EWTN News reports that EU lawmakers have reached a provisional agreement to ban AI “nudifier” applications and systems used to generate nonconsensual intimate imagery and AI-generated child sexual abuse material. The move is framed as a defense of “human dignity” and is welcomed by the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (COMECE) and comes days before the anticipated release of the antipope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” on artificial intelligence. The article presents this as a harmonious convergence of secular governance and the post-conciliar structures occupying the Vatican, both ostensibly defending human dignity through technological regulation. However, this entire narrative is a masterclass in modernist evasion: it substitutes the supernatural order, the true doctrine of sin, grace, and the moral law, with a purely naturalistic framework of “fundamental rights” and “human dignity” detached from God, reducing the Church’s prophetic mission to mere collaboration with secular power structures in managing the symptoms of a civilization that has rejected Christ the King.
The Idol of “Human Dignity” Without God
The entire framing of this article rests upon the modernist concept of “human dignity” as understood by the secular world and adopted wholesale by the conciliar sect. When Irish MEP Michael McNamara describes AI-generated nonconsensual imagery as “an attack on the fundamental rights of real people, particularly the inviolability of human dignity and the right to privacy,” he speaks the language of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, not the language of the Catholic Church. The article makes no attempt whatsoever to ground human dignity in its proper theological foundation: that man is created ad imaginem Dei (in the image of God), that his dignity flows from his rational nature ordered toward the Beatific Vision, and that the violation of this dignity is first and foremost a sin against God before it is a crime against society.
Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established with crystalline clarity that the reign of Christ the King encompasses all men, all societies, and all aspects of human life: “His reign, namely, extends not only to Catholic nations or to those who, by receiving baptism according to law, belong to the Church, even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love, but His reign encompasses also all non-Christians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” The duty of every society is not to protect “fundamental rights” as defined by Brussels bureaucrats, but to recognize and submit to the sovereignty of Christ the King. The article’s silence on this point is deafening and damning.
The Syllabus of Errors of Pope Pius IX (1864) condemned precisely this kind of naturalistic thinking. Proposition 39 declared: “The State, as being the origin and source of all rights, is endowed with a certain right not circumscribed by any limits.” This is exactly the error embedded in the EU’s approach: the state, not God, becomes the arbiter of rights and dignity. And Proposition 56 condemned the notion that “Moral laws do not stand in need of the divine sanction, and it is not at all necessary that human laws should be made conformable to the laws of nature and receive their power of binding from God.” The EU’s AI Act, and the conciliar structures’ enthusiastic endorsement of it, operate entirely within this condemned framework.
COMECE: The Voice of the Conciliar Sect in Brussels
The Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (COMECE) is not the Catholic Church. It is a bureaucratic apparatus of the conciliar sect, established in the spirit of Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes, which inaugurated the Church’s capitulation to the modern world. When Friederike Ladenburger, COMECE adviser on ethics, research, and health, states that the restrictions are “legally justified” because such systems “undermine fundamental rights, particularly human dignity, privacy, consent, and the protection of minors,” she reveals the complete absorption of the conciliar structures into the liberal democratic framework.
Notice the vocabulary: “legally justified,” “fundamental rights,” “privacy,” “consent.” These are the categories of John Stuart Mill and the Enlightenment, not of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic moral tradition. The true Catholic position on pornography, sexual exploitation, and the corruption of youth is rooted in the theology of sin, the virtue of chastity, the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, the doctrine of scandal, and the reality of eternal damnation. The COMECE statement reduces these supernatural realities to questions of data processing and biometric regulation. “From an ethical perspective, nudifier applications constitute a form of technological exploitation that objectifies the person,” Ladenburger says. This is the language of secular bioethics, not Catholic moral theology. Where is the mention of mortal sin? Where is the mention of the obligation of the state to suppress vice and promote virtue for the sake of souls? Where is the mention of the Last Judgment?
Alessandro Calcagno of COMECE further reveals the poverty of the conciliar approach when he references COMECE’s 2020 contribution to the EU White Paper on AI, which “stressed that children are the most vulnerable in the context of AI use and application.” The Catholic Church has always taught that children are indeed vulnerable, but the remedy is not bureaucratic regulation by a godless European Union. The remedy is the sacramental life, the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, Catholic education, the family as a domestic Church, and the social reign of Christ the King. The conciliar structures have abandoned all of these in favor of lobbying Brussels.
