Holy See AI Ethics: Rome Call, Vatican Doctrine, Encyclical

A pledge, not a regulator

The Holy See is the Catholic Church's sovereign government, headquartered at the Vatican. It has no jurisdiction over how any company builds or deploys AI. Its influence on the subject runs instead through moral statements it asks others to sign onto voluntarily, and through the pope's own teaching documents, which bind Catholics in conscience but nobody else. [2]

The Pontifical Academy for Life signed the Rome Call for AI Ethics on February 28, 2020, alongside Microsoft, IBM, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, and Italy's Ministry of Innovation. The document sets out six principles: transparency, inclusion, accountability, impartiality, reliability, and security and privacy, under an umbrella it calls "algorethics." It asks signatories to commit to them; it does not audit or enforce compliance. [3]

Later signatories broadened the Call beyond tech companies and Catholic sponsorship. Muslim and Jewish religious leaders joined in January 2023, and Cisco's chief executive signed at an audience with Pope Francis in April 2024, describing the principles as consistent with Cisco's own stated position on trustworthy technology. [4][5]

A Vatican office writes a doctrinal note

In January 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education jointly published Antiqua et Nova, a note examining the relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence. It is a doctrinal document rather than a policy proposal: it distinguishes AI's pattern-matching from human understanding and judgment, and addresses AI's use in education, warfare, and labor without endorsing or condemning any specific technology or company. [6]

The first encyclical to take AI as its subject

On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV presented Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, signed ten days earlier on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical on industrial labor. The document runs to roughly 42,000 words across five chapters, arguing that AI is not neutral because it takes on the characteristics of whoever designs, finances, regulates, and uses it, and that unchecked concentration of that power in private, transnational hands works against the common good. [7]

The encyclical invokes the Tower of Babel, read as a warning against forcing a single technology and a single direction onto humanity, against Jerusalem's rebuilding as a model of plurality held together by shared purpose. It calls on the Church to act as "an unyieldingly moral voice and informed critic" of AI development, and warns specifically against systems that displace human judgment, concentrate power, or exploit workers, without naming any specific company or product. [7][8]

Atlas interpretation: Read together, the three documents show an institution's position hardening rather than starting from scratch. The 2020 Rome Call sought corporate co-signers on a voluntary pledge; the 2025 note supplied doctrinal grounding for why AI needs one; the 2026 encyclical, the Church's highest form of teaching document, restates the same core claim, that technology inherits the values of whoever controls it, at the top of the institution rather than through one of its academies. [3][6][7]