The National Catholic Register reports that the Vatican has established a new commission on artificial intelligence, approved by the antipope Leo XIV, as part of preparations for his expected first encyclical addressing AI through the lens of Catholic social teaching. The body includes representatives from multiple conciliar dicasteries and pontifical academies, coordinated by the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. The stated purpose is to address AI’s implications for human dignity, integral development, and the Church’s internal use of technology. “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor,” Leo XIV declared when explaining his choice of papal name to the College of Cardinals on May 10, 2025. This entire enterprise is a grotesque exercise in bureaucratic self-aggrandizement by an institution that has forfeited all claim to speak with moral authority on any subject, let alone one of such gravity.
The Abomination Speaks: A Heretic Presumes to Teach
The foundational absurdity of this announcement must be stated without equivocation: the individual styling himself “Pope Leo XIV” is not the Roman Pontiff. He is a usurper occupying the Vatican apparatus, a man who emerged from the conciar sect that has systematically dismantled Catholic doctrine since 1958. The entire line from John XXIII onward consists of modernist infiltrators who have transformed the Barque of Peter into a vessel of apostasy. That such a figure now presumes to establish commissions and issue encyclicals on matters of grave moral consequence is not merely ironic — it is blasphemous.
Consider the theological reality. A manifest heretic cannot be Pope. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches in De Romano Pontifice: “The fifth true opinion is that 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.” The conciliar sect has embraced religious liberty (Dignitatis Humanae), false ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio), and the evolution of dogmas — all formally condemned by the pre-conciliar Magisterium. Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors explicitly condemns the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). The entire trajectory of post-conciliarism is precisely this reconciliation with modernity — a reconciliation that ipso facto severs the individual from the Chair of Peter.
Wernz and Vidal in Ius Canonicum confirm Bellarmine’s position: “By notorious and publicly manifested heresy, the Roman Pontiff, should he fall into it, is deprived ipso facto of his personal jurisdiction even before any declaratory sentence by the Church.” The word of a man who is not Pope — who cannot be Pope — carries no more weight than that of any other private individual, and considerably less than that of the saints and doctors whose teachings he systematically contradicts.
The Bureaucratic Theater of the Conciliar Sect
The structure of this commission reveals the inner workings of the neo-church with painful clarity. It is a committee — a bureaucratic apparatus designed to produce documents, facilitate “dialogue,” and project an image of institutional relevance. The commission includes representatives from the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Dicastery for Culture and Education, the Dicastery for Communication, the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. This is not the Church of Christ. This is a corporate boardroom simulating governance.
The coordinating role is entrusted to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development — a body whose very name betrays the anthropocentric revolution at the heart of post-conciliarism. The true Church has always taught that the ultimate end of all human activity is the glory of God and the salvation of souls, not “integral human development.” This substitution of naturalistic humanism for supernatural theology is the defining characteristic of the conciliar apostasy. Pius XI, in Quas Primas, established the Feast of Christ the King precisely to combat the secularism that removes Jesus Christ and His law from public life. The neo-church’s obsession with “human development” divorced from the Kingship of Christ is the very error Pius XI condemned.
The commission is tasked with “promoting dialogue, communion, and participation” — the holy trinity of conciliar buzzwords. “Dialogue” means the abandonment of the Church’s missionary mandate to proclaim the one true Faith. “Communion” means false ecumenism with heretics and schismatics. “Participation” means the democratization of the hierarchical Church established by Christ. These are not Catholic principles. They are the fruits of the modernist virus that has consumed the Vatican apparatus.
The Silence That Condemns: What Is Not Said
The most damning aspect of this announcement is not what it says, but what it omits. There is no mention of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. There is no mention of the sacraments. There is no mention of the state of grace, mortal sin, or the final judgment. There is no mention of the Social Kingship of Christ over all nations, including over the development and deployment of technology. There is no mention of the demonic dimension of human pride manifest in the creation of artificial intelligence — the latest iteration of the ancient temptation: “Eritis sicut dies” (“You shall be as gods,” Genesis 3:5).
Pius XI, in Quas Primas, taught with unmistakable clarity: “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.” And further: “The state is happy not by one means, and man by another; for the state is nothing else than a harmonious association of men.” The duty of rulers is to publicly honor Christ and obey Him in all things — including in the governance of technological development.
The conciliar commission on AI will produce documents filled with the language of “human dignity” and “integral development” while remaining utterly silent about the only framework within which these concepts have any coherent meaning: the Catholic Faith, the sacramental life, and the Social Kingship of Christ the King. This is not moral teaching. It is secular humanism dressed in ecclesiastical vestments — a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or more precisely, a bureaucrat in a cassock.
The Industrial Revolution Parallel: A False Analogy
The article notes that Leo XIV’s expected encyclical will draw a parallel with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution. This parallel is revealing in its inadequacy. Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum as the Supreme Pontiff, vested with the full authority of the Magisterium, addressing the rights and duties of capital and labor within the framework of Catholic social doctrine — a doctrine rooted in the natural law, divine revelation, and the Church’s infallible teaching authority. The encyclical presupposes the existence of the true Church, the validity of her sacraments, and the binding force of her moral law.
The conciliar sect possesses none of these. Its “social teaching” since 1958 has been a progressive accommodation to the world — embracing religious liberty, religious indifferentism, and the subordination of Catholic truth to the demands of “dialogue” and “progress.” The Syllabus of Errors condemns the proposition that “in the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be held as the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship” (Proposition 77). Yet this is precisely the position the conciar sect has adopted. Its “teaching” on any subject — including artificial intelligence — is therefore not the teaching of the Church but the opinion of a heretical body.
