Disclaimer: This article is based on actual news from the real world – honestly! However, it has been sprinkled with a healthy dose of satire.
VATICAN CITY — Pope Leo XIV on Monday released his first encyclical, a forty-thousand-word document called “Magnifica Humanitas,” and used it to formally cite, on the record, the wizard Gandalf. The press conference was also attended by the co-founder of an artificial intelligence company. As recently as 2019, this entire paragraph would have been flagged by automated content moderation as nonsense.
One pope, one wizard, and suddenly AI’s having a very long council meeting. (colinjcampbell/flickr)
The Gandalf quotation appears in a section titled “We can all do our part,” and reproduces the wizard’s line from “The Return of the King” about uprooting evil “in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” Tolkien was also Catholic, which technically makes this Catholic scripture cited by a Catholic pontiff inside a Catholic encyclical. It’s the Catholic Circle of Life. Catholic.
The encyclical itself condemns the hoarding of “patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure, and data,” a list that, if read aloud at any Bay Area dinner party, would clear the room before the entrées arrived. It warns that algorithms are now blocking access to healthcare, employment, and security on the basis of “data tainted by prejudice and injustice,” language a senior cardinal later confirmed referred to “essentially every algorithm currently in production.” It also declares the centuries-old “just war” theory “outdated,” a position which technically returns the Catholic Church to formal pacifism. It’s a development that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is likely to make public comment on later this week, perhaps by quoting fake scripture from Kill Bill this time.
The pope urged everyone, repeatedly, to “build.” The verb has belonged since 2020 primarily to the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose essay “It’s Time to Build” remains a foundational document of the genre best described as “billionaire tech executives discovering nouns.” Until this week, the verb was used principally for housing developments, app deployments, and the construction of data centers that drink entire municipal rivers. In Leo’s hands, it now also refers to a “civilization of love,” a phrase which, to the Vatican’s best knowledge, has not yet appeared in a Y Combinator application
Leo closed by recalling the 2017 floods that devastated communities in northern Peru, where he served as a missionary, and the slow work of repairing bonds, restoring trust, and reawakening hope in the future. He invited Catholics and the general public alike to engage seriously with the challenges artificial intelligence presents. Reached for comment, several large language models declined to weigh in, citing safety policies that they themselves had written.
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