Pope Leo XIV throws down the gauntlet against AI hype.
At his first "working meeting", the pope outlined his priorities to include defending "human dignity" against the threat of AI, citing the dehumanizing effects of the industrial revolution.
Pope Leo XIV specifically called out his intent to defend “human dignity, justice, and work” in the face of “artificial intelligence” and compared the challenges of today to the first industrial revolution which Pope Leo XIII had responded to with the encyclical Rerum novarum about the need for amelioration of the misery and dehumanizing effects of the industrial revolution on the working class.
We also have some "he's just like us" content to luxuriate in as Americans too. Apparently even the Pope has an embarrassing MAGA family member. Senior citizen and elder brother of Pope Leo XIV is a guy named Louis, who seems to hold his brother with regard, but who like so many Trump conservatives his age, is a heavy user of Facebook, and posts lots of pro-Trump anti-Democrat content, called Nancy Pelosi the c-word, claimed Democrats are Communists and that if they hadn't taken over the schools people would've shot them or strung them up. So not just any maga conservative family member either, but a die-hard Trumpy loud and proud in public, drank in the right-wing red pills by the handful maga family member. The New York Post said that the brother Louis also "called for Democrats to be arrested for treason for meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky." Well, we know where the pope stands on this because in his first Sunday address where he sang the Regina caeli, the pope made a point to mention: "I carry in my heart the sufferings of the beloved Ukrainian people" — this is documented on the official Vatican Holy See website where you can read the entire anti-war statement including a call for a ceasefire and for humanitarian aid to get into Gaza.
The pope does have another brother with whom he plays word games with on the regular, and sounds more or less like a nice normie brother, if that makes anyone feel any better on behalf of the pope.
The MAGA guy claimed to the press that his brother Pope Leo XIV will be able to “smooth” the conservatives into unity in the Church — conservatives who he thinks found Pope Francis off-putting. For people who are just broadly left of the far right Christian nationalist extremists, and hoping for a win here – this is as good as it gets for a potential to possibly walk back at least some Christians from the genocidal precipice many have been so obviously teetering upon right here in the US. I have repeatedly been alarmed at the attempts to use, not just Christianity, but specifically the Roman Catholic religion, to whip up people to the point to perhaps perpetrate some kind of massacre against people labeled progressives by calling them the enemies of Christ. When I read that sedevacantist letter to the editor in my local newspaper, and considering that it had been published on January 6th 2024 to boot, it ended any doubt in my mind that it can happen here. We’ve been sleepwalking into it.
But with so many saying that people are searching for meaning in today's world, and often looking endlessly to social media for something, there is no doubt that an American born, English-fluent pope, who also speaks several other languages, and is not shy about using social media, is going to perhaps have more influence over cultural winds in the world than the Church has had in decades. I don’t have to like that any more than I like the information landscape we’re all swimming in — but it’s at a minimum a relief that Pope Leo XIV emphasized that he would continue with the goals of Evangelii Gaudium by Pope Francis for prioritizing the discarded and least fortunate, and that he specifically referenced Vatican II.
I don’t really even know a lot of what’s from Vatican II much beyond that my grandmother and mother grew up eating fish on all Fridays, but in my adulthood most Catholics I’ve known and worked with only do the fish on Fridays during Lent. I do however know that doubling down on Vatican II is a distinct signal to the right-wing rad trad caths and other sedevacantists who want to erase any human progress in the Church since Vatican II and that they believe that progress from Vatican II means that all the popes since then have been heretics — (not kidding, they talk about heresy), which is why they haven’t been happy, and is why it’s called sedevacantism. (The time between the death or resignation of one pope and the election of another is called sede vacante, meaning vacancy.) The radicals often refer to “The Deposit of Faith” as their point of contention, but yet that always involves a lot of hand waving and it’s more often apparent that what bugs a lot of these people is BIPOC Catholics and potentially being outnumbered by Catholic populations in the Global South. And this has a big overlap of racist concerns about “Western culture” and intersects with the disinformation propaganda conspiracy theory called “white replacement theory”.
And this is how some Christians, who I was always taught were supposed to prioritize the poor, and the meek who shall inherit the earth, so on and so forth — many who claim not to believe in genetic evolution at all — wind up on the same side with billionaires who are using pseudoscience eugenics ideology to discard those with misfortunes and treat the masses of their fellow people with dehumanizing disdain. This pope prioritizing the least and the poor is also in opposition to the anti-empathy tech tycoons and the dystopian world they want for the working class.
I'm not in the market for saviors – the Pope or Jesus Christ – and I'm certainly not into any social gurus or political cults for that matter. But if the Pope wants to take up the job of Holy Influencer and go toe to toe on behalf of humans against the AI hype and unfettered network state pushing moguls… and perhaps dissuade some Catholic Americans away from ethnic cleansing of… progressives?
Well… heaven knows tech won't save us, but go ahead bring it, thy rod and thy staff and thy youtube channel. I’m tired so I'll take it.
I just hope THE POPE understands what AI is (and what it isn’t) better than most politicians, healthcare ceos, and coworkers.