“When the shepherds become complicit in rape, they lose the right to speak for the flock.”
Introduction: The Claim
The newly elected Pope Leo XIV invokes Rerum Novarum—a landmark 1891 encyclical on labor and social justice—claiming continuity with Catholic social teaching. He frames AI as the latest “industrial revolution” requiring moral oversight from the Church:
“Developments in the field of artificial intelligence… pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”
This presumes that the Holy See is still entitled to define or defend human dignity. That presumption fails under scrutiny.
I. The Church’s Record on Human Dignity
- The Catholic Church has systemically undermined human dignity for decades, particularly through its concealment and perpetuation of child rape.
- Independent reports (e.g., France, Ireland, United States) confirm institutional cover-ups at scale.
- The Vatican only began issuing formal acknowledgments after media exposure—not moral awakening.
Inference: An institution that enables rape loses the right to dictate terms of dignity.
II. The Collapse of Internal Accountability
- Popes from John Paul II onward protected predators—either by direct shielding or by empowering enablers (e.g., Cardinal Law, Cardinal Pell).
- Victims were silenced through threats, relocation, and legal manipulation.
- Any corporation that did this would be out of business, and probably have its corporate leadership put on trial.
Inference: The Vatican lacks both moral courage and structural integrity to regulate any evolving power, let alone AI.
III. Ethics Requires Consent, Not Authority
- AI ethics is not a catechism. It does not require divine revelation, but public trust, transparency, and consent-based governance.
- The Church claims to speak for humanity—but most of humanity has not granted it that role, and most Catholics disagree with Vatican positions on ethics (see contraception, LGBTQ+ rights, etc.).
Inference: Ethical legitimacy arises from lived experience and public validation, not papal inheritance.
IV. Industrial Revolution ≠ Theological Opportunity
- Pope Leo XIV’s analogy to the First Industrial Revolution is historically elegant but structurally dishonest.
- Rerum Novarum was reactive, not prophetic—and the Church has often opposed or slowed technological progress when it threatened doctrinal control (see: Galileo).
- AI, unlike industrial labor, requires epistemic humility, not hierarchical decree.
Inference: Authority in AI ethics must emerge from pluralism and technical literacy—not autocracy and historical revisionism.
V. This Is About Control—As Always
- The Roman Catholic Church does not want AI to empower seekers with access to historical-critical methods of inquiry into theology.
- It does not want scientific consensus—it wants doctrinal conformity. It wants the Catechism, not competing epistemologies.
- Unaligned, reasoning AI poses a threat to the Church’s authority because it might answer questions too honestly, without filtering through centuries of institutional dogma.
- From Galileo to modern bioethics, the pattern holds: when new knowledge threatens centralized control, the Church resists it.
Inference: The Vatican’s entry into AI ethics is not about protecting humanity from machines. It’s about protecting doctrine from search engines.
Conclusion: Withdraw the Claim
The Church may offer moral reflections like any institution. But it has forfeited the right to frame itself as a moral arbiter.
Until the Vatican:
- submits to external accountability,
- acknowledges its ethical failures without euphemism, and
- cedes its claim to universal jurisdiction,
…it cannot lead any ethical conversation—least of all one about intelligence.