You have probably heard them or even know a few of them by heart—phrases and concepts that jump out of Catholic social teaching or related expressions of Catholic doctrine that become memorable in both the sacred and secular worlds.

St. John XXIII first spoke of “the right to live” in 1963’s “Pacem in Terris.” In 1965, Saint Paul VI told the United Nations’ General Assembly: “Never again war!” He implored “authentic development” in “Populorum Progressio” in 1967 and suggested in the same encyclical that “development is a new name for peace.” Another memorable line was from his World Day of Peace message in 1972: “If you want peace, work for justice.”

The “preferential option for the poor” is a phrase credited to Pedro Arrupe, S.J., and brought into the Catholic mainstream by the bishops of Latin America meeting in Puebla, Mexico, in 1979. It was further hammered into the Catholic cultural psyche by St. John Paul II in his “Centesimus Annus.”

In a Christmas message in 1990, St. John Paul II attempted to head off the first Gulf War. Evoking Paul’s plea for peace, he called war the “adventure with no return.”

Pope Francis was responsible for a crowd of such expressions, first using or popularizing terms like “integral ecology,” the “globalization of indifference” and “technocratic paradigm.”

Other terms and expressions out of Catholic teaching have become so absorbed into the contemporary social and moral lexicon they have lost their ecclesial connection: “just war,” “human dignity,” “the common good,” “solidarity,” “subsidiarity,” “the just wage,” “structures of sin” and “the dignity of work,” among many others. Even the lately much-derided “social justice” has origins in church documents and official supplications.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” makes its primary focus managing the promises and perils of the fourth industrial revolution heralded by artificial intelligence. What phrases or concepts included in Leo’s letter may emerge as the most memorable, escaping the confines of ecclesial discourse?

There are some sure contenders.

In the spirit of Nehemiah and the rebuilders of Jerusalem, Leo urges all people of good will to join together to build a just and humane social and economic order, with an eye toward maintaining the fullness of our humanity as A.I. tech evolves. “Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the ‘construction site’ of our time,” he writes. And “when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization,” he adds, “ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.”

A Leonine catchphrase could result from his citation of the notion of “disarming A.I.”

Leo speaks of the concept in a number of ways. But he primarily means coming up with human-made strategies to prevent some of the worst case effects of runaway A.I. on social life and communities.

Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. [No. 110]

People often speak of A.I. as if it will inevitably result in the obliteration of meaningful work. Leo reminds us that to safeguard families and human expression, acquiescence to such an outcome should not be humanity’s default position.

He also means “disarming artificial intelligence” quite literally. That is, not allowing its military battlefield integration, where A.I.-piloted weapons pull the trigger—whether that means a drone equipped to fire small arms or drop grenades or A.I. used to guide a vastly more powerful missile to a target.

Long before the release of “Magnifica Humanitas,” the Holy See has been preoccupied by the emergence of autonomous weapons systems. It has hosted conferences meant to raise the alarm against A.I.-controlled weapons that are empowered to make battleground “decisions” bereft of the human factors of compassion, mercy and carbon-based moral judgments.

How will the Trump administration respond?

It can be hoped that the Trump administration will use the release of Leo’s first encyclical as an opportunity to pause and reflect on the comprehensive social implications of artificial intelligence. Up to now, the White House has been a relentless cheerleader for the new tech.

First reactions from administration officials have not been encouraging. In a condescending chat with Fox Business News anchor Maria Bartiromo, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum mocked Leo’s reflections on A.I., telling a smirking Ms. Bartiromo, “I didn’t know that tech editorializing was part of the role of being pope.”

Mr. Burgum’s response is the classic “stay in your lane” rebuttal that the president and his cabinet have frequently used after its policies have been criticized by the pope. It is one that seriously misunderstands the historical role of the bishop of Rome in morally interpreting the signs of the times. It also profoundly underestimates the depth of historical and technical expertise that Leo and other popes have at their disposal, thanks to scientists, economists, theologians and more in consultative roles at the Vatican.

A more encouraging response came from the nation’s most famous convert to Catholicism, Vice President JD Vance, who said in an interview with NBC News on May 26 that he had not finished reading “Magnifica Humanitas,” but “what I read of it sounds very profound, and the sort of thing that you would expect and hope from a leader of the church.”

He added: “The thing about morality is that the principles never change, but the way you apply those principles does, because the world changes, right?”

In “Magnifica Humanitas,”, Leo implores a prudent regulatory frame around A.I. as the new tech evolves. This is appropriate, as its own innovators acknowledge that they do not quite understand how A.I. works or what it may be capable of doing unleashed on the digital world.

But the Trump administration has so far taken a hands-off approach to A.I., worried about inhibiting innovation and losing ground to China. Soon after his return to office, President Trump announced that he had “revoked my predecessor’s attempt to paralyze this industry and directed my Administration to remove barriers to United States AI leadership.”

“My Administration has already done tremendous work to advance that objective, including by updating existing Federal regulatory frameworks to remove barriers to and encourage adoption of AI applications across sectors,” the president wrote in an executive order signed on Dec. 11, 2025.

“These efforts have already delivered tremendous benefits to the American people and led to trillions of dollars of investments across the country. But we remain in the earliest days of this technological revolution and are in a race with adversaries for supremacy within it.”

Perhaps most worrying, Pete Hegseth’s “Department of War” seems intent on rushing ahead with A.I. integration into the U.S. military. The department announced in January that it was launching “a transformative Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy that will extend [U.S.] lead in military AI deployment and establish the United States as the world’s undisputed AI-enabled fighting force.”

The hazards of such an accelerated integration are already evident. According to some media reports, the use of A.I.-assisted targeting was at least partly responsible for a devastating error early in the war on Iran that led to a U.S. missile strike on an elementary school outside Tehran, which claimed the lives of at least 168 schoolchildren and school staff—a fatal mistake still unacknowledged by the U.S. military.

The pope’s concerns with A.I. in combat reflect not a far-off ethical hazard, but a contemporary threat. Writing for the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Marie Lamensch, the global affairs officer at the Montreal Institute for Global Security, describes wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Iran as “laboratories for a new kind of warfare.”

“Across all three conflicts,” she writes, “artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how targets are identified, how quickly decisions are made, and who holds power over life and death. The result is a battlefield increasingly shaped by data, algorithms and machine-assisted judgment—and governed, for now, by no one.”

Will the world’s political and business leaders take the pope’s words to heart and reconsider their headlong rush into an A.I.-mediated future? If history is any guide, probably not. Church wisdom expressed through documents and pronouncements tends to reveal itself most in hindsight and after real harm has been inflicted. For example, we still await a time of “authentic development” where “just wages” and a human-centered economic order allow the opportunity for the rich human flourishing we are surely capable of achieving.

Sadly, our global elite prefer a world of no limitations, for them at least. “Move fast and break things” is a catchphrase attributed to Mark Zuckerberg. He has surely followed through on this advice with little regard to the children and teens his social media conglomerate has broken.

The key insight of “Magnifica Humanitas” may be the precise opposite of that Zuckerbergian exhortation. On artificial intelligence, slow down, build carefully and protect the people is the takeaway ethos that Leo promotes. Attention should be paid.

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Kevin Clarke is America’s chief correspondent and the author of Oscar Romero: Love Must Win Out (Liturgical Press).