When Time Magazine released its 2025 list of the world’s most influential people in artificial intelligence, one name surprised many outside Catholic circles: Pope Leo XIV.
Time's list includes "leaders" "innovators" "shapers" and "thinkers," placing Pope Leo among the last group of the four, along with the chief scientists of Google and OpenAI.
The new pontiff, born Robert Francis Prevost, was elected in May and chose his name as a deliberate nod to Pope Leo XIII, who led the Church during the Industrial Revolution. Just as that Leo addressed the social upheavals of his age in the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, Leo XIV has signaled that he intends to guide the Church through the moral and economic challenges of the digital era.
In his first major address after election, Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence represents nothing less than a “new industrial revolution.”
He stressed that its advance must never compromise “human dignity, justice, and labor.”
This framing, Time noted, echoes the 19th-century defense of workers against systems that reduced them to commodities. The new Pope appears determined to ensure that history does not repeat itself under different machines.
Leo and Leo
The comparison is fitting. When Rerum Novarum was issued in 1891, factories and railroads were reshaping economies at tremendous human cost.
Pope Leo XIII insisted that work was not a disposable function but a core part of human flourishing. His call for just wages, safe conditions, and solidarity helped Catholic social teaching for the modern era.
Today, Leo XIV seems poised to argue that AI, while promising great benefits, risks a similar dehumanization if left unchecked.
In June, the Vatican hosted a global gathering on AI, ethics, and governance, where the Pope praised technology’s potential in healthcare and science but voiced deep concern about its possible misuse. He cautioned against allowing algorithms to distort humanity’s search for truth or to fuel conflict and aggression.
Continuing Pope Francis' work
These remarks build on initiatives begun under Pope Francis, who advocated for an international treaty on AI regulation. With Leo XIV, that vision gains a new urgency.
The Church’s insistence on the dignity of work remains central. As automation reshapes industries, questions about retraining, fair wages, and equitable sharing of benefits are not just policy debates but moral imperatives.
The Catechism teaches that “work is for man, not man for work” (CCC 2428). By extension, no machine — however advanced — should undermine the human person at the heart of labor.
Leo XIV brings a personal dimension to this struggle. Having served for years in Peru, especially among farming communities and low-wage workers, he knows firsthand the vulnerability of those who often bear the brunt of economic upheaval. His pastoral lens suggests that his leadership on AI will not be abstract theorizing but grounded in lived human experience.
As Time recognized in naming him to its AI list, the Pope’s voice introduces an unexpected counterweight to the global tech conversation: a spiritual tradition that measures progress not by profit or power, but by whether it safeguards the dignity of every person.
