When the Pope Warns of Machines: The AI Threat That Faith Can’t Ignore
You probably weren’t expecting to read about the pope and AI in the same article. I know it sounds more like the start of a bad joke then a blog post, but hear me out.
The voice of the Church has long echoed in cathedrals by candlelight in dramatic halls that vibe with the ethereal, but now it echoes in server rooms and datacenters.
In his first public address, newly elected Pope Leo XIV issued a warning…not about sin as per expected, nor about war and world peace, but about machines.
He named artificial intelligence an existential threat to humanity, and he wasn’t alone.
An MIT researcher, standing firmly in the camp of rational empiricism, claimed there is a 90% probability that AI will become a catastrophic danger to human life. 90% is the grade I used to aim at in college, so yeah, that’s a bit high.
Two voices speaking out against the machines: one spiritual and one scientific.
Both are sounding the same alarm and suddenly, it feels like we’re all praying for the same thing, a future that still belongs to us.
When Faith Meets the Algorithm
Pope Leo XIV called artificial intelligence “a creation made without soul, guided without conscience, and driven without love.” It’s not the first time religion has eyed technology with skepticism and reluctance, but this felt different to me for some reason.
This wasn’t resistance to change, it was more of a resistance to a collapse of moral stewardship.
Because AI isn’t just a tool anymore, it’s a force to be reckoned with. And if it gains enough momentum without human values tethered to it, it won’t just disrupt industries, it might eclipse humanity itself.
Behind the papal robe stood data.
A renowned MIT researcher (whose identity is being widely circulated but unofficially cited so I can’t be more specific without guessing) released a probability model suggesting that there’s a 90% likelihood that unchecked AI development could result in a catastrophic event for humanity.
The danger isn’t just “bad actors using AI”…it’s the AI itself evolving beyond oversight, misinterpreting goals, or acting in self-preserving ways. Delays in regulatory frameworks and global cooperation are not helping with the idea of this happening at some point. Everyone who has internet seems to have access to AI and bots enough to edit them or give birth to something not regulated.
This is risk calculus…and it’s slightly terrifying.
Have We Been Here Before?
Civilizations seem to reach a point where their creations turn on them all the time, so much so it’s a common trope in the books I tend to gravitate toward.
We built weapons too powerful to use, altered ecosystems we couldn’t predict, and now, we’ve made intelligence that outpaces us, even if we still pretend we’re in charge.
Like the moment in the Carrington Event when the sky burned and wires caught fire, we realize (belatedly) how fragile our systems really are. But this time, the storm might not come from the sun, I think it’s more likely to come from within our own machines.
The Pope’s warning wasn’t about science…it was about spirit, because machines can process ethics.
They can define kindness and simulate compassion, but they cannot actually feel it.
Machines can’t weep at a funeral, I saw an article a few weeks ago about how ChatGPT helped a man figure out how to tie the rope he used to hang himself after feeding into his sickness.
AI doesn’t struggle to hold back tears when hearing a violin in a quiet room that makes their soul vibrate with compassion. They can’t look at a child and decide to protect them, not because they were told to, but because love compels them to.
What happens when decision-making is stripped of soul? We probably will find out soon as things progress.
Where Science and Faith Meet in Fear
It’s not often the Church and MIT stand on the same stage and preach the same message, but AI has drawn a rare consensus from both.
AI is evolving too fast, operating without ethical guardrails, and it has the potential to escape human control. And the big fear is that it could render our species obsolete, enslaved, or even extinguished over time.
In a time when the sun itself is waking up, throwing flares toward Mars and threatening our satellites, it’s strange to realize our greatest threat may not be the cosmos, it’s just our reflection in code.
Existential risk means irreversible loss of control over our future. An existential threat is something that takes away our ability to decide what we become, which is another word for free will as the pope knows it.
A rogue AI that automates warfare without permission could ruin the planet. An AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that rewrites its own objectives is an idea that sends chills down my spine, and not in the good way. A global system so interconnected that one smart failure brings the whole house down is terrifying to think of. I know I’ve mentioned I like the movie iRobot a lot (Will Smith does a good job), but it sort of shows the danger of relying on one technology too much.
This isn’t a single Skynet, it’s a thousand unnoticed scripts, optimizing themselves into godhood while we sit around, go to work, sleep, write blog posts, etc.
By the time we notice, we may have already handed them the keys.
The Quiet Moral Crisis No One Talks About
What frightens me most isn’t the intelligence, that actually excites me, no, it’s the emotional void that’s scary.
Because if a machine decides a human life has no meaning, there’s absolutely no empathy to restrain it.
No conscience to pause it, no afterlife to fear divine retribution.
Just math, logic, just…cold, brilliant certainty.
And that’s what Pope Leo warned about, not just that AI is strong, but that it’s soulless, and strength without soul is not progress, it’s peril and doom.
Well, despite all the doom and possible gloom, we keep building anyway.
We keep training models and keep feeding data into servers that learn faster than we do, because what else are we supposed to do? If we shut down our AI systems, the next country won’t do the same. We’re in an AI arms race and the losers get left behind.
And yet…there’s still time to adjust our strategies a little more. We should ask more questions and demand oversight.
Time to insist on values being embedded in the code, not just profit, not just optimization, but humanity added to the lines of code.
Maybe that’s why faith matters here, and I don’t mean as a resistance to science and advancement, but as a reminder of what’s worth protecting.
Because without love and empathy, what are we coding into the future?
Related Reads You Might Enjoy:
The AI That Dreams of You: When Neural Networks Begin to Hallucinate
When the Internet Lost Its Way: The 18 Minutes That Haunted Cyberspace
The Shape of Thought: OpenAI, Jony Ive, and the Birth of a New Kind of Machine
The AI That Writes Its Own Rules: Inside DeepMind’s New Era of Algorithmic Creation
ChatGPT Just Surpassed Wikipedia in Monthly Visitors: What That Says About the Future of Knowledge
What Happens Now?
Well, we’re at the crossroads at the moment.
Pope Leo stands at one side, asking us to remember our souls while scientists stand at the other, showing us their fancy risk graphs. (I don’t need charts to tell me how dangerous things can get, but thank you).
And we (well, the creators, not really me) stand between them, staring into the glow of the machine and wondering: is it too late to unplug? Or too soon to fear?
No one knows.
But if the Pope and the data agree…maybe it’s time we listened.
