As Pope Leo XIV takes the helm over 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide, consider what troubles the 267th Bishop of Rome. If warnings of the imminent rise of superhuman AI come to pass, he may be the last pontiff crowned during the Golden Age of Homo sapiens.
“We are living in times that are both difficult to navigate and to recount,” he confessed to reporters. These times “present a challenge for all of us but it is one that we should not run away from.” Quoting Saint Augustine, he encouraged his audience: “Let us live well and the times will be good. We are the times.”
While the papacy of Leo XIV may herald the end of an era, recent commentary celebrates several notable firsts.
Besides being the first American pope, Leo is the first Augustinian to head the Vatican, having previously been Prior General of that monastic order. A 1977 graduate of Villanova University, Leo is also the first pope to hold a degree in mathematics, to the delight of internet meme enthusiasts.
Once a high school physics teacher in Chicago, the new pope is consequently at home in the worlds of science and religion, grasping the need for both faith in divinity and proof in the material realm.
In his inaugural address to the College of Cardinals, Leo XIV praised his namesake Leo XIII. Reigning from 1878 to 1903, Leo XIII was renowned for his worldly activism.
The former Robert Prevost extolled his predecessor’s 1891 encyclical, Rerum novarum, which confronted “the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution.” In some ways, the 19th century mirrored the present.
Rerum novarum—On Capital and Labor—depicted society when “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses” stirred the conscience of the church. Surveying this landscape, Leo XIII deplored the conditions of the working class as “a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”
In place of unfettered capitalism and godless socialism he envisioned a Christian commonweal combining natural rights of property with those of organized labor; the right to a living wage with “the full life of the soul … made after the image and the likeness of God.”
Addressing the College of Cardinals this year, Leo XIV observed that “the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution.”
In particular, he highlighted “developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.” Against such challenges, Leo asserted, hope abides in the “immense community” and “true grandeur of the Church.”
Hammering Home
Of course, Pope Leo is not the first Augustinian to make history. Martin Luther was a devout Augustinian in 1517, when he hammered his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany.
For even as he repudiated Catholic authority, this renegade friar echoed Saint Augustine in viewing salvation as a gift from God. Such conviction sharpened his denunciation of the sale of indulgences by Rome. Luther denounced these “treasures of Gospel”—exorbitant permits paroling sinners from Purgatory—as “nets” by which the church was “wont to fish for men of riches.”
The ultimate symbol of corruption was St. Peter’s Basilica, whose construction took over a century from groundbreaking in 1506 to consecration in 1626, and from whose balcony Leo XIV recently saluted the faithful.
Funding for this grandiose edifice came from the sale of indulgences to sinners both great and small, prompting Luther to ask: “Why does not the pope, whose wealth is today greater than the riches of the richest, build just this one church of St. Peter with his own money, rather than with the money of poor believers?”
Like Leo XIV—who kept a personal Twitter account before his accession—Luther craftily embraced the media of his day. For Luther, this was the moveable-type press, invented by fellow German Johannes Gutenberg around 1440.
Luther’s nail in the door was inspired, but reproducibility hammered home his ideas. As one study demonstrated, the presence of a printing press before 1500 strongly predicted that any town or city would embrace Protestantism during the Reformation.
The marketplace of ideas was no mere metaphor. Significantly, Luther attributed the most biting accusations in his Theses “to the shrewd questionings of the laity,” thus ascribing radical authority to the common people.
Thereafter, he determined “to speak as men do in the marketplace,” yet in so doing rendered Moses “so German that no one would know that he was a Jew.” Luther’s remark hinted at his notorious antisemitism, even as his embrace of printed propaganda reflected the growth of popular literacy and the democratization of European Christianity.
For all its popular appeal, the Reformation was a dark chapter of human history. The Wars of Religion killed millions of Catholics and Protestants from 1517 to 1648. The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) alone wiped out up to 20 percent of Europe’s population—a death toll proportionately higher than World War Two.
Other violence proliferated. Expulsions of the Jews intensified in Germany and elsewhere. In 1542, Luther incited his followers “to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn.” And from 1500 to 1650 some 100,000 alleged witches were tried in Europe, of whom roughly half were executed.
What inspired such violence?
While there were many causes, print culture stoked humanity’s darkest instincts. Before early modern times, for example, witch-hunting was a relatively rare, localized phenomenon. From the 1480s, however, clergyman Heinrich Kramer’s witch-hunting manual Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches) became one of Europe’s first bestsellers.
While a few intellectuals consumed such scientific classics as the writings of Copernicus and Galileo, tens of thousands of copies of Kramer’s lurid tome fell into the hands of would-be inquisitors within a few generations. Seeding both the specter of witchcraft and the means by which it was to be uprooted, this one book produced untold suffering.
The marriage between literacy and barbarism continued. The advent of print unleashed a flood, destroying the church’s control of education and literacy even as it empowered maverick clerics like Kramer and Luther.
