U.S. President Donald Trump.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

The Catholic Church has survived over two millennia of collapsing empires, plagues, schisms, and televangelists, so it probably says something about the current state of technology that Pope Leo XIV chose artificial intelligence as the defining subject of his first encyclical, the formal papal teaching document intended to shape long-term Catholic doctrine.

Released this month under the title Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), the text prominently featured unusually sharp language for a Vatican document, since Leo warned that humanity was drifting toward “new forms of slavery” driven by algorithmic systems, autonomous weapons and concentrated corporate power, while urging governments and tech companies to slow the current AI arms race before economic incentives hardened into permanent social infrastructure.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for the internet to recognise the markers of a familiar science-fiction concept buried within the Pope’s credo — social media has been brimming with references to the “Butlerian Jihad,” the fictional anti-AI uprising from Frank Herbert’s Dune novels that outlawed “thinking machines” across the galaxy. Though the actual connection between Herbert’s fiction and Leo’s warning runs deeper than just the memes because both arguments have emerged from the same anxiety: once societies transfer human judgment into systems optimised for efficiency and centralised control, political responsibility begins to disappear behind machinery that nobody can meaningfully challenge.

For readers who have only encountered Dune through Denis Villeneuve’s recent blockbuster adaptations starring Timothée Chalamet, the Butlerian Jihad explains one of the most curious details in Herbert’s futuristic universe: computers barely exist. 

Herbert introduced the idea in his 1965 novel during a period when American institutions had become fascinated with cybernetics and computer-assisted governance, and he imagined a civilisation that had already experienced the endpoint of that dependence. Thousands of years before the events of Dune, humanity waged a catastrophic war against intelligent machines, known as the Butlerian Jihad, after automated systems displaced human decision-making across political and social life, and the survivors responded by turning the rejection of machine cognition into sacred law.  

That history reshaped every institution inside Herbert’s universe because the ban on “thinking machines” forced human beings to reorganise civilisation around trained specialists who could replicate computational functions biologically.

These ‘human-computers’ known as the Mentats became living analytical engines capable of processing enormous quantities of information through disciplined mental training. The Spacing Guild also mutated navigators with prolonged exposure to the psychoactive substance called Spice so they could calculate safe paths through interstellar travel without machine assistance. And the Bene Gesserit sisterhood spent generations engineering political influence through psychological conditioning, selective breeding and even control over memory.

Herbert built an entire feudal order around the consequences of technological prohibition, which gave the Butlerian Jihad unusual durability among sci-fi canon.

Leo XIV’s encyclical approaches the same territory from Catholic social teaching, although the overlap becomes difficult to ignore once the document turns from abstract ethics into concrete examples.

The pope condemns “a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets” driven by governments and corporations seeking geopolitical advantage, while arguing that AI systems must never receive authority over lethal military decisions because human accountability disappears once warfare becomes a computational procedure. 

Those arguments have surfaced as major tech firms including Microsoft, Google, Amazon Web Services, Palantir and OpenAI have already expanded partnerships with defense agencies across the United States and Europe, while autonomous targeting systems and AI-assisted surveillance tools continue spreading through military procurement pipelines. Leo referenced the gencode in Gaza, and the wars in Ukraine, Lebanon and Iran during a speech at Rome’s La Sapienza University earlier this month, where he warned that emerging technologies were accelerating “a spiral of annihilation” through increasingly automated conflict.

The Vatican deliberately framed the encyclical as part of a longer historical lineage inside Catholic doctrine. Leo signed Magnifica Humanitas on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the landmark 1891 encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII during the Industrial Revolution, which addressed labor exploitation, industrial capitalism and the social consequences of mechanised production.

It feels symbolic as the current AI boom has revived many of the same economic tensions under digital conditions such as concentrated ownership, invisible labour, weakened bargaining power and extraordinary wealth accumulation inside a tiny group of firms controlling infrastructure. But the pope’s argument seems to focus less on the software itself and more on the structures surrounding it, since the Vatican repeatedly returns to the question of who benefits from automation and who absorbs the human cost required to sustain it.

