The term artificial intelligence (AI) refers to all computer systems capable of performing tasks previously associated with human intelligence: recognizing an image, translating a language, driving a car, writing a text, diagnosing a disease. Within a few years, these systems have moved from laboratories into the daily lives of billions of people. Such a power, which imitates certain operations of the mind and insinuates itself into work, health, information, war and even human relationships, could not remain outside the moral gaze of the Church.
Faced with it, the Church responds neither with the fascination of a religion of progress, nor with reactionary fear that would reject every machine. Its position rests on a firm distinction, laid down by the reference document on the matter, the note Antiqua et nova (2025): AI is a tool — a legitimate fruit of the intelligence God gave to man — but it is not a person. Its “intelligence” is purely functional: it calculates, it executes, it simulates, but it does not think, does not understand and is accountable for nothing. The measure of all its ethics therefore remains the dignity of the human person.
This discernment is no passing fad. Elected in May 2025, Pope Leo XIV explicitly chose his name with reference to Leo XIII and Rerum novarum: just as the Church had confronted the first industrial revolution through its social doctrine, it must today respond to a new revolution, that of AI, which raises “new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor”[1].
This article sets out the Catholic vision of artificial intelligence as a whole: what AI is, why the word “intelligence” is partly misleading, in what way AI is good and in what way it is ambivalent, what major social and moral questions it raises, what the Magisterium proposes, and what the ultimate spiritual risk is. The particular areas — the claim to remake man through the machine, bioethics, digital addiction, connected loneliness, truth in the media — each have their own article: they are referred to without being duplicated here.
Why does the Church speak about artificial intelligence?
AI is readily placed on the side of the engineer, the start-up or the laboratory, rather than morals. That is an optical illusion. The way a society designs, deploys and governs its technical power involves its conception of man, its justice toward the weakest and the meaning it gives to progress. AI is, from end to end, a social question.
A leading “social question”
No major domain of existence now escapes AI. It decides how we work (automation, screening of job applications, organization of work), how we treat illness (diagnostic assistance, imaging), how we inform ourselves (media, networks, algorithmic recommendation), how we are judged (predictive justice, social scoring, surveillance) and even how we wage war (autonomous weapons). Antiqua et nova stresses this: AI “marks a significant new phase in humanity’s relationship with technology”[2]. A reality that weighs upon all these collective choices is no longer a mere gadget: it has become a civilizational fact, and thus a proper object of the Church’s social and moral doctrine.
A new industrial revolution: from Leo XIII to Leo XIV
The continuity is striking. In 1891, faced with the upheavals of the first industrial revolution — factories, the proletariat, the conflict between capital and labor — Leo XIII published Rerum novarum, the founding act of modern social doctrine[3]. More than a century later, it is precisely this parallel that guided the choice of name of Leo XIV, the first pope elected in the age of AI:
“Pope Leo XIII, with the historic encyclical Rerum novarum*, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution; and today the Church offers to all her heritage of social doctrine in order to respond to another industrial revolution and to the developments of artificial intelligence, which pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”* — Leo XIV, Address to the College of Cardinals, 10 May 2025[4]
AI is therefore not treated as a technical curiosity, but as an anthropological mutation on the scale of the one that gave birth to social doctrine. That says how seriously the Church takes it.
A reflection maturing for twenty years
The Church’s word on AI is nothing improvised. It is rooted in a century of reflection on technology — from Gaudium et Spes (1965) to Laudato Si’ (2015) — and has taken more precise shape in stages since 2020: the Rome Call for AI Ethics (Pontifical Academy for Life, 2020), the Message for the 2024 World Day of Peace devoted entirely to AI, the Message for the 2024 World Day of Social Communications, Pope Francis’s address to the G7 (June 2024 — the first address by a pope before a G7) and, as its doctrinal crowning, the note Antiqua et nova (January 2025). This acceleration shows that the Church has taken the measure of the urgency.
