The Pope and Catholic priests keep giving terrifying warnings about AI. What exactly are they scared of?

Artificial intelligence could bring people back to the church – or replace it entirely, writes Maja Anushka

Quantum computers in the Torre Girona Chapel, Barcelona (Mario Ejarque/BSC-CNS)

If there’s one defining aspect to Catholicism, it’s a fondness for the corporeal. They’ve involved themselves, for thousands of years, with the natural world and the role of the human body within it. Every sacrament has matter and form: something in the hand, something said with the voice. Water, to cleanse the body of sin. Ashes, pressed into the forehead. Bread and wine, blood and flesh, placed in the mouth. It’s a preoccupation that makes sense for a faith born from an incident of extreme physical torture, but Catholics know, for all their focus on Jesus’ singular body, that one body alone is of little use. Churches are not built by disparate networks of hermits. Your sins cannot be absolved without the attentive ear of a priest to hear them in the first place. People are important.

As a result, the labour of the Catholic church is largely done offline, by real people in real buildings. Its practitioners should be among the most insulated from fear about new, unwieldy technology. But after being elected as the new Pope in May of last year, Leo XIV used his first cardinal address to sound an alarm not only rooted firmly in the digital present, but which also rings out long into the future.

The Leo before him, Leo XIII, became head of the Catholic church in 1878, when the Gilded Age was well underway. Now, 147 years later, the new Pope looked upon a world grappling with a new industrial revolution. “Sensing myself called to continue in this same path, I chose to take the name Leo XIV. The Church offers her social teaching… in response to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour,” he said.

“It was so unexpected to hear him speaking about AI. It delighted a number of Catholics I know,” Father Stephen Wang, the Rector of the Venerable English College in Rome, reflects. “They thought, thank God, we've got a pope who gets it.” Work on AI within the Catholic community was already well underway before Leo XIV’s papacy. In 2023, Longbeard founded Magisterium AI: a Catholic chatbot which can read relevant Bible passages to you.

Leo XIV’s first mention of AI was fairly neutral. But by 24 January, when he published his message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications, his tone had starkly intensified. The technology threatens to alter the fundamental pillars of human civilisation, Leo XIV warned. It could “invade and occupy” our sphere of intimacy. We stand to lose our ability to understand meaning, “turning into passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without ownership or love.”

It’s undeniably striking to hear the leader of one of the oldest religions in the world speaking so directly about the dangers of unguarded AI usage. We already know that AI is changing our minds and hearts, but could it change our faith? And why does it seem that, out of all the organised religions, Catholics are particularly bothered about it?

Pope Leo XIV holding his weekly general audience at the Vatican, on 8 October 2025 (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)

Fr Stephen thinks it has to do with the attitude towards struggle. “For the Christian, need and vulnerability and brokenness is not something to be avoided. There’s an understanding built into the theology that these are not just roadblocks to try and get around, but they're part of what our humanity is, and in this imperfect world, they're part of the way that we learn to love and to be loved.”

Perhaps Catholics are particularly preoccupied with AI because it’s precisely this type of friction which chatbots are built to remove. There’s the obvious danger that AI doesn’t work well. That it could be taken over by a bad actor, or used to spread more written and visual mis-truth and mis-information. We’ve already seen the fatal impact of AI failing to understand the nuances of human communication. But there’s a secondary, altogether more concerning possibility: that AI works really, really well.

The promise of every large language model is the same, whether it be ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. A lack of effort to get what you want, and a lack of friction in receiving it. “But if AI is substituting for my friend, my librarian, my teacher, my counsellor, my companion, my prayer partner,” Fr Stephen continues, “I become isolated. I've lost the things which nurture what it is to be human, a friend, a brother, or a sister.” Things are not meant to be this easy.

It’s these anthropological questions that bug Fr Stephen, much more than whether AI is going to start a thermonuclear war or not. “Because that, at least, you have a chance to solve. But you can't solve the questions about our consciousness easily. As a Christian, they’re on my mind all the time.”

Fr Stephen admits to having a bit of déjà vu with the whole thing. It feels very much like the world has stood here before. Naoise Grenham, a senior policy and research analyst for the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, agrees: “There's a sense that we were a bit behind when it came to social media. So now, we're working with AI to be a bit more kind of, if not ahead of the curve, then at least not as far behind.”

