One of the things that’s now impossible to not see coming out of the Vatican is how it has learned from and is emulating the Trump administration’s PR strategy since taking office in 2025. To say President Donald Trump’s first 100 days were jam-packed with news announcements is an understatement. His administration attacked the governing of a nation, the correcting of the Biden administration’s mistakes and the things it did with intent to destroy the country, and that was just the beginning of his second term.
From a communications standpoint, the Trump strategy has been to flood the zone of each media cycle with so much news that the legacy media couldn’t delve on one issue and try to destroy Trump’s momentum one issue at a time. So far, for the Trump administration, it’s working.
If you look closely, this strategy appears to be driving the way in which the Vatican is operating these days. It’s no coincidence that you seem to be seeing and hearing from Pope Leo XIV with more frequency on a number of issues, and in a more challenging way. This is not your “father’s” Vatican, at least when it comes to engineering its media narratives.
The pope has picked fights with the American president. He’s taken stands on wars that have not exactly been neutral, even though, as the Vatican is known to do, it has always operated with a certain plausible deniability.
It floods the zone of the news cycle pretty routinely, which, in the way it's now doing it, is new for the Vatican. Now, the pope is focusing on one of the most pressing issues of our time – artificial intelligence (AI). He has said this would be a priority of his, and he’s following through. The pope has created what the Associated Press (AP) has described as “a study group on artificial intelligence,” which is an understated way to say the Vatican is mobilizing to identify the major moral and theological issues tied to AI and its impact on mankind. Knowing this pope, it is to be expected that that study group will take a closer look at “equity” issues as well.
AP reported that the pope is gearing up to release his first encyclical that will “emphasize the need for an ethics-based approach to the technology that prioritizes human dignity and peace.”
It’s reported that the Vatican’s study group is in direct response to the accelerated deployment of AI technology and “its potential effects on human beings and on humanity as a whole (and) the church’s concern for the dignity of every human being.”
Something tells me, after seeing previous encyclicals, there will be no small amount of lecturing and guilt-tripping us Catholics over the evils of capitalism.
Don’t get me wrong. If the Vatican kept its focus strictly on the moral and ethical issues we will need to address because of AI, I’d be completely on board, but Rome’s propensity to not let a culture issue go to waste in the advancement of leftism is why I may not be all-in, at least right up front.
Speaking of… AP reported that the pope signed his encyclical 135 years to the day after his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, dated his encyclical called Rerum Novarum, translated to mean “Of New Things.”
“That document addressed workers’ rights, the limits of capitalism, and the obligations that states and employers owed workers as the Industrial Revolution was underway,” AP wrote.
This is absolutely no coincidence. The pope has said that he sees the parallels between the industrial age and the information age, and he’s been very keen on tackling the issues he thinks are most pressing as AI becomes integrated into daily life.
One day after the College of Cardinals elected him to become the pope, Leo told church leadership that it has an obligation to the world to deliver a “treasury of social teaching” in order to address the dilemmas that AI will present in terms of “human dignity, justice and labor.”
As a conservative Catholic, I always get a sour aftertaste when he speaks, because I almost always agree with the merits of what he wants to do, but immediately afterward, I tend to instinctively reject his knee-jerk tendency to see socialist philosophies as the solution to all worldly problems.
Once he says something like that, you just know where it’s going. The West, and America in particular, are always the villains.
The Vatican has already inserted itself into the AI discussion. It established ethical guidelines on AI in warfare, education, and healthcare in Jan. 2025.
The running theme is that AI is no replacement for humans or human intellect. In addition, the Vatican has sounded the alarm on the environmental impact AI may have on communities. This is something Americans are already seeing, as they’re watching their energy costs skyrocket where data centers are built, along with the emergence of major water shortages as data centers pull from local water sources to cool their machinery.
More deeply, and with a certain level of nuance that you rarely find in the public conversation (even from the Vatican), the pope is asking some questions that need to be asked. What impact will AI have on world peace? Will it help or hurt? What about the impact on humans and the job market? And as only a pope can do, Leo wants to talk about the very meaning of reality itself.
He worries about the ability of AI to make convincing deep fakes and spread false information, while at the same time recognizing the potential good AI can do. Healthcare and scientific research are two areas that he sees as having positive potential.
In the end, if you’re a conservative, it’s a draw. The Vatican is doing what it’s here to do, which is to raise the critical moral questions anytime society climbs to yet another world-changing plateau. If only Rome could do this without pushing socialist politics and philosophies as the non-spiritual cure-all.
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