Not to be too glib about it, but the Catholic Church doesn’t come out of the whole European colonial project too well. I’m not a church scholar by any means, but a handful of important and relevant papal bulls make an appearance in all three of my books in relation to colonialism or slavery.

For instance, there was the 1452 Dum diversas that allowed the King of Portugal to conquer non-believers in foreign places and take their land and enslave them; or the infamous Inter caetera of Pope Alexander VI in 1493 that called for voyages to the lands of the Americas to carry ‘worthy, God-fearing, learned, skilled, and experienced men, in order to instruct the aforesaid inhabitants and residents in the Catholic faith’. This ‘doctrine of discovery’ also split the Americas between Spain and Portugal, which was confirmed the following year by Treaty of Tordesillas. The agreement — which, of course, did not involve the people who lived in these places — drew an imaginary line at 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. To the east, all the land was Portugal’s, and to the west, Spain’s.

Such papal legislation has not aged particularly well, though people far better versed in Catholic history could cite other bulls where the papacy tried to rectify itself, for instance the 1839 In supremo apostolatus, in which Pope Gregory XVI condemned the slave trade. This was followed five decades later with Leo XIII’s encyclical In plurimis, written on the occasion of Brazil’s abolition of slavery, the last place to do so in the Americas.

Despite this long history, when I sat down to read what the current pope, Leo XIV, had to say about artificial intelligence, I was not expecting a section on slavery in the middle of his recent encyclical. Leo XIV made headlines in the spring with his Magnifica humanitas, which reflects his deep engagement with many of the pertinent moral and ethical questions around AI. I was travelling at the time when it was issued and so I only followed the story out of the corner of my eye until I could return to my desk and have a proper look at the text. It’s not exactly the lightest read, though it is very much worth the effort.

At the end of chapter four, the subheading ‘Breaking the chains of new forms of slavery’ signals a bit of a key change. In this relatively brief section, the pope connects old patterns of exploitation to today’s developing AI economy, citing a range of examples, from low-paid women serving as content moderators to the impoverished miners forced to find the precious minerals that power our devices.

Leo XIV rightly points out that ‘it is not enough to invoke efficiency, nor to celebrate the benefits of innovation, if they are built on a chain of exploitation that remains deliberately hidden’. This technology promises emancipation, he reminds us, but so far has only produced ‘new forms of global subordination’. He positions himself in continuity with his predecessor’s condemnation of slavery at the end of the 19^th century, which now informs this recent denunciation of new forms of servitude and human trafficking.

The pope then takes it a step further and admits that the church has often been negligent on these issues in the past. He says: ‘Neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery.’ The Catholic Church’s actions — or inaction — on the issue of slavery has long been one of the fundamental contradictions in its history. Leo XIV makes no excuses, saying: ‘there has been a continuous affirmation throughout history of the dignity of every human being, created in the image of God, even if it took eighteen centuries for its full incompatibility with slavery to be explicitly recognized’. Even more surprising, he goes on to issue an apology:

It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon. 

It is, in many ways, an extraordinary passage, and one that perhaps could have only been contemplated or crafted by a pope whose own family would understand what it meant to be enslaved. Leo XIV, like many people across the entire Americas, is the product of the very legislation that condoned the rise of the European colonial project. On his mother’s side, he is part of a New Orleans creole family, meaning he has African ancestry and wider Caribbean connections. Indeed, he recently explained that his family tree includes enslaved people and enslavers. In addition, Leo was a priest in Peru for nearly two decades and is a fluent Spanish-speaker, which connects him to other parts of the sprawling, epic history of the Americas.

When I started reading the encyclical for this essay, I was hoping to see flashing beacons of papal wisdom to guide me through this AI present and future. They are certainly there. However, I hadn’t expected a light to fall on slavery and bring it out of the shadows. But it makes sense. It’s a common refrain from historians who work on topics like colonial Americas or African slavery (myself included) that the system forged in the 15^th century lives with us today. Even the pope agrees. The machines will never understand suffering, but humans do and must work to ensure that they are not, as Leo XIV writes, ‘reduced to data, a cog in the machine or a commodity’.

Amen to that. 

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What I’m … watching

I finally saw Before Sunrise on my way to Vienna this summer and I decided to rent the other two parts of the ‘Before’ trilogy, Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013), for the flight home. And then I managed to fall asleep and not watch them, so I had to do so last week, before the rental expired. Once more, I was taken with the prescient observations scattered throughout the series. (I was also delighted by the dreamy portrayals of Vienna, Paris, and the Greek coast). It feels like 2020 was a rupture of time, space, and conversation, but really we have been worried about the computers for a long time. The current AI conversation is just the latest — and perhaps most accelerated — form.

In the final installation, Before Midnight, it was amusing to see some of the characters talk about having a long-distance relationship using Skype, now mostly deceased (RIP) after being bought by Microsoft. At a dinner scene at a Greek villa, one of the people around the table asked the host, a writer modelled on Patrick Leigh Fermor,’And you are a writer, how are you going to feel when a computer can write a book better than War and Peace?’ to which he replied: ‘It’ll never happen.’ The others disagreed, not least the lead, Jesse (Ethan Hawke), who is also a writer. He reminded that crowd how the computer Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in chess: ‘Remember at first nobody thought a computer could ever beat our best … And now we can’t even compete.’ Patrick weighs back in, observing, ‘every generation believes that they’re witnessing the end of the world but … I feel that I’m actually living it.’ More than a decade on from that film, and we all seem to be doing just that. Maybe not the end of the world, but the end of a world.