What this article covers — and what it refers elsewhere
To remain clear, this article stays at the level of principles and major social questions. The particular areas are treated separately:
- the claim to remake man, to “enhance” him or to make him immortal through fusion with the machine → transhumanism;
- the manipulation of living beings (genetic engineering, procreation, CRISPR) → bioethics;
- connected man: screen dependence, loss of the real, isolation → addiction, modern loneliness, truth in the media;
- man’s general relationship to his technical power → technology and man, of which this article is a particular application.
Here, we seek the Catholic compass proper to artificial intelligence.
What is artificial intelligence?
Before judging, one must understand — and first shed the images of science fiction. Real AI is neither a conscious electronic brain nor a malicious robot: it is a set of statistical methods that learn from enormous quantities of data.
A “galaxy” of technologies, not a single thing
Pope Francis warned as early as 2024 against speaking of AI as a single bloc:
“Artificial intelligence must therefore be understood as a galaxy of different realities, and we cannot assume a priori that its development will contribute beneficially to the future of humanity and to peace among peoples.” — Pope Francis, Message for the 57th World Day of Peace, no. 2 (1 January 2024)[5]
In concrete terms, AI covers very different families: systems that classify (detecting a tumor on an X-ray, filtering an email), those that predict (anticipating a breakdown, a fraud), those that recommend (choosing the next video) and, since 2022, generative systems that produce text, images, voice or code on demand. The latter — the large language models popularized by conversational agents — have given hundreds of millions of people the impression of talking to an intelligent machine.
Narrow AI, generative AI, “general AI”: not to be confused
Three levels must be distinguished, for they are constantly confused in public debate:
| Level | What it is | Real status |
|---|---|---|
| Narrow AI | A system trained for one precise task (playing chess, translating, recognizing a face) | Omnipresent, highly effective |
| Generative AI | A system that produces new content (text, image, voice) by imitating statistical regularities | Widely spread since 2022, rapidly growing |
| “General AI” (AGI) | A hypothetical intelligence equalling man in all domains, endowed with consciousness | Does not exist; a projection, even a myth |
Confusing these levels means attributing to real statistical tools the powers of an intelligence that does not exist — and feeding, conversely, disproportionate fears or hopes. Antiqua et nova invites precisely this sobriety of vocabulary.
What AI does — and what it does not do
This is the decisive point, and it is subtler than it seems. An AI system can produce a poem, but it does not know that it is writing a poem; it can “answer” a question, but it understands neither the question nor its answer. It computes the most probable sequence of words. Antiqua et nova puts it bluntly:
“Its advanced features give AI sophisticated capabilities for performing tasks, but not the ability to think.” — Antiqua et nova, no. 12[6]
In other words, AI simulates the results of intelligence without possessing its act. This distinction, which seems abstract, governs all that follows: it is what forbids treating a machine as a subject.
Human Intelligence and “Artificial” Intelligence: A Decisive Distinction
The entire moral debate over AI turns on a single word: intelligence. If we believe that the machine is truly intelligent — in the sense that man is — then nothing stands in the way of entrusting it with human decisions, of becoming attached to it as to a person, or of dreaming of merging with it. If we understand what radically separates the two, everything becomes clear. This is the heart of the third part of Antiqua et nova.
The Word “Intelligence” Is Partly Misleading
The term “artificial intelligence” is an analogy, and an analogy can deceive. In the Catholic tradition, intelligence is not merely the ability to solve problems: it is a faculty of the whole person, open to truth, goodness, beauty, and God. The document therefore draws a sharp distinction between the two uses of the word:
“In the case of the human being, indeed, intelligence is a faculty pertaining to the person in his or her entirety, while in the case of AI it is understood in a functional sense.” — Antiqua et nova, no. 10[7]
The machine’s “intelligence” is measured by its ability to perform tasks; man’s intelligence concerns what he is. The same word covers two realities of a different order — and confusing them is the first trap.
Human Intelligence Is Embodied, Spiritual, and Relational
Why does man “think” where the machine merely computes? Because his intelligence is not a program running in a void: it is carried by a body, animated by a spiritual soul, and exercised within relationships. Man knows with his flesh, his sensibility, his wounded and joyful memory, his freedom, his openness to others and to God.