The labour critique forms some of the encyclical’s strongest material because Leo moves away from abstract fears about sentient machines, instead examining the industrial systems already supporting contemporary AI development.

He writes that every “seemingly immediate and flawless response” produced by AI systems depends upon hidden human labor, including content moderators exposed to traumatic imagery, warehouse workers maintaining hardware supply chains and miners extracting rare-earth minerals under dangerous conditions. Herbert too explored similar territory through the desert planet Arrakis, where the entire imperial economy depended upon violent extraction of Spice by workers exposed to brutal environmental conditions while aristocratic factions accumulated wealth and political leverage from a distance.

The online reaction to Leo’s encyclical spread so quickly because the Butlerian Jihad already exists as a pop cultural shorthand for the anxieties of accelerating technology among people raised on sci-fi. Herbert’s concept has endured for years, though recent advances in generative AI gave it a renewed sense of urgency because tech giants now market systems capable of entirely replacing cognitive labor.

But what’s most ironic is that Herbert never wrote Dune as a rejection of technology itself. His novels are ripe with advanced genetic engineering, complex ecological science, interstellar travel and chemically enhanced cognition.

The Butlerian Jihad targeted the act of dependence rather than act of invention because Herbert believed civilisations become politically fragile once human beings surrendered all judgment to systems that operate beyond public understanding. And Leo XIV reaches almost the same conclusion when he argues that technology “takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”

Of course, nobody at the Vatican is preparing to outlaw laptops or launch a holy war against chatbots, despite the internet’s determination to imagine cardinals storming Silicon Valley.

Leo repeatedly acknowledges that AI systems can improve medical research, reduce repetitive labour and assist education when governments establish democratic oversight and enforce ethical constraints. And the encyclical’s actual demands — of decelerating the current acceleration cycle, distributing power more evenly, preserving human accountability and forcing technological development to answer social questions before the market logic calcifies into permanent infrastructure — sound much less cinematic and much harder to implement. 

Sixty years ago, Frank Herbert may have imagined a civilisation so traumatised by machine dependency that it turned distrust of artificial intelligence into sacred law, and the Butlerian Jihad  might even sound like the paranoid fantasy of a boomer who distrusted computers. But when billionaires ask for deregulation while building systems that consume entire cities’ worth of electricity to autocomplete emails and imitate empathy, while others openly describe their company’s mission as helping the West “scare enemies” and, “on occasion, kill them,” perhaps raging against the machine doesn’t sound too far fetched after all.

Lead us to paradise, Lisan al-Gaib Leo XIV…

Published – May 28, 2026 11:09 pm IST

Illegal waste is seen on the side of a road in the outskirts of the southern Italian town of Acerra in the Terra dei Fuochi, or Land of Fires, an area scarred by decades of pollution from illegal waste dumping and burning, much of it linked to organized criminal groups, on May 22, 2026, a day ahead of Pope Leo XIV’s visit.
| Photo Credit: AP

This picture, taken on April 14, 2026, shows the front pages of some Italian newspapers reporting on comments by U.S. President Donald Trump about Pope Leo XIV, with headlines using words such as “outrage”, “shock attack”, “insult”, and Trump’s schism”.
| Photo Credit: AP

Pope Leo XIV holds a holy Mass for peace and justice at Bamenda airport in Bamenda, Cameroon, on April 16, 2026.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Pope Leo XIV greets the crowd as he arrives surrounded by security for a meeting with youths in Bkerki, the seat of the Maronite Church, in Lebanon, on Monday, Dec. 1, 2025.
| Photo Credit: AP

Pope Leo XIV arrived in Turkiye on Thursday (November 27, 2025) on his first foreign trip, fulfilling Pope Francis’ plans to mark an important Christian anniversary and bring a message of peace to the region at a crucial time in efforts to end the war in Ukraine and ease Mideast tensions.

Pope Leo’s charter plane landed at Ankara’s international airport.

Later, he had a meeting planned with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a speech to the country’s diplomatic corps. He’ll then move late on Thursday (November 27, 2025) on to Istanbul for three days of ecumenical and interfaith meetings that will be followed by the Lebanese leg of his trip.