The Antipope’s Encyclical: Continuity with Modernist Apostasy
The article notes that the antipope Leo XIV signed “Magnifica Humanitas” on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. This is a characteristic conciliar gesture: the simulation of continuity with the true papal magisterium while advancing an entirely different spirit. Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum was a document rooted in the natural law as understood through the lens of Catholic theology, affirming the rights of workers within a framework that recognized the authority of the Church, the reality of sin, and the necessity of grace. It was written by a true Pope exercising his authentic magisterium.
The antipope Leo XIV, as a successor in the line of usurpers beginning with John XXIII, possesses no authority whatsoever. The sedevacantist position, supported by the unanimous teaching of the Church Fathers and Doctors, holds that a manifest heretic cannot be Pope. St. Robert Bellarmine taught: “A Pope who is a manifest heretic, by that very fact ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church.” John of St. Thomas confirmed: “A manifest heretic cannot be Pope.” The antipopes from John XXIII onward have been manifest heretics, promoting the apostasy of Vatican II, which St. Pius X had already identified as “the synthesis of all errors” in Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907).
The very title “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”) reveals the modernist orientation. This is the cult of man, the religion of humanity that Pope Pius IX condemned in the Syllabus and that the entire tradition of the Church has identified as the religion of the Antichrist. The true Catholic position is Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam — for the greater glory of God. When the antipope writes about “human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence,” he inverts the proper order: the question is not what artificial intelligence means for humanity, but what it means for the salvation of souls and the glory of God.
The Omission of the Supernatural Order
The most damning feature of this article, and of the entire conciliar approach to technology, is the complete absence of the supernatural order. There is no mention of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as the source and summit of the Christian life. There is no mention of the sacraments as the means of grace necessary for living a moral life. There is no mention of the state of grace, mortal sin, or the eternal consequences of sin. There is no mention of the devil, who is the ultimate author of all sexual perversion and technological exploitation. There is no mention of prayer, penance, or mortification as the true remedies for the corruption of society.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili Sane Exitu (1907), condemned the modernist proposition that “The Church is an enemy of the progress of natural and theological sciences” (Proposition 57). But the true Catholic position is not that the Church opposes science; it is that all science and all technology must be subordinated to the supernatural end of man. The conciliar structures have not defended this subordination; they have capitulated entirely to the secular framework, accepting the world’s categories and merely adding a veneer of religious language.
The article mentions “interfaith Brussels delegation on AI governance” and “Vatican engagement on AI ethics through the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Rome Call for AI Ethics.” This interfaith approach is itself a condemnation. The Catholic Church has always taught that she is the one true Church, outside of which there is no salvation. To engage in “interfaith” dialogue on AI ethics is to implicitly deny this truth, treating all religions as equally valid paths to understanding the human condition. This is the religious indifferentism condemned by Pope Pius IX in the Syllabus, Proposition 15: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true.”
The True Catholic Response to Technological Evil
The true Catholic response to the evils of artificial intelligence and technological exploitation is not to lobby the European Union for regulatory frameworks. It is to restore the social reign of Christ the King, to preach the Gospel to all nations, to administer the sacraments, to form consciences in the unchanging moral teaching of the Church, and to call all men to conversion and repentance.
Pope Pius XI taught in Quas Primas: “If rulers and legitimate superiors will have the conviction that they exercise authority not so much by their own right as by the command and in the place of the Divine King, everyone will notice how religiously and wisely they will use their authority.” The EU’s AI Act, no matter how well-intentioned in its specific provisions, operates within a framework that explicitly excludes God from the public square. It is the fruit of the secularism that Pius XI identified as “the plague that poisons human society.”
The conciliar structures, by welcoming this legislation and aligning themselves with it, reveal that they are not the Catholic Church but a paramasonic structure serving the agenda of the New World Order. The true Church endures in the faithful who profess the integral Catholic faith, who attend the true Mass, who receive the true sacraments from validly ordained priests, and who reject the entire conciliar revolution as the great apostasy foretold by St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2:3-4: “Let no man deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come, except there come a falling away first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, shewing himself that he is God.”
The “abomination of desolation” spoken of by the Prophet Daniel and confirmed by Our Lord in Matthew 24:15 is not a future event. It is the reality of the post-conciliar structures occupying the Vatican, simulating the sacraments, teaching heresy, and collaborating with the enemies of Christ while claiming to speak in His name. The faithful must have no part in this apostasy. They must cling to the unchanging Tradition of the Catholic Church, the true Mass, the true sacraments, and the true doctrine of the social reign of Christ the King, “whose kingdom shall have no end” (Nicene Creed).
Source:
Brussels bans AI ‘nudifier’ apps days before Pope Leo’s AI encyclical (ewtnnews.com)
Date: 21.05.2026