Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
A reminder: to receive a free copy of American Pope, the new book by NPR’s Daniel Burke and Scott Detrow, you must buy a yearly subscription or donate $80 or more through my review itself by Thursday, Oct. 8.
Peter Thiel told a closed-door audience in Nashville that Pope Leo XIV took up artificial intelligence to change the subject from the sexual abuse of children. Decoded by POLITICO obtained recordings of the lectures, which Thiel gave on Sept. 28 and Oct. 5, and published them Thursday.
“He needed something politically popular to distract from the church’s child sex abuse scandals, and he found it in AI,” Thiel said, in a passage POLITICO reported was aimed at the pope’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.
Barack Obama got the same treatment. “Many people know that AI is politically unpopular and want to leverage that to boost their own popularity,” Thiel said. “Both Obama and the pope fall into this category.” He added that “Obama knows the Democrats have no ideas, but they can at least oppose AI.”
Nashville is the latest stop in a yearlong campaign by JD Vance’s biggest benefactor against this pope. In leaked San Francisco lectures last fall, Thiel suggested Leo was a tool of the Antichrist. At the Aspen Ideas Festival in July, he said the pope was “working for the Chinese Communists.” On Sept. 24 in Berlin, the day Axel Springer gave him its award, he called Leo “a useful idiot for the CCP.”
Watch Thiel in Berlin, where he pauses to concede that “maybe it was too harsh” before saying it anyway:
The new charge is ludicrous, and the calendar alone sinks it.
Leo named AI as a priority two days after the conclave elected him. Addressing the College of Cardinals on May 10, 2025, he explained his choice of name: Leo XIII had answered the first industrial revolution with Rerum Novarum, and the Church now had to bring its social teaching to “another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence.”
He kept returning to the subject that first week. Chilean Cardinal Fernando Chomali told OSV News that Leo raised artificial intelligence and robotics at an informal dinner right after his election. On May 12, the new pope told a hall full of journalists that AI “requires responsibility and discernment in order to ensure that it can be used for the good of all.” Thiel would have us believe a man who had been pope for less than 100 hours was already staging a cover-up.
The encyclical came a year later. Leo signed Magnifica Humanitas on May 15, 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, and presented it himself in the Synod Hall on May 25, with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah among the speakers. No pope had attended the launch of his own encyclical before. A panicked distraction does not get timed to a 135-year-old anniversary.
Thiel’s theory also needs a pope who has ducked the abuse crisis, and Leo has walked straight into it. Last October, he sat down at the Vatican with the leaders of End Clergy Abuse, a global network of survivors pressing for zero tolerance. In Madrid on June 8, he spent about an hour with six survivors at the Vatican’s embassy, after telling Spain’s bishops they owed victims reparations.
At Lourdes on Sept. 27, a meeting with seven French survivors was scheduled for 30 minutes and ran close to two hours, according to Colleen Dulle of America. Jean-Marie Delbos, 80, abused as a boy at a Catholic boarding school, had not been to Mass in 60 years. “He took me with both arms,” Delbos said of the pope.
Survivor advocates still want more from him. Groups left out of the Madrid meeting protested outside the embassy, and French activists pressed for broader action before Leo landed in Paris. Those critics carry wounds the Church inflicted, and Rome owes their demands a hearing.
Thiel belongs in another category. He raised the abuse crisis during a lecture series about the Antichrist and the dangers of regulating technology, and the victims show up in his argument only as a stick to beat the pope with.
His claim that AI is “politically popular” for a pope gets the story backward. Magnifica Humanitas condemns AI in warfare and warns against an AI arms race, which sets Leo against some of the richest men on earth. Thiel is one of them. He co-founded Palantir, which sells AI software to the Pentagon, and a pope asking hard questions about those tools is bad for his business.
On Memorial Day, the day the encyclical came out, I told Ali Vitali on MS NOW that Thiel was watching his worst fear come true:
Catholics should notice what Thiel did in Nashville. He took children who were raped by men they trusted and turned their suffering into a talking point for his portfolio. Leo’s encyclical warns that AI carries a “risk of dehumanization.” Thiel supplied a live demonstration, using survivors as a tool to defend the very technology the pope asked the world to keep in human hands.
None of this would matter much if Thiel were an eccentric shouting from the margins. He is the man who built JD Vance. Thiel brought Vance into his venture capital world after Yale Law School, then put $15 million into Protect Ohio Values, the super PAC behind Vance’s 2022 Senate run. POLITICO reported it was the largest sum anyone had ever given to help a single Senate candidate. Two years later, Vance was on the ticket with Donald Trump.
Vance credits Thiel with reopening the door to his faith. On Glenn Beck’s show the day Communion came out, he recalled hearing Thiel at Yale 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.”
Vance, a convert, praised Magnifica Humanitas in May and quoted it to Air Force cadets days after it landed. His patron had told a lecture audience last fall that he urged Vance to ignore the pope on moral questions, as I reported at the time. Now that patron calls the encyclical Vance quoted a cover-up for the rape of children.
The question for Vance takes one sentence. Does he agree with his top donor that the pope is hiding behind abuse survivors?
As of Thursday night, no reporter has asked him. That silence is an abomination. Vance has said nothing through any of Thiel’s attacks on this pope, and the press has let him. Every day the question goes unasked, Thiel’s smear stands unanswered by the most powerful Catholic in American government, and Catholics deserve to know where their vice president stands on a claim this vile.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with the survivors who spent decades forcing the Church to tell the truth about itself. Their courage is why a pope now holds an 80-year-old man at Lourdes for as long as he needs, and a billionaire who borrows their pain to protect his investments will find no audience in this community.
We stand with Pope Leo, too. A Church that defends human dignity against the machine has to begin with the dignity of the wounded, and in an age that prices everything, including a child’s suffering, people are hungry for a voice that will not put a price on a person.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the men who would reduce it to an instrument — I am asking you to join us.
If you’d like to invest in our mission, here are three ways you can help:
Subscribe as a paid member to receive exclusive posts about the life and formation of Pope Leo and help sustain this newsletter.
Donate with a one-time gift to fuel this project’s mission.
Share this post (and Letters from Leo) with a friend who might enjoy it.
Paid members get our full coverage of Pope Leo’s fight over AI, along with the biographical series on Pope Leo’s Life & Formation and the Sunday Scripture Reflection Series.
Whether you give $0, $5, $50, $500, $1,000, or more, your presence here matters — no matter your faith or your politics.
Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
Again I read this and see fear with Peter Theil. Pope Leo is focusing on the future where he can see the impacts of uncontrolled AI on the population at large. Theil is using the history of predatory sexual abuse as a deflection against the Pope. When the Antichrist or a tool of the Chinese does not land, we go for the salacious. Yes it is and was terrible, and those who perpetrated should be brought to justice. What Thiel forgets is the Pope is fully capable of concurrently working multiple issues. I really wish I understood why Thiel is so afraid of the Pope’s moral and theological leadership on AI.
We all know P Thiel’s MO
Also Thiel is likely a pedo just like Trump
Thiel is an enormously rich gay man who despises democracy.
Thiel’s perfect governing ideal is feudalism. A pretty clear indication of his desire to be an overlord who makes all the rules.
At the end of the day he is a homely rich guy who is unhappy and likely cannot even remember the last time he really laughed.
Pretty sad.