In Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV frames artificial intelligence as more than a technological challenge: AI calls into question the value and worth of the human person. The parallel with Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 response to the Industrial Revolution, is deliberate. Then, the Church confronted a world in which labour and capital were being remade by machines that threatened to turn workers into means rather than ends.