When the Vatican voices anxieties of the AI age

The Vatican has entered the Artificial Intelligence debate with a certain historical familiarity. In 1891, as factories transformed Europe and industrial capitalism reordered everyday life, Pope Leo XIII responded with Rerum Novarum, an encyclical that confronted the social consequences of mechanised labour. More than a century later, Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas returns to a similar anxiety. This time, the machine is not the factory but the algorithm. The timing of its release is deliberate: the document was signed on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. Unlike many earlier Vatican documents translated from Latin or Italian, Magnifica Humanitas is written originally in English and carries a striking structural and argumentative clarity.

The encyclical does not condemn technology. Rather, it argues that technological acceleration does not automatically produce social wisdom. At a moment when governments and technology companies speak confidently about AI-driven futures, Magnifica Humanitas pauses to consider a different set of questions: what happens to labour, judgment, care, and even attention when more and more decisions are delegated to systems ordinary people neither understand nor control?

Algorithms already shape what people read, watch, and trust. They influence hiring, insurance, banking, policing, and education. Large technology corporations now exercise forms of influence once associated primarily with states. The encyclical’s central concern is that societies may gradually surrender moral and political judgment to systems designed largely around efficiency, prediction, and optimisation.

This concern is particularly relevant in the Global South, where AI is rapidly entering schools, workplaces, hospitals, financial systems, and public administration. Most countries in the Global South are also marked by deep inequalities in access, language, and digital infrastructure. Technologies often arrive carrying the promise that they will solve social problems automatically. Yet the history of technology shows that systems can also inherit and reproduce the inequalities already embedded within society itself.

Magnifica Humanitas is especially attentive to the question of who gets excluded from technological futures. The document pays specific attention to women and marginalised communities, arguing that despite greater public language around rights and inclusion, deep inequalities continue to shape everyday life. AI is not positioned to enter neutral social environments. They arrive within societies already marked by disparities of class, gender, language, and access, and they often end up reproducing those inequalities in less visible but more systematic ways. The people most affected by automated systems are frequently those with the least power to question or challenge them.

The encyclical repeatedly turns towards the changing nature of work. Automation is beginning to affect not only industrial labour but also white-collar professions once considered secure. In India’s expanding gig economy, many workers already inhabit algorithmically managed worlds in which invisible systems shape wages, visibility, and opportunity. The encyclical repeatedly returns to the question of whether human beings are slowly being reduced to units of productivity within systems whose priorities they do not control.

Some of the document’s most compelling reflections emerge in its discussion of education and human relationships, arguing that not everything valuable in life can be measured by efficiency or speed. Teaching, care, friendship, parenting, and democratic discussion are slow, imperfect activities. They require judgment, emotional presence, and forms of attention that cannot easily be automated. Beneath these arguments lies a deeper philosophical distinction. There is caution against treating AI as equivalent to human intelligence. AI systems can process vast amounts of information, imitate conversation, and generate increasingly convincing forms of language and analysis. But they do not experience the world. They do not grow through memory, relationships, grief, responsibility or moral conflict.

Their “learning” is statistical adaptation rather than lived experience. What concerns the Vatican is not merely the rise of intelligent machines, but the possibility that societies may gradually begin redefining human intelligence itself in computational terms.

This becomes especially relevant as AI tools increasingly enter classrooms through automated testing, personalised learning platforms, and digital tutoring systems. Such technologies may assist teachers in important ways. Yet schools are not merely sites for information transfer. They are also places where children learn confidence, empathy, disagreement, and social life itself. The encyclical suggests that an education system organised entirely around optimisation risks confusing learning with data processing.

The Catholic Church itself is hardly free from historical contradiction. Its history includes complicity with colonialism, hierarchy, and institutional violence. Critics will rightly point to the irony of the Vatican warning the world about concentrated power. Yet the significance of Magnifica Humanitas lies less in the moral purity of the institution than in the questions the document raises. Institutions with long historical memory sometimes recognise civilisational anxieties earlier than cultures captivated by novelty.

The public debate around AI is still largely conducted in the language of innovation, competition, and inevitability. Magnifica Humanitas introduces a different vocabulary into that conversation – labour, vulnerability, dependency, ageing, care, and moral limits. Invoking the Tower of Babel, the encyclical warns against societies that mistake technical capability for wisdom. As AI becomes more deeply woven into everyday life, that distinction may become harder to ignore.

(The writer is an assistant professor at the School of Arts and Sciences, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru)