I really wanted to read the encyclical.

I had it open on my tablet over the weekend, sitting on the back patio, coffee getting cold the way it does when I'm pretending I'm about to do a serious thing. I got through the table of contents. I made it through the introduction. I tip-toed into chapter one. Somewhere around "the principle of subsidiarity" my phone buzzed about a workshop reschedule and that, as they say, was that.

My progress bar shows I read 2,100 words of a 42,300 word letter which is 5%. Sounds about right.

So what you’re about to read is built from the table of contents, the introduction, and three podcasts I listened to while driving from Rancho Mirage to Indio and back. Which, if I'm being honest, is how I read most things now. Summaries, podcasts, five percent. Thank you, AI.

The document is called Magnifica Humanitas — "Magnificent Humanity" — Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, on Safeguarding the Human Person in the time of Artificial Intelligence. 42,300 words. Signed on May 15, formally released by the Holy See on my birthday, May 25. Leo presented it himself at the Vatican, unlike most popes who delegate the job to cardinals.

The Pope, in person, with an AI lab co-founder in the audience. Somewhere a cardinal who had a PowerPoint at the ready was sitting in the back row wondering what he's been doing with his life.

The Vatican is weighing in on AI before most of society has fully felt the impact. We're still early. The disruption is real but it hasn't quite landed yet — the job losses, the institutional restructuring, the whatever-comes-next. And the Pope is already here.

That's unusual. Religious commentary on technology tends to arrive during the height of the upheaval, not before it. Which means either the Vatican is reading the room better than most, or they've seen this movie before and they know how fast act two arrives.

Probably both.

And then there's the name. Pope Leo XIV didn't choose it randomly. The signing date — May 15, 2026 — is the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's landmark social encyclical Rerum Novarum ("of new things"), published on May 15, 1891. Leo XIII wrote that one at the height of the Industrial Revolution, when factories were replacing farms and nobody had figured out yet what that meant for the people doing the work. His argument was essentially: technology is changing everything, and somebody needs to ask what happens to human dignity while that's happening.

Leo XIV looked at AI and thought: same question, new century. I'll take the name, thank you very much.

That's a 135-year through-line. The Church has been in this conversation longer than Silicon Valley has existed.

Now. About the actual document, which I did not read.

The encyclical opens with a choice. Babel or Jerusalem. The tower you build because you can, or the city you rebuild because somebody has to and you're somebody.

It's not a subtle metaphor. Babel is what happens when technology becomes self-justifying — when the project exists because it's possible, not because it's good, and efficiency becomes the only measure of value. Jerusalem is the other thing: building together, accountable to each other, asking who gets left out before the foundation is poured.

The line that's been clipped into every social post, the one I will do my best to recall but will probably fail to: "Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it."

That is not a theological claim. That is just the observable behavior of every tool we’ve ever used. It's also the entire premise of the responsible AI pledge I've been dragging around the valley for 18 months, which I now get to describe — at dinner parties, to my wife, to anyone who will listen — as "pope-adjacent." This is a meaningful upgrade to my marketing.

(I would like to formally acknowledge that this is exactly the kind of opportunism the encyclical, had I read it, would probably warn against.)

The encyclical also offers apologies for the Catholic Church's role in slavery — directly, by name — and has a chapter titled "Breaking the chains of new forms of slavery." Reading between the lines — remember, I'm working from five percent — the thread seems to run from that history directly into the question of who actually builds this stuff and at what cost. The people mining the minerals for the chips. The contractors labeling training data for pennies per task. The communities hosting the data centers and absorbing the water and power costs. The argument is that the extraction hasn't ended. It has just changed form. If you want proof, just look at the phone you're reading this on. We all make these compromises. We've just gotten very good at not thinking about them.

There's also a chapter on truth and democracy that I'll summarize as: AI is very good at making it harder to agree on what actually happened. The Pope considers this a civilizational problem. I consider this an understatement.

Oh, and he published the whole thing without a Latin version first. First time in fifteen hundred years. Meeting people where they are.

There's a section on human limitation that’s disconcerting. Pope Leo XIV warns: "If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy."

Projects to be optimized.

