The papal plane hummed quietly as it carried Pope Leo XIV home from France, but there was no rest for the leader of the Catholic Church. He had just spent four days visiting the country, meeting with bishops, celebrating Mass, and listening to survivors of abuse. Now, somewhere over the European countryside, he faced questions that had nothing to do with the gentle rituals of faith and everything to do with the terrifying uncertainty of the future. The world is caught in a fierce argument about artificial intelligence. Some of the very people building it have warned that it could one day destroy humanity. Others, including U.S. President Donald Trump, have dismissed such warnings as “fake news,” a phrase that has become a weapon to silence inconvenient conversations. When the pope was asked where he stood, he did not waffle. He said that the dangers described by tech leaders are not fake news, and that anyone who simply closes their eyes to the possibility of catastrophe is not being responsive to the moment. “This is a problem that we need to sit down and talk about,” he said on Sept. 28, during the airborne press conference with reporters traveling back to Rome. There was something refreshingly human about his answer. He did not claim to know exactly how artificial intelligence will evolve, and he did not pretend to have a technical solution. But he refused to let the conversation be dismissed by slogans. “To simply say, ‘Oh it’s not going to happen,’ and close our eyes to it is probably not the most responsive way to go about that,” he said. He also pointed out that calling these concerns “fake news” can be a way for people to gain financial or political advantage. In other words, the pope was saying that ignoring a global threat because it is inconvenient is not wisdom; it is denial. And denial, he seemed to suggest, is a luxury that humanity cannot afford.
But the pope did not sound alarmist. In fact, he said something that surprised many in the press cabin: he is “relatively optimistic” that technology companies can put in place guardrails to avoid losing control of artificial intelligence entirely. He laughed off the idea that he was lying awake at night in fear. “If someone would ask me, ‘Am I in panic mode?’ No, I’m not, I sleep at night,” he said. This is not the language of a doomsday prophet. It is the language of a man who has seen enough of human history to know that people are capable of both great destruction and great prudence. The pope explained that through the Vatican’s coordination with tech leaders, he has seen signs of genuine willingness to engage with the deeper questions of AI development, not just the questions of power and competition and who gets to market first, but also the moral questions. He is convinced that enough people in the tech industry are willing to think beyond short-term profit and think about what is good for the whole human family. That does not mean he is telling us to leave the problem in the hands of a few brilliant engineers. On the contrary, he said, “we need to continue to invite political leaders, the leaders of AI, social organizations, associations, to come together and look at what is happening already and what could be down the road.” This is a call for a broad, inclusive conversation. The pope clearly believes that decisions about the future of humanity should not be made by a tiny elite behind closed doors. They should be made in the open, with the voices of workers, citizens, philosophers, people of faith, and everyone else who has a stake in the world our children will inherit. That is not a technical vision. It is a deeply human one.
The pope’s words on AI were consistent with the message he offered during his visit to France. There, he said society must work to ensure that artificial intelligence serves humanity and does not become “another instrument of domination and injustice.” Those words are worth pausing over. The apocalyptic scenarios of AI turning against humanity are dramatic and horrifying, but the pope was pointing at something more subtle and perhaps more immediate. Even if no machine ever decides to wipe out the human race, artificial intelligence can be used right now to control, exploit, divide, and oppress. It can be used to build surveillance systems that strip people of their privacy. It can be used to create algorithms that spread lies and hatred. It can be used to automate jobs and leave millions of people behind. It can be used to concentrate enormous power in the hands of a few corporations and governments. That, too, is a kind of catastrophe. The pope sees all of these dangers, and he refuses to dismiss any of them. But he also refuses to despair. He remains hopeful because he believes that human beings are not simply the playthings of the machines we create. We have the capacity to build a future that is just, compassionate, and respectful of human dignity. The question is whether we will choose to do so. And that is why the pope is calling for dialogue. He wants the church to be present in the conversation about artificial intelligence, not because the church has a special technical expertise, but because the church has something else: a conviction that every single person is created in the image of God and has infinite value. That conviction must be at the heart of every decision we make about the future. If we forget it, no amount of technological progress will save us.
