Pope Leo XIV Tells Rome’s Priests: No AI Homilies, No TikTok Priesthood

As Block fires 4,000 workers and Anthropic battles the Pentagon, the pope delivered a message Silicon Valley should hear — stop outsourcing your soul to a machine.

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Late last month, Jack Dorsey fired nearly half of Block’s workforce and told the world that most companies would soon follow. Anthropic is now suing the Pentagon over a blacklisting that could reshape the relationship between artificial intelligence and the American military.

Across Silicon Valley and Washington, AI has become the dominant force reshaping how human beings work, fight, and think.

Three weeks ago, before any of those headlines landed, Pope Leo XIV walked into the Paul VI Hall in Rome and told his priests something the rest of the world should have been listening to.

Stop outsourcing your soul to Silicon Valley machines.

Rekindle the Gift

On Thursday, February 19, Pope Leo gathered the priests of the Diocese of Rome for a conversation that lasted about forty-five minutes.

Cardinal Baldo Reina, the vicar general of Rome, introduced four priests from four different generations, each with a question for the pope. What followed was one of the most direct pastoral exchanges of Leo’s young papacy.

The pope opened with an image that will stay with me. He compared the priestly calling to embers buried under ash — still burning, but desperate for someone willing to breathe life into them.

“The fire is lit,” he told the room, “but it must be rekindled again and again.”

It was a gentle beginning for a pointed message.

Pope Leo pressed his clergy not to see themselves as, in his words, “passive executors of an already defined pastoral plan.” He wanted creativity, initiative, courage — priests who collaborate with God rather than coast through a routine.

His message was clear and concise: “It is urgent to return to proclaiming the Gospel. This is the priority.”

A Homily Cannot Be Outsourced

When the questions turned to artificial intelligence, the pope did not equivocate.

He warned his priests against “the temptation to prepare homilies with artificial intelligence” and framed the issue with the precision of a man who has spent decades thinking about formation rather than efficiency.

The brain, he said, is like a muscle: if you stop exercising it, it dies. A priest’s mind must be worked, stretched, forced into encounter with the Word of God — never delegated to software.

This is a pope who once designed a website for the Augustinian Order. He is not a Luddite. He understands that a homily is a personal act of witness. It demands that a priest bring his own mind to the text, wrestle with scripture through prayer, and let the Word reshape him before he speaks it aloud.

Pope Leo helped build and design the Augustinian Order’s website after he was elected their global leader in 2001. This is a screenshot of their website at the time.

An AI-generated homily might be grammatically flawless and even theologically accurate. But it will never carry the weight of a priest who has sat at the bedside of the dying, baptized the newborn, buried the beloved, and then stood before his people at the Sunday pulpit to tell them what it all means.

When Block’s shareholders cheered the elimination of four thousand jobs, they were celebrating the same logic the pope rejected in that room: the idea that human judgment amounts to overhead — something to be optimized out of the system entirely.

Pope Leo’s answer to the priests of Rome applies just as sharply to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Some work cannot be automated without destroying the thing that makes it sacred.

The TikTok Priesthood

The pope turned to social media with equal directness. He warned against priests who chase likes and followers on platforms like TikTok. Accumulating followers, he said, does not mean you are evangelizing. A priest who mistakes visibility for fruitfulness risks confusing the algorithm’s approval with God’s.

“If we are not transmitting the message of Jesus Christ,” the pope told the room, “perhaps we are mistaken, and we must reflect very carefully and humbly about who we are and what we are doing.”

This is the same pope who has been quietly preparing what Vatican insiders describe as a “moral earthquake” of an encyclical on artificial intelligence. His words to Rome’s priests amounted to a preview — a signal that when Pope Leo XIV speaks about technology, he is speaking about the soul.

A Little Fraternity in Chicago

Pope Leo also spoke about something that no algorithm can manufacture: friendship. He warned against invidia clericalis, clerical envy, and urged his priests to take the initiative to meet, study, reflect, and pray together. The impulse had to come from love, he said.

Then the Chicago kid in him came through. He told a story about a group of priests in his hometown who decided, while still in seminary, to meet once a month. There was no agenda. Just friendship, prayer, and shared life. Some of them kept it up until they were over ninety years old.

“A little fraternity,” the pope called it.

In a Church where priestly isolation has become a genuine crisis — where loneliness corrodes vocation and leads too often to burnout, scandal, and despair — that image of old men still showing up for one another carries a moral force that words alone cannot provide. It is a rebuke to every system that treats human connection as inefficiency.

The Deeper Fire

Pope Leo spoke about prayer, too. Without the foundation of prayer, Leo warned, everything else — the homilies, the outreach, the engagement with young people — risks becoming performance.

He spoke about youth with candor, acknowledging that “many of them live without any reference to God and the Church.” He offered no easy formulas. He counseled patience, presence, and the willingness to listen to what he called their “deep existential discomfort.”

He encouraged dialogue with schools and educators, less to impose the faith than to offer an encounter with Christ as an alternative to isolation.

This is a pope who refuses to pretend the Church has all the answers.

It doesn’t!

But he insists — with the quiet ferocity of a man who spent decades as a missionary in the mountains of Peru — that authentic human connection, not technological substitution, is the only path forward.

In a country where AI now drives more than nine thousand layoffs and counting, his message to the priests of Rome lands differently than it did three weeks ago.

The question he posed is no longer just for clergy. Every teacher, doctor, journalist, and worker in America should be asking it: what part of my vocation am I willing to surrender to a machine?

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV and the millions of Catholics and people of goodwill who believe the human soul was never meant to be optimized — and who understand that a civilization’s worth lies in its capacity for authentic encounter, not in how efficiently it can replace the people who built it.

In an era where corporations celebrate the replacement of human beings and governments weaponize artificial intelligence against their own people, we remain rooted in a faith that insists on the irreducible dignity of every person and refuses to treat witness, prayer, and human presence as expendable.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than algorithms and engagement metrics.

They are looking for courage, for truth, for love made visible in action — and right now, as our pope calls priests to rekindle the fire within them, that hunger has never been more urgent.

If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a world that increasingly treats us as data points — I am asking you to join us.

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