Pope Leo’s visit comes as Turkiye, a country of more than 85 million people of predominantly Sunni Muslims, has cast itself as a key intermediary in peace negotiations for the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza.

Ankara has hosted rounds of low-level talks between Russia and Ukraine and has offered to take part in the stabilisation force in Gaza to help uphold the fragile ceasefire, engagements Leo may applaud in his arrival speech.

Reaction in Turkiye

Turkiye’s growing military weight, as NATO’s largest army after the U.S., has been drawing Western leaders closer to Erdogan even as critics warn of his crackdown on the country’s main opposition party.

Though support for Palestinians and an end to the war in Ukraine is widespread in Turkiye, for Turks who face an ongoing cost-of-living crisis, owing to market turmoil induced by shake-ups in domestic politics, international politics is a secondary concern.

That could explain why Pope Leo’s visit has largely escaped the attention of many in Turkiye, at least outside the country’s small Christian community.

“I didn’t know he was coming. He is welcome,” said Sukran Celebi. “It would be good if he called for peace in the world, but I don’t think it will change anything.”

Some said they thought the visit by history’s first American pope was about advancing the interests of the United States, or perhaps to press for the reopening of a Greek Orthodox religious seminary that has become a focal point in the push for religious freedoms in Turkiye.

“If the pope is visiting, that means America wants something from Turkiye,” said Metin Erdem, a musical instruments shop owner in the touristic Galata district of Istanbul.

Historic anniversary

The main impetus for Pope Leo to travel to Turkiye is to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, Christianity’s first ecumenical council.

Pope Leo will pray with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, at the site of the 325 AD gathering, today’s Iznik in northwestern Turkiye, and sign a joint declaration in a visible sign of Christian unity.

Eastern and Western churches were united until the Great Schism of 1054, a divide precipitated largely by disagreements over the primacy of the pope.

While the visit is timed for the important Catholic-Orthodox anniversary, it will also allow Leo to reinforce the church’s relations with Muslims. Leo is due to visit the Blue Mosque and preside over an interfaith meeting in Istanbul.

Asgin Tunca, a Blue Mosque imam who will be receiving the pope, said the visit would help advance Christian-Muslim ties and dispel popular prejudices about Islam.

“We want to reflect that image by showing the beauty of our religion through our hospitality — that is God’s command,” Tunca said.

Religious freedom in Turkiye

Since coming to power in 2002, Erdogan’s government has enacted reforms to improve the rights of religious groups, including opening places of worship and returning property that were confiscated.

Still, some Christian groups face legal and bureaucratic problems when trying to register churches, according to a US State Department report on religious freedoms.

The Catholic Church, which counts around 33,000 members in Turkiye, has no formal legal recognition in the country “and this is the source of many problems,” said the Rev. Paolo Pugliese, superior of the Capuchin Catholic friars in Turkiye.

“But the Catholic Church enjoys a rather notable importance because we have an international profile … and we have the pope holding our backs,” he said.

Possible tensions

One of the more delicate moments of Leo’s visit will come Sunday, when he visits the Armenian Apostolic Cathedral in Istanbul. The cathedral has hosted all popes who have visited Turkiye since Paul VI, with the exception of Francis who visited Turkiye in 2014 when its patriarch was sick.

Francis visited him at the hospital, and a few months later he greatly angered Turkiye in 2015 when he declared that the slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was “the first genocide of the 20th century.”

Turkiye, which has long denied a genocide took place, recalled its ambassador to the Holy See in protest.

Leo has tended to be far more prudent than Francis in his public comments, and using such terms on Turkish soil would spark a diplomatic incident. But the Vatican is also navigating a difficult moment in its ties with Armenia, after its interfaith overtures to Azerbaijan have been criticised.

Published – November 27, 2025 03:55 pm IST

Pope Leo XIV will pray at the site of the 2020 port blast in Beirut that killed over 200 people and compounded Lebanon’s economic and political crisis during his first foreign trip as Pope next month, which will also take him to Turkiye to mark an important anniversary with Orthodox Christians.

