Pope Leo XIV Warns on AI in Paris as a Catholic Schism Simmers

Pope Leo XIV warned in Paris this week that artificial intelligence could undermine humanity, speaking of a 'paradise of machines' at the Élysée Palace, according to Al Jazeera and Le Monde. The four-day state visit to France was his first to the country, and crowds cheered him in the streets, Le Monde reported.

France 24 reported that the trip is shadowed by the Vatican's recent excommunication of followers of the Society of Saint Pius X, an ultra-conservative Catholic splinter group with an extensive network of schools. The schism has revived a longstanding feud within the Roman Catholic Church, the broadcaster said.

The pope also used the visit to restate positions on bioethics. Le Monde reported that he condemned surrogacy, the buying of organs and what he described as the concept of arranging one's own death, and Politico Europe noted that he defended freedom of conscience without naming France's far right.

The visit has a political dimension that the foreign press has been quick to draw out. Politico Europe reported that the pope called for dialogue as France's populist forces eye power, and that the front-runner Marine Le Pen has revived a proposed headscarf ban. The pope did not name the far right; he spoke of freedom of conscience, which in the French context is read as a comment on laïcité and its limits. Le Monde added that he stressed 'authentic secularity' should not exclude religion, and urged France to be a 'tireless champion of peace'.

The New York Times framed the trip differently, as the work of a pope trying to be everyone's pope. After visiting Africa, the paper wrote, Leo's four days in France show him seeking to appeal both to Roman Catholicism's original European heartlands and to its newest strongholds. That is a strategic reading of a journey that otherwise looks ceremonial: a state visit to a secular republic, with a stop that the French press has treated as a test of the pope's reach into a country where practice has long been falling.

The schism reported by France 24 is the sharper story beneath the ceremony. The Society of Saint Pius X, founded in opposition to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, has built a parallel network of schools and attracts traditionalist believers. Its followers' excommunication revives a dispute that has run for decades, and it lands during a papal visit designed to project unity. The France 24 report does not put a figure on the group's membership or the number of its schools.

A second thread runs through the wire from Rome. Politico Europe reported that Cardinal Michael Czerny, who leads an artificial intelligence commission at the Vatican, admitted he does not use AI himself, saying he has not had time to try it. The admission sits awkwardly beside the pope's Paris warning about machines, though the two are not in direct contradiction: the Vatican's concern is with the technology's direction, not with the personal habits of its officials.

The wire does not state any Italian or regional consequence of the visit, and none should be inferred. What the foreign coverage establishes is a papacy moving on several fronts at once — bioethics, artificial intelligence, secularism and a traditionalist rupture — in a country that is not Italy but whose church politics Rome cannot leave alone.