“Authentic engagement demands embracing the full extent of being: spiritual, cognitive, embodied, and relational.” — Antiqua et nova, no. 26[8]
A machine, “devoid of a physical body,” knows nothing of all this: it “relies on computational reasoning and learning”[9] and remains, the text says, “fundamentally confined within a logico-mathematical framework”[10]. It can manipulate the signs of love, suffering, or prayer without ever having the experience of them. That is why it can never replace the presence of a friend, a caregiver, or a teacher.
The Machine Computes; It Does Not Think
Pope Francis had summed it up at the G7, in a deliberately modest formula:
“Artificial intelligence is a tool designed to solve a problem, and it works through a logical sequence of algebraic operations.” — Pope Francis, Address to the G7, Borgo Egnazia, 14 June 2024[11]
A sequence of algebraic operations: that is what, at bottom, even the most impressive AI is. Its power comes from scale (billions of parameters, oceans of data), not from a spark of thought. The consequence is immense: what is not a subject cannot be held responsible, and what does not think cannot decide what is good.
The Dignity of the Person, the Measure of All AI Ethics
If AI is not a person, then the person remains the measure. The whole Catholic ethics of AI flows from a single principle: the inalienable dignity of the human being, created in the image of God. It is dignity that determines what is permitted and what never is.
Man’s Worth Does Not Depend on His Performance
In a culture obsessed with performance, AI risks suggesting that a man is “worth” what he produces, computes, or achieves. Antiqua et nova firmly overturns this logic — and this is also where the answer to transhumanism is decided:
“The value of a person does not depend on the possession of particular abilities, cognitive and technological achievements, or individual successes, but on his or her intrinsic dignity founded on the fact of being created in the image of God.” — Antiqua et nova, no. 34[12]
The newborn, the Alzheimer’s patient, the disabled person — whom no machine would judge “high-performing” — possess exactly the same dignity as the scholar or the champion. No algorithmic scoring system, no measure of “usefulness,” can diminish this dignity. It is this dignity that the companion article on the dignity of the human person defends.
Only Man Is a Morally Responsible Subject
From dignity flows responsibility. A machine can execute an instruction; it can never answer for it before its conscience. Antiqua et nova insists on this: “only the human being is truly a moral agent”[13]. That is why it is always illusory and dangerous to “entrust” a moral decision to AI while imagining that it bears the weight of it: behind every system there are human designers, owners, and users who remain responsible for its effects. The Rome Call makes this one of its principles: “there must always be someone who takes responsibility for what a machine does”[14].
An Ethics at the Service of the Person: “Algor-Ethics”
As early as 2020, the Pontifical Academy for Life brought together technology giants (Microsoft, IBM), international institutions (FAO), and the Italian State around a founding text, the Rome Call for AI Ethics, and a new word: algor-ethics, that is, an ethics embedded in the very design of algorithms. The text sets out six principles that Catholic teaching recognizes as demands of human dignity:
| Principle | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Transparency | AI systems must be understandable |
| Inclusion | Discriminate against no one, for every human being has the same dignity |
| Responsibility | Someone must always answer for what the machine does |
| Impartiality | Neither create nor follow unfair biases |
| Reliability | Systems must be safe and reliable |
| Security and privacy | Protect people’s data and privacy |
These principles are not external constraints imposed on technology: they translate, into the language of engineers, what faith affirms about man[15].
Is Artificial Intelligence Good? An Ambivalent Tool
One question keeps coming back: should we fear AI? The Church’s answer is both nuanced and firm. AI is a real good, but an ambivalent good, everything depending on the use made of it and the place given to it.
A Legitimate Fruit of Created Intelligence
AI springs from the intelligence God entrusted to man to “till and keep” the earth (Gen 2:15). Designing it, perfecting it, placing it at the service of the common good is, in itself, a good work. Antiqua et nova explicitly connects scientific and technical research to the “collaboration of man and woman with God”[16]. The Church therefore feels no nostalgia for a pre-technological age: it recognizes the immense possible benefits of AI — in medicine, in research, in access to knowledge, in assistance to vulnerable persons.
