Progressives rightly treat the Catholic Church’s conservative attitudes towards medical innovations—such as IVF, contraception and abortion—as regressive and puritanical. Yet, when it comes to other technologies, the Vatican gets a pass, if not praise for applying similar logic—even when there is less theological justification.
Pope Francis has decried video games, as did his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI in 2007, playing into unfounded concerns about its culpability for mass shootings. In 2019, Francis lent support for weakening encryption when he called for a “balance” between privacy and protecting children from predators.
The same year he said nuclear power should not be used until safety can be guaranteed on a trip to Fukushima—ignoring the unique circumstances of that accident, the impossible goal of “absolute safety,” and the widespread exaggeration of risk.
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Now, the Vatican—in an attempt to remain relevant and reassert moral authority —seems to have increasingly turned to a form of puritanical conservatism that is palatable to political progressives: technophobia.
When screen time became a fashionable secular sin, the pope told families to get off their devices and talk to each other in 2015. In 2020, he incorporated moderate screen time use in official Catholic teachings in the middle of the pandemic. Now that secular panic has shifted to artificial intelligence, the Vatican has moved in lockstep.
Only a week before he decried surrogacy as a “disgusting” act, Pope Francis warned in a message for World Peace Day about the possible threat of AI including “technological dictatorship,” war, and misinformation. The statement began lauding the salvation scientific and technological development has offered mankind thus far—crediting it as a manifestation of the holy spirit.
However, he caveated this tech-optimism by acknowledging technological change can also “pose a risk to our survival and endanger our common home,” an allusion to nuclear weapons, global warming, and the so-called existential risks of AI. The rest of the 3,500-word screed contained, by my count, only 202 words that were positive about AI—or just 6.2 percent.
This rhetoric mimicked Pope John Paul II, who once said that GMOs could be “a disaster for the health of man and the future of earth” if not heavily regulated, with a brief note of possible upsides. In retrospect, over-regulation of GMOs driven by that very same alarmism caused millions of preventable deaths and slowed the creation of crops that reduce environmental harm—a fact pointed out this week in an open letter to the EU by a number of Nobel laureates. The same pope had a long history of alarmist statements regarding rapid advances in biotechnology, including genetic engineering, organ transplants, and in vitro fertilization (aka surrogacy).
Back then, the surrogacy debate was not as partisan—with some on the left opposing the “commodification” of childbirth including Jeremy Rifkin, a key figure in the anti-GMO movement who likely shaped the very European GMO regulations recently decried, as an adviser to three EU presidents.
The tech-pessimist progressives of the 21st century have become unwitting allies of the Catholic Church, mirroring its rhetoric when they warn of excising AI demons, decrying dating app promiscuity, algorithmic temptation, perversion enabling encryption, and video-game debauchery. Like denying women IVF, this neo-luddite mindset creates real world harm to the environment and developing world. It isn’t progressive, it is regressive.
If Catholics and progressives want a fairer, more prosperous future, they must stop treating technological advance as a curse and start treating it for what it is: a miracle.
Perhaps in 2050 middle-aged Zoomers will decry synthetic surrogate wombs, designed with and monitored by AI—and maybe the then pope will decry them too, calling for a return to the good old days of organic surrogacy, with a human womb, designed by a real—not artificial—god.
