Like his great namesake, Pope Leo XIII, who famously confronted the social disruptions of the Industrial Revolution, Leo XIV appears ready to offer the world a new moral framework for navigating the transformations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. His choice signals a papacy concerned not just with the Church’s internal life but with the structures of the global economy , technology revolution and society itself—structures increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, automation, and data-driven technologies.
In choosing the name Leo XIV, the pontiff consciously places himself in continuity with the “pope of the workers,” whose 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum broke new ground by defending the rights of laborers to just wages, safe working conditions, and human dignity. At the dawn of the 20th century, Leo XIII called the Church to engage with economic systems that were marginalizing millions in factories and industrial centers across the world. Today, his successor seems prepared to extend that same moral clarity to the digital economy—calling attention to the rights of gig workers, platform laborers, creators whose work is exploited by opaque algorithms, and those displaced by artificial intelligence and robotics.
Pope Leo XIV seems to recognize that the algorithms shaping our economies are not neutral tools, but moral agents in themselves—designed by humans, yet operating at a scale and speed that often eludes human oversight and accountability. In such a world, there is a real risk that human beings become mere data points, optimized and monetized in service of profit, rather than recognized as persons with inherent dignity. Leo XIV’s emerging message appears to be that the Church must once again stand as a global voice calling for technological progress to serve human flourishing, not replace or exploit it.
The pontiff seems poised to call for what might be described as a Rerum Novarum for the digital age—an encyclical or teaching that confronts the ethical vacuum surrounding artificial intelligence, digital labor rights, data privacy, and the socio-economic exclusion. Such a document could insist that economic systems—whether driven by markets, states, or algorithms—must place human dignity at their center. The Church under Leo XIV may well champion what it could call “algorithmic solidarity”: the idea that those who design, deploy, and benefit from advanced technologies have a moral obligation to ensure that no one is left behind, that new technologies do not entrench inequality, and that every human person retains their agency and worth.
If Leo XIII was the pope of industrial solidarity, Leo XIV seems poised to become the pope of digital solidarity. https://lnkd.in/eb345t7j
