In the much-discussed case of the President v. the Pope, one is tempted to pass over in silence the manufactured “debate” as unworthy of the name. In this corner is Pope Leo XIV, an acknowledged expert in the ecclesiology and “political theology” of Augustine of Hippo and former Prior General of the global religious order which bears the saint’s name and embodies his charism. In the opposing corner is Donald Trump, the self-deifying, delusional uber-narcissist, and his religious hatchet-man, the supercilious J.D. Vance, whose naive arrogance and pseudo-intellectualism give converts a bad name.
A debate? Really? Trump and Vance are not serious interlocutors.
On the other hand, the contretemps, which played out over three or four news cycles in the spring of 2026, is instructive. However clumsy and self-parodying, the Trump-Vance attempt to discredit the pope reflected their desire to vanquish their leading cultural rival on the world stage. The new pope, an American, was becoming quite a nuisance. He had dared to question the joint decision by President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to wage an unprovoked war on Iran, and he was not pleased by Trump’s threats to bomb the country back into the Stone Age. Pope Leo was also said to be preparing a sustained critique of morally questionable applications of Artificial Intelligence. The primary companies driving US military targeting and strike operations in Iran were Palantir Technologies and Anthropic, pioneers in the application of AI in warfare. Palantir’s “Maven Smart System” acts as the core battle management platform that plans and prioritizes targets, while Anthropic’s “Claude” AI is programmed to analyze data and assess strategy.
In short, the back-and-forth between the President and the Pope, far from a trivial matter, reflected the gravity of the present moment in human history. No less than control of the global narrative about the future of peace, justice and human flourishing is at stake, as Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo’s recently released first encyclical, makes abundantly clear.
A Blueprint for the Civilization of Love
Magnifica humanitas [MH hereafter] wastes no time in setting forth two alternate visions, that of Babel and of Jerusalem, vying for moral legitimacy in the digital age. Babel or “the culture of power” (a.k.a., the city of man) fosters “the normalization of war,” “force without limits,” the weaponization of artificial intelligence, the crisis of multilateralism, and a distorted “political realism.” Jerusalem, or “the civilization of love” (i.e., the city of God), is intent on reviving dialogue and diplomacy, building peace through justice, adopting the perspective of victims, and cultivating “a healthy realism.”
To those who have been paying attention, it will be no surprise that the Church aligns itself squarely with the city of God; fully one-third of the lengthy encyclical traces and advances the evolution of an increasingly coherent social worldview which has unfolded over the past 135 years under the banner of Catholic Social Doctrine. This body of social teaching, the pope writes, “is not the result of a project devised at a desk, but rather the product of a patient process” by which each pontiff—together with the Second Vatican Council [1962-‘65]—made a unique contribution in light of the “new things” of each particular era:
In response to the challenges of their time, each [pope and the Council Fathers] interpreted historical changes according to the Gospel, bringing to light different aspects of a single heritage: the dignity of the person, the value of work, the universal destination of goods, solidarity and subsidiarity, care for creation and the centrality of peace and fraternity. The result is a harmonious, though not always linear, development that is marked by different emphases, progressive insights, and, at times, changes in perspective that do not break with what came before, but allow its implications to mature. If today we can speak of a corpus of shared principles and criteria, it is because this faith-based interpretation of history has never been interrupted, remaining ever open to the challenges posed by each generation (MH, para. 45).
The New Americanist Heresy
Reversals as well as continuities mark this evolution, Pope Leo XIV acknowledges. Only with the papacy of his predecessor and namesake, Leo XIII (1878–1903), for example, did the Church begin tentatively to lower its guard against liberal democracy, which it fully endorsed in the mid-twentieth century and now champions as the form of government most capable of preventing power “from being monopolized by small elite groups motivated by particular or ideological interests” (MH, para. 45)
The evolution of the Church’s modern position on democracy began haltingly with Immortale Dei (1885), the encyclical Leo XIII devoted not to endorsing democracy, but to setting forth the conditions under which this (or any) form of government might prove acceptable, namely, that it protects “the general welfare” (in later parlance, the common good), recognizes that all legitimate authority comes from God, and therefore honors and protects “the true religion” (i.e., Roman Catholicism). In Testem Benevolentiae (1899) Leo XIII condemned the naïve and arrogant tendency of some American (and French) Catholics to prioritize natural over supernatural virtues and to adopt a radical individualism according to which one follows one’s own interpretations of the moral law without the guidance of Church doctrine.
