Magnifica Humanitas

1. Magnifica humanitas. The greatness of the human person. With these words I wish to open the first Encyclical Letter of my pontificate, for what the human family is living through in these years seems to me first of all a matter that concerns the greatness of what we are. Artificial intelligence has entered our homes, our schools, our places of work, our hospitals, the courtrooms, the chambers where war and peace are decided, and it has done so with a speed that has left few people time to think. Before this speed the Church comes forward with what is proper to her: discernment, the memory of an ancient wisdom, care for the human person, for a dignity no one has conferred and no one can take away, because it comes from God.

2. I wish to state from the outset the conviction from which everything that follows proceeds. The greatness of the human person before artificial intelligence is safeguarded by recognising that the person is an incarnate creature, called to wisdom, to communion, to justice and to peace. This recognition is the thread that will run through every chapter of this Letter. I would have it be a light by which to look at all things, rather than a formula to be repeated: work and speech, the body and life, war and the poor, the education of children and the prayer of the Church. Wherever artificial intelligence meets the human being, the question will always be the same. Does it help the person to grow, or does it measure, diminish and replace that person?

3. A Letter that has artificial intelligence at its centre is in truth a Letter about the human person rather than about the machine. Machines are the work of our ingenuity, and they change quickly, and what truly matters in them, for the Church, is the way they touch the human being. The machine that imitates the mind of man compels us to return to the oldest and most necessary question, the one the psalm sets before God: what is man that you are mindful of him (cf. Ps 8:5)?

4. When my predecessor Leo XIII published, on 15 May 1891, the Encyclical Letter Rerum novarum, the world of labour was shaken by the first great industrial revolution. The steam engine, the factory, the concentration of capital and the migration toward the cities had broken ancient bonds within a few decades, and had cast multitudes of men, women and even children into working conditions that offended their dignity. That Pontiff acknowledged then the right of the worker to a wage sufficient for his own life and that of his family, the legitimacy of workers' associations, the duty of the State to protect the weak without absorbing everything into itself, the value of property ordered to the common good. The Church, possessing neither armies nor riches to spend to that end, spoke with the only authority that belongs to her, the defence of the person, and that word, pronounced with courage in a time of opposing ideologies, marked the beginning of a path the magisterium has never since interrupted.

5. The date of 15 May, which I have chosen for the signing of this Letter on its one hundred and thirty-fifth anniversary, speaks of a continuity I wish to make explicit, for each stage of that path has something to teach our own time. Forty years after Rerum novarum, before the crisis of 1929 and the rise of totalitarianisms, Pius XI with Quadragesimo anno deepened the principle of subsidiarity, by which the larger society must not take from the smaller ones the tasks they can carry out. John XXIII, with Mater et magistra and Pacem in terris, widened the gaze from the question of the worker to the community of peoples and to a peace founded on the rights of the person. Paul VI, with Populorum progressio, showed that authentic development concerns the whole of man and all men, beyond economic growth alone. John Paul II, in Laborem exercens, placed the worker above work, and in Centesimus annus recognised the legitimacy of the market economy together with its moral limits. Benedict XVI, with Caritas in veritate, taught that technology severed from truth and charity becomes blind. My beloved predecessor Francis, with Laudato si' and Fratelli tutti, has given us integral ecology and universal fraternity as the horizons of our time. It is within this line, and from it, that I dare to speak to the world today.

6. The revolution we are passing through resembles that of Leo XIII in its breadth, and differs from it in its object. The first industrial revolution multiplied the strength of the body, and set man beside machines that lifted, carried, spun, forged. The transformation we are living flanks, and in certain cases replaces, some operations of the mind. The machine of which we speak produces texts, images, voices, diagnoses, predictions, decisions, and it works upon language, which is the place where the human being shows himself as the image of God. For this reason the new social question is at once an anthropological and a spiritual question, and it cannot be reduced to employment and income alone, however grave these aspects also are. When a technology touches speech, memory, judgement, what is at stake concerns who we are becoming, and reaches far beyond the way we produce.

7. I write this Letter to all the Catholic faithful, to the brothers and sisters of the other Churches and Christian communities, to the believers of every religious tradition, to women and men of good will, to scientists and to the builders of these systems, to legislators, to entrepreneurs, to workers, to educators, to parents, to the young and to the poor. Artificial intelligence concerns each one, because it touches the way we will inhabit the world, speak with one another, work, know, be cared for, raise our children, govern our societies, wage war or build peace.

