Pope Leo XIV Signals Focus on AI with Nod to Leo XIII’s Social Teaching Legacy

Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum on May 15, 1891, at a time when laborers were struggling with poor working conditions amid the industrial revolution and when Marxists were seizing on the discontent to promote radical changes to the social order.

Essentially, Leo XIII was “primarily concerned with laying out … a philosophical or theological anthropology” that focused on “the human person and the dignity of work,” according to Joseph Grabowski, the vice president of evangelization and mission at the Society of Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

In the encyclical, Leo XIII wrote that there is a need “in drawing the rich and the working class together,” which could be accomplished by “reminding each of its duties to the other” and “of the obligations of justice.”

These obligations to justice include a business owner’s duty to “respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character” and to never “misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain or to value them solely for their physical powers,” Leo XIII taught.

Grabowski told CNA that one of the problems of industrialization was that people were “kind of viewed mechanistically” when working in factories and that the pontiff was reminding factory owners that humans should not be treated as though they are simply “part of a machine.”

Leo XIII also defended the right to private property, which he wrote must “belong to a man in his capacity of head of family” and rebuked Marxist and socialist ideologies, which he thought would disrupt the social order by pitting humans against each other and turning private property into “the common property of all, to be administered by the state or by municipal bodies.”

“It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten,” Leo XIII wrote. “And similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his children, who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by him provided with all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life.”

Grabowski said if one were to summarize the encyclical in one line, it would be: “The economy is meant to serve man and not vice versa.”

“Economics and productive work and things like that are all really about man’s nature and serving the highest end of man,” he said, which is to “get to heaven” and live in a “harmonious community.”

Social teachings and AI

Pope Leo XIV’s predecessor Pope Francis already incorporated some elements of Catholic social teaching into the Church’s approach to questions surrounding AI.

In December 2023, Francis urged global leaders to regulate AI toward “the pursuit of peace and the common good” and emphasized that innovations must avoid a “technological dictatorship” and instead be used to serve “the cause of human fraternity and peace.”

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in January released a 30-page “note” that explained that AI lacks “the richness of corporeality, relationality, and the openness of the human heart” and that innovation should spur “a renewed appreciation of all that is human.”

Grabowski told CNA that, as AI continues to advance and the Church formalizes its teachings on the new technology, Leo XIV will be contending with some of the same issues that Leo XIII wrestled with at the turn of the 20th century.

“It’s still a question of: How do we use machinery within economic production in a way to serve man [that] does not subvert man to servitude of the machine?” he said.

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AI is already being incorporated into many workplaces, such as the fields of marketing, banking, health care, and coding. The adoption of AI can sometimes improve accuracy and efficiency but is yielding concerns that the technology could replace humans in certain activities.

A May 25 New York Times article noted that some software developers at Amazon are complaining that their work is becoming routine and thoughtless as much of the coding has been automated with AI, while other workers are cheering the increased productivity.

Alternatively, in health care, an October 2024 Forbes article noted that AI is helping doctors find anomalies in patients and link symptoms together to boost the speed and accuracy of medical diagnoses.

Speaking to the AI assistance in the field of medicine, Grabowski said: “There can be benefits there” with the technology helping doctors “look through symptoms and maybe come up with things a human doctor isn’t going to catch onto.”

“We would have no objection to that, but like with everything, a balance is called for,” he said.

In line with some complaints reported at Amazon, Grabowski said “increasingly mechanized work” poses a concern, and with AI, there’s a lot of outsourcing of “the creative process” and “the idea generation process” with the ability of AI to produce art and novels, which he called “somewhat alarming.”

“There is a notion of a right to a meaningful employment for a person [in Leo XIII’s writings],” he added. “To be fulfilled.”

Another principle of Rerum Novarum that can help guide teaching on AI is the concern about a “respect over property, over productive property,” Grabowski noted, highlighting that one issue with AI is “respect for intellectual property rights.”

“There’s great concern over the fact that [AI] isn’t really producing anything itself, so therefore it’s recycling the words and images created by other real people and usually doing so without credit,” he said.

Grabowski said the pontiff’s choice to pick the name Leo is “exciting,” given that the world is in a “very critical point in economic history.” He expressed hope that people will be amenable to the expected moral guidance from the Holy See and referenced a line from G.K. Chesterton’s book “What’s Wrong With The World.” 

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting,” Chesterton wrote. “It has been found difficult and left untried.”