From Vatican News:
Pope Leo XIV’s first Encyclical Letter Magnifica humanitas, on preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, will be released on May 25, 2026.
It bears the Pope’s signature dated May 15th, 135th anniversary of the publication of Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum.
Magnifica humanitas will be presented on the day of its release at 11:30 a.m. at the Vatican’s Synod Hall.
The Pope will be present, along with several speakers: Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith; Cardinal Michael Czerny, S.J., Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development; Professor Anna Rowlands, a theologian and professor at Durham University (United Kingdom); Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic (USA) and head of research on the interpretability of artificial intelligence; and Professor Leocadie Lushombo, I.T., professor of political theology and Catholic social thought at the Jesuit School of Theology / Santa Clara University in California (USA).
Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin will offer closing remarks, followed by an address and blessing by Pope Leo XIV.
Some context, from OSV News:
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 honor 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 labor,” Pope Leo XIV said two days after his election.
The first American pope and a former mathematics major, Pope Leo has returned to the subject of AI again and again in speeches, messages and interviews in his first year, leading Time magazine to include him on its 2025 list of the world’s most influential people in artificial intelligence, with the magazine describing him as a spiritual counterweight to Silicon Valley.
Pope Leo has addressed the issue of AI in venues ranging from a sports stadium packed with teenagers, whom he told to use AI “in such a way that if it disappeared tomorrow, you would still know how to think,” to a gathering of legislators from 68 countries, where he insisted that artificial intelligence is a tool meant to serve human beings, not replace them. The pope has also warned priests not to use chatbots to write their homilies and expressed concern for AI’s potential effect on children’s “intellectual and neurological development.”
The pope’s 2026 message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications, published in January, has been his most robust document on AI and protecting human dignity to date. In the papal message, 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.”
Pope Leo also warned that AI systems “have increasingly taken control of the production of texts, music and videos,” putting “much of the human creative industry at risk of being dismantled and replaced with the label ‘Powered by AI,’ turning people into passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without ownership or love.”
“The ability to access vast amounts of data and information should not be confused with the ability to derive meaning and value from it. The latter requires a willingness to confront the mystery and core questions of our existence,” Pope Leo said in a December speech to participants in an AI conference.