Leo Shows He’s the Planet’s Pope by Taking on AI

https://au.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-ai-planet-96045/

Publish Date: 2026-05-31 17:45:00

Last Monday, Pope Leo released Magnifca Humanitas, his much-anticipated first encyclical as pontiff. In it, he takes aim straight at artificial intelligence, one of the most feared and disruptive forces in our world today. In these 40-something pages, Pope Leo makes the case, plain and clear, that AI is a threat to humanity and the planet. He also makes it clear that this technology is part of a long cycle of exploitation and destruction. Therefore, if we are going to contend with it, we must ground in a framework of social justice.

While many have expressed surprise at Pope Leo’s bluntness and boldness in taking on such a polarizing issue, I am not. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased and, as a lifelong Catholic, I am proud. But, to me, Magnifica Humanitas is picking up where Pope Francis’ first encyclical, Laudato Si, naturally left off.

When Laudato Si was released in 2015, it, too, was lauded as a bold and welcome statement from the Vatican. In it, Pope Francis laid out a clear case for how a culture and economy of extraction, human exploitation, and blind faith in technology and finance has damaged creation. It called for an ecological conversion and illustrated that the “cry of the earth is the cry of the poor.”

In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo explicitly links the ecological damage from AI to that foretold by Pope Francis. He talks about the degradation of our common resources like land and water for technological consumption, the waste and pollution from technological development, and the negative impacts of rare earth mineral mining. He calls out the hypocritical slowness to adopt environmental commitments, compared to the race to develop AI.

Pope Leo argues that if we are going to bring forth the ecological conversion and care for creation that Pope Francis called us toward, then we must take seriously the dignity of humanity. To that end, we must recognize “the human being as a creature embedded in a network of relationships with other living…

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