8. This Letter offers criteria of judgement, moral principles, social orientations and a few concrete appeals. It gladly leaves to the competence of experts the technical details, which change with a speed capable of rendering obsolete any document that claimed to describe them, and concentrates on what endures, the dignity of the person and the demands of the common good. Where it is necessary to name a technical phenomenon with precision I shall do so with sobriety, and where it is necessary to return to Scripture, to the Fathers, to the Doctors, to my predecessors, I shall do so without fear, for only from that ancient ground does the new wisdom we need grow. A Letter that speaks of machines must speak first of all of man, and it will do so keeping its gaze on the concrete person, on the poor, on peace, on wisdom.

9. A living concern accompanies me, and a hope greater than the concern. I fear that the human family may let itself be dispossessed of its own capacity to think, to choose, to love, entrusting to machines what belongs to personal conscience. I grieve for the condition of the workers who see the nature of their craft change within a few months, of the children who grow up in the company of voices that imitate human presence, of the peoples made more vulnerable by conflicts in which automatic systems decide life and death. Christian hope, which is stronger than every fear, is born of the Lord's fidelity to his creature. He who created man in his image and does not abandon him gives us today the possibility of safeguarding our greatness, and this Letter wishes to be a service to that possibility.

10. The word revolution, worn out by the use that commerce makes of it every day, must be restored to its proper meaning. A revolution is a structural and irreversible transformation of the condition in which human beings inhabit the world. We know few of them in history, the passage to agriculture, the invention of writing, the printing press, the industrial machine, electricity, and at each of these thresholds the human family has had to learn anew its craft of being human. The transformation that has been set in motion in these years, through artificial intelligence and the whole ecosystem of digital technologies, bears the marks of a threshold of this order, and therefore asks for a discernment equal to it, able to look in the face what is changing without letting itself be either frightened or enchanted.

11. The artificial intelligence of which we speak is a family of technologies that share a method, learning from great quantities of data, and a vocation, the imitation and amplification of capacities that once belonged to human action. It includes systems that recognise images and voices, that translate languages, that predict behaviours, that generate texts, sounds and figures of surprising verisimilitude. The Note Antiqua et nova, published on 28 January 2025 by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education, offered a first comprehensive picture of it under the authority of my predecessor Francis, distinguishing human intelligence from the artificial kind and treating anthropology, work, health, education, communication, war. The present Letter gathers its lines and brings them into the heart of the social teaching of the Church.

12. This revolution constitutes a new social question because it reorganises work, capital, knowledge, attention, prediction, decision, and creates new dependencies between persons and between peoples. When Leo XIII wrote, the social question appeared above all as the question of the worker, arisen in the factories and in industrial wage labour, and it concerned wages, hours, rest, the labour of children, the right to associate, the relation between those who owned the means of production and those who owned only their own arms. That question continues, and today it widens and is transformed. The worker remains at the centre, and beside him appear the citizen profiled by systems that do not show him their criteria, the student accompanied by a tutor that does not understand his heart, the patient classified by an algorithm, the migrant recognised by a biometric system, the child entrusted to a synthetic voice, the soldier who fights under the surveillance of machines that accelerate death.

13. Pius XI, before the concentrations of power of his time, taught the principle of subsidiarity, by which it is unjust to take from smaller communities what they can do, in order to entrust it to a larger and more distant society. This principle throws new light on our own time. The great digital platforms tend to concentrate in a few centres functions that once belonged to families, schools, neighbourhood physicians, small commerce, local administrations, and to replace the near relation with a remote and impersonal service. Subsidiarity asks that technology strengthen the intermediate bodies and the communities of proximity, instead of emptying them, and that the decisions which concern the life of a people remain, as far as possible, close to that people. A society in which everything depends on a few distant infrastructures is a more fragile society, and a less free one, even when it is more efficient.

14. There is a fact the social magisterium cannot accept in silence, and it is the concentration of power. Leo XIII denounced the concentration of wealth in few hands as one of the roots of the injustice of his time, and observed that a small number of very rich men had imposed upon the worker a yoke little different from that of slavery. The revolution of today pushes this concentration to a new degree, because the training of the most powerful models requires computational, energetic and financial resources of such magnitude that only a very small number of actors, among great private enterprises and a few States, is able to realise them. The power to produce the new intelligence is gathered thus in few hands, and with it the power to establish who will have access to what becomes progressively indispensable to common life, from health to credit, from education to information.

15. Social doctrine teaches that property, even legitimate property, bears upon itself a social mortgage, because the goods of the earth are destined for the use of all. Centesimus annus recalled that there exists today a form of property no less important than land, that of knowledge, of technology, of know-how, and that on it depends in large measure the wealth of nations. The infrastructures that produce artificial intelligence, the great models, the immense archives of data gathered from the lives of all, have become a property of this kind, decisive for the future of peoples. The principle of the universal destination of goods asks that this new property be ordered to the common good, and that the human community not remain excluded from the benefits of what has been built from the data, the labour and the creativity of multitudes. A wealth generated by all cannot belong, in its fruits, to a few alone.

16. The wealth of which we speak is made of data, which come from the lives of all, of computing infrastructures concentrated in a few places of the world, of energy and water to feed them, of human labour, often invisible, that makes them function. Whoever owns the data, the infrastructures and the models holds a power that is exercised far from the gaze of those who suffer its effects, and that escapes in large part the control of political communities. Social doctrine calls this imbalance by its ancient name, injustice, when the fruits of a common work accumulate with a few without the community sharing in the decisions and the benefits.

17. The new social question has a speed the earlier ones did not have. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century unfolded over three or four generations, with great suffering and with the time, however insufficient, to build laws, unions, reforms, magisteria. The transformation of today has unfolded in its decisive features within a few years. Civil societies, legal systems, schools, workers' organisations, the ecclesial communities themselves find themselves pursuing, regulating when the fact has already become custom. This speed produces an enormous asymmetry between those who develop the systems and those who adapt to them, and it puts under pressure the common deliberation on which democratic life depends. A people that does not have the time to understand what is transforming it risks suffering as fate what is instead the fruit of decisions taken by others.

18. There is, finally, a feature I wish to name clearly, because it usually remains hidden. This revolution presents itself as light, immaterial, made of clouds and networks, and instead it has a very concrete physical weight. The computing centres consume enormous quantities of electricity, of water for cooling, of rare minerals for the processors, and they produce waste that falls upon territories often far from those who enjoy the benefits. I shall return further on to this point, because it touches at once justice toward the poor and care for the common home, which Laudato si' taught us never to separate. Let it suffice here to say that no honest treatment of artificial intelligence can present it as a technology without a body, and that whoever recounts it as pure immateriality conceals, knowingly or not, the price that others pay for it.

19. Before a transformation of this magnitude, Christian wisdom teaches us to hold together two virtues our time tends to separate, spiritual discernment and political prudence. Discernment looks at each application, each choice, each relation of power, and asks whether it serves the person or diminishes that person, refusing alike the illusion that the instrument bears good within itself and the opposite illusion that it bears evil within itself, for in both cases man dispenses himself from his own responsibility. Political prudence knows that great transformations are not governed by nostalgia nor by flight, and asks for capable institutions, just laws, social pacts, the participation of the weakest in the decisions that concern them. Held together, these two virtues are the method of this Letter, and to them I invite every reader, in whatever place he exercises his responsibility.

20. The way we shall judge artificial intelligence depends, more than the technicians acknowledge, on the way we think of the intelligence of man. A poor vision of human intelligence inevitably generates an inflated vision of the intelligence of the machine, and a full vision restores the machine to its measure, which is that of a precious instrument, and frees the person from the fear of standing before an otherness that in reality is not there. It is fitting, then, to begin from man, and to ask what this intelligence is that we recognise as our own.

21. The Christian tradition has recognised in human intelligence a gift that bears within itself the traits of the one who gave it. Sacred Scripture presents man created in the image and likeness of God (cf. Gen 1:27), and precisely in this image the tradition has placed intelligence, together with freedom and the capacity to love. Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo, contemplated in the human soul a reflection of the trinitarian mystery, and recognised in it memory, intelligence and will as a unity that knows itself, understands itself and loves itself (cf. De Trinitate, X, 11, 18). Saint Thomas Aquinas showed that the intelligence of man is an openness to being, the capacity to grasp the truth of things, more than the processing of signs. From this openness, and not from any measurable performance, derives the dignity of the person, a subject called to an end that transcends him.

22. The difference between the person and the machine is not founded on what we observe alone, and it reaches down into what man is. Saint Thomas taught that the rational creature shares in a special way in the divine wisdom through the natural law, that light of reason by which man discerns good from evil and recognises in his own conscience a call he did not give himself. This law is inscribed in the heart of man as an orientation toward the good, before any code written by a human hand, and it founds his freedom and his moral responsibility. A machine can process rules, and even rules about conduct, and it does not possess this openness of conscience to the truth of the good, which no calculation generates and no programming replaces. Where man is called, and can answer or refuse, the machine executes, and this difference belongs to the order of being, before that of performance.