“The inherent dignity of each person and the fraternity that bind us together as members of the one human family must underpin the development of new technologies.” — Pope Francis, Message for the 2024 World Day of Peace, no. 2[17]
But No Technology Is Morally Neutral
We often hear that “technology is neutral; everything depends on how it is used.” This is a dangerous half-truth. An AI system already steers behavior: a recommendation algorithm is not neutral with respect to attention, a scoring system is not neutral with respect to justice, an autonomous weapon is not neutral with respect to violence. The Catechism recalls this for all technology:
“It is an illusion to claim moral neutrality in scientific research and its applications.” — Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2294[18]
Claiming that AI has nothing to do with morality is already taking a moral position — the worst one, which leaves the field open to brute efficiency and the interests of the strongest.
The Risk of Reinforcing the “Technocratic Paradigm”
AI can become the most powerful instrument of what Laudato si’ calls the technocratic paradigm: the mindset that reduces reality to what can be calculated, possessed, and produced[19]. Antiqua et nova warns precisely against this risk in the economic sphere:
“We cannot allow a tool as powerful and indispensable as artificial intelligence to reinforce such a paradigm.” — Antiqua et nova, no. 68[20]
The danger is not the machine, but the worldview it may impose: a world in which everything — nature, work, information, and ultimately man — becomes data to be exploited. This is exactly the drift described in the article Technology and Man.
The major moral and social questions raised by AI
It is in concrete reality that the compass proves itself. The fifth part of Antiqua et nova reviews the areas where AI engages the good of persons. We retain here the most decisive ones for the social question.
AI and work: liberating or excluding?
Automation can liberate human beings from arduous and repetitive tasks — a good welcomed by social doctrine. But it can also exclude: concentrate wealth, eliminate jobs without creating new ones, turn the worker into a mere appendage of the machine. Antiqua et nova sets a clear limit:
“We should not seek to replace more and more human labour with technological progress.” — Antiqua et nova, no. 70[21]
Work is not merely a cost to be optimised: it is a place of dignity, subsistence and personal fulfilment. The Message for the 2024 World Day of Peace warns that, in a technocratic paradigm, “knowledge and wealth [could] accumulate in the hands of a few”[22], to the detriment of the common good and of the universal destination of goods. The question is not “should we automate?” but “in whose service?” — which is the whole meaning of the doctrine of work inherited from Rerum novarum.
AI and warfare: “no machine should ever choose to take a life”
This is undoubtedly the gravest point. Autonomous weapons systems can select and strike a target without direct human intervention. Yet deciding the life or death of a human being is a moral act that no calculation can assume. Pope Francis hammered this home at the G7:
“No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.” — Pope Francis, Address to the G7, 14 June 2024[23]
Antiqua et nova takes up the same requirement — “No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being”[24] —, and the Message for the 2024 World Day of Peace gives the underlying reason:
“Autonomous weapon systems can never be morally responsible subjects: the unique human capacity for moral judgement and ethical decision is more than the complex collection of algorithms.” — Pope Francis, Message for the 2024 World Day of Peace, no. 6[25]
Hence the call for real and permanent human supervision over weapons, and for a “binding international treaty” regulating AI[26].
AI, disinformation and “deepfakes”
Generative AI makes it possible to fabricate in seconds fake images, fake voices and fake speeches indistinguishable from the real thing: deepfakes. Antiqua et nova warns that AI “generates manipulated content and false information which [...] can easily mislead”[27]. The Message for the 2024 World Day of Social Communications calls this evil “cognitive pollution”:
“[These tools] can also be instruments of ‘cognitive pollution’, distorting reality by partially or completely false narratives that are believed — and shared — as if they were true.” — Pope Francis, Message for the 2024 World Day of Social Communications[28]
The stake is not only factual error: it is trust itself, the cement of all common life, that is being undermined. The Catholic response depends as much on the ethics of designers as on the formation of consciences — a subject developed in Truth in the media.
