Pope Leo XIV names biggest threat to humanity in first address to cardinals

Leo XIV said the Church must now take the lead in facing newer threats to workers,such as artificial intelligence (Picture: Vatican Media via AP)

Pope Leo XIV named artificial intelligence as one of the biggest threats to humanity as he laid out his vision for the papacy to cardinals today.

In his first formal audience,the new pontiff revealed he took the name to honour Pope Leo XIII,a social justice advocate who backed workers’ rights during the industrial revolution.

Leo XIV said the Church must now take the lead in facing newer threats to workers,such as artificial intelligence,saying AI poses ‘new challenges for the defence of human dignity,justice and labour’.

The first American-born pope 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,Leo said he identified with his predecessor,who addressed the great social question of the day posed by the industrial revolution in the encyclical.

He said: ‘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.’

Pope Leo XIV meets the College of Cardinals in the New Synod Hall at the Vatican (Picture: Vatican Media via AP)

Toward the end of his pontificate,the late Pope Francis became increasingly vocal about the threats to humanity posed by AI and called for an international treaty to regulate it.

He warned that such powerful technology risks turning human relations into mere algorithms.

Francis brought his message to the G7 when he addressed their summit last year,insisting decisions about when to use weapons always remain made by humans and not machines.

The Argentine also used his 2024 annual peace message to call for an international treaty to ensure AI is developed and used ethically.

He argued that a technology lacking human values of compassion,mercy,morality and forgiveness is too perilous to develop unchecked.

Leo’s two-hour meeting with the cardinals took a different format to that used by previous popes,who would typically offer a speech and expect the clerics only to listen.

This time,Leo gave a prepared address and then opened the floor to any cardinal who wanted to make a comment – allowing the clerics to voice their opinions and concerns about the main issues facing the global Church.

Leo greeted each cardinal individually as they left the meeting,which was held in the same small Vatican auditorium where they gathered before the conclave to discuss the next pope.

Formerly Cardinal Robert Prevost,Leo was elected the 267th pontiff on Thursday on the fourth ballot of the conclave.

It was an exceptionally swift outcome,especially when many of the 133 cardinal electors – hailing from 70 countries all over the world – probably would not recognises each other in the street.

He also overcame the traditional taboo precluding a pope from the United States given America’s superpower status.

But Prevost was already known to many of them given his decades as a missionary and then bishop in Peru and had been the head of the Vatican’s bishops office since 2023.