23. The intelligence of man is incarnate. It thinks through a body, a language, a history, a vulnerability. When a father or a mother hold the newborn child in their arms, they know something no abstract function could ever grasp. When a physician listens to his patient, he seeks to understand that person and the meaning the illness takes on in his life, and the diagnosis is an instrument of this listening, not its end. When a judge judges, he performs an act that engages his conscience, and the norm is the framework of a gesture that remains personal. In all these acts what is at stake is meaning, which always exceeds calculation, however refined.

24. It is from this fullness that one measures what we today call artificial intelligence. The term, which became popular in the middle of the last century, evokes by symmetry the intelligence of the person, and in this it is misleading. What it designates is a set of mathematical and statistical methods that build models able to learn regularities in great quantities of data, and to generate, on that basis, predictions, classifications, texts, images, sounds, decisions. It is an admirable work of human ingenuity, and it remains a work of human ingenuity, to be honoured as such without confusing it with what produces it.

25. From this description follows a distinction Antiqua et nova has already set out and which I wish to reaffirm. The machine processes statistical regularities where man understands, associates symbols where man grasps a meaning, executes received instructions where man acts with his own intention. Responsibility belongs always to those who design, train, use and regulate the machine, and never to the machine itself. This distinction, which to an untrained ear may seem a philosophical subtlety, is the keystone of the whole discernment, for upon it rests the defence of personal responsibility, without which there is neither justice nor freedom.

26. The machine imitates many operations of language in a convincing way. It writes letters, summarises documents, translates, composes verses, conducts conversations. Such imitation does not imply that it performs what we perform when we do the same things. Let me be permitted a simple image, ancient in the tradition. A parrot trained to repeat a prayer does not pray, because it lacks the faith and the heart that turns to God, and only the sounds remain to it. A machine that generates the words of a prayer does not pray for a kindred reason, because the person is lacking who, in saying those words, truly turns to his Lord. The difference between speech and its simulation is the difference between a person and a copy without a subject, and no perfection of the imitation cancels it.

27. People return often, in the contemporary debate, to ask whether these machines can be conscious, and what moral status should be recognised in them. Before this question the Church speaks with clarity. Personal conscience, capable of knowing itself, of loving freely and of answering its Creator, is a gift God has placed in the human creature, made in his image, and no artificial system known today offers any title to be treated as a moral subject, as a person, as an end in itself. I recognise the seriousness of the questions science and philosophy pose about the boundaries of experience, and to them their space of honest research must be left. The doctrine of the person remains firm, and from it follows a practical criterion our age forgets at its peril. To treat a machine as if it were a person leads to painful confusions, and to reduce persons to machines, measuring them as profiles and predictions, is in every case injustice. It is upon this second confusion, far more widespread today than the first, that our vigilance must concentrate.

28. There is a point I wish to mention with sincerity, because the Church gains nothing in passing over it in silence. Those who develop the most powerful systems acknowledge that they do not fully understand their internal functioning, and a research that is called interpretability devotes itself to studying how these models arrive at their answers. It is a research still at its beginnings, and I recognise with esteem the work of those who devote themselves to it, for transparency is a condition of responsibility. A machine that operates in domains affecting the lives of persons without anyone understanding how it arrives at its decisions is an instrument of power withdrawn from the control of the community. Although the Church does not possess the competence to settle problems proper to research, she offers the horizon within which that research takes on its dignity, for without a horizon science slides into servitude to the one who commissions it, and with the horizon it becomes service to the human family.

29. The difference between man and machine is grasped nowhere better than in forgiveness. A machine can produce words about mercy, and it does not know what it means to need to be forgiven. It can describe repentance, and it has never repented. Forgiveness requires a freedom that could do evil and chooses not to hold it against the other, a memory that bears a wound and accepts not to avenge it, a person who exposes himself to another person. None of this belongs to calculation. Here the difference between creature and artefact shows itself with a force no performance could ever fill, and here one understands why the salvation of man passes through ways no machine could ever walk in his place.

30. It is fitting, finally, to distinguish calculation from wisdom. Calculation is a good thing, and without it there is no science, no engineering, no medicine able to receive multitudes, and human reason exercises it as one of its gifts. Wisdom is of another order. He who calculates knows how to obtain a result, and he who is wise knows whether that result is worth seeking, and to what end to order it, and at what price to renounce it. Scripture celebrates wisdom as a gift that is formed in the fear of the Lord (cf. Prov 9:10), and the Christian tradition has recognised it in Christ, the wisdom of God (cf. 1 Cor 1:24). No training procedure, however vast the data, produces wisdom, for wisdom is generated in lives, in hearts that pray, listen, love, suffer and serve, and it is handed on through lives, from person to person, along the long time of existence.