AI and human relationships: the risk of the simulacrum
Applications now offer artificial “friends”, “confidants”, even “companions”. The danger is to mistake a simulacrum for a relationship. Antiqua et nova sets the rule:
“[AI] must be considered for what it is: a tool and not a person.” — Antiqua et nova, no. 59[29]
For authentic empathy, the text says, “cannot be reproduced by artificial systems”[30]: a program can imitate the words of compassion, but never live them. And the risk is explicit:
“If we replace these relationships [...] with technological means, we risk replacing authentic relationship with a simulacrum.” — Antiqua et nova, nos. 62-63[31]
Substituting the machine for the face of the other exposes us to an even deeper solitude — the one described in the article Modern solitude, and which feeds digital addictions.
AI, privacy and surveillance
AI feeds on data — and our data says who we are. Antiqua et nova warns that such data “convey not only information, but also personal and relational knowledge which [...] can become a power over the individual”[32]. Mass surveillance, social scoring, profiling: AI can serve an unprecedented control of consciences and behaviours. Respect for dignity requires, says the Message for peace, “refusing to allow the uniqueness of the person to be identified by a set of data”[33]. A human being is never reducible to his profile.
AI and our common home
This is often overlooked: large AI models have a considerable ecological cost. Their training and operation “require large quantities of energy and water”[34] to power and cool immense data centres. The question of AI thus joins that of integral ecology and of safeguarding creation: progress that exhausts our common home is not true progress.
AI and the education of the young
AI can be a formidable learning aid, but it cannot form an intelligence nor transmit a humanity. Antiqua et nova recalls that “an essential task of education is to train the intellect to reason well”[35] — which presupposes effort, memory and patience, not the delegation of thought to a machine that “does the homework”. Above all, “the physical presence of the teacher creates a relational dynamic that AI cannot reproduce”[36]. To educate is to awaken one person through another person: no algorithmic tutor will ever suffice.
Summary table: promise and risk
The whole social question of AI can be summed up in a grid — each area carries a promise and a risk, and the compass remains the same: the person.
| Domaine | Promesse | Risque | Boussole catholique |
|---|---|---|---|
| Travail | Libérer des tâches pénibles | Exclure, concentrer la richesse | Le travail, lieu de dignité (n° 70) |
| Guerre | Précision, protection | Armes autonomes décidant de tuer | Nulle machine ne choisit la mort (n° 100) |
| Information | Accès, traduction, savoir | Deepfakes, “cognitive pollution” | La vérité et la confiance |
| Relations | Lien, accessibilité | Simulacre, isolement | L'autre est une personne, pas un outil (n° 59) |
| Vie privée | Services personnalisés | Surveillance, profilage, contrôle | L'homme n'est pas un jeu de données (Paix n° 5) |
| Environnement | Optimisation, recherche | Énergie, eau, empreinte carbone | L'écologie intégrale (n° 96) |
| Éducation | Soutien, accessibilité | Délégation de la pensée | Former une personne par une personne (n° 79-81) |
The magisterial response: benchmarks and proposals
Faced with these challenges, the Church does not merely raise the alarm: it offers benchmarks and calls for action. Five milestones structure its recent teaching.
Antiqua et nova (2025), a reference note
Published on 28 January 2025 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education, Antiqua et nova — “ancient and new things” — is the most comprehensive doctrinal text to date on AI. In 114 paragraphs, it grounds discernment in Christian anthropology, distinguishes human from artificial intelligence, and surveys all the major social questions. It is the reference source for this article.
Pope Francis: peace, the G7, the “wisdom of the heart”
The year 2024 saw a threefold intervention:
- the Message for Peace holding that AI cannot be presumed good a priori and insisting that dignity remain “at the foundation” of all development;
- the address to the G7, where, the first pope to appear before the G7 heads of state, Francis pleaded for a “space for meaningful human control” over AI choices, on which “human dignity itself” depends[37];
- the Message for the World Day of Social Communications, which sets against the coldness of calculation the “wisdom of the heart”, “that virtue which enables us to weave together the whole and its parts”[38].
The Rome Call and “algor-ethics”
Earlier (2020), the Rome Call for AI Ethics had the merit of bringing industrial and international actors together around the Church on six concrete principles (cf. above). It shows that Catholic doctrine does not refuse technical dialogue: it seeks to embed ethics from the design stage of systems.
