too late.

I am not a religious person, and I have significant reservations about the institutional record of the Catholic Church on many of the issues that matter most to me. I say this upfront, because what follows might otherwise seem incongruous: the encyclical published yesterday by Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, is one of the most clear-eyed political documents on artificial intelligence that any major institution has produced, and it deserves to be read far beyond Catholic circles.

The document - 245 paragraphs, published on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the encyclical that first engaged the Church with the social consequences of industrial capitalism - makes arguments that will be familiar to readers of this series. AI carries moral weight not only in how it is used but in how it is designed. Technological progress will inevitably produce structural inequalities if left ungoverned. A more ethical AI means nothing if the ethics are determined by a handful of people in a handful of boardrooms. The encyclical warns of a “culture of power” fuelled by the digital revolution, calls for AI to be removed from military and economic interests, subjected to stricter state and international regulations, and shaped by the broad participation of individuals and communities rather than left to those who profit most from its development.

The timing is deliberate. Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 was a response to industrial capitalism - the last time a technological transformation of this magnitude reshaped the terms of human existence. Leo XIV is making the same move, and the parallel is not subtle: what is happening now demands a civilisational response, not a technical adjustment at the margins.

What strikes me most is the framing of the core problem: “We are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human,” driven by the unbridled promotion of technology at the expense of human dignity. That phrase - an eclipse of the human - captures something that most political documents on AI have been unable or unwilling to say: that the stakes here are not primarily economic but existential, and that a society which allows the terms of its own transformation to be written exclusively by those profiting from it has already conceded something it will struggle to recover.

The concentration of AI power in a handful of companies, the extraction of data without consent or compensation, the displacement of workers without protection, the risk of systems designed to serve oligarchic interests rather than common ones - these are political problems with political solutions, and a document from the Vatican has articulated them more clearly and more forcefully than most elected governments have managed. The encyclical charts a direction that the European Union, national governments, and international bodies have the legal and institutional tools to pursue, if the political will existed to do so.

That political will does not currently exist at the scale required. The existing parties are too embedded in the donor relationships and ideological frameworks of the pre-AI world to take these questions seriously as a matter of electoral priority. What the moment demands - urgently, not eventually - is a political movement organised specifically around human agency over artificial intelligence: one capable of contesting elections, shaping regulation, and making the defence of the human against the machine a live political question rather than an academic one.

The Pope’s document will not by itself change the trajectory of AI development. But it does something important: it establishes, with the moral authority of an institution that speaks to more than a billion people, that defending the human in the age of AI is not a reactionary or marginal position. It is, to use the language of this publication, the avant-garde.

The argument for organising has never been stronger. That work is beginning.