The current Pope Leo is wary of a new, aggressive “Americanism.” Which naïve but arrogant power-grabbers might qualify as today’s “heretical” Americanists?
In answering this question MH leaves little to the imagination. Without naming Trump or Trumpism the encyclical denounces as “pure power devoid of truth” the serial falsehoods that infect current political discourse and calls to account those political and corporate leaders who find in artificial intelligence what one papal ally calls “a perfect multiplier: algorithms that reward confrontation, platforms that amplify polarization, deepfakes that dissolve the distinction between true and false.”
The encyclical’s almost militant tone, including its call to “disarm” AI, is striking coming from this soft-spoken (albeit Chicago-born) pope; its theo-political imagination is presented in direct opposition to the techno-political ideology undergirding Trumpism. Indeed, MH can be read as casting the debate about the morally appropriate applications of digital technologies as a battle royale between irreconcilable worldviews, only one of which is concerned with safeguarding humanity against the very real dangers of machines which cannot be considered ethically neutral if their regulation is left exclusively to a small elite class promoting a potentially catastrophic anti-humanist techno-political ideology. The same hubris that animates Trumpism’s uncritical embrace of AI is evident in the administration’s apparent conviction that it has the right to intervene militarily in any country that fails to do its bidding—any country, that is, which it perceives as weak and unable to mount an effective defense.
The Palantir Ideology
Among the influential contributors to the construction of this emergent ideology are the co-founders of Palantir, the AI tech firm which among other “services,” provides expanded surveillance capacity to the U.S. Intelligence Community and Defense Department; its contracts with the Trump administration have facilitated the deportation of undocumented immigrants and the collection of sensitive data on all Americans. Peter Thiel, the German-American libertarian venture capitalist, multibillionaire and so-called “intellectual architect of Silicon Valley,” is the most celebrated ideologue of the Palantir group. His 2004 essay, “The Straussian Moment” argues that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 signalled the end of the world order of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and necessitated “a reexamination of the foundations of modern politics” (191). Thiel, who used his wealth and influence in Silicon Valley to help elect Trump to the presidency, is said to have planted the seeds for the President’s creation of the Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] under Elon Musk.
In a series of private lectures which he delivered in Rome in March 2026, Thiel suggested that the Antichrist could be assuming the form of a global government system that consolidates power by exploiting societal fears around artificial intelligence, climate change, and nuclear war. He framed any attempts to halt or excessively regulate technological progress and innovation as forces that would aid the rise of this global Antichrist system. Leading Catholic institutions, including the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (the Angelicum), publicly distanced themselves from the event, and Catholic media castigated Thiel as an “agent of chaos” and criticized what I will call “the Palantir ideology” for turning the Gospel into a tool for tech-industry geopolitical analysis.
A fuller presentation of the “Palantir ideology” is available in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (2025), a sustained polemic against the supposedly wooly-minded anti-government liberalism of Silicon Valley executives who have forgotten the debt they owe to the U.S. State, which fueled their initial rise with massive government funding. Authored by Palantir CEO Alexander Karp and his deputy Nicholas W. Zamiska (and by AI?), The Technological Republic argues that Silicon Valley has lost its way by funneling capital not into solving big problems like climate change and space exploration, but into gratifying trivial consumerist and social media demands for more apps. Separating the tech industry from the national-security apparatus, the authors argue, is an unjustifiable luxury in an era of fierce geopolitical competition. The West has fallen behind in the “AI Arms Race,” which is no less urgent than the nuclear arms race; accordingly, technology companies and State actors must build advanced, sovereign defense and military capabilities driven by AI. “If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle,” the authors write, “we should build it; and the same goes for software” (143). Such a formula invites the ethics of a tech-oligarchy to drive the development and application of military and state surveillance technologies.