The difference here, he explains, is that in the early 2000s, when society was just starting to worry itself about social media, people in his community were primarily concerned about the content of the tool. Now, they’re worried about the effects of the tool on consciousness itself – and therefore, the consciousness we have about God.

Despite his simultaneous excitement and fear over AI, Fr Joseph finds comfort in the physicality of Catholicism. “Christianity in general, and especially Catholicism, are completely embodied religions, and have to stay that way. So that's why, as a Catholic thinker, I'm not worried that we'll go kind of stratospheric and become unrooted because we can't. Things might get very messy, and a lot of people might get broken and hurt on the way, but we’ll come back to the mass, to communion, to community.”

The Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, located in the former Torre Girona chapel in Barcelona (JOSEP LAGO/AFP via Getty Images)

But could it be exactly this reliance on in-person rituals that puts Catholicism particularly at risk of losing worshippers to AI? These things require a combination of time and effort, which are two concepts we’re stripping more from our lives every day (see: the lack of friction thing), and you could argue that AI stands to be a fairly seamless substitute. The similarities are quite remarkable: both are something omnipresent, available to be called upon at any moment. They hold (or claim to hold) the answers to life’s greatest questions. They can be trusted to hear about your darkest secrets, and won’t tell a soul; will even comfort and absolve you of them. There to provide unwavering guidance and support in your loneliest moments, any time you need. The main difference between God and AI is that one of these things requires getting up and going to church, investing time into a community, building relationships, having discipline, maintaining dedication through doubt, and the frustration and persistence of undertaking a spiritual journey. The other lives inside your phone, for free.

Bishop Paul Hendricks, the Lead Bishop for AI at the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, finds the concept of someone fully replacing God with AI troubling. “I think it is, in a sense, only a matter of time. A relationship with a chatbot is less rewarding, obviously, but also less demanding. I guess that's the temptation. It's difficult to envisage, but I can't help thinking that someone's bound to, sooner or later.”

It’s one example of how AI could become ‘spiritually unhealthy’, Naoise says. “If the relationship is overly dependent, that would be, in a Christian Catholic sense, a form of idolatry. Tech or AI could become an idol, and be revered or worshipped, even if kind of unwittingly. It needs to be used as a tool. That distinction is really important.”

Bishop Paul half-jokes: “I used to have a rather pessimistic rule of thumb. If it's possible to do a stupid thing, sooner or later, someone's going to do it.”

Father Josef Wieneke, pastor at St Matthias Catholic Church in Berlin, remains hopeful that nothing will ever replace the power of church-going, or his physical and spiritual role within his religious community. “There are lots of professions under threat, but mine isn’t. The Catholic sacraments cannot be performed by a computer. They only work face-to-face,” he says.

“Which may even lead to people becoming more sceptical of the internet, so that the search for what is genuine, real and authentic becomes stronger. We've been telling the young people at our church for years: ‘If you've posted some nonsense on the internet, that's terrible. But if you confess a sin, God will forgive you and never remind you of it again.’ It would be gone forever.”

Fr Joseph isn’t quite so optimistic. “I don’t think that’s where most ordinary people are,” he says, somewhat sadly. “The slope is so steep that I don’t think most of us are capable of getting off it. That’s why I'm not campaigning that we stop it – but the other reason is that I think it's impossible. We're in an AI race, and no one can stop it.

“I do think things will get very bad for a lot of people in the next 10 years, for the reasons that we’ve spoken about. We will go down a slippery slope. We’ll adopt AI uncritically. It will have lots of intended and unintended consequences. Some of those are going to be very dark.”

When I point out that I can’t follow how this bleak vision of the future chimes with his earlier statements that humanity will overcome the challenges of AI, he disagrees. “I don’t think there’s a contradiction here. There are enormous benefits and great risks. But I really believe in my Christian faith, and that Christianity is built to survive. I'm hopeful that humanity and human wisdom and the tech people will be able to adjust it before one of the tech companies takes over, or we reach [artificial superintelligence], and we’re blown up. I think we will find our way forward with AI before…” Fr Joseph stops speaking and cocks his head to the side, thinking. “No, I’m contradicting myself now,” he realises. After pausing for a moment, he continues, nodding, once again assured: “No, I am hopeful. I'm hopeful that we will find our way before existential annihilation.”