Pope Leo to release AI encyclical May 25

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, will be published May 25, addressing artificial intelligence and the protection of human dignity, the Vatican has announced.

The encyclical, the title of which is Latin for “Magnificent Humanity,” was signed by the Pope on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s foundational 1891 social encyclical on labour and capital written during the first Industrial Revolution.

In a first, Pope Leo XIV will be present in person at the Vatican press conference to mark the publication of the social encyclical, along with a tech founder from one of the world’s fastest growing AI companies.

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Pope Leo XIV has expressed interest in the issue of artificial intelligence and the dignity of work since the first week of his pontificate, telling the College of Cardinals days after his election in May 2025 that he took his papal name partly in honour of Pope Leo XIII, whose landmark encyclical “Rerum Novarum” has shaped the Church’s social teaching for more than a century.

“In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labour,” Pope Leo XIV said two days after his election.

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Pope Leo has returned to the subject of AI again and again in speeches, messages and interviews in his first year, leading Time magazine describing him as a spiritual counterweight to Silicon Valley.

The Pope’s 2026 message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications has been his most robust document on AI and protecting human dignity to date. He underlined that “our faces and voices are unique, distinctive features of every person” that reveal “a person’s own unrepeatable identity” and that by “simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship,” AI systems “encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships.”

(Courtney Mares is Vatican Editor for OSV News. Follow her on X @catholicourtney.)

A version of this article appeared in the May 24, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "AI encyclical to be released May 25"