SocietyIssue #107

Why a Math-Major Pope Wrote an Encyclical on AI

The same question the Vatican asked 135 years ago about the Industrial Revolution is back — now about AI.

Oswarld (Kwangseob Ahn)· Writer & editor of INLEVEL9

Why a Math-Major Pope Wrote an Encyclical on AI

Opening

Dear reader, on May 15, 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the Catholic Church’s first social encyclical1 addressing the labor exploitation created by the Industrial Revolution. The document, Rerum Novarum (“On New Things”), posed a question: “When machines replace people, who protects human dignity?”

Exactly 135 years later, on May 15, 2026, Pope Leo XIV signed his first encyclical. Its title: Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”). Its subject: protecting human dignity in the age of AI. And standing at the document’s unveiling won’t be Google or OpenAI — it’ll be Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah.

Let me cut to the point: this isn’t religious news. It’s the moment the world’s largest institutional organization, with 1.4 billion followers, stakes out a formal position in the AI governance debate.

🏭 1891: When Machines Pushed People Out

In the late 19th century, Europe’s factory districts were battlegrounds. The Industrial Revolution’s productivity gains were staggering, but behind them lay 16-hour workdays, child exploitation, and a cycle of poverty. Wealth concentrated among a handful of capitalists while most workers were pushed below the line of survival.

European society at the time had split into two camps. Socialists called for abolishing private property; liberals trusted the market’s self-correcting power. The Church stood with neither. More precisely, it hadn’t yet found its footing.

Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum filled that vacuum. Its core message was clear: neither socialism nor unrestrained capitalism was the answer, and workers’ dignity and rights had to take priority over any economic system. Specifically, it called for just wages, limits on working hours, and workers’ right to form associations. It was the first time in history the Church had staked out a formal position on labor issues.

The document’s power came from moral authority. Catholics at the time made up nearly half of Europe’s population. It carried no legal force, but a single papal statement could shift the moral baseline for hundreds of millions of people. What’s striking is that Rerum Novarum criticized both socialism and capitalism. Denying private property and exploiting workers were both, in its view, affronts to human dignity. In practice, the document went on to serve as one of the intellectual foundations for labor law reforms and welfare-state systems across Europe. Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it “the starting point of modern Catholic social doctrine.”

🤖 2026: When AI Pushes People Out

135 years later, the world has changed, but the structure looks remarkably similar.

If the 19th-century steam engine replaced physical labor, the large language models2** of 2026 have begun replacing knowledge work.** Instead of factory workers, office professionals are the ones at risk; instead of machines, algorithms are making the decisions. The concentration of wealth and influence among a handful of Big Tech companies also mirrors the capitalist class of the Industrial Revolution era.

Pope Leo XIV, born Robert Prevost, is keenly aware of this structural parallel. Born in Chicago, the current pope earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Villanova University and once taught high school math and physics. He’s effectively the first pope in history to have majored in math. Harvard mathematician Martin Nowak even coined the nickname “the Pi Pope,” noting that combining the papal name Leo (3 letters) with the ordinal XIV (14) yields 3.14 — pi. He went on to spend more than 20 years as a missionary in Peru, and he’s both the first American-born pope and the only pope to hold dual citizenship, in his case with Peru.

Right after his installation, he explained to the College of Cardinals why he had taken his name in honor of Leo XIII, and the core of it was this: “Another industrial revolution is underway in our time, and the advance of AI poses new challenges to human dignity and the justice of labor.” TIME already placed Leo XIV on its list of the most influential people in AI in 2025, his first year in office. The very combination of a math-major pope speaking on AI ethics was news in itself.

The fact that Magnifica Humanitas was signed on May 15 is no coincidence. It’s the exact same date Rerum Novarum was signed. The Vatican deliberately stitched together 135 years.

The May 25 unveiling breaks precedent too. Normally cardinals present an encyclical on the pope’s behalf, but this time the pope himself will attend, deliver remarks, and give the final blessing. Standing alongside him will be Cardinal Fernández, who heads the doctrine office, and Cardinal Czerny, who oversees integral human development, plus two lay speakers — Durham University moral theologian Anna Rowlands and Santa Clara University theological ethicist Leocadie Lushombo. Dutch public broadcaster’s Vatican correspondent Andrea Vreede put it precisely.

“If cardinals do it, nobody listens. If the pope is there, every camera shows up.”

⚖️ Why Anthropic, of All Companies

The fact that the tech-industry figure standing at the unveiling is Christopher Olah is worth noting.

Olah is an Anthropic co-founder who leads its interpretability3 research — a field devoted to tracing back why AI makes the decisions it does. He created the DeepDream visualization at Google Brain, led the interpretability team at OpenAI, and joined Anthropic’s founding team in 2021. He also made TIME’s list of the 100 most influential people in AI in 2024.

Understanding why the Vatican chose Anthropic over Google, Microsoft, or OpenAI requires some context.

