“Disarm AI” — Pope Leo XIV Drops His First Encyclical on Slavery, Algorithms, and War
The pope’s first encyclical takes on autonomous weapons, the layoff cycle behind generative AI, and the algorithmic capture of democracy — and asks whether the dignity of the human person can survive.
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I’m exhausted. Today is going to be mostly television hits, and last night I read Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, in full — so I could write this letter for those of you who cannot read 200 paragraphs of papal prose in short order. I hope I articulate myself well, nevertheless. If you’re able, you should read the encyclical too.
No summary will do this document justice. I previewed it last week and wrote a reader’s guide. What follows is what stood out to me on the first full read.
Here is the shape of what Pope Leo has done.
The encyclical opens with a choice. In its first paragraph, Leo writes that “the magnificent humanity created by God stands today before a decisive choice: to erect a new Tower of Babel or to build the holy city, where God and humanity dwell together” (§1).
The Tower of Babel is the Genesis story in which a unified humanity tries to build a tower to heaven on its own terms, without reference to God, and ends in confusion and dispersion.
Leo uses it as the image for a civilization that lets technology dominate the person, against the alternative of a city built around the dignity of every human being.
Chapter One traces the development of Catholic social doctrine from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 through Francis’s Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti, presenting the magisterium as a living tradition rather than a static rulebook.
The second chapter restates the foundational principles — the dignity of the person, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, social justice. In the third, Leo names what Pope Francis first called the technocratic paradigm and identifies its newest expression in artificial intelligence.
The fourth applies those principles to truth, work, and freedom in the digital transition. Chapter Five moves from the algorithm to the battlefield, identifying the use of AI in war as a sin against what Pope Paul VI called the civilization of love.
Inside that structure, Leo has tucked a moment of historic moral reckoning. For the first time in the history of the papacy, a pope has formally apologized for the role the Holy See itself played in legitimizing the slave trade.
Earlier popes have apologized for Christians who participated in slavery. None has acknowledged, until now, that the fifteenth-century bulls of Nicholas V and his successors gave Portuguese and Spanish sovereigns explicit authority to “invade, conquer, fight and subjugate” non-Christians.
Leo names that record a “wound in Christian memory.” The pope, whose own family tree includes both enslaved people and slaveholders, issued the apology inside an encyclical on artificial intelligence for a reason.
He is asking whether we are repeating the pattern in the unregulated labor that supplies the rare minerals for AI chips and the new digital trafficking enabled by the platforms.
This is the heart of what the encyclical does — it refuses to let artificial intelligence be treated as a theoretical question. Leo is direct on this point.
Here’s what I mean:
