Pope Leo XIV warns on AI, assisted dying during Paris visit

Pope Leo XIV stepped onto the tarmac at Paris's Orly Airport on Friday afternoon, the first pontiff to visit France in eighteen years. President Emmanuel Macron was there to receive him—a formal greeting that would set the tone for four days of carefully orchestrated meetings, masses, and warnings about the direction of modern life.

Leo, who leads roughly 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide, had come to a country that prides itself on secular governance and had just, two months earlier, legalized assisted dying for people with incurable illnesses. Standing at the Élysée Palace alongside Macron and other French officials, the pope did not name the law directly. Instead, he spoke in broader terms about what he saw as a troubling pattern: the transformation of human vulnerability into commercial opportunity. He called out surrogacy, the trade in organs, genetic manipulation, and the ability to arrange one's own death—all, in his view, instances of science and technology being weaponized for profit rather than deployed in service of human dignity. "I firmly reiterate that the protection of the right to life constitutes the indispensable foundation of every other human right," he said, his words carrying the weight of institutional doctrine delivered at the seat of French power.

But the pope's concerns extended beyond end-of-life questions. He issued what he framed as an urgent warning about artificial intelligence—a technology he has made a signature concern of his papacy. In May, he had published his first major papal encyclical, titled "Magnificent Humanity," devoted entirely to AI and its implications. On Friday, he returned to the theme with a phrase that captured his anxiety: the risk of losing our humanity amid a "paradise of machines" that invades and conditions daily life. The solution, he argued, was not to halt technological development but to embed it in ethical education and discernment. Leaders, he said, must "govern wisely" when dealing with these tools, which raise fundamental questions about what it means to be human.

The itinerary Leo had accepted was ambitious and symbolically dense. He would speak at UNESCO, lead Vespers at Notre Dame, and celebrate Mass for approximately eighty thousand young people at the Stade de France on Friday night. Saturday would bring another Mass, this one at Place de la Concorde, expected to draw six hundred thousand people. Then he would travel to Lourdes, the pilgrimage site near the Spanish border, before heading to Metz on Monday to deliver a speech on European roots, peace, and unity—an address that Macron himself would introduce and that had drawn invitations to EU leaders across the continent.

During the flight to Paris, Leo addressed a separate controversy that had been shadowing his recent travels. A CNN reporter asked him about U.S. President Donald Trump's efforts to ban certain news outlets from covering him. Leo's response was pointed: "I am very happy that here, you are all welcome." The comment carried an implicit contrast—a reminder that France, for all its secularism, maintains press freedoms that the pope saw as under threat elsewhere. He also took the opportunity to apologize to his traveling press corps for a previous incident, a mechanical failure on a flight from Spain that had forced him to return to Rome alone, leaving journalists stranded. "I want to apologize personally for an incident that I had nothing to do with, but which I know left a number of you unhappy," he told reporters at the back of his plane. He framed his presence in France as that of "a pilgrim for peace" at a moment when wars in Ukraine, Iran, and elsewhere demanded moral witness.

Beneath the diplomatic choreography lay a deeper institutional challenge. In 2021, a report had documented seven decades of sexual abuse within the French Catholic Church, affecting three hundred thirty thousand children. The scandal had severely damaged the Church's credibility in a country already skeptical of religious authority. Leo's visit included meetings with abuse survivors—a recognition that repair required not just words but presence and acknowledgment. The pope was attempting to rebuild trust in an institution that had forfeited it, to show that the Church understood the gravity of what had been done and was committed to a different path forward. Whether four days in Paris, however carefully planned, could accomplish that remained an open question as his motorcade left the airport.