“For the longest time, I’ve been waiting for
the adults to enter the room.”
At a recent gathering hosted by a frontier AI lab, that’s how a prominent AI developer described his feelings about the industry’s current trajectory. We can see why. While AI technology continues to develop and spread rapidly, neither AI companies nor the government officials responsible for regulating them have adequately reckoned with the profound moral or social questions AI raises. Though some have acknowledged the problems, nobody seems to have answers. There has been a vacuum of credible moral leadership in the AI space—as the increasingly anxious public perceives.
But all that changed on May 25th, when Pope Leo XIV entered the AI conversation in a definitive way.
Magnifica Humanitas—“Magnificent Humanity”—is the encyclical letter that the world has been waiting for. Encyclicals are the principal documents popes use to develop Catholic teaching on particular issues, typically in response to “the signs of the times.” Since the beginning of his papacy, Leo has signaled his intent to address the ethical and social implications of AI, in particular, its relation to human dignity. In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of his chosen namesake, Leo XIII and his historic encyclical, Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), whose 135th anniversary was May 15th.
Rerum Novarum was the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching, the church’s still-evolving body of ethical teaching on social, political, and economic questions. Its catalyst was a social crisis not unlike the one we face today. By the late 19th Century, the Second Industrial Revolution was in full swing. New technologies and economic developments were fueling rapid change and rising anxiety. Power and wealth were growing ever more concentrated in the hands of a few, while masses of working people struggled to achieve even the most basic standards of living. Conflict and violence were escalating, as capitalists fought to preserve their property rights at all costs, while growing numbers of laborers turned to revolutionary politics.
With Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII stepped in to provide the moral leadership the moment required. Drawing on the rich tradition of Catholic thought, but also appealing to human reason, he sought to chart a way forward that was both ethically principled and prudently pragmatic, while avoiding ideological extremes on all sides. Against socialists, he defended the individual’s right to private property. Against capitalists, he insisted on the state’s responsibility to regulate the economy, for the common good. Stressing workers’ human dignity, he championed their right to form unions, to receive a living wage, to work in humane conditions, and to have a place at the decision-making table. What’s more, he committed the Catholic Church to working towards reforms on all of these fronts.
Leo XIII’s vision in Rerum Novarum did not go unheeded, in the church or the world at large. Over the following decades, it inspired a new wave of labor organizing, political leadership, and, ultimately, policy change, made possible by growing collaboration between Catholic and non-Catholic people of conscience, as scholars like Paul Misner have shown. As a result, many of the specific recommendations Leo advocated—labor laws and protections, a regulatory role for the state in the economy, and so on—are now taken for granted. One pope’s moral leadership moved countless others to address the “new things” of their time and enact the needed responses to them together.
It does not take much imagination to draw the parallels from 1891 to 2026. Once more, we find ourselves in an era of revolutionary change—sometimes called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Once more, the interests of capital and labor clash: the power and wealth of AI owners grow astronomically, while their technology threatens to upend the livelihoods—and perhaps even the humanity—of everyone else. Once more, we stand in need of moral yet pragmatic leadership that avoids ideological extremes and can inspire collaborative collective action for the common good.
With Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV has taken on the mantle of leadership that we need. But one leader alone cannot lead a new world into being all by himself. If that earlier Leo showed how a pope could provide moral leadership in a moment of crisis, he also showed that such leadership only becomes effective by enabling others to exercise agency and take shared responsibility for the common good. Rerum Novarum would have remained a dead letter were it not for the conscientious labor leaders, church leaders, business leaders, thought leaders, political leaders, and ordinary working people—Catholic and non-Catholic alike—who eventually made its vision real.
Leo XIV might be an “adult in the room,” but he must not be the only one. Much work has preceded him, and much work must follow. Magnifica Humanitas considers so many things: the risks AI poses to labor, to our ability to know the truth, to human relationships, to political life, to the environment, and even to the dignity of human existence itself (and there are innumerable more). But ultimately, the success of Leo’s leadership depends on how we choose to respond to it. If we are to meet the challenge of AI, we must all step into responsibility for the common good. We must all be the adults in the room we’ve been waiting for.
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