Moreover, the challenges posed by artificial intelligence are not analogous to those of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution, for all its disruptions, dealt with the mechanization of physical labor. Artificial intelligence represents something categorically different: the mechanization of the intellect itself — the faculty that is the imago Dei in man. To address this challenge without reference to the supernatural order, without reference to the distinction between the created intellect and the uncreated intellect of God, without reference to the demonic temptation to usurp divine prerogatives, is to address it as a secular technologist, not as a shepherd of souls.
The Pontifical Academies: Captive Institutions
The inclusion of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in this commission deserves particular scrutiny. These institutions, once potentially useful organs of the Church’s engagement with the world, have been thoroughly captured by the conciliar revolution. The Pontifical Academy for Life, under the conciliar regime, has produced documents riddled with ambiguities on matters of bioethics, often employing the very proportionalism and consequentialism condemned by the pre-conciliar Magisterium. The Pontifical Academy of Sciences has hosted speakers whose positions are flatly incompatible with Catholic doctrine. The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences has promoted “Catholic social teaching” that is indistinguishable from secular progressive thought.
To entrust these institutions with a role in addressing artificial intelligence is to ensure that the resulting “teaching” will be a synthesis of modernist theology and secular techno-optimism — precisely the kind of synthesis that St. Pius X condemned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis as the essence of Modernism: “the synthesis of all heresies.” The condemned propositions of Lamentabili Sane Exitu are instructive here: “The progress of sciences requires a reform of the concept of Christian doctrine concerning God, creation, Revelation, the Person of the Incarnate Word, and Redemption” (Proposition 64). The conciliar approach to AI is precisely this: a demand that Catholic doctrine be reformed to accommodate technological progress, rather than technological progress being judged by the immutable standard of Catholic truth.
The Name “Leo”: An Insult to the Saints
The choice of the name “Leo” by the current usurper is itself a study in conciar audacity. The name evokes Leo the Great, who confronted Attila the Hun and saved Rome, and Leo XIII, who authored Rerum Novarum and Satis Cognitum — the latter a powerful reaffirmation of the papal primacy against the errors of Eastern Orthodoxy and Anglicanism. That a modernist antipope should appropriate this name is an act of symbolic theft — a attempt to borrow the authority of his predecessors while systematically undermining everything they stood for.
Leo XIII taught in Satis Cognitum that the Church is “one, visible, hierarchical, and endowed with all the attributes which Christ her Founder willed her to possess.” The conciliar sect has transformed the Church into an invisible, democratized, and perpetually evolving “community” — precisely the kind of ecclesiology condemned by the pre-conciliar Magisterium. The name “Leo” on the lips of Robert Prevost is a lie — a sign that signifies the opposite of what it claims.
The True Response to Artificial Intelligence
What would a true Pope — a true successor of St. Peter — say about artificial intelligence? He would begin not with “human dignity” as defined by the United Nations, but with the imago Dei as defined by Catholic theology. He would affirm that the human intellect, created by God and elevated by grace, is not a machine to be replicated but a participation in the divine intellect, ordered toward the beatific vision. He would warn that the attempt to create artificial intelligence is, at its root, a manifestation of the sin of pride — the desire to be as God, to create ex nihilo, to usurp the creative power that belongs to the Almighty alone.
He would teach that all technology must be subordinated to the moral law, the common good, and the supernatural end of man. He would insist that no development in artificial intelligence can be evaluated apart from its impact on the salvation of souls — on the ability of men to know, love, and serve God in this life and to be happy with Him in the next. He would remind rulers of their duty, under pain of eternal damnation, to govern their nations in accordance with the commandments of God and the social teaching of the Church — not the opinions of technocrats and bureaucrats.
None of this will emerge from the conciar commission. What will emerge will be a document filled with pious platitudes, secular frameworks, and the language of “dialogue” — a document that will be celebrated by the world precisely because it says nothing that the world does not already believe. This is the pattern of every conciliar document since 1958: ambiguity designed to accommodate error, silence on matters of doctrine, and a relentless focus on temporal concerns at the expense of eternal ones.
Conclusion: The Irrelevance of the Abomination
The creation of a Vatican commission on artificial intelligence by the antipope Leo XIV is an event of no theological significance. It is a bureaucratic act by a bureaucratic institution that has long since ceased to be the Church of Christ. The documents it produces will carry no authority, bind no consciences, and teach no truth. They will be the opinions of men who have rejected the Faith once delivered to the saints — men who, in the words of St. Pius X, “aim at such a development of dogmas as appears to be their corruption” (Lamentabili, Introduction).
The faithful who cling to the integral Catholic Faith — the Faith of the Fathers, the Councils, and the pre-conciliar Popes — will recognize this commission for what it is: another symptom of the abomination of desolation that has occupied the Vatican since 1958. They will continue to seek guidance not from the conciliar sect, but from the immutable teaching of the true Church, preserved in the writings of the saints, the canons of the councils, and the documents of the authentic Magisterium. And they will pray for the restoration of the true Papacy — the only institution on earth that can speak with the authority of Christ on matters of faith and morals, including the profound challenges posed by artificial intelligence to the human person and to human society.
Source:
Vatican Sets Up Commission on Artificial Intelligence (ncregister.com)
Date: 17.05.2026