The conversation on the flight back to Rome was not only about machines. It was also about the human heart and the dark directions it can take when it is filled with fear and anger. The pope was asked about the rise of the far-right in Germany, where recent state elections had brought significant gains for extremist parties. He said he was intrigued by the combination of far-right worldviews with a certain kind of religion, which he called “not an authentic expression of Christianity.” This is a powerful statement. In some parts of Europe, people who claim to be Christian are embracing nationalist and xenophobic politics, using faith as a banner for exclusion rather than as a source of love. The pope pushed back against that with unmistakable clarity. “We can go back to the values of the Gospel, which are not about hatred and division, but they’re about understanding and compassion and accompanying,” he said. He expressed hope that the church could find ways to reach out to a majority of people of goodwill and help them make clear choices for the common good, rather than for extremist ideas that may do far more damage than we can even recognize at the moment. The pope’s response was not a political attack on any particular party. It was a pastoral appeal. He did not write off people who are drawn to the far-right as monsters. He seemed to recognize that many of them are searching for meaning, belonging, and security in a world that feels increasingly unstable. The far-right offers simple answers, but those answers are rooted in hatred and division. The Gospel, he said, offers something better: life-giving values, not destruction and division and hatred. The church’s job, in the pope’s view, is not to scream at people from a distance. It is to preach, teach, and talk about what the church truly believes, and to do so with confidence and compassion. It is to invite people into a different way of seeing the world, a way that does not require an enemy to hate. That is a difficult mission, especially in an age of tribalism and social media outrage. But the pope seems to believe that there are enough people of goodwill in the world to make a difference. He is not interested in condemning the lost. He is interested in reaching them.
Perhaps the most painful moment of the press conference came when the conversation turned to the meeting the pope had held with seven victims of sexual abuse by priests and other church workers in France. The meeting lasted ninety minutes, and the pope told reporters that several of the victims “spoke about systemic abuse.” That phrase has been a source of enormous controversy inside the Catholic Church. In 2021, a landmark report commissioned by France’s bishops and religious orders estimated that roughly 330,000 children had been sexually abused by priests and other church workers in France between 1950 and 2020. The report claimed that the abuse was not simply the acts of a few degenerate individuals, but was made possible by church structures that allowed abuse to happen and be covered up for decades. The report was met with hostility in the Roman Curia, and even Pope Francis expressed doubts about its methodology, cancelling a planned meeting with the commission that produced it, to the deep dismay of survivors and their supporters. So when Pope Leo was asked about the systemic dimension of abuse, he could have repeated the phrase, or he could have rejected it. Instead, he chose a more personal approach. “Personally, I prefer to express it in a different way,” he said. He acknowledged that some organizations within the church have at times, as a system, been abusive. But then he added something that might seem like a turn: “Sexual abuse is first and foremost a human problem.” He went on to explain that when abuse happens inside the church, it carries an additional horror, because people’s lives of faith are deeply wounded and sometimes even destroyed. This means the church has a particular responsibility to walk with survivors and to help them seek healing. In his meeting with the victims in Lourdes, he asked them to help him express to other victims the willingness of himself and the church to listen, to walk with them as they look for healing, and to recognize the pain that abuse has caused in their lives. It is a delicate, almost trembling response. The pope seems to want to hold two truths at once: that abuse is always a personal betrayal by one human being against another, and that the church as an institution has failed in ways that cannot be ignored. He will not let the church hide behind abstract systems, but he also will not let it wash its hands by blaming individual scapegoats. For him, the only response is accompaniment, walking alongside the wounded, listening to them, and acknowledging their suffering without defensiveness.
Taken together, the pope’s words on that flight paint a portrait of a leader who is not afraid to face hard truths, but who refuses to let them lead to despair. Whether the subject was artificial intelligence, the far-right, or the church’s own failures, Pope Leo XIV responded with a consistent moral vision. Human beings are capable of terrible harm, but they are also capable of extraordinary good. The proper response to danger is not panic, and it is not denial. It is engagement. We need to sit down and talk. We need to build guardrails around the technologies that could destroy us, and we need to remember that those technologies are not just tools; they are expressions of human choices. We need to stand up against extremism, not by demonizing individuals, but by offering the life-giving values of the Gospel, which are rooted in compassion and not hatred. And we need to accompany the wounded, especially those wounded by the church, with humility and honest listening. The pope is not offering a political program or a set of policies. He is offering a way of being in the world. He says he sleeps at night, but he does not sleepwalk. He is awake to the dangers, awake to the pain, awake to the possibilities. His optimism is not a happy fog; it is a stubborn belief that human beings can choose life over death, compassion over cruelty, hope over fear. In a world that screams for attention, that is a quiet and radical message. The pope is telling us that we are not helpless. We have the power to shape the future. The only question is whether we will have the wisdom and the courage to do so. And that, he seems to say, is a question that no one can fake, and no one can ignore.