Start with the Vatican’s history with Big Tech. The Vatican already published the Rome Call for AI Ethics4** with Microsoft and IBM back in 2020.** It laid out six principles: transparency, inclusion, accountability, impartiality, reliability, and security. More than 50 organizations have since signed on, and in 2024 in Hiroshima the signing expanded to include 11 world religions — Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and others. The Vatican is an organization that’s been building this conversation on AI ethics for years.

So why Anthropic this time, rather than existing partners like Microsoft or IBM? This is where Anthropic’s current situation becomes decisive. In February 2026, the U.S. Department of Defense demanded that Anthropic permit “all lawful use” of its AI models. Anthropic refused, insisting it wouldn’t budge on restrictions against developing autonomous weapons or enabling mass surveillance of U.S. citizens. In response, President Trump designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk” — a label normally reserved for companies from hostile nations — and ordered every federal agency to immediately stop using its products.

Anthropic sued in March, arguing a First Amendment violation, and Judge Rita Lin of the federal court in San Francisco granted an injunction, writing that “slapping an adversary-nation label on an American company simply because it disagrees with the government is Orwellian.” The fight is still very much ongoing — oral arguments were held just yesterday, May 19, at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In short, Anthropic is currently the only frontier AI company locked in a legal fight with the U.S. government over its insistence on drawing ethical lines around AI. The Vatican putting one of its people on the podium at this moment isn’t a simple corporate invitation — it can be read as a signal of which side it’s standing on in the AI governance debate.

Oz’s Lens

Watching this unfold, I was reminded of a pattern I’ve often seen in GTM (go-to-market) strategy work.

There’s a concept called “standard pre-emption.” It’s a strategy where, before the market has settled on a standard, one player proposes the benchmark first and builds an ecosystem on top of it — the way Intel first proposed the USB standard.

That’s exactly what the Vatican is doing. In a domain that has no “standard” yet — AI ethics governance — it’s setting the frame first, backed by 1.4 billion followers. The 2020 Rome Call was the prototype; Magnifica Humanitas is the official launch. And it’s no accident that it uses the encyclical, the highest-authority document format in Catholicism. This isn’t an “opinion” — it’s “teaching that carries the weight of doctrine.”

Of course, there’s a counterargument. Ask whether the Vatican’s declaration carries actual regulatory power, and the direct answer is no. It has no legal force like the EU AI Act or a U.S. executive order. But Rerum Novarum in 1891 had no legal force either, and it’s hard to deny that it became a moral foundation for 20th-century European welfare states. The Vatican’s influence comes not from law but from framing — the power to shape society’s sense of what’s “acceptable” and what’s “crossed the line.”

One more thing: having the pope personally attend, seating lay speakers instead of cardinals, and placing an AI company founder alongside them — this staging isn’t content, it’s communication design. If there’s one thing I’ve learned building corporate strategy, it’s that who delivers a message, where, and how matters just as much as the message itself. The Vatican seems to have known this 135 years ago.

Closing

Here’s the recap.

  • The Vatican has intervened with the same frame — “human dignity and labor” — at every technological turning point, from the Industrial Revolution in 1891 to the AI revolution in 2026.
  • Magnifica Humanitas is both a religious document and a position statement in the AI governance debate. The Anthropic invitation is a signal of which direction that is.
  • The Vatican’s influence lies not in legal regulation but in moral framing. And 135 years ago, that framing actually changed the world.

When the full text of the encyclical is released on May 25, I’d recommend checking for yourself exactly where the Vatican draws the line on AI in warfare, surveillance, and labor. In particular, how much specificity it offers on banning autonomous weapons and protecting workers will be the key to gauging this document’s real-world impact. Regardless of your religious views, it’s shaping up to be a document that shows where the next frame for AI governance is being written.

References & Further Reading

Primary sources

Background

The author, Kwangseob Ahn, is a professor of business administration at Sejong University and lead consultant at OBF (Oswarld Boutique Consulting Firm). He teaches statistics and data analysis — business data management and business analytics — while leading GTM and AI strategy consulting in the field, designing the seam between technology and business. He has published academic research on a memory architecture for AI dialogue systems (HEMA) and runs Daily Arxiv, a daily curation of global AI papers. He holds a master’s from Korea University’s Graduate School of Technology Management and a KMBA. He is the author of Homo Brainless: The People Who Outsource Their Thinking.

Footnotes

  1. Encyclical: A formal letter the pope sends to the entire Catholic Church worldwide. It’s one of the highest-authority forms of papal document, carrying that pope’s core priorities. Think of it as roughly equivalent in weight to a president’s inaugural address. ↩

  2. Large Language Model (LLM): The underlying technology behind AI services like ChatGPT and Claude. It refers to AI models trained on massive amounts of text data to read and write in human-like ways. ↩

  3. Interpretability: A research field focused on tracing back, in ways humans can understand, why AI reached a particular decision. Think of it like a car’s black box — a way of looking inside AI’s internal workings. ↩

  4. Rome Call for AI Ethics: An AI ethics framework the Vatican published with Microsoft, IBM, and others in 2020. It lays out six principles — transparency, inclusion, accountability, impartiality, reliability, and security. More than 50 organizations had signed on by 2024. ↩

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