The Spanish writer Javier Cercas reflects on Pope Leo XIV’s Message for the 2026 World Day of Social Communications.
By Javier Cercas
Pope Leo XIV’s Message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications, entitled, “Preserving Human Voices and Faces”, is an important text. It is important for Catholics and non-Catholics, for believers and for non-believers. It is important because of its many implications — political, religious, moral, social, economic — and because of many more reasons than I am unable to comment upon here. I will mention just a few of them.
I am not an expert in Artificial Intelligence, but I am surprised when I hear the same or similar apocalyptic forecasts that have been repeated throughout the course of history, every time there was a big technological revolution (and there is no doubt that AI is that). In Plato’s Phaedrus, King Thamus complained of the advent of writing, an extremely dangerous invention that would “implant forgetfulness in their souls” and cause them to “cease to exercise memory” because mankind would rely on what is “written”. Moreover, Plato’s character said that writing would make the relationship between teacher and student irrelevant — a relationship that is essential for all learning. Writing he continued, will not give people wisdom but “the conceit of wisdom” which will lead to the end of authentic culture.
Centuries after Plato, the same or similar complaints resurfaced when Guttenberg invented the printing press. Many predicted that, with the new discovery, culture would expand beyond the limits known until then, leaving the exclusivity of the libraries where it had been stored until then, to reach a very numerous public. In this way, knowledge would lose value and become vulgar in order to reach the wider public. And thus, the more demanding culture — the new, authentic culture — would be degraded and in the end, disappear.
Not too long ago we heard similar things about television, the internet and social media. But the truth is that writing did not result in the end of real culture, but rather in the emergence of a different culture. Similarly, the printing press did not put an end to high culture. The proof is that neither Shakespeare nor Cervantes is inferior to Homer and Virgil.
I am not saying that AI does not include risks, nor that we should not pay great attention to its development. I am saying that, just like writing, the printing press or the internet, it is necessary to use it for the good and not for evil, that the way we use it depends only on us, on the control that we and our public authority exercise over them. Writing and the printing press, just like AI, can be used both for good and for evil, to publish Don Quixote, but also to publish Mein Kampf.
Technology is not the problem. The problem is the use we make of technology. I am also not saying that technology is neutral. I am saying that we human beings designed the technology and therefore we are responsible for the good or evil that is done with it — whether it is writing, the printing press or AI.
If I am not mistaken, this is Leo XIV’s perspective on AI. The Pope is not apocalyptic. He does not think like many that this new technology is and will be the cause of all our evils, or of the majority of them, and that it will end up destroying our civilization, or at least our culture, but he is also not “integrated”, and does not think like many others, that this new technology has in itself the capacity to improve our lives. “Embracing the opportunities offered by digital technology and artificial intelligence with courage, determination and discernment does not mean turning a blind eye to critical issues, complexities and risks”, Pope Leo XIV writes.
The Pope is well aware of this and warns against “a naive and unquestioning reliance on artificial intelligence as an omniscient ‘friend’, a source of all knowledge, an archive of every memory, an ‘oracle’ of all advice”. In short, for Leo XIV AI is not a panacea, nor a diabolical instrument. It is nothing more and nothing less than what we do with it. Thus, its development is above all a challenge: to use it to build a more just, more egalitarian and more joyful society.
This is why the Pope says that the “task laid before us is not to stop digital innovation, but rather to guide it and to be aware of its ambivalent nature”, its obvious advantages and its less obvious risks. In order to completely promote the former and avoid the latter, to transform AI into our ally and not our enemy, Pope Leo XIV invokes a triad of values: responsibility, cooperation and education. The responsibility of AI owners, creators and programmers, politicians, regulating bodies and journalists, as well as citizens who are called to control them; cooperation among various sectors that determine the destiny of AI (no one can do it alone); education of its users, which is all of us. These three imperatives outline an ambitious program. I think it is also an indispensable one.
Almost one year from the death of Pope Francis, many of us, Catholics and non Catholics, continue to ask themselves what kind of pope Leo XIV will be, especially or inevitably, when compared to Francis: this Pope came to calm the waters that his predecessor had stirred and he is in continuity with Francis in substance, but not in form, as he seemed from the very beginning.
In any case, this document demonstrates that like Francis, Leo XIV is capable of addressing the most pressing issues of our times with courage, clarity of mind and without prejudice. It is one of the ways in which the Catholic Church can be useful to all of us.
