One Pope After Another

English translation of the Italian 10x33 episode, first aired on 29 May, 2026.

Do you know what I have to say about Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas?

Nothing whatsoever.

You see, I don’t have any connections in the Vatican who’ll leak me the draft under strict embargo.

I don’t presume to read through 200 pages of doctrine and understand more than one percent of the references; I already struggle with a few simple passages from the Gospels in Enzo Bianchi’s Bible.

And I don’t even have the nerve to rely on an LLM to quote encyclicals and play the couch Vatican expert on social media.

But above all, I don’t look to St. Peter when it comes to ethics, and even less so when it comes to Artificial Intelligence. One of the problems with the debate on Artificial Intelligence is the constant and manipulative drift into metaphysics, and the political consequences of this drift. Faith just does not seem to me to be the most suitable starting point for discussing science, technology, and politics.

The Pope is entirely free to hold whatever opinion he wishes on any subject, and everyone is free to take it as their own reference point, but for me, what is sacred above all is the separation of Church and State, and therefore of politics and faith.

So I won’t try to explain to anyone whether the Church is for or against Artificial Intelligence, for or against the tech giants, or what significance a humanistic Artificial Intelligence might have for an organized religion.

It may sound strange to you, but I really have no opinion on the matter.

What I mean is, I have no opinions on the content, but I do have opinions on the act.

Let’s start with the basics.

An encyclical is first and foremost a marketing document, a strategic positioning document.

This is not meant to be a criticism. A book I read many years ago was titled “Jesus Washes Whiter, Or How the Church Invented Marketing.” It was written by a one-of-a-kind advertising executive, Bruno Ballardini, and it recognized something that almost everyone overlooks in favor of focusing on doctrinal content: the Church always engages in strategic communication, and it does so better and with greater awareness than any communications firm. It’s no coincidence that it’s been around for two thousand years.

To its secular counterparts of the moment, the Church has always said: we were here before you, and rest assured we will still be here after you, which is why your power and money cannot buy us; at most, if we come to an agreement, you can have our cautious and temporary proximity. Do you really want to count your chickens before they hatch?

And so, while the techbros blather incessaantly their millenarian delusions, while Europe’s only response to US language models is a French language model, while every manager and every shareholder revels in the idea of having work without workers, while the very idea of human labor is called into question, and millions of people see every certainty of the future vanish...

the Church steps in to say, “oh, but replacing work with Artificial Intelligence, burning through resources as if there were no tomorrow, sowing social insecurity, and automating war isn’t nice, you know? Maybe we should think it through more carefully.”

We must acknowledge that this is a masterstroke. Also because, according to what the newspaper commentaries say, it’s not as if Pope Leo said anything new. These are the same arguments that have been circulating since ChatGPT appeared, and not even all of them, nor even the most hard-hitting ones.

And since it’s a masterstroke, it’s even hard to notice that Pope Leo, in fact, doesn’t take any specific position for or against: he says there is potential, he says there are risks.

What profound insight, what ethical lighthouse!

One position is clear: the Encyclical states that Artificial Intelligence represents the future. But here's the rub: that's the techbro sales pitch.

The fact that Pope Leo starts by taking that sales pitch for granted is not a mere political act. For nitty-gritty politics, there are the cardinals, at most. A Pope in an encyclical sets the tone. He defines the context that, from that moment on, determines what is acceptable and how we will discuss it. The encyclical builds the Overton window.

The Pope is saying, “Gentlemen of Silicon Valley, you have these technological toys and a lot of money and power. We know a thing or two about power; welcome. Now let's talk.”

One has to admire the nonchalance with which those who are, to all intents and purposes, idolaters, who in other times would have been burned at the stake, are recognized as legitimate counterparts.

But that’s the way it is, and the reulst of this is that the Church positions itself as the necessary interlocutor in a dialogue in which, up to now, States have only proven their ineptitude.

This is not cynicism; it is what the Church has done since forever, and certainly since it "voluntarily" renounced temporal power, discovering that it could wield far greater influence without it.

Because there is also another thing going unnoticed. Everyone rightly points out the coincidence of dates between the publication of Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas and that of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum.

Same pope’s name, same date: exegetes are having a field day; the Church is a master in references and allusions, and it certainly doesn’t have them written by ChatGPT.

But at a time when opposition to language models is reawakening civil society’s engagement in response to the lethargy of the political class and the greed of the business class, it occurs to me that Rerum Novarum itself made one thing very clear: that socialism was not the answer to conflicts in the world of work. My religion teacher explained this to me in high school.

And in a world where economic inequality is reaching levels known only in the Ancien Régime, I’m not surprised that the Church is taking a stand: any power is a good interlocutor, except the power of the masses, who have a habit of speaking of universal rights and equality. It’s hard to talk about power with those who argue that there should be no power other than that of the sovereign people. The masses reclaiming their rights tend to be godless and without the requisite fear of God, and the Good Shepherd needs a flock.

You say, you’re being anticlerical. Of course I’m anticlerical; I have a brain and a memory.

My brain lets me remember that in secular affairs, the Church always plays both sides, and carefully denied the entry of any other players. And my memory reminds me that Benedict XV called World War I “a useless slaughter,” but in 1917, after four years, millions of casualties, and evidence that the heirs to the Sacred Roman Empire were not going to win after all; his successor, Pius XI, signed the Lateran Pacts with Mussolini, a fascist dictator with a socialist and anticlerical past. Under the next Pope, Pius XII, after 1945 the Church offered shelter and escape routes to South America for hundreds of Nazi and Fascist leaders, while the Pope was busy excommunicating Christian communists while at the same time stating that both Communism and Capitalism were threats to the order and balance of the family hearth, which women were called upon to preserve.

More recently, Pope John Paul II is universally acclaimed for having supported (and, for many, helped bring about) the fall of the communist regimes in Poland and the rest of the countries behind the Iron Curtain; but it is the same Pope who smiled as he shook hands with the fascist dictator Pinochet, and turned a blind eye while the CIA and its henchmen massacred the priests in South America who took the Church’s verbal support for Liberation Theology too literally.

We could go on and on, but these are just examples. What I said at the beginning still holds true: I don’t look to St. Peter when it comes to science, ethics, or politics.

I want to see what will happen now. Whether everyone will fall into the trap and restrain themselves to commenting for or against whatever sounds like a proposal in the Encyclical, remaining rigidly within the papal Overton window, or whether we will finally have politicians capable of considering the rights and needs of their constituents and going beyond the statements of principle of those who, no matter who wins, with deep Christian compassion for the victims, will always sit alongside the victor.