A call for regulation
A constant theme in these texts: AI cannot be left to the law of the market or of power alone. Hence Francis’s call for “a binding international treaty to regulate the development and use of artificial intelligence”[39]. Regulation is not the enemy of innovation: it is the condition for innovation to serve humanity.
The ultimate risk: making AI an idol
Beyond social questions, Antiqua et nova points to a deeper peril, of a spiritual order. The temptation, as old as man himself, to make oneself a god through one’s own works.
The Promethean temptation
Some promoters of AI do not hesitate to speak of creating an “intelligence” superior to man, of “conquering death,” of manufacturing consciousness. This is, in modern dress, the ancient idolatry. The document is unambiguous:
“The presumption of replacing God with a work of one’s own hands is idolatry.” — Antiqua et nova, no. 105[40]
Man who worships his own technical power ends up enslaved to his idol. The Message for Social Communications speaks of a “delusion of omnipotence” from which man must be awakened[41]. This is precisely the territory of transhumanism, which dreams of abolishing the human condition.
“Is man truly becoming better?”
The ultimate criterion of progress, Antiqua et nova recalls, quoting Saint John Paul II, is not power gained but the growth of the interior man: the real question is whether “man [...] truly becomes better, that is, more spiritually mature”[42]. A civilization can multiply its machines and regress in humanity. Technical progress is human progress only if it makes man freer, more just, more loving.
The wisdom of the heart, which no machine will ever possess
Against the cold power of calculation, the Gospel sets an intelligence of another order: the wisdom of the heart, fruit of the Spirit, which knows how to discern the good, to love concretely, and to let itself be seized by God. It is this, and not performance, that makes man’s greatness — and no system, however powerful, will ever be able to reproduce it.
How to live as a Christian in the age of artificial intelligence?
Catholic discernment is not limited to principles: it calls for a way of life. A few concrete guidelines emerge from the texts.
Keep control; do not outsource your conscience
Use AI as a tool — yes; hand over your decisions, your judgment, your thinking to it — no. The Christian remains responsible for what he produces, shares, and believes. Checking one’s sources, refusing to spread dubious content, keeping a critical mind: this is a demand of charity toward the truth.
Put people before screens
Where AI offers simulated relationships, the Christian chooses real relationships: presence, the face, time given, patience. The fight against loneliness and digital addictions runs through a daily decision to prefer the living other to his algorithmic reflection.
Put AI at the service of the weakest
The Gospel criterion is constant: what serves “the least” is blessed. An AI that heals, includes, and lightens the burden of the poor fulfils its vocation as a tool; an AI that monitors, excludes, or enslaves betrays it. Discernment is always measured against the common good.
Remain in adoration, not in fascination
Finally, the deepest remedy for technical idolatry is the adoration of the true God. The man who knows to whom he belongs will not risk bowing down before his own machines. Prayer, sacramental life, and contemplation restore to man his proper measure: a beloved creature, not the creator of his own salvation.
“We would condemn humanity to a hopeless future if we were to take away people’s ability to decide for themselves and their lives, condemning them to depend on the choices of machines.” — Pope Francis, Address to the G7, 14 June 2024[43]
Artificial intelligence, taken for what it is — an admirable and formidable tool — can serve humanity greatly. Taken for what it is not — a person, a consciousness, a god — it threatens it. Between the two, the boundary is precisely the one the Church, faithful to her mission, never ceases to recall: the inalienable dignity of the human person.
Going further
- Technology and man — the overall Catholic vision of the relationship between man and his technical power, of which AI is one application.
- Transhumanism — the claim to “remake” or “enhance” man by the machine, and the Catholic response.
- Bioethics — manipulation of living beings, genetic engineering and procreation.
- The dignity of the human person — the anthropological foundation of all AI ethics.
- Truth in the media — disinformation, deepfakes and the Christian’s responsibility.
- Modern loneliness and Addictions — connected man and the risk of the relational simulacrum.
