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The anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum came and went last week, without a successor encyclical for our time from the reigning pontiff. Instead, we learned that Leo XIV signed his first encyclical on Friday, May 15, exactly 135 years to the day after his predecessor and namesake, Leo XIII, signed his seminal social encyclical. Leo XIV’s encyclical has been highly anticipated both in the Church and in the broad world, especially after the pontiff cited his predecessor’s signal contribution as a reason for taking his papal name. “Leo XIII,” said Leo XIV to the assembled College of Cardinals on May 10, 2025 – not two full days after they had elected him – used Rerum novarum to address “the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.” “In our own day,” continued Leo XIV, “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.” The neo-elect pontiff said those developments “pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.” That set expectations for a first foray into high-level magisterial writing very high, indeed. There are, however, some important differences between 1891 and 2026, not least of which is that the AI revolution is still mostly on its way, while the industrial revolution was well advanced by the time the work on what became Rerum novarum had begun. That’s not to say people haven’t been thinking about AI for a long time – they have been – and even catastrophizing, as a brief survey of 20th century cinema will suffice to show. “New… powerful… hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence,” said Kyle Reese – played by Michael Biehn – in 1984’s The Terminator. “Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: Extermination,” he said, and the words scare people today. An even more disturbing portrait was 1999’s The Matrix, where the AI machines turned people into literal batteries. “What is real?” asks the techno-rebel Morpheus – played by Laurence Fishburne – as he reveals the truth about the pseudo-world the machines have created to Keanu Reaves’ character, Neo. “How do you define ‘real’?” Morpheus asks, not rhetorically. “If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain,” he says. Pope Leo hinted at some of these concerns in his address to students at Rome’s La Sapienza University last week. “We must also keep a watchful eye on the development and application of artificial intelligence in both military and civilian contexts,” Leo said, “to ensure that it does not absolve humans of responsibility for their choices and does not exacerbate the tragedy of conflicts.” Fears over new technologies are nothing new. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Luddites destroyed the new stocking frames they thought would destroy their textile industry. They weren’t exactly wrong about what the mechanization of industry would do to their highly skilled craft, either. RELATED: Pope decries the rise of AI-directed warfare, saying it leads to a spiral of annihilation The rise of steam and then electric power changed the world, not all for the better, and to say it was hard going for the generations caught up in the sweep of change would be an understatement for the ages. The new technology improved lives, too, in ways we hardly consider because the disruptive revolutionary novelties are now commonplace. Workdays became shorter, the five-day workweek came into being, standards of living eventually rose and lifespans grew. The new technology has the potential to do the same, and on an exponential scale. That is part of the reason why it was announced on Saturday that the pontiff has approved the creation of a special commission to examine the growing technology, which will be made up of members from seven different Vatican bodies. These are the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Dicastery for Culture and Education, the Dicastery for Communication, the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. The Itnerdasterial Commission won’t be doing the thinking for the Church, but it will be doing its thinking with the Church, to help the world navigate a challenging civilizational moment. RELATED: The Vatican has said a lot about artificial intelligence. A primer ahead of the pope’s encyclical One of the most vocal churchmen on the subject of AI has been Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, who wrote a special reflection for the 60th World Day of Social Communications celebrated Sunday, May 17. “In a nutshell,” Martin wrote, “Pope Leo XIV is asking us to preserve human voices and faces. He is speaking into a world where technology can now copy a voice, create a face, imitate emotion, and produce words that sound human.” “The Pope asks us to go deeper,” Martin wrote, “and think about … What is a person? What does it mean to truly communicate?” For most people, AI has literally been popping up to them more and more over the past decade. Websites offer to “speak” to them, and tech leaders speak of a new age in which people can even make “virtual friends” to make their lives more complete. Many families are concerned about how this will affect their lives: Jobs might be lost – some have already begun to disappear – years of training may be made obsolete overnight, and the usual ways of meeting people and making friends will change even more drastically than they already have. RELATED: Cardinals debating 20th century problems in a 21st century world And another film shows where that leads to a different danger: 2008’s WALL-E from Pixar. No, the robot cleaning planet Earth wasn’t what was terrifying; it was the life of the humans in the spaceship carrying them around in space. The passengers on the Axiom had spent centuries just sitting in floating chairs, eating free food to obesity, watching videos, and having robots catering to their every need. They had lost the very ability to be truly human. Even today, algorithms determine the content users see on social media platforms. They track individuals’ posts and “engagement” with others’ posts. They show users content the algorithms “think” the users want to see. The algorithms will also show users content they’ve determined is likely to make them angry. There is some overlap in the categories. Basically, the algorithms will show users anything they determine likely to garner a click, for whatever reason. People are now less likely than ever to meet people who disagree with them, creating a twofold danger: The illusion that everyone thinks just the way they do; weakened ability to tolerate different opinions and viewpoints. At the end of WALL-E, the humans return to Earth and slowly learn how to be human again. Pope Leo XIV is hoping we can find our way to a choice that isn’t between The Terminator and WALL-E. He might also be aware of the fact we aren’t an “either-or” society, and we may be facing a “both-and” world. Follow Charles Collins on X: @CharlesinRome

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