But information seldom privileges truth, unless incentivized to that end—more generally, it revives old prejudices and superstitions. So, persecution of Jews, religious minorities, and eccentric old women accompanied the radicalism of the Protestant Reformation, alongside an uptick in astrology and various forms of divination.
Comparably today, the rise of cryptocurrency, erosion of constitutional norms, and muddling of entertainment and politics parallel crises of legitimacy in global finance, justice, and democracy—all fueled by a surfeit of junk information.
Comparisons between the print and digital revolutions, while compelling, can also overlook new developments.
Take the 2017 genocide of thousands of Rohingya Muslims by Myanmar’s Buddhist majority, a modern-day witch hunt fomented on social media. While this persecution evokes others in history, the role of Facebook’s algorithms was stark.
Although not hard-wired to discriminate against the Rohingya, these algorithms latched on to racist content, magnifying “a storm of hatred … which contributed to real-world violence.” Thus, the Rohingya became the first group in history slaughtered on account of engagement-driven advertising.
Answers in Augustine?
The Brave New World of automation raises some daunting questions: What is the role of free will in human society? What of faith? What, if anything, is the end of human history?
Saint Augustine, Bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa, wrestled with these questions 1600 years ago. Whether or not we embrace his methodology, his answers are a map of sorts to our moral maze, having guided generations of religious leaders from Luther to the current pope.
Published in 426, Augustine’s masterpiece The City of God reflected an empire on its last legs. Everywhere, the old order stumbled. Some sixteen years before, the Visigoths sacked Rome, a blow from which the city never recovered. Elsewhere, frontiers broke. Germanic Vandals were poised to invade Augustine’s native province of Numidia.
Yet Augustine defended the church, rebuking those who blamed Rome’s downfall on its adoption of Christianity rather than pagan corruptions. And while he offered no solution to Rome’s decline, his allegory of the City of Man and the City of God promised a foundation of faith:
“Accordingly, two cities have been formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.”
Augustine’s allegorical worldview jars with our secular understanding of history, being defined not by random contingency but by divine providence.
The partition of the City of Man from the City of God, for example, reflected the plight of Adam and Eve in Genesis. The triumph of the heavenly city vindicated the prophecies of Revelation. Both anticipated the Day of Judgment when God would sort the saved from the damned.
Such thinking inspired reformers such as Luther and John Calvin, for whom the “just punishment of the wicked” and divine grace were two sides of the same coin, and for whom the persecution of heretics was justified. Notably, the Reformation, like the fall of Rome, was a time of apocalyptic angst.
Still, our own times do not lack their vanities. Is Augustinian history, revealed in salvation and judgement, more absurd than Big Tech’s fixation on artificial general intelligence? Is the pursuit of limitless “compute” any less dangerous than the heaping of firewood at the feet of heretics?
By contrast, Augustine’s respect for natural order and human limitations is worth revisiting.
As AI datacenters threaten to surpass the energy consumption of Japan, for example, he celebrates creation: “How grateful is the alteration of day and night! how pleasant the breezes that cool the air!”
While techno-utopians peddle brain-hacking and virtual immortality, he reminds us that “the body is not an extraneous ornament or aid, but a part of man’s very nature.”
Admittedly, reading The City of God in the 21st century may cause déjà vu.
Just like the United States, Rome was as much a fallen ideal as a shining reality. Even as Vandals besieged Augustine’s native Hippo, “the groans of the dying defenders on the wall mingled with the roar of the spectators in the circus.” Today’s bread and circuses may be on our smartphones rather than in the amphitheater, but our nonchalance is no less alarming.
Against all odds then, an Augustinian pope encourages his flock. At the time of writing, Leo XIV has yet to pen an encyclical along the lines of Rerum novarum, but his recognition of its teachings reflects the issues of our times.
Anxiety abounds as machines—sentient or otherwise—displace humanity. What Augustine called “that little spark of reason … the image of God” litmus tests our reality. Buttressed by tradition, one of humanity’s oldest institutions may be its final holdout. At least, algorithms are unlikely to replace the pope anytime soon.
As Augustine insisted: “Let us live well and the times will be good.” Human flourishing is to be found by this reckoning not in technology but in each other.
Learn More:
Augustine of Hippo. Basic Writings of Saint Augustine, 2 vols. Edited by Whitney J. Oates. New York: Random House, 1948.
Harari, Yuval Noah. Nexus : A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI. New York: Random House, 2024.
Kokotajlo, Daniel, et al. “AI 2027.” https://ai-2027.com/
Leo XIII. “Rerum novarum.” https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_l-xiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html
Leo XIV. “Address of His Holiness Leo XIV to the College of Cardinals.” https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/speeches/2025/may/documents/20250510-collegio-cardinalizio.html
Luther, Martin. “Ninety Five Theses.” https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/274/pg274.txt
Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961.
Rubin, Jared. “Printing and Protestants: An Empirical Test of the Role of Printing in the Reformation,” The Review of Economics and Statistics (May 2014), vol. 96, no. 2: 270–286.
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