Dismantling the Technological Paradigm
MH contests virtually every premise of what I am calling the Palantir Ideology, dismissing such thinking as a kind of techno-theological magisterium.[1] Pope Leo objects strenuously to the aspiration to set State and corporate priorities according to what Pope Francis called “the technological paradigm.” MH summarizes this theory as “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions,” which is quickly becoming “the standard by which everything is judged . . .dictating what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency” [MH, para. 92].
The paradigm has spread rapidly in recent years, Leo warns, “fueled in part by the expansion of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, nanotechnology, robotics and biotechnology” (para. 93). In themselves, he notes, these innovations can serve human dignity and advance integral human development. Yet they can also hasten the expansion of the technocratic paradigm.
For this reason, technological progress — valuable in itself — requires careful discernment of the anthropological vision that guides it and the ends it pursues. If technological development advances without a corresponding ethical and social progress, the result may be an increase in means without a growth in humanity: ‘having more’ without ‘being more.’ In such a scenario, there is a risk that individuals will be evaluated principally according to the outcomes they produce [MH, para. 94].
Control over platforms, infrastructure, data, and computing power no longer rests with states, the pope notes, but with major economic and technological actors, who effectively set the conditions for access, determine the rules of visibility, and shape the very possibilities for participation. When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, “it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that give rise to new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities” [MH, para. 95].
An Alliance of Religions and Humanists?
Faced with this concentration of power in the digital world, the pope offers “the noble principles of Social Doctrine” as a platform on which religions and humanists of all stripes might contest what I have referred to in this essay as “the new Americanist heresy” and “the Palantir Ideology.” “Every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations,” Leo writes. Accordingly, our conversations about technology must be guided by an inclusive process of discernment through which ordinary people from multiple backgrounds and perspectives contribute to the debate about the proper application and regulation of AI. The debate, the pope urges, cannot be limited to “using a system for good or bad purposes.” Rather, together we must “examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it” (MH, para.104). We must assess whether the power of digital infrastructures and algorithms “truly fosters participation and responsibility, protects the vulnerable, ensures fair access to opportunities and remains directed toward the good of all” (MH, para. 104). On this basis, declares the new pope’s first encyclical, “we can now examine more closely what artificial intelligence is, the possibilities it opens up and the risks it entails.”
The hope is that sociomoral principles like the inalienable dignity of the human person, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice can find resonance not only in other branches of Christianity but also in Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu practices, teachings and sensibilities. Educators and intellectual and spiritual leaders within these traditions have recently engaged in dialogue seeking to identify and articulate just such “a common faith.”
Perhaps, after all, the U.S. President and Vice-President were not entirely clueless in directing their fire at a fellow American who had become the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics and, for the moment at least, the spokesperson for countless others who have thus far been intimidated and effectively silenced by the handful of wealthy individuals who are poised to control the future of artificial intelligence and its virtually unimaginable potential to transform, for good or ill, the human future.
The rhetorical, structural and substantive logic of MH is clear on a close reading. The first third of the encyclical presents the various core principles of Catholic Social Doctrine as an integrated, evolving but already coherent and comprehensive-to-the-moment moral foundation for dialogue with the (post)modern world. The second third warns that, if guided by the distorted utilitarian ethos of an aloof, ultra-wealthy American and global elite, AI will quickly become a means of further marginalization of society’s vulnerable masses and a force for replacing the inalienable dignity of each and every person with the ruthless antihuman logic of “efficiency first” algorithms. The third connects the threat of unregulated AI to the scourge of war waged without consideration for just war criteria—the Iran war being a typical marriage of Palantir-era technology with disregard for quaint notions like “just cause,” “proportionality,” and “civilian immunity.”
The issue is joined. The game is afoot. Stay tuned.
[1] MH even invokes J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings —in symbolic repudiation of Palantir’s self-identification? (The name comes from palantíri, the “seeing stones” in the Tolkien stories.)
