Pope Leo XIV lays out his vision and identifies AI as a main challenge for humanity

Pope Leo XIV vows to modernise the Catholic Church, address AI challenges, and continue Pope Francis' core priorities.

Pope Leo XIV laid out the vision of his papacy Saturday (May 10, 2025), identifying artificial intelligence as one of the most critical matters facing humanity and vowing to continue in some of the core priorities of Pope Francis.

In his first formal audience, Pope Leo repeatedly cited Francis and the Argentine pope’s own 2013 mission statement, making clear a commitment to making the Catholic Church more inclusive and attentive to the faithful and a church that looks out for the “least and rejected.”

Pope Leo, the first American pope, told the cardinals who elected him that he was fully committed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s meetings that modernized the church. He identified AI as one of the main issues facing humanity, saying it poses challenges to defending human dignity, justice and labor.

In another hint of his priorities, the Vatican revealed that Pope Leo, a member of the Augustinian religious order, would retain the motto and coat of arms that he had as bishop of Chiclayo, Peru. The motto, “In Illo uno unum,” was pronounced by St. Augustine in a sermon to explain that “although we Christians are many, in the one Christ we are one.”

Pope Leo referred to AI in explaining the choice of his name: His namesake, Pope Leo XIII, was pope from 1878 to 1903 and laid the foundation for modern Catholic social thought. He did so most famously with his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, which addressed workers’ rights and capitalism at the dawn of the industrial age. The late pope criticized both laissez-faire capitalism and state-centric socialism, giving shape to a distinctly Catholic vein of economic teaching.

In his remarks Saturday (May 10, 2025), Pope Leo said he identified with his predecessor, who addressed the great social question of the day posed by the industrial revolution in the encyclical.

“In our own day, the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor,” he said.