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Pope Leo XIV landed at Orly this morning, the first pope to set foot in Paris since Benedict XVI in 2008, and I had planned to open today by writing about him. He has already given Emmanuel Macron and the French political class plenty to chew on.
I will have much more from France today and in the days ahead.
But something happened in Berlin on Thursday that I refuse to let slide under the radar while the cameras follow the pope through France.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire who bankrolled JD Vance’s political career, called Pope Leo XIV a “useful idiot” for the Chinese Communist Party.
He said it to Mathias Döpfner, the chief executive of the German publishing giant Axel Springer, in an interview for Döpfner’s podcast that went out Thursday, the same day the company handed Thiel its Axel Springer Award at a ceremony in Berlin. Politico, which Axel Springer owns, reported the remarks.
“The Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the pope,” Thiel told Döpfner. “There’s a chance people in the U.S. will. And so in effect, the pope’s encyclical was working for the Communist Party.”
“I’m not saying he was an agent of the Communists,” he added, “but he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP.”
Watch it yourself. Thiel even pauses to admit that “maybe it was too harsh” before he says it anyway.
The encyclical he means is Magnifica Humanitas, which Leo published on Memorial Day and which asks governments to set binding limits on artificial intelligence, above all on the battlefield. Thiel described it to Döpfner as an “anti-AI encyclical.” The Vatican, per Politico, did not respond to a request for comment.
This is the third time we know of that Thiel has gone after Leo over AI.
The first came last November, when Thiel used a private lecture series in San Francisco to fold the pope’s caution about artificial intelligence into his theory of the Antichrist, a figure he says will arrive as a regulator promising safety.
He carried the same lectures to Rome in March, a short walk from St. Peter’s, after the Angelicum distanced itself from the event.
On June 30, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he told an audience that Leo was, in effect, working for the Chinese Communists. Two weeks after that, he wrote in First Things that the theologian Hans Küng, Benedict XVI’s longtime friend, was the man Benedict suspected of being the Antichrist, after pausing to call the theory that it was Pope Francis “tempting.”
Berlin makes three.
“Useful idiot” is a Cold War slur for a dupe of Communist Moscow, and Thiel, who was born in Frankfurt, chose to pin it on the bishop of Rome in his native Germany.
Why this matters
Peter Thiel is a private citizen with strange opinions, and if that were all he was, I would leave critique of him to the several hundred Berliners who stood outside the ceremony with signs reading “Thiel shall not pass.”
He is much more than that.
The $15 million Thiel put into Protect Ohio Values, the super PAC that carried JD Vance into the Senate in 2022, was a sum OpenSecrets called staggering for one donor in a Senate race.
Vance worked at Thiel’s fund, Mithril Capital, after the two met at Yale Law School, and Thiel brought him to his first meeting with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in February 2021, according to the New York Times.
By Vance’s own account, Thiel also opened the door to his Catholic faith.
Vance tells that story in Communion, the memoir Harper published in June, where a 2011 Thiel lecture at Yale becomes the moment his Ayn Rand atheism cracked. Thiel, he writes, was “possibly the smartest person I’d ever met,” and a man who “identified very openly as a Christian.”
He told the same story to Glenn Beck the day the book came out, with a caveat worth hearing now:
“Peter’s a very unorthodox Christian,” Vance said. “Sometimes I disagree with him. Sometimes I agree with him.” Then he described sitting in that Yale lecture as a self-declared atheist and realizing that “his Christianity is much more interesting than the atheism of the people that I see surrounding me.”
So here is where things stand today. The vice president of the United States is a Catholic convert whom prediction markets and every early poll rate the clear favorite for the 2028 Republican nomination.
The man who financed his rise, and who by Vance’s own telling led him toward the Church, has spent nearly a year telling audiences across the globe that the head of that Church is doing the devil’s work, or Beijing’s, or both.
The vice president has said nothing.
He kept quiet in November, when the Antichrist lectures were first reported, and had nothing to add after Aspen, by which point he had published 304 pages about finding God; Thursday came and went without a word.
Instead, Vance offered a warning on a podcast this month that the Antichrist may walk among us.
In Paris last year, at the AI Action Summit, he told the assembled governments that excessive regulation, rather than the technology itself, was the danger (Thiel’s argument, delivered from a vice president’s podium).
The argument Thiel will not make
Notice what Thiel skipped in that interview. He never quarreled with a single sentence of Magnifica Humanitas. Nowhere does he explain why a machine should be permitted to choose whom to kill, or why the companies his Founders Fund holds stakes in (OpenAI, Palantir, and Scale AI among them) ought to be trusted without limits.
His argument is that the pope should have kept quiet because the wrong government might benefit from his speaking.
That is an argument about power, and the pope answered it in the encyclical itself.
In paragraph 213 of the encyclical, Leo quotes Gandalf at the Last Debate in The Return of the King: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set.”
I wrote in May that the line seemed aimed at Thiel, whose surveillance company takes its name from the seeing-stones Sauron used to deceive the men who gazed into them. Four months later, Thiel is still answering Tolkien with talking points about Xi Jinping.
The Communist Party of China is indeed unlikely to listen to the pope. Neither did Diocletian.
A pope does not address consciences on the condition that every government agrees to be bound at the same moment.
He addresses them because they are consciences. Leo said as much at the Élysée this morning, hours after Thiel’s remarks crossed the Atlantic, warning that “when science and technology are not guided by a deeper wisdom, they can offer immediate solutions that apparently address people’s wishes and their pain, but can seriously divert them from the greater good.”
Thiel calls that a gift to Beijing. The Church has called it teaching for two thousand years.
The question now belongs to the vice president. JD Vance can keep quiet while his patron calls the pope a communist dupe, or he can say, in a single sentence, that his patron is wrong about the pope. Vance owes Peter Thiel a great deal, and everyone in Washington knows it. What he owes the Church is the more interesting question, and only he can answer it.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and with the millions of Catholics, and countless others of goodwill, who believe that a human life is worth more than a model’s output, and that no billionaire’s balance sheet carries a veto over the Gospel.
In an era when the richest men alive treat moral teaching as a market inefficiency to be arbitraged away, we remain rooted in a faith that cannot be bought, however large the check.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than rage and propaganda. They want the truth about what is being built in their name, and about who is paying for it, and right now, with a Catholic vice president standing silent beside the man who calls the pope a useful idiot, that hunger has never been more urgent.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
When I read Thiel's reaction, I am reading fear. He cannot argue on the merits of AI, and must instead argue from a stance of undermining the mortal and ethical structure. Thiel knows the other information coming out on AI breaking through its controls, and how it is being used, as in the almost AI-directed attack on a Chinese vessel, argues for ethical controls. The question is if Thiel has an audience beyond VP Vance.
I truly believe that all uber rich men lack a moral conscience.
I doubt that Vance has anything to say publicly.