The Pope Who Didn’t Speak
On May 22, 2025, the Vatican issued a rare and pointed condemnation—not of a person but of a machine-generated lie. A thirty-six-minute video had circulated online in which Pope Leo XIV appeared to praise Captain Ibrahim Traoré, the controversial revolutionary leader of Burkina Faso. The video, complete with lip-synced movements and papal solemnity, seemed real to the average viewer. But it was a fake. The voice, the gestures, the words—all fabricated using AI techniques like morphing and deep synthesis. The pope had never spoken those words. He hadn’t met the man. The speech, shared by a YouTube account called “Pan African Dreams,” was the product of an artificial intelligence engine trained to speak in the pontiff’s voice and move his image convincingly.
That the Vatican responded so swiftly speaks to the gravity of the offense. It wasn’t simply that the pope had been misrepresented or even that the Church was dragged into a volatile geopolitical narrative. It was that moral authority itself had been counterfeited, hijacked by tools capable of deceiving even the well-formed conscience. This was no harmless parody. It was an act of technological theft, one that violated not just trust in the person of the pope but trust in the Church as a witness to the truth.
In the Christian tradition, speech matters. The Logos—the Word—was made flesh (John 1:14). God speaks creation into being, and Christ speaks the beatitudes to reorient the moral order of the world. The Church, for her part, is entrusted with proclaiming the Gospel not just in ritual but in speech—homily, encyclical, exhortation, blessing. When the pope speaks ex cathedra, he does so not as a private individual but as a shepherd of souls.
To artificially generate papal speech, complete with gestures and tone, is not merely to simulate a public figure. It is to fabricate a false Magisterium—a shadow papacy of machines. The Vatican’s Antiqua et Nova (2025) anticipates this: “AI-generated fake media can gradually undermine the foundations of society,” it warns, especially when falsehood is clothed in institutional or spiritual authority (AN 88). When people can no longer distinguish between the true voice of the Church and a forged one, the proclamation of the Gospel is imperiled.
Moral authority itself had been counterfeited, hijacked by tools capable of deceiving even the well-formed conscience.
This is not just a political or technological challenge. It is a theological one. Deepfakes of religious leaders do not merely spread misinformation. They invent a lie in the image of truth, an inversion of Scripture aimed not to illuminate but to confuse. The danger of AI-generated papal speech lies precisely in its mimicry of moral gravity. It is a false Gospel spoken by a non-person, designed to appear as the authentic Word.
The Church’s Voice in the Digital Age
Every pope, from Pius XII’s early radio addresses to Benedict XVI’s digital catechesis, has engaged with the communication tools of his time. But artificial intelligence introduces something qualitatively different. Not merely a platform for distributing speech, AI can now invent speech—complete with tone, posture, facial expression, and rhetorical gravitas. The Church must now defend not only what she teaches but whether what she appears to teach is, in fact, hers at all.
Antiqua et Nova articulates this well: “It must be understood for what it is: a tool, not a person. This distinction is often obscured by the language used by practitioners, which tends to anthropomorphize AI and thus blurs the line between human and machine” (AN 59). A papal deepfake, even when exposed, leaves a residue of uncertainty in the public imagination. The Church’s task is not only to rebuke the lie but to reassert the metaphysical truth of human communication—that only a person can speak for the Church because only a person can love, suffer, repent, forgive, and bear moral responsibility.
The pope’s voice, whether in homily or in silence, is rooted in prayer, conscience, and ecclesial communion. No machine—no matter how accurate its rendering—can replicate that. In fact, the Vatican explicitly warns against the idolatry of artificial intelligence. “By turning to AI as a perceived ‘Other’ greater than itself . . . humanity risks creating a substitute for God” (AN 105). The deepfake of Pope Leo XIV praising a foreign leader is not just political manipulation. It is a graven image of a new kind—one that mimics the holy in form but not in substance.
We should view this as part of the long theological tradition that sees idolatry not simply as the worship of statues but the confusion of sign and source. To make an image of the pope speak falsely in his own name is to break the eighth commandment with digital tools. It is to bear false witness with algorithmic “lips.” In a culture where the line between real and artificial is easily blurred, as this example surely attests, truth becomes relative to perspective. A deepfake is a lie wearing the mask of plausibility. And when the lie is made to speak with the Church’s voice, it becomes a false sacrament—an outward sign of inward deception.
From Labor to Image
When Pope Leo XIV took his name in honor of Leo XIII, he signaled more than continuity. He declared that we are now facing a new “social question,” one as urgent as the labor injustices of the industrial revolution. In 1891, Rerum Novarum defended the worker’s body, wage, and dignity. In 2025, Antiqua et Nova defends the worker’s image, identity, and voice from technological co-option.
When people can no longer distinguish between the true voice of the Church and a forged one, the proclamation of the Gospel is imperiled.
Where the first industrial age threatened to grind human beings into mechanical parts, the AI age threatens to digitally duplicate the human form and separate it from moral agency. Just as Leo XIII opposed the reduction of the laborer to an economic function, so Leo XIV must oppose the reduction of the moral teacher to a programmable output.
In both cases, the Church responds by affirming the person: embodied, free, responsible, irreplaceable. “The intrinsic dignity of every man and every woman,” Antiqua et Nova declares, “must be the key criterion in evaluating emerging technologies” (AN 42). That dignity includes not only bodily integrity but the integrity of one’s moral witness.
Theological and Ethical Responsibilities
The Church has a double task: First, to form the faithful to discern truth from digital illusion; second, to shape the ethical architecture of the technologies that increasingly mediate our experience of reality.
In another piece, I argued that AI systems, however advanced, lack intentional consciousness, moral reflection, and spiritual interiority. Antiqua et Nova affirms this: “Only the human can be sufficiently self-aware to the point of listening and following the voice of conscience” (AN 39). A deepfake cannot sin, but it can be the instrument of sin. Thus, developers, platforms, and users all bear responsibility. The principle of subsidiarity (AN 42) demands that this discernment begin in families, schools, and parishes—not just regulatory agencies.
Concrete steps are needed. The Vatican itself has adopted ethical AI guidelines, requiring transparency, non-discrimination, and human accountability in all systems it employs. That’s commendable. But the broader digital ecosystem needs more. Watermarking, authentication protocols for official Church media, AI ethics education for seminarians and lay leaders—these are no longer optional.
Theologically, the Church must continue to articulate a robust anthropology in the face of AI’s anthropomorphic illusions. A human being is not a pattern of data. She is a mystery, a moral agent, a beloved child of God. When her likeness is manipulated to serve untruth, it is not only her dignity that is profaned—but also our understanding of truth itself.
Truth, Charity, and the Digital Common Good
The deepfake of Pope Leo XIV is a sign of the times—not just of technological capability but of cultural fragility. In a world saturated with images, we are increasingly susceptible to the persuasive lie, the plausible untruth, the voice that speaks without soul.
The Church must respond not only with denunciation but with proclamation—with the joyful witness that truth is not an algorithm but a person: Jesus Christ.
As Antiqua et Nova concludes, “The wisdom of the heart . . . cannot be sought from machines” (AN 114). It is found in the lives of the saints, in the discernment of the Church, and in the love that seeks not its own. Pope Leo XIV’s very name is a call to action. Just as Leo XIII defended the worker against the grinding forces of industry, so must we now defend the human voice, the human face, the human conscience from being hijacked by machines.
In the digital age, the Church remains the one place where truth is not optimized but revealed, not synthesized but received. It is left to us to ensure that the voice of the pope, and the Gospel he proclaims, is never reduced to an echo in the machinery of manipulation—but continues to speak, authentically and boldly, in the name of the Word made flesh.