New Pope Leo XIV cites AI’s challenge to human dignity in his name choice

The name choice of a new pope carries symbolism for the values he wishes to emulate, in recognition of the most pressing issues he sees as leader of the Catholic Church.

For Pope Leo XIV, artificial intelligence is at the heart of his name choice.

Born Robert Francis Prevost, the new pope chose his papal name in reference to Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) who presided over the Catholic Church during the Industrial Revolution, which ushered in massive social upheaval. Pope Leo XIV sees the AI boom as a similar moment of rapid societal change.

In his address to the College of Cardinals on Saturday, Leo XIV explained his name choice, explicitly mentioning the parallels of these two cataclysmic eras:

Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. 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 defence of human dignity, justice and labour.

Pope Leo XIII was known for focusing on social inequality and labor rights during the industrialization period as workers moved away from individual craftsmanship and farm work and into mass production factories under harsh, low-wage conditions. Yet he also emphasized individual human rights and rejected socialism. In his encyclical, or formal letter to the Catholic Church, Leo XIII called for a balance between “the duties and rights of capital and labor,” which is also the subtitle of his Rerum Novarum address.

For Leo XIV to follow in the footsteps of the previous social reformer is a powerful message to the AI industry and its impact on the global workforce.

Modern society has already seen the effects of AI through job replacement and the exploitation of data labelers. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 jobs report, 41 percent of employers intend to downsize their workforce in favor of automating tasks with AI. And the International Labor Organization published a 2024 report highlighting the “invisible labor” of AI development and the low-wages and the limited protections of these workers.

The Catholic Church has already weighed in on other consequences of AI. Pope Francis, Leo’s predecessor, published a message in January 2024, warning about AI as a “distortion of reality by partially or completely false narratives, believed and broadcast as if they were true.” More recently, Pope Francis’ final address before he died reflected on technology replacing human interaction.