Main sources: Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education, Antiqua et nova (28 January 2025); Pope Francis, Artificial Intelligence and Peace, Message for the 57th World Day of Peace (1 January 2024), Address to the G7 (14 June 2024) and Message for the 58th World Day of Social Communications 2024; Pontifical Academy for Life, Rome Call for AI Ethics (28 February 2020); Leo XIV, Address to the College of Cardinals (10 May 2025). Official texts on vatican.va.
Notes and References
Leo XIV, Address to the College of Cardinals, 10 May 2025: “Pope Leo XIII, with the historic encyclical Rerum novarum, addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution; and today the Church offers to all her heritage of social doctrine in response to another industrial revolution and the developments of artificial intelligence, which pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and work.” Text on vatican.va.
1 4Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith & Dicastery for Culture and Education, Antiqua et nova. Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, 28 January 2025, no. 4: AI “marks a new important phase in humanity’s relationship with technology”. Text on vatican.va.
2Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, 15 May 1891: first social encyclical, on the condition of workers in the face of the industrial revolution. Cf. the article Rerum novarum.
3Pope Francis, Artificial Intelligence and Peace, Message for the 57th World Day of Peace, 1 January 2024 (dated 8 December 2023), no. 2: “Artificial intelligence must therefore be understood as a galaxy of different realities, and we cannot assume a priori that its development will contribute beneficially to the future of humanity and to peace among peoples.” Text on vatican.va.
5Antiqua et nova, no. 12: “Its advanced characteristics give AI sophisticated capabilities for performing tasks, but not the capacity to think.”
6Antiqua et nova, no. 10: “In the case of the human being, indeed, intelligence is a faculty relating to the person in his or her entirety, whereas, in that of AI, it is understood in a functional sense.”
7Antiqua et nova, no. 26: “Authentic engagement requires embracing the full scope of being: spiritual, cognitive, embodied and relational.”
8Antiqua et nova, no. 31: AI, “devoid of a physical body, relies on computational reasoning and learning”.
9Antiqua et nova, no. 31: “although AI processes and simulates certain expressions of intelligence, it remains fundamentally confined within a logico-mathematical framework”.
10Pope Francis, Address to the G7 session on artificial intelligence, Borgo Egnazia (Puglia), 14 June 2024: “Artificial intelligence is a tool designed to solve a problem and operates through a logical chain of algebraic operations.” First pope to address a G7. Text on vatican.va.
11Antiqua et nova, no. 34: “the value of a person does not depend on the possession of singular abilities, cognitive and technological achievements or individual successes, but on his or her intrinsic dignity founded on the fact that he or she is created in the image of God”.
12Antiqua et nova, no. 39: “only the human being is truly a moral agent”, that is, a morally responsible subject.
13Pontifical Academy for Life / RenAIssance Foundation, Rome Call for AI Ethics, Rome, 28 February 2020, principle of responsibility: “there must always be someone who takes responsibility for what a machine does” (French translation of “there must always be someone who takes responsibility for what a machine does”).
14Rome Call for AI Ethics, 28 February 2020: six principles (transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, security and privacy), summed up by the neologism algorethics (“algor-ethics”). Initial signatories: Pontifical Academy for Life, Microsoft, IBM, FAO, Italian Ministry of Innovation. Text on romecall.org and vatican.va.
15Antiqua et nova, no. 37: scientific research and the development of technical skills are part of the “collaboration of man and woman with God to bring visible creation to perfection”.
16Pope Francis, Message for the 2024 World Day of Peace, no. 2: “The intrinsic dignity of each person and the fraternity that binds us together as members of the one human family must remain at the basis of the development of new technologies.”
17Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 2294: “It is illusory to claim moral neutrality in scientific research and its applications.”
18Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, 24 May 2015, no. 106: description of the “technocratic paradigm” as a “homogeneous and one-dimensional paradigm” applied to all of reality. Cf. Technology and man.
19Antiqua et nova, no. 68: warning against the reinforcement of the technocratic paradigm in the economic sphere and that of work — “we cannot allow a tool as powerful and indispensable as artificial intelligence to reinforce such a paradigm, but we must rather make artificial intelligence a bulwark precisely against its expansion”.
