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In the final chapter of his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (MH), Pope Leo XIV addresses war in the age of artificial intelligence. He insists no algorithm may ever decide to take a life, for peace is not a naïve dream but the deepest calling of the human family.
Part Three of Three. This week discusses Chapter Five of the encyclical and its conclusion.
Across this series, Pope Leo XIV has set before us two builders: one who raises Babel by force and pride, and one who rebuilds Jerusalem patiently before God. Now he brings them to the gravest construction site of all—war.
Peace, he writes, in Magnifica, is not one issue among many but “a prerequisite for the universal common good and a test of the moral maturity of peoples” (182). In the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), that test has grown sharper.
The lie that war is inevitable
The culture Leo describes is one of power: the ability to dominate sets the agenda, and the suffering of peoples becomes a footnote. It grows, he warns, by normalising war.
Some 60 years after Paul VI cried “Never again war” at the United Nations, the Holy Father sees “a troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics,” with public opinion shaped by media narratives “often amplified by algorithms that prioritise conflict and confrontation” (190).
Beneath it lies a loss of historical memory: as the last witnesses of the World Wars pass, we forget what war costs, and “political decisions risk being made on the basis of power alone” (191).
At the root, Leo names a false realism: “the cultural and anthropological belief that war is an inevitable part of human nature.” The truly irresponsible position, he argues, is the Realpolitik that “sows in consciences … an attitude of resignation to the inevitability of war” and dismisses peace as utopian.
Against it, he sets a prophetic conviction: “peace is neither a naïve hope nor merely the absence of war; instead, it is always possible as the fruit of justice and charity” (205).
From this comes one of its boldest claims: that, while preserving the strict right of self-defence, “the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated” (192). Humanity already possesses better tools: dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.
When the machine goes to war
Before addressing the newest weapons, Leo names the older ones that never disappeared. He warns of an “armed nation,” in which war becomes a natural extension of politics and the arms trade a force of its own (193), and of a renewed nuclear danger. As disarmament agreements are dismantled and “tactical” and “miniaturised” weapons multiply, their use comes to seem less improbable.
The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, in force since 2021, marks a step—yet, the Holy Father says, it “risks remaining largely symbolic since the major nuclear powers have not agreed to it” (194).
Into this fragile situation, AI enters as an accelerant. It can lower the threshold for the use of force, shield decision-makers from responsibility, and foster “a culture in which the enemy is reduced to a statistic and the victim to ‘collateral damage'” (183). What is built for defence can be turned to attack overnight.
His warning here is sharpest: the machine is efficient, but it has no conscience. “Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation,” he writes, “for it involves conscience, personal responsibility and the recognition of the other as a person.” He states unambiguously, “it is not permissible to entrust lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems. No algorithm can make war morally acceptable” (198).
AI does not remove war’s inhumanity; it only makes it faster and more impersonal, reducing victims to data. The decision to take a life, Leo insists, “cannot be delegated to opaque or automated processes, but must remain under effective, self-aware and responsible human control” (200).
The instruments of peace
Yet the encyclical refuses to end in denunciation. Against the culture of power, Leo invokes Paul VI’s phrase, the “civilisation of love,” declaring it, “no naïve utopia, but a demanding project” (186) that translates charity into structures of justice and gives fraternity institutional form.
It is built not by the powerful alone but by everyone. The idea that our choices do not matter is, he says, “a polite form of resignation, often disguised as realism”; and “no one is without responsibility” (212).
Borrowing from writer JRR Tolkien, he reminds us that it is not ours “to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set” (213).
The first instrument Leo names is our speech. Drawing on his 2025 address to media representatives, he writes: “Let us disarm words and we will help to disarm the world… Peace begins with each one of us: in the way we look at others, listen to others and speak about others” (214).
From disarmed words he moves to peace founded on justice, to the courage to see through the eyes of victims, to patient dialogue and negotiation, and to a renewed diplomacy and multilateral order strong enough to set the rule of law above the rule of force (cf. 226). For, as he said at his election, “War is never inevitable. Weapons can and must be silenced” (222).
A final breath: Nehemiah, the Eucharist, the Magnificat
Then the argument gives way to prayer. The answer to every dream of a machine that surpasses us is, Leo says, the Incarnation—the God who “descends into our history in order to free us from all forms of slavery” (232).
No computer, “however sophisticated, can create a heart that gives itself, or a conscience that discerns good from evil” (233).
A human face, waiting to be gazed upon, remains the centre of history. That face is made one body in the Eucharist, where “union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself.”
And so Leo returns to Nehemiah, who heard the cry of a ruined city, brought it to prayer, and rebuilt its walls with his people, brick by brick—calling us to “unite listening and courage, prayer and responsibility” (241).
The city is finally received rather than achieved—the new Jerusalem that “descends as a gift for all God’s people” (242), its gates open to every nation. Leo leaves us Mary’s song, the ‘Magnificat’ of the God who “takes the part of the lowly,” and asks us to become “weavers of hope” (245), so that even the age of AI may become a time when the Spirit builds the civilisation of love.
The peace he prays for is the one we cannot manufacture: the Easter gift of the risen Christ, “unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering” (228).
Key Message:
Chapter Five confronts the gravest test of the common good: war, now accelerated by AI. Against the false realism that calls war inevitable, Leo affirms that peace is always possible—the fruit of justice and charity—and insists that no algorithm may ever make the decision to take a life. The civilisation of love is built by small, steadfast acts and completed as a gift: the peace of the risen Christ.
Action Step:
In the Holy Father’s view, peace begins with how we speak. This week, disarm your words: find one place—a conversation, an argument, a post—where you reach for the language of combat, and choose instead to look, listen and speak as though the other were a brother or sister, not an enemy. Then pray for the peace we cannot make alone.
Scripture for Reflection:
“He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly”— Luke 1:52
This completes our three-part journey through Magnifica Humanitas, from the two cities of the Introduction to the civilisation of love. Pope Leo XIV signed the encyclical in Rome on May 15, 2026.
