Church bells tolled across France when Pope Leo XIV’s charter flight touched down at Paris’ Orly airport on Friday. Crowds lined the capital’s streets as his motorcade passed, and more than a million people are expected to turn out during a four-day visit, the first official state visit by a pope in 18 years.
His message was not a comfortable one. Leo warned that a “paradise of machines” risks undermining humanity, and he posed basic questions about what it means to be human in an age of artificial intelligence, a nuclear arms race and other threats to life.
Élysée and UNESCO
He spoke first to President Emmanuel Macron and officials at the Élysée Palace, then to diplomats and United Nations employees at UNESCO’s headquarters. “The paradox has become increasingly evident,” he said. “While ‘intelligence’ is attributed to computational systems, we struggle to recognize the inalienable dignity of human persons, whose lives are judged according to the criterion of efficiency and, when deemed no longer productive, are rejected and discarded.”
The remedy, he said, is education: “If we are to avoid losing our humanity amid a ‘paradise of machines’ invading and conditioning our daily lives, there is an urgent need for education in ethical discernment and the capacity to acknowledge the moral good.”
Leo made AI a theme from the start of his pontificate and devoted his first encyclical to it, “Magnificent Humanity.” It calls for robust regulation and for developers to work for the common good rather than profit. He has also urged AI developers and the politicians who regulate them to slow down. On the flight to Paris he told reporters he was pleased the message was being heard and hoped the Vatican’s dialogue with tech companies would go on. Many of them, he said, are open to making sure AI does not displace or destroy humanity. “Good things are beginning at least.”
With wars in Europe and the Middle East, he also restated the Vatican’s opposition to nuclear weapons, calling the doctrine of deterrence “mistaken” because it fuels a new arms race. “Peace is not a balance of power; rather, it is built day by day through dialogue and justice,” he said.
A hard audience
France is not easy ground for a pope. The Catholic Church has lost influence over ethical questions there under the country’s strict secularism, and the right to abortion was written into the constitution in 2024. Lawmakers recently gave final approval to a bill letting adults with incurable illnesses receive lethal medication. The French Catholic hierarchy strongly opposed both.
Leo reminded France of its “deep Christian roots” and called the right to life the “indispensable foundation of every other human right.” Unlike Francis, who favored small Catholic communities far from Rome, he is keen to reawaken Europe’s Christian roots.
Macron said the visit brings “a source of hope” to many French people. Analysts see politics in it too. Macron cannot seek a third term, his approval ratings are near record lows, and Pope Francis refused repeatedly to make a proper state visit and pointedly skipped the 2024 reopening of Notre Dame. “For a president of the republic as Macron, who is at the end of his mandate, it can be important to be aside the pope and to capture a part of his popularity,” said Charles Mercier of Paris EPHE university.
Later Friday, the pope was due at a vespers service in Notre Dame. The Rev. Aristide Ahidote, from Ivory Coast, planned to be there. “God has given us a pope with vigor and strength,” he said.