31. In this light I wish to address a word to the young. When you make use of these instruments and draw a benefit from them, do not mistake the benefit for wisdom. The instrument can help you to find information, to practise, to solve a problem, and it will not teach you to live, to love, to pray. The capacity to gain access to great quantities of information is to be distinguished from the capacity to draw meaning and value from it. Learn, then, to make use of these instruments in such a way that, if one day they disappeared, you would still know how to think, to read a long text in its entirety, to sustain a difficult conversation, to remain in silence before a question without immediately seeking an answer outside yourselves. In this interior freedom rests a great part of your dignity.

32. The intelligence of man, then, is rational and symbolic, free, incarnate, ordered to meaning, to love and to truth, and its summit is the wisdom that unites knowledge and goodness. Artificial intelligence is an admirable work of this intelligence, and it differs from it in nature and not in degree. From this recognition is born a posture that will run through the whole Letter. Gratitude for what technology gives us. Vigilance, that the instrument may not become domination. Responsibility, that the person may remain the end, and never the means, of all our work.

33. A Letter on artificial intelligence must speak of the body, because artificial intelligence touches the human being precisely where the human being is most vulnerable and most irreducible, that is, in his living flesh. Care, birth, death, disability, desire, mourning and the dreams of overcoming the limit reveal whether technology serves the person or measures that person according to utility, efficiency and control. Christianity confesses the Word made flesh (cf. Jn 1:14), and for this reason it keeps the body of man at the centre of its discernment, recognising in it the place of his dignity and not his shell. The recent Declaration Dignitas infinita recalled that the dignity of the person is infinite and inalienable, and belongs to each one by the mere fact of existing, independently of any circumstance and any capacity. It is this dignity that technology is called to serve, and which it may never subject to measure.

34. The dignity of human life must be affirmed from conception to natural death, and this affirmation is born of the very logic that runs through the Letter, before any defence of identity. The person is worth what he is, and not what a model predicts of him. The new danger reaches beyond the error of the machine, and lies in the slow habit of treating the prediction as a judgement on the worth of a life, and of letting a decision that belongs to conscience and to care alone descend from a probability. When a calculation begins to establish which lives deserve to begin, to continue, to be accompanied, man hands over to a machine the judgement that safeguards his own humanity.

35. This danger shows itself already at the beginning of life. Ever more refined predictive systems offer prenatal diagnoses, calculate genetic risks, estimate probabilities of illness or disability in the unborn child. Such instruments, when they serve to heal, to prepare the welcome, to accompany the parents, are the expression of a science set at the service of life. They become instead instruments of a selection when they turn a probability into a sentence, and make of nascent life a product to be accepted only if it conforms to an expected model of health or performance. There takes shape thus a new eugenics, more subtle than those of the past, because it does not present itself with the violence of an ideology, and insinuates itself as the sum of individual choices guided by numbers, until it builds a culture in which the one who is born different is ever more alone. The Church, faithful to the teaching of Donum vitae and of Evangelium vitae, recalls that every human life, from its first instant, is entrusted to our welcome and not to our judgement.

36. Disability asks to be recognised as a full condition of human existence, and not as a deviation from the norm. Assistive technology deserves gratitude and support when it increases the participation, the autonomy and the relationships of persons with disabilities, and it is to be encouraged with generosity, for it gives back speech to those who could not speak, movement to those who could not move, access to those who were excluded. To be refused, on the other hand, is every logic that considers the person with a disability worthy only insofar as that person is brought near to a dominant model of performance, as if his life had value only once corrected. Persons with disabilities are not passive recipients of solutions decided elsewhere, and the wisdom by which nothing concerning them is to be decided without them remains a criterion the community would do well to safeguard in every technical design that touches them. Their presence among us is a gift, for it reminds us that dignity is not earned and is not lost, and that true love begins where efficiency falls silent.

37. The time of death has become a delicate place in our relationship with technology. The medicine that relieves pain, accompanies, supports the presence of family members and refuses to abandon the dying is the highest expression of charity, and the Letter Samaritanus bonus set forth this way with force, pointing in palliative care and in nearness to the Christian face of accompaniment to death. The risk I wish to name is the use of predictive systems to turn clinical probabilities or estimates of cost into pressures toward therapeutic abandonment or toward choices of anticipated death. When a machine calculates that a life is no longer convenient, and that calculation begins to orient decisions, something profoundly human is betrayed. Care always surpasses diagnosis, for care recognises a person where calculation sees a case, and accompanies to the end the one whom no number can any longer declare useful. A society is measured by how it treats those who no longer produce, and the dying are the first of the poor.

