Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence shows humans have a champion.

May 31, 2026 — 6:00am

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In my final opinion column as religion editor of The Age I played a practical joke on the opinion editor, a good friend, by filing my article in Latin. I used Google Translate – a form of artificial intelligence. A decade on, I fear the joke is on me.

That is the only time I have used AI in writing, but its meteoric rise might be society-defining, very soon if not already. It cannot be left to the dominant voices.

Pope Leo presents his first encyclical at the Vatican.AP

Who today believes Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or the Chinese or American governments have the faintest interest in the public good compared with the power, control, efficiency, wealth and military might they can extract from AI?

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on AI, Magnifica Humanitas, last Monday shows that, in him, ordinary humans do have a champion. For Leo, the most important stakeholders are the masses who are not billionaires or technocrats but whose lives are already massively affected for good and ill by AI.

With the advent of calculators, people often lost the ability to do mental arithmetic. Now that we are ready to outsource so much thinking itself, the cost may be incalculable.

Studies suggest the average IQ in the West has already been dropping for 15 years. The ability to reason critically is diminishing, while society has become ever more atomistic and fragmented, creating a pandemic of loneliness that AI’s purveyors are eager to fill with a meretricious alternative.

Pope Leo XIV greets Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah at the Vatican on Monday.AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino

Into this arena, Leo has brought a calm, reflective, compassionate voice that rightly puts people at the centre.

He identifies the challenge in his first sentence: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel…

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