“Who is Leo XIV?”
That’s a question lots of people still have, on several different levels, but the people of Chiclayo already knew the man we now call Leo XIV.
The man they knew as Robert Francis Prevost was their bishop for nearly a decade, and to say he had a warm welcome at his homecoming would be to put oneself in the running for Understatement of the Year.
Perhaps that’s why the pope chose Chiclayo to state the core of his teaching pontificate.
“Charity,” Leo said on Friday in Chiclayo, “is inseparable from truth, which is not a theory, an abstract idea or a utopia, but a person, Jesus Christ, who invites us to conform our lives to his in faithful obedience to his commandments.”
Leo offered the remark during his homily at Mass near the Pampas de Pimentel in Chiclayo.
“The harmony between charity and truth calls us to make our faith concrete,” the pontiff said, “so as to spread, with renewed joy, the fragrant perfume of holiness.”
The pope then called on his hearers to remember “that without truth, love degenerates into mere sentimentality, while truth without love becomes rigid and cold,” a riff on the great theme of Benedict XVI’s encyclical letter, Caritas in veritate.
It’s fair to say a great many people have the idea that a Catholic response to the AI revolution is the principal focus of Leo’s pontificate, and that’s not exactly wrong, but it isn’t close to the whole story.
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Not two full days after his election, Leo XIV located the rise of AI within the context of “another industrial revolution” and noted how developments in AI “pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
The core of Leo’s teaching pontificate, however, is not the development of a pastoral-theological response to AI. The AI revolution is still only just dawning. Leo knows we don’t have the data for a project like that, not yet.
By comparison, the Church had a hundred years of industrialization on which to reflect before Leo XIII put together his crackerjack team to work on what became Rerum novarum, the seminal 1891 social encyclical by Leo XIV’s predecessor and namesake.
What we do know, already, is that AI’s advent has coincided with a cultural and civilizational moment in which consensus over human nature – consensus regarding what human being is – has already weakened dangerously.
It is also fair to note that the rise of AI hasn’t happened in a technological or a cultural vacuum, either.
Social media had been making the world smaller and meaner for the better part of a generation before AI captured the attention of the broad public (a fact I note in my Leo XIV: The New Pope and Catholic Reform).
Leo XIV, the first pope to have been active on social media through his own personal accounts before his election (and is known to have been a regular online word-gamer before his election), knows all of this all too well.
Pope Leo XIV wants people to have their eyes open to the harsh and urgently challenging realities of the moment and to work together not only to limit the baleful effects of new and emerging technologies but harness them to the useful and the genuinely good.
There is lots of good that AI may do (and is already doing) across a vast array of fields “from archaeology to medicine to zythlogy (the all-important scientific study of brewing beer),” as I put it in a column earlier this year.
RELATED: Leo XIV at Regina Caeli: Putting humanity first in the AI age
Leo XIV has been working from the outset to recover the Church’s reflection on human nature and bring her “expertise in humanity” to bear on social problems that are already disruptive on a scale and with a scope not seen since the last great Industrial Revolution.
Then as now, the great social challenge was to maintain the primacy of the human in the face of technological displacement and social upheaval.
In short, the core of Leo XIV’s teaching pontificate is anthropological.
It is the recovery of an understanding of human being as made for truth, which is a fact of human nature that we only discover in rightly ordered relationship with ourselves, our fellows, and ultimately with the God who made us all.
That calls for “practical, committed and respectful love,” Leo also said in his Chiclayo homily this past Friday.
Such love, he said, “also demonstrates the unbreakable bond between the proclamation of the Gospel and the effort to transform the structures of human coexistence.”
There, the pope was riffing on his own recent encyclical letter, Magnifica humanitas, in which he noted quite frankly that many of the conditions described by his predecessor and namesake in Rerum novarum have changed.
Nevertheless, the U.S.-born pontiff and adopted son of Peru – who lived through those changes and came of age during a time of massive social upheaval – also noted two particular insights of Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum that remain highly relevant today.
The first was “the primacy of human labor over any mindset focused solely on finance or productivity,” he said, “with the consequent attention to the people and families most susceptible to exploitation.”
The second perennially relevant insight Leo XIV noted from his predecessor’s 1891 encyclical was “the inseparable link between proclaiming the Gospel and pursuing a more just social order.”
“For a baptized person,” Leo also said on Friday, “love of neighbor is at the heart of the Christian message, the commandment received ‘from the beginning’,” which is to know the truth about the human person and to live in a way that makes the Gospel credible.
The headlines and the commentary surrounding the pontificate of Leo XIV focus heavily on his engagement with artificial intelligence, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but it is crucial to understand how that engagement fits within a broader framework.
The stakes are high.
Any literary types out there reading this may also have caught the allusion to Dante’s Inferno in Leo’s description of truth without love as “rigid and cold.”
In Dante’s literary fantasy, the lowest pit of hell is not a fiery hellscape but a vast frozen lake, blasted with the icy wind produced by Satan’s beating wings.
It also bears mention that Leo XIV – a son of St. Augustine – will know that the holy Bishop and Doctor who led the Church at Hippo in Roman North Africa during the early fifth century famously taught how knowledge without charity is the very property of demons.
Follow Christopher R. Altieri on X: @craltieri