20Antiqua et nova, no. 70: “we should not seek to replace human work more and more with technological progress”.
21Pope Francis, Message for the 2024 World Day of Peace, no. 4: in a technocratic paradigm, “inequalities could grow disproportionately, knowledge and wealth accumulating in the hands of a few, with grave risks for democratic societies and peaceful coexistence”.
22Pope Francis, Address to the G7, 14 June 2024: “No machine should ever choose to take away the life of a human being.” (To be distinguished from the parallel formulation of Antiqua et nova no. 100, which says “to take the life”.)
23Antiqua et nova, no. 100: “No machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being.” On lethal autonomous weapons systems, devoid of the “exclusively human capacity for moral judgment”.
24Pope Francis, Message for the 2024 World Day of Peace, no. 6: “Autonomous weapons systems can never be morally responsible subjects: the exclusively human capacity for moral judgment and ethical decision is more than a complex set of algorithms.”
25Pope Francis, Message for the 2024 World Day of Peace, no. 8: call for “adequate, meaningful and coherent human supervision of weapons systems” and for the adoption of a “binding international treaty” on AI.
26Antiqua et nova, no. 86: AI “generates manipulated content and false information which, being very difficult to distinguish from real data, can easily mislead”.
27Pope Francis, Artificial Intelligence and the Wisdom of the Heart: Towards a Fully Human Communication, Message for the 58th World Day of Social Communications 2024: “[These tools] can also be instruments of ‘cognitive pollution,’ of the alteration of reality through narratives that are partly or totally false and are believed — and shared — as if they were true.” Text on vatican.va.
28Antiqua et nova, no. 59: “[AI] must be considered for what it is: a tool and not a person.”
29Antiqua et nova, no. 61: “the distinctly personal and relational nature of authentic empathy cannot be reproduced by artificial systems”.
30Antiqua et nova, nos. 62–63: “if we replace these relationships [and the relationship with God] with technological means, we risk replacing authentic relationship with a simulacrum”.
31Antiqua et nova, no. 90: data “convey not only information, but also personal and relational knowledge which, in an increasingly digitized context, can become a power over the individual”.
32Pope Francis, Message for the 2024 World Day of Peace, no. 5: “Fundamental respect for human dignity requires refusing to identify the uniqueness of the person with a set of data.”
33Antiqua et nova, no. 96: large AI models “require large quantities of energy and water” for their training and operation, and contribute significantly to CO2 emissions.
34Antiqua et nova, no. 81: “an essential task of education is to train the intellect to reason well in all matters, to tend toward the truth and to grasp it”.
35Antiqua et nova, no. 79: “The physical presence of the teacher creates a relational dynamic that AI cannot reproduce.”
36Pope Francis, Address to the G7, 14 June 2024: “We must guarantee and protect a space of meaningful human control over the process of choosing artificial intelligence programs: human dignity itself depends on it.”
37Pope Francis, Message for Social Communications 2024: “The wisdom of the heart is therefore that virtue which allows us to weave together the whole and the parts, decisions and their consequences, heights and fragilities, past and future, the I and the we.”
38Pope Francis, Message for the 2024 World Day of Peace, no. 8: “I urge the Community of nations to work together to adopt a binding international treaty regulating the development and use of artificial intelligence in its many forms.”
39Antiqua et nova, no. 105: “the presumption of replacing God with a work of one’s own hands is idolatry”.
40Pope Francis, Message for Social Communications 2024: it is a matter of “awakening man from the hypnosis into which he falls through his delusion of omnipotence, believing himself a totally autonomous and self-referential subject, separated from every social bond and forgetful of his status as a creature”.
41Antiqua et nova, no. 109, citing John Paul II, Redemptor hominis (1979), no. 15: the essential question of progress is whether man “really becomes better, that is, more spiritually mature”.
42Pope Francis, Address to the G7, 14 June 2024: “We would condemn humanity to a future without hope if we took away people’s ability to decide for themselves and their lives, condemning them to depend on the choices of machines.”
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