Pope Leo XIV has told UNESCO that artificial intelligence (AI) systems can correlate data but cannot answer questions about the meaning of human life, in an address at the body’s Paris headquarters on September 25.
Speaking in French and English to representatives of member and observer states, academics and young delegates, the Pontiff said communication had grown faster without growing more truthful. Information was abundant, he argued, though abundance was not the same thing as wisdom.
AI amplified that problem because such systems dealt in correlations rather than in lived experience, he said. “Meaning is the oxygen of the mind,” he told the hall.
It was the first papal visit to the organisation since John Paul II in 1980, a gap that director-general Khaled El-Enany called “a truly historic moment”. The stop was the most technology-focused engagement of a four-day journey through Paris, Lourdes and Metz.
Leo XIV returned to the argument of Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, published in May, which urged the faithful to fast from the technology. Thought and intelligence were being attributed to computational systems, he said, while the dignity of people judged inefficient or unproductive was set aside.
He also told the hall that technical progress severed from wisdom had become a weapon in the Second World War, that culture bent to ideology decayed into propaganda and that education which abandoned truth turned into an instrument for manipulating consciences.
Two biblical images carried the speech. Babel stood for unity imposed through domination, which the Pope linked to globalisation without fraternity, financial neocolonialism and ideological imposition, while Pentecost stood for a public square in which peoples of different tongues still understood one another.
The message ran against the direction of travel in Brussels. The European Commission’s Digital Omnibus would hand member states the duty, in force under the European Union’s AI Act since February 2, 2025, to ensure that staff working with the technology are AI-literate.
Hours earlier, at the Élysée Palace, the Pope told French President Emmanuel Macron that the right to life was the foundation of every other right, warning against profit-driven uses of science.
At UNESCO he asked for particular care for the unborn, children in war zones, people with disabilities, the elderly, migrants and refugees, and all those excluded as unproductive. Religious traditions, he added, asked the questions about origin and destiny that other institutions left alone.
The journey ends on September 28 in Metz, northeast France, where Leo XIV is due to address EU leaders on European integration as a model for peace.
