Pope Leo XIV Continuing Pope Leo XIII's Legacy in the Age of AI

By Robert Mixa

Much has already been said about the significance of the new pope choosing the name Leo XIV, especially given the legacy of Leo XIII, the architect of Catholic social teaching through his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. In his inaugural address to the College of Cardinals, Pope Leo XIV himself explicitly evoked this continuity, framing his pontificate as a response to today's urgent social question —one beyond the context of the first industrial revolution, but in the emerging challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor that stem from developments in artificial intelligence.

But there is another, subtler resonance in the name "Leo"—a resonance that calls us back to an earlier, more controversial legacy of Leo XIII—his critique of "Americianism." It is perhaps no small irony—or providence—that the first American pope, a religious formed in the Augustinian tradition, would take the name of a pope who warned so sharply against certain tendencies he saw emerging from American culture.

In 1899, Leo XIII issued the apostolic letter Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae to Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore. In it, he expressed concern over ideas associated with the so-called "Americanist" tendency—a term used not to denounce America per se, but rather to identify a theological and spiritual problem he feared would undermine the proper spiritual order in relation to God, which is at the heart of the Church. Gibbons famously dismissed the accusations as a "phantom heresy," insisting that no such ideas (which he did not deny were erroneous) were actually held by American clergy. Yet, rereading Leo's warnings in light of today's cultural and spiritual landscape—so profoundly shaped by American assumptions about liberty, utility, and technology—suggests that the pope may be been far more prescient than Gibbons recognized.

At the heart of Leo XIII's concern was not politics or nationalism, but what could be called spiritual anthropology. He detected a tendency to elevate the active virtues—those of industriousness, achievement, initiative—above the passive or contemplative virtues, such as humility, docility, and receptive silence before God. He feared an erosion of the Christian understanding of liberty, where freedom is not simply  self-direction, but submission to divine truth and grace. In this light, vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience were not seen as constraints but as liberations—ways of binding oneself in order to be truly free.

Leo wrote:

"Those who so bind themselves by the vows of religion, far from having suffered a loss of liberty, enjoy the fuller and freer kind, that liberty by which Christ hath made us free."

This is profoundly Augustinian: Augustine taught that the will, left to itself, is not free but enslaved—bent inward on itself (incurvatus in se). Only in binding ourselves to God do we find true liberty, since we are ordered to love Him. The paradox of Christian freedom is that it is discovered in surrender.

As an American, I find myself instinctively inclined to justify my life in terms of activity, productivity, usefulness. Even prayer can be reduced to a task—a discipline to be measured, optimized, and checked off. Years ago, my uncle—a physician caring for a contemplative community of nuns—confided in me his struggle to see the value of their way of life. "They just pray all day," he said. "Wouldn't it be better if they were doing something like feeding the poor, educating the ignorant, or caring for the sick?" I remember feeling uneasy, not because his question lacked sense, but because I too shared it—because I too was formed in a culture where contemplation seems impractical, even selfish.

We are, as Henry Adams put it in The Education of Henry Adams (1900), children of the Dynamo (the machine). In the now-famous chapter "The Dynamo and the Virgin," Adams, writing around the same time as Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, contrasts the mechanical, impersonal force of modern technology with the feminine, receptive power of the Virgin, particularly what he finds in the Virgin of Amiens or Chartres. He admits to standing before the giant generator at the 1900 Paris Exposition and feeling a kind of religious awe—an unconscious act of worship. "One began to pray to it," he confesses. For Adams, the dynamo symbolized a new ontology: power, energy, transformation, force—the ontology he attributes to Lord Francis Bacon. But Adams saw no corresponding reverence for the Virgin, no room for the contemplative, the passive, the graceful. "The twelfth-century man placed all his energies at the service of a woman. The twentieth-century man placed all his energies at the service of a machine." While Henry Adams was not a believer and saw Christianity as passing into the age of the machine, a Christian does not have to se this as inevitable.

Generators at 1900 Paris Exposition

Pope Leo XIV, elected on the Feast of Our Lady of Pompeii, patroness of the Rosary, appears keenly aware of this tension and the new age in which we are living. In his first address to the Cardinals, he urged them to become "docile listeners to His voice...mindful that God loves to communicate Himself not in the roar of thunder or the violence of the earthquake, but in the whisper of a gentle breeze...in a sound of sheer silence."

This is not incidental. "Docile listening" is not a passive abdication of responsibility—it is an active receptivity (bringing together the active and passive virtues). It is the virtue of Mary, who said fiat (let it be) to the angel's word and became the model for all Christian discipleship. In a world intoxicated by the logic of the machine (the world now coming out of Silicon Valley), the Church's mission may once again be to recover and uphold the contemplative—to remind the world that not all value is measured by output (which artificial intelligence will vastly outdo human beings), and that transformation begins in silent surrender to the Word.

If Leo XIII warned against the spiritual distortion he criticized in Americanism in the age of the dynamos, perhaps Leo XIV, standing at the threshold of the age of AI and a religious himself, is called to reclaim the Church's witness to a different kind of power—not that of control or acceleration, but the power of grace, of interior liberty, of lives conformed to Christ, that is, life informed by the evangelical counsels (poverty, chastity, and obedience).

May Leo XIV not only renew the Church's social vision in continuity with Rerum Novarum, but also—perhaps more radically—renew her spiritual anthropology by reclaiming the primacy of the contemplative over the technological, the receptive over the productive, and Mary over the dynamo. This does not mean the abolition of the latter but its elevation through service, like Mary’s, to the Word.

Virgin of Amiens