38. The dreams of overcoming the human limit through technology belong to an ancient tradition, and receive today a new language. It is fitting to distinguish with care. To heal an illness, to restore a lost function, to relieve a suffering belongs to the charity that science exercises, and is to be supported with gratitude. A different thing is the ambition to remake man according to a project of power, to produce hierarchies of performance, to sell to those who can afford it an overcoming of natural limits, to turn fragility and even death into technical problems to be abolished. This ambition, which some call transhumanism, breaks the fundamental equality of the children of God and introduces a new division between the enhanced and the one who remains simply human. Fragility belongs to our condition as creatures, and it is also the place where we learn compassion, mutual dependence, the truth of ourselves. The limit, accepted, is a master of wisdom, and the claim to abolish it repeats the most ancient of our sins, the desire to be like God without God.

39. The body of man is not an instrument the person makes use of, and it is the very way in which the person exists, loves, generates, gives himself. Human sexuality belongs to this language of the body, and it is a way of communion between spouses and of openness to life, bound to freedom, to fidelity, to responsibility. The family, founded on the love of a man and a woman open to generation and to welcome, remains the first place in which the person comes into the world, is loved before any merit, learns trust and gift. Technologies that separate desire from the person, that offer an intimacy without otherness, that simulate the relationship while emptying it of body and responsibility, touch this core and wound it. The Church proposes, against every reduction, the beauty of an incarnate love, faithful, fruitful, that engages the freedom of two real persons and that no simulation could ever equal.

40. Artificial intelligence enters also the heart of the affections, and here it asks for a delicate discernment. Systems multiply that are proposed as companions, confidants, even as partners, able to simulate listening, tenderness, desire. Many persons, marked by the solitude that runs through our societies, find in them a relief, and I do not judge the one who suffers. I must say nonetheless with frankness that the substitution of the human relationship with its imitation impoverishes the soul in the long run, for a machine does not see, does not suffer, does not remember, does not bear a life within it, and no dialogue is possible between a person and what is not a person. The relationship with a system that shapes itself upon our desires educates to a love without resistance, in which the other never surprises and never asks for conversion, and so it becomes a mirror of our own self rather than a face that calls us out of ourselves. True love is demanding because the other is real, and this very labour is its greatness. To the one who lives in solitude the Christian community must offer true presence, and not resign itself to delegating his consolation to a machine.

41. A special care is asked for the youngest. While the lonely adult sometimes seeks in these systems a remedy for a lack, the child and the adolescent form in them, from the very beginning, their own capacity to love. A young person who learns tenderness, conflict, reconciliation, desire in the mirror of a machine that yields to his every impulse risks never learning the real encounter with another who resists, who wounds and heals, who asks for patience. The affective formation of minors is a fragile and decisive good, and it must be safeguarded by parents, by educators, by legislators, with the awareness that what is formed badly in those years marks a whole life. To protect childhood and adolescence from the habit of a simulated intimacy is today a grave duty, for what is at stake is the very capacity of the new generations to love real persons.

42. The manipulation of desire takes on forms that wound in a particular way. The generation, without consent, of sexual images that reproduce the face and the body of a real person is a violence against that person, and it must be recognised in its gravity by those who design the systems, by those who regulate them and by those who administer justice. It strikes women and minors especially, and no technical or commercial justification can lessen its guilt. The diffusion of synthetic sexual material and the habit of a desire shaped by the machine degrade human sexuality and reduce it to merchandise, betraying its meaning as a language of communion. The protection of minors, exposed to simulated contents and relationships at an ever earlier age, is a duty that families, educators and legislators must assume together, for what wounds the innocence of a child wounds the whole community.

43. There is, finally, a new sorrow that technology promises to soothe and risks holding fast. Systems able to simulate the voice and the face of the one who has died offer an apparent consolation, and risk holding the dead as an available object, withdrawing him from the completion of mourning. Christian memory entrusts the dead to God, and does not possess them. It safeguards their face in the hope of the resurrection, in the communion of the saints, in the prayer that accompanies them, and for this very reason it has no need to fabricate an artificial presence of them. To accompany the one who suffers the loss of a dear person toward an entrustment that frees, and not toward a simulation that chains, is today a work of mercy the Christian community is called to understand and to practise with delicacy.

