Pope Leo XIV's encyclical *Magnifica Humanitas*, surfaced in widespread reporting on 25 May 2026, treats artificial intelligence less as a doctrinal subject than as a lens — the document is primarily about concentrated power, eroded democracy, and the influence of a small tech elite over how the world is shaped, according to early analysis. The papal text invokes AI throughout, but the church's substantive critique is of the political-economic conditions in which AI is developed, not of the technology itself. The framing matters because Catholic social teaching has historically reshaped labour and inequality debates well beyond the church's congregation.