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When in the early days of his pontificate Pope Leo XIV chose to keep his official social media accounts active, thus inheriting the digital voice of Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis, many observers perceived an administrative continuity. In reality, it was a broader project aimed at reaffirming the universal dimension of the Christian message in the digital world, where consciences are formed today. This represents a significant symbolic transition: a bridge between three pontificates, three worldviews, and three eras of the technological revolution. Benedict XVI, in 2012, opened the first Twitter profile, inaugurating the papacy’s presence in the digital universe. Francis expanded its pastoral and communicative reach, using social media as a global pulpit from which to speak about peace, migration, and inequality. Leo XIV inherits this tool but adapts it to a more radical challenge: that of human survival in a world where artificial intelligence emerges.
THE PROJECT OF CONTINUITY
The new Pope’s decision to continue using social media should not be interpreted as a routine gesture. It is a stance, affirming the continuity of the Gospel message even in contemporary languages. The accounts, translated into nine languages and followed by over fifty-two million people, are today one of the largest institutional communication channels in the world. Their permanence testifies to the Church’s desire to inhabit the digital public space not as a spectator, but as an active participant. Leo XIV’s language is sober, almost ascetic, yet profoundly aware of the power of symbols. The decision to maintain the account intact – rather than creating a new one – affirms that the figure of the Pope, despite his changing face, remains a sign of continuity. The internet, a place par excellence of volatility and oblivion, is thus transformed into a space of shared memory.
DIGITAL HERITAGE AND SPIRITUAL ROOTS
The papacy’s presence on social media, begun in 2012 with Benedict XVI, has evolved from a communications experiment to a global pastoral infrastructure. With Francis, Twitter and Instagram have become tools of evangelization and moral diplomacy. During the 2020 pandemic, the Argentine Pope’s content reached billions of views, becoming a spiritual reference for many amidst information chaos and social isolation. Leo XIV inherits an impressive legacy and transforms it into a terrain of discernment. If his predecessors had used social media as a channel to speak to the world, he seems to want to use it to listen to the world: a laboratory of observation, a place where the Church can understand contemporary humanity. But the digital legacy is not limited to communication. The challenge is no longer simply to spread messages, but to defend the truth in an age where information can be manipulated and reality can be simulated. It is in this context that Leo XIV’s speech on artificial intelligence takes on a prominent political significance.
AI AND THE NEW “SOCIAL QUESTION”
The new Pope has repeatedly invoked the figure of Leo XIII, author of Rerum Novarum (1891), the founding text of the Church’s social doctrine. Just as his nineteenth-century predecessor had addressed the wounds of the industrial revolution, so Leo XIV now finds himself confronted with the contradictions of the digital revolution. His approach to artificial intelligence is not apocalyptic, but lucidly critical. He recognizes the benefits of technological progress in the medical, educational, and economic fields but forcefully denounces the uncontrolled speed with which innovation advances, often without adequate ethical reflection. In a recent interview, Leo XIV admitted that it will be very difficult to discover the presence of God in artificial intelligence. This is not a rejection of progress, but a warning: technology, if deprived of a moral orientation, can obscure the dimension of the sacred and dissolve human conscience and spirituality. This is also the context for the Pope’s refusal to create a digital avatar of himself, reiterating that the Pope cannot be represented by an artificial image. In an age where the boundaries between person and representation tend to blur, this stance has extraordinary symbolic value: presence cannot be replicated, the word cannot be replaced by an algorithm.
FROM FRANCIS TO LEO
To fully understand the new Pontiff’s position on AI, it is useful to compare it with that of his predecessor, Pope Francis. The latter had inaugurated a wide-ranging reflection insisting on the urgency of a global ethics of artificial intelligence. In various documents and speeches, he defined AI as a non-neutral technology, capable of both emancipation and oppression. The problem, for Francis, lay not in the machine itself, but in the power that humans project onto it. The Argentine Pope feared that automation could widen social inequalities and consolidate the domination of technological elites over peoples. Hence his proposal for a binding international treaty that would regulate the development of AI according to principles of justice, equity and the protection of human dignity. His encyclical Dilexit nos summarized this vision in a formula both poetic and political: in the age of artificial intelligence, poetry and love are needed to save humanity. Leo XIV builds on that legacy but interprets it in a more philosophical and theological way. While Francis had emphasized the ethics of use, for the new Pope AI is not just a moral issue, but an ontological challenge: what does it mean to be human in a world where machines can imitate language, emotion, even creativity? Leo XIV’s answer is clear: a machine can imitate, but not understand; it can calculate, but not discern; it can reproduce the language of love, but not love. This is where he draws the line between what is human and what is not. In a society that tends to dissolve distinctions, the Church – he states – must be a master of differences. While Francis saw AI as a field of potential cooperation between faith and science, Leo XIV recognizes it as a battleground for the defence of the human person. AI, the Pope says, cannot be left to its own devices; it must be governed so that it contributes to a just order of social relations, not to their dissolution.
THE RISK OF DEHUMANIZATION
In one of his first public speeches, Leo XIV denounced the dehumanization of the digital world. Fake news, deepfakes and the manipulation of images and opinions are, for him, not side effects of progress, but symptoms of a deeper illness: the loss of a sense of truth. When reality becomes negotiable and lies masquerade as authenticity, faith itself risks becoming a simulacrum. In a world where every image can be manipulated, trust becomes a good thing. And defending trust means, for Leo XIV, defending humanity. In this sense, his pontificate opens with a gesture of cultural resistance: rejecting the digital duplication of the Pope is equivalent to affirming that truth is not a replicable file. Technology can help, but it cannot replace.
TOWARD A CHRISTIAN DIGITAL HUMANISM
What emerges from the comparison between Francis and Leo XIV is the progressive maturation of Catholic thought in the face of the technological revolution. While the former laid the foundations of an ethic of responsibility, the latter proposes limits based on the centrality of the person and the awareness that not everything that is possible is also permissible. The new Pope is not afraid to call technology by its name, nor to denounce the economic interests that drive it. In an age when AI decides who gets hired, who gets a loan, who has visibility on social media, the Pope’s reflection takes on global political significance. He does not limit himself to calling for an ethics of algorithms (the algorethics advocated by Francis), but proposes a spiritual reform of digital humanity. Leo XIV’s digital humanism represents the conviction that even in the age of artificial intelligence, humanity remains called to safeguard what no machine can ever reproduce: freedom, responsibility, the capacity to love and forgive. The pontificate of Leo XIV thus opens under the banner of continuity and vigilance. Continuity with his predecessors, who brought the Church into the heart of the digital world; vigilance in the face of a future in which technology risks replacing humanity. His voice, firm but free from alarmism, calls for a new alliance between faith and reason, between innovation and conscience. If Benedict XVI had introduced the Church to the internet and Francis had made it a pastoral platform, Leo XIV transforms it into a field of moral discernment. And in doing so, he reminds the world that true intelligence is not artificial, but human and spiritual: it’s one that can choose, love, judge and forgive.