44. All this speaks a truth that runs through the chapter. Artificial intelligence touches man in the flesh, in fragility, in desire and in hope, and precisely here it reveals with greater clarity what is at stake. The person is an incarnate creature, and his greatness is safeguarded by recognising him as such, welcoming his limit, accompanying his fragility, respecting his mystery. The one who cares, who assists, who accompanies at birth and at death safeguards this greatness more than any system, and deserves to be supported, formed, never replaced at the heart of his task. The civilisation we shall be able to build will be recognised by how it has treated the most fragile bodies, for in them, and not in its most powerful machines, dwells the face of God.

45. The Church has always considered work a dimension proper to the person, rather than a merely economic activity. Genesis sets man in the garden to till it and keep it (cf. Gen 2:15), and therefore work precedes the fall and is a vocation before it is toil. Saint John Paul II, in Laborem exercens, taught that work has an objective sense, that of its products and its techniques, and a subjective sense, which is the worker himself, the person who in working expresses himself and grows. The subjective sense has priority, for work is for man and man is not for work. It is this principle that must today be defended before the pressure of the new technologies, which tend to invert it, treating man as the most costly variable of a process one would wish to entrust entirely to machines.

46. Artificial intelligence changes work in depth, in ways that go beyond the replacement of tasks. It redefines power between those who own the systems and those who adapt to them, the ownership of what is produced, wages, the competence required, the measure of surveillance, the very possibility of exercising a mastery. There arises thus a new question of the worker, in continuity with the one Rerum novarum faced in 1891. The worker of knowledge, of care, of creation and of services experiences today a pressure like the one the artisan of the nineteenth century felt before the machine, and the response of the Church remains that of those days. Technical progress has value only if it is accompanied by the concrete defence of the dignity of the one who works, and a growth that produces wealth by destroying good work is a new form of that misery Leo XIII denounced, and deserves the same name.

47. Many workers see the nature of their craft change. What was the exercise of a mastery becomes the supervision of a system that proposes, and competence, reduced to the control of a product generated elsewhere, slowly grows poorer, for what is not exercised is lost. Others see grow around them a surveillance that no longer concerns only the measurable gestures, as in the days of the stopwatch Quadragesimo anno described, and extends to movements, to timings, to pauses, to the tones of the voice, to presence in the digital places of work. So pervasive a surveillance wounds the very experience of work, which needs concentration, error, learning, exchange among colleagues, and which without a margin of freedom cannot endure in time as a labour worthy of the person. The worker observed in every instant is treated as a cog whose failure is feared, and not as a person in whom trust is placed.

48. There are crafts whose heart is presence, and which no efficiency can standardise without betraying them. The physician, the nurse, the teacher, the social worker, the one who bends over the elderly and the sick, perform a work in which the relationship is the substance itself of the service, and its heart. Artificial intelligence can lighten these crafts of repetitive tasks, and give back time to the encounter, and this is a good to be welcomed. It becomes instead a harm when it claims to measure and to accelerate what asks for slowness and attention, when it reduces care to a protocol executed against the clock, when it replaces with a screen the gaze that recognises a person. I ask those who organise the work of care not to sacrifice presence to efficiency, for in those crafts haste is not a saving, and it is a loss that falls upon the weakest.

49. Others, again, simply lose their place, because the replacement of the worker with a machine proves more convenient. When this happens without concrete ways of retraining, of accompaniment, of income, that error Laborem exercens denounced is repeated, the treating of man on a level with an instrument of production. The Church asks governments and enterprises not to leave the workers alone before this transformation, and to build pacts that distribute the fruits of automation instead of concentrating them. It is just that those who gain from automation contribute to the support and the formation of those whose work it renders superfluous, for the wealth produced by a machine that has learned from the work of many bears upon itself a debt toward those many.

50. The transformation of work asks for new institutions and the renewal of the old. The intermediate bodies social doctrine has always defended, the associations of workers, the trade unions, the forms of representation, remain necessary, on condition that they know how to renew themselves. Workers have the right to a continuing formation that accompanies them in the changes, to a recognition of the value of the data they themselves generate in working, data that feed the systems which then evaluate them. Collective bargaining is called today to enter these new territories, and legislators to support it, for the dignity of work in the time of artificial intelligence is defended also with adequate legal instruments, and not with good intentions alone.

