Pope Leo’s Unfashionable Universalism

A two-millennia-old institution with one foot in the Roman Empire challenges Silicon Valley’s masters of AI and automation to do better. That’s the generic read on Pope Leo XIV’s debut encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, dramatized by photos from the Vatican of the pontiff shaking hands with Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. And that’s true enough: “artificial intelligence” is right there in the encyclical’s subtitle, and many of its 245 paragraphs are devoted to the topic.