The Vatican on Monday (October 27, 2025) released the itinerary of Pope Leo’s Nov. 27-Dec. 2 trip. It includes several moments for history’s first American Pope to speak about interfaith and ecumenical relations, as well as the plight of Christians in the Middle East and regional tensions overall.

Pope Francis had planned to visit both countries, but died earlier this year before he could. He had particularly long wanted to go to Lebanon, but the country’s economic and political crisis prevented a visit during his lifetime.

The main impetus for travelling to Turkiye this year is to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, Christianity’s first ecumenical council.

Pope Leo made clear from the start of his pontificate that he would keep Francis’ commitment, and has several moments of prayer planned with the spiritual leader of the world’s Orthodox Christians, Patriarch Bartholomew I.

Nicaea, today located in Iznik on a lake southeast of Istanbul, is one of seven ecumenical councils that are recognised by the Eastern Orthodox. Pope Leo will travel there by helicopter on November 28 for a brief prayer near the archaeological excavations of the ancient Basilica of Saint Neophytos.

A visit to the Armenian cathedral in Istanbul

Another significant moment in Turkiye is Pope Leo’s November 30 prayer at the Armenian Apostolic Cathedral in Istanbul. Francis didn’t go there during his 2014 trip, but a year later, he angered Turkiye when he declared the slaughter of Armenians by Ottoman Turks “the first genocide of the 20th century.”

Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed by Ottoman Turks around the time of World War I, an event widely viewed by scholars as the first genocide of the 20th century. Turkiye, however, has insisted that the toll has been inflated, and that those killed were victims of civil war and unrest, not genocide. It has fiercely lobbied to prevent countries, including the Holy See, from officially recognising the Armenian massacre as genocide.

Pope Leo has tended to avoid polemics during his first six months as pope, so it will be telling if he repeats Francis’s characterisation of the slaughter.

A prayer at the site of the Beirut port blast

In addition to the traditional protocol visits with Turkish and Lebanese leaders, meetings with Catholic clergy and liturgies, Leo’s visit to the site of the Aug. 4, 2020, Beirut port blast will likely be another stirring moment in his trip, coming on its final day.

The blast tore through the Lebanese capital after hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate detonated in a warehouse. The gigantic explosion killed at least 218 people, according to an AP count, wounded more than 6,000 others and devastated large swaths of Beirut, causing billions of dollars in damage.

Lebanese citizens were enraged by the blast, which appeared to be the result of government negligence, coming on top of an economic crisis spurred by decades of corruption and financial crimes. But an investigation into the causes of the blast repeatedly stalled, and five years on, no official has been convicted.

While Leo will celebrate Mass on the Beirut waterfront and travel to some areas near the Lebanese capital, his itinerary is significant for where he is not going: He will not visit Lebanon’s south, battered by last year’s war between Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.

Places left off the itinerary in both Lebanon and Turkiye

While the brunt of the destruction was concentrated in Shia communities that form Hezbollah’s main base of support, Christian communities were also impacted by the conflict, with houses, agricultural land and even churches destroyed. Christian groups in southern Lebanon had lobbied for the pope to visit the area.

In Turkiye, there are also no plans for Leo to visit the landmark Hagia Sophia monument in Istanbul, as previous popes have done. The former Greek Orthodox patriarchal basilica, which was a mosque during Ottoman times, was a museum when Francis visited in 2014.

But in 2020, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government changed its status from a museum back to a mosque and opened it up to Muslim worship. At the time, Francis said he was “deeply pained” by the decision.

Despite the renovations to preserve its historic domes, Hagia Sophia remains open to visitors and worshippers. Leo will visit the nearby Sultan Ahmed Mosque, popularly known as the Blue Mosque.

Published – October 27, 2025 07:16 pm IST

Italian President Sergio Mattarella (right) sees off Pope Leo XIV and Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin (left) as they leave the Quirinale Presidential Palace in Rome on October 14, 2025.
| Photo Credit: AP

Pope Leo XIV. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters