Pope Leo XIV Opens France Visit With Warning Against a 'Paradise of Machines'

Pope Leo XIV opened a four-day journey through France on Friday by warning that artificial intelligence risks producing what he called a "paradise of machines," a phrase he used at both the Élysée Palace and the headquarters of UNESCO to argue that societies are already judging human beings by the same standard of efficiency applied to computers. The visit, from September 25 to 28, is the first sustained trip to a major Western European power since his election in May 2025, and it placed the American-born pontiff at the center of a debate that has moved well beyond church walls: how, and whether, governments can restrain artificial intelligence before it reshapes politics, work and childhood.

Leo landed in Paris on Friday morning and was received by President Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte Macron at the Élysée Palace, where the two men discussed what the French presidency described as challenges "to which France and the Holy See are jointly committed, foremost among which are climate change and artificial intelligence." In his own remarks to French authorities, civil society and the diplomatic corps, delivered in the palace gardens and published in full by the Vatican's official record of the address, the pope said that "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."

A return to UNESCO after 46 years

From the Élysée, Leo traveled across Paris to the headquarters of UNESCO, the United Nations' education, science and culture agency, at the invitation of Director-General Khaled El-Enany. According to UNESCO's own account of the visit, it was the first appearance by a pope at the organization in more than 40 years, since John Paul II addressed the agency in 1980. Leo used the setting to expand on his central theme, telling member states, diplomats and academics that "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."

He also turned to the institution's own struggles with relevance, telling the assembled delegates, according to reporting confirmed by ABC News Australia's account of the address, that international bodies risk becoming performative rather than functional.

"Dialogue is seen as an obstacle to action rather than a resource for peace, a charade rather than an opportunity to seek the common good together."

The line landed as a broader critique of multilateralism, delivered while a fractious session of the United Nations General Assembly was still underway in New York. Leo argued that AI systems, however sophisticated, "can correlate data" but "cannot answer questions that concern the meaning of human life," according to the pope's remarks as summarized by Al Jazeera's coverage of the UNESCO speech, and he asked the international community to focus in particular on children, saying their "vulnerability must never become an opportunity for exploitation."

The numbers behind the message

The Vatican has scheduled roughly fifteen public addresses across the four-day trip, which continues through Paris before moving to the pilgrimage site of Lourdes and concluding Monday in the border city of Metz, birthplace of Robert Schuman, one of the founding architects of postwar European integration. Leo's UNESCO remarks were anchored to the agency's 2021 Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, the first global standard of its kind, which has since been adopted by more than 70 of UNESCO's 193 member states but carries no binding enforcement mechanism. On the humanitarian side, the pope praised the French government-backed Fonds pour les écoles d'Orient, which has supported more than 260 schools and institutions in the Middle East since 2021, as an example of the kind of concrete solidarity he said should accompany diplomatic statements about the region's wars.

Who is watching, and who reacts

The audience for Leo's remarks was deliberately broad: heads of state and diplomats in the Élysée gardens, technology and education officials at UNESCO, and, more diffusely, the AI industry itself, which has faced a wave of government inquiries this year over child-safety failures and data misuse. UNESCO Deputy Director-General Åsa Regnér said the visit was "timely for our world," according to the Vatican's own news service report on the address, pointing to the agency's parallel work on information integrity and algorithmic bias. French officials, for their part, framed the visit primarily as a moment of bilateral diplomacy rather than confrontation, with the Élysée statement noting that Leo's April meeting with Macron at the Vatican had already opened a running dialogue on AI governance between Paris and the Holy See.

Catholic bishops traveling with the pope have also pointed to a domestic audience: French seminarians, clergy and lay Catholics, several thousand of whom were expected to gather for vespers at Notre Dame Cathedral, rebuilt after its 2019 fire, as part of the same day's schedule. For them, the AI message was paired with Leo's remarks on what he called the "indispensable foundation" of the right to life and a defense of what he termed "authentic secularity," which he said should value religion as "an educational resource" rather than exclude it from public life, according to the same Vatican-published transcript of his Élysée address.

What happens next

Leo's itinerary sends him to Lourdes for the weekend, where he is expected to lead prayers at the Marian shrine that draws millions of pilgrims annually, before a full symbolic day Monday in Metz tied to the European Union's founding generation. Vatican officials have signaled that AI and its governance will recur as a theme through the rest of the trip and into Leo's next major addresses, building on the encyclical he dedicated to the subject earlier in his pontificate. For UNESCO and the wider UN system, the immediate test is less rhetorical than practical: whether the pope's public rebuke of institutional "charade" adds pressure on member states to move beyond voluntary ethics recommendations toward enforceable rules, at a moment when national governments, including France's own, are simultaneously racing to attract AI investment and datacenter development on their own soil.