Vatican to release encyclical on AI ethics amid global governance gaps and corporate power concentration
Original framing: “Pope Leo to issue first major work, addressing AI, on May 25 - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The encyclical's focus on AI ethics echoes the Catholic Church's long history of engaging with technological revolutions, from the printing press to nuclear weapons, often positioning itself as a moral counterweight to secular power. This historical pattern reveals a tension: the Church critiques AI's dehumanizing potential while simultaneously benefiting from its own digital surveillance and data collection practices. The encyclical's release in 2024 also coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Bretton Woods system, highlighting how AI governance is being shaped by the same neoliberal frameworks that the Church has historically opposed.
The Vatican's AI encyclical arrives at a pivotal moment where the Catholic Church, a 2,000-year-old institution, seeks to assert moral authority over a technology that threatens to render human labor, creativity, and even consciousness obsolete.
This tension mirrors the Church's historical engagement with technological revolutions, from the printing press to nuclear weapons, where it oscillated between condemning and co-opting new tools to maintain its influence. Yet the encyclical's framing risks replicating the same extractive logics it critiques, as the Vatican's own data practices—from surveillance of parishioners to partnerships with surveillance capitalists—remain unexamined. The document's potential lies in its ability to bridge Western moral philosophy with non-Western ethical systems, such as Ubuntu or Dharma, but only if it cedes authority to marginalized voices and embraces pluralistic governance. The real test will be whether the encyclical can move beyond moral warnings to propose structural solutions, such as a pluriversal AI council or Catholic data commons, that challenge the neoliberal frameworks shaping AI development. Without this, the encyclical risks becoming a performative gesture that obscures the Vatican's complicity in the very systems it seeks to critique.