Pope Leo XIV has laid out his vision for his papacy, identifying artificial intelligence (AI) as one of the most critical matters facing humanity and vowing to continue in some of the core priorities of his predecessor, Pope Francis.
But in a sign he was making the papacy very much his own, Leo made his first outing since his election to a sanctuary south of Rome that is dedicated to the Virgin Mary and is of particular significance to his Augustinian order and to his namesake, Pope Leo XIII.
Townspeople of Genazzano gathered in the square outside the main church housing the Madre del Buon Consiglio (Mother of Good Counsel) sanctuary as Leo greeted and blessed them. The sanctuary, which is managed by Augustinian friars, has been a place of pilgrimage since the 15th century. The previous Pope Leo elevated it to a minor basilica and expanded the adjacent convent in the early 1900s.
After praying in the church, Leo greeted the crowd and told them they had both a gift and a responsibility in having the Madonna in their midst. He offered a blessing and then got back into the passenger seat of the car, a black Volkswagen, with Vatican security alongside.
The after-lunch outing came after Leo presided over his first formal audience, with the cardinals who elected him Pope two days ago.
Leo repeatedly cited Francis’s own 2013 mission statement, making clear a commitment to making the Catholic Church more inclusive, attentive to the faithful and concerned with the “least and rejected.”
Leo, the first American-born pope, told the cardinals he was fully committed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council that were put together during meetings in the 1960s that modernized the church.
He identified AI as a critical issue, saying it poses challenges to defending human dignity, justice and labour.
Leo referred to AI in explaining the choice of his papal name. Leo XIII, the pope from 1878 to 1903, laid the foundation for modern Catholic social thought — most famously with his 1891 encyclical (papal letter) 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.
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“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 defence of human dignity, justice and labour,” the current pope said.
Toward the end of his pontificate, Francis, who died on April 21, became increasingly vocal about the threats to humanity posed by AI and called for an international treaty to regulate it. He warned such powerful technology risks turning human relations into mere algorithms.
Francis brought his message to the Group of Seven industrialized nations when he addressed their summit last year, insisting AI must remain human-centric so that decisions about when to use weapons or even less-lethal tools will always be made by humans and not machines.
The late Argentine pope also used his 2024 annual peace message to call for an international treaty to ensure AI is developed and used ethically, arguing a technology lacking human values of compassion, mercy, morality and forgiveness is too perilous to develop unchecked.
In Saturday’s speech, delivered in Italian in the Vatican’s New Synod Hall, Leo repeatedly referenced Francis and the mourning over his death.
He held up Francis’s mission statement at the 2013 start of his pontificate, “The Joy of the Gospel,” as something of his own marching orders, suggesting he intends to continue Francis’s priorities.
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He referenced Francis’s insistence on the need for the church to make its leadership more collegial, to express “loving care for the least and rejected,” and to engage in courageous dialogue with the contemporary world.
Leo also mentioned the need to pay attention to what the faithful say, “especially in [their] most authentic and inclusive forms, especially popular piety.”
Greeted by a standing ovation as he entered, Leo read from his prepared text, only looking up occasionally. Even when he first appeared to the world on the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica on Thursday night, Leo read from a prepared text that he may have drafted sometime before his historic election or in the hour or so after.
