News

Cover Story

On HALO

2 weeks ago

The pope takes on AI

Pope Leo XIV gestures as he addresses the crowd during the weekly general audience at St Peter's Square in the Vatican on May 20, 2026. | Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty Images Monday morning, the Roman Catholic Church made its biggest foray yet into the discourse on artificial intelligence and the role it should play in human life as the technology develops. In the first encyclical of his papacy, titled Magnifica humanitas (Latin for “magnificent humanity”), Pope Leo XIV argued that AI is not intrinsically immoral, but that its adoption needed to be slowed in order to build moral guardrai...