I've been in those meetings. I've run those meetings. Every AI adoption conversation eventually hits the same wall — not a technical one. The tools work. The bottleneck is always the people. The culture. The team that isn't ready, the leader who hasn't committed, the organization that adopted the software but not the thinking.

The tech world talks about this like it's a friction problem to be solved. The Pope talks about it like it's a feature. Human beings change slowly, build trust slowly, adapt slowly — and that slowness isn't a bug. It's how dignity gets preserved in the middle of disruption. When you optimize that away, the work gets faster. The meaning gets narrower. Those two things are not the same problem, and most organizations are only solving one of them.

The Pope apparently thought the second one was worth 42,300 words. He might be right.

In case you were wondering: an encyclical is a formal letter from the Pope to the bishops and the wider Catholic community — the word comes from the Greek for "circular," something meant to circulate. Not considered infallible, but carrying real weight. I guess in tech terms: it's the playbook. The roadmap. The document that gets everyone in the organization pointed in the same direction. The difference is that most tech playbooks live in a Notion folder nobody opens after onboarding.

On the other hand, the encyclical gets distributed through a decentralized network to 1.4 billion Catholics. Through 225,000 parishes across 195 countries. 407,000 priests. Every Sunday, in nearly every language spoken on earth, a pastor stands up and carries this conversation to the people in the pews. Not as a headline. Not as a notification. As a sustained, face-to-face, community-rooted dialogue about what it means to remain human while the world reorganizes itself around machines.

That's how this framing of AI and humanity seeps out into the world. Not through a press release. Not through a product launch. Through 225,000 conversations happening simultaneously, every week, in villages and suburbs and cathedrals, in places where most tech CEOs giving “AI adoption at all costs” keynotes have never been and probably couldn't find on a map.

There's something worth borrowing here — not the theology, not the 42,300 words, but the intent. A document that isn't just strategy. That carries moral weight alongside the roadmap. That's designed to circulate through a community and change how people think, not just what they ship. Most corporations have the playbook. Very few have the encyclical. Given where AI is headed, that gap seems worth closing.

The Pope is not going to slow AI down. That wasn't the ask. The ask, as far as I can tell from the table of contents and the three podcasts and the one paragraph I actually read because it was bolded, is simpler: while this is happening, keep asking who designed the algorithms and who absorbs the extraction — because it's never the same people.

There's a version of the AI skepticism story that attributes all the pushback to geopolitics — foreign influence, coordinated doubt, bad actors muddying the water. Maybe some of that is true. But when the head of the Catholic Church stands up in front of the world at the Vatican and says the tech industry has accumulated a level of private power that surpasses most governments, and that this power is shaping the lives of billions of people without their meaningful input — that's not a foreign influence operation. That's 1.4 billion people being told, by someone with genuine moral authority, that it's reasonable to ask hard questions about who benefits and who pays.

At the presentation, the Pope said this: "Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed. The word is strong, I know, but deliberately chosen because this moment needs words capable of attracting attention, awakening consciences and indicating paths forward for humanity."

Disarmed. Not regulated. Not aligned. Disarmed.

Every Sunday, in roughly 225,000 parishes, in most of the languages people actually speak, that question will be put in front of 1.4 billion people. Some of them will think about it for thirty seconds and then head to brunch. Some of them may sit with it for a while. A few of them will change something about how they think and how they work.

I do that here. Not because the valley is the center of this conversation — it isn't — but because the center of this conversation has to exist somewhere other than a keynote stage. In the workshops at ERC. With the schools and nonprofits. In the small businesses on 111 that still think "agent" is someone you call about travel plans or insurance.

The Pope wrote 42,300 words. I have a one-page pledge and a calendar full of Saturday mornings. Apparently we're both trying to answer the same question.

Or I'm going to keep meaning to read the encyclical.

One of the two.

Sat Singh builds AI products and runs AI workshops in Rancho Mirage. He got as far as the table of contents and has opinions anyway, which feels about right for 2026.

Saturday Morning AI: Idea Labs is back starting July and running through the end of the year. Different format, always AI. Reach out if you'd like to propose a talk or be part of it.

If this resonates, pass it along to somebody in the valley who'd benefit.