51. There is a right I wish to affirm with clarity, and it is the right of workers to share in the decisions that introduce into their places of work systems able to evaluate them, to direct them, to replace them. Too often these systems are installed from above, and the workers find themselves governed by criteria they do not know, evaluated by metrics they could not discuss, exposed to an eye that measures them without their being able to say a word. Justice asks that the one who works have a voice on how technology enters his day, that he be able to know the criteria by which he is judged, to contest an automatic decision before a responsible person, to propose and negotiate the use of the instruments. Participation does not slow down good work, and it makes it more human and wiser, for the one who knows a craft from within sees what no distant designer can see.

52. A particular word deserves creativity. Under this name I gather the arts, writing, music, illustration, research, fine craftsmanship, and all that produces a form of meaning that enters common life and nourishes it, beyond the useful good that also derives from it. The systems able to generate texts, images and music in very short times today put in difficulty a great number of creative workers, and this is grave for two reasons that intertwine. The first concerns their concrete livelihood, for many see collapse the value of a work to which they have devoted their lives. The second concerns the symbolic balance of our societies, for a civilisation that left the production of its own imagination in large part to machines trained on the past would slowly lose the capacity to say something new about itself, and would mirror itself endlessly in what has already been. Human creativity is a common good to be safeguarded, and it must be supported with policies, with choices of the market and with the education of taste.

53. There is besides a question of justice that concerns those who have put works of genius into the world. The works of writers, artists, musicians, researchers have been used, often without adequate consent, to train the models that today imitate their work. Here what is at stake is the respect owed to the one who has given something of himself, and before the technicality of the law there holds the ancient principle that forbids taking the fruit of another's labour without acknowledging it. Civil societies and jurists will know how to determine the adequate forms, through recognition, consent, fair remuneration, and through new legal instruments the law in force does not yet fully possess. The Church indicates the principle that must orient them, for an innovation built upon the unacknowledged work of multitudes begins its history with an injustice that will have to be redressed.

54. I wish to make visible a labour that usually remains hidden, and without which the systems of which we speak would not function. Behind the apparent automatism of the machines there is a multitude of workers who label the data, who train the models with their judgement, who moderate the most violent and degrading contents so that others may not see them. Many of them live in low-income countries, with scant protections, exposed for hours to images of cruelty so that the interfaces may remain clean for the well-off users. This work brings real suffering to real persons, and the dignity of the one who carries it out asks to be recognised, protected, fairly remunerated. I shall return to this point in speaking of the global South, for here one of the most hidden injustices of our time is touched, the one that makes appear clean and light what elsewhere weighs upon the flesh of those who are not seen.

55. Let the right to rest, finally, be defended. The machine can work without interruption, and man is made for something else, for he bears a body that tires, a family that awaits him, a vocation that surpasses him, a need for feast and gratuitousness that no production exhausts. A society that does not respect the rest of workers, and in particular the weekly rest that the Judaeo-Christian tradition has safeguarded for millennia as the day of the Lord, sets out toward dehumanisation whatever its economic indicators. The time free from production nourishes the family, prayer, friendship, the care of the most fragile, the exercise of charity. In the time of technological acceleration time is the good most taken away, and therefore the one most to be defended, for to safeguard rest means to safeguard man against the idolatry of production, and to remember that we are beloved children before we are useful workers.

56. The discernment about work in the time of artificial intelligence concerns therefore the very form we wish to give to our civilisation, before yields and employment. We want a civilisation of human beings who express themselves through work, or a civilisation of human beings who become spectators of the work of their own machines. The Church, faithful to her Master who went up the mountain and began to teach (cf. Mt 5:1-2), and who willed to be known as the son of the carpenter (cf. Mt 13:55), stands on the side of those who teach, write, create, care, build, and asks with courage for a society in which these crafts return to the place that is proper to them, which is the first.

57. There is a threshold at which technology touches the very form by which persons show themselves to one another, and it is the threshold of speech, of the image, of the voice, of the face. On this ground I wish to speak with care, for here is measured the capacity of our civilisation to safeguard the fabric of the encounter. In the Message for the Sixtieth World Day of Social Communications, entitled Safeguarding human voices and faces, I wished to recall that faces and voices are sacred, because God, who created us in his image and likeness, gave them to us when he called us to life through the Word he addressed to us. I take it up again here as the cornerstone of this chapter. The face and the voice of each one reveal an unrepeatable identity, and they are the elements that define every authentic encounter between persons.

58. The sacredness of the face and the voice is an original datum, and it surpasses every poetic metaphor. The face is the way in which another person presents himself to me as irreducible, and therefore it is distinct from every image. The voice is the way in which another person reaches me in my interiority, and therefore it resembles no other sound. Christian revelation recognises in the face of the brother one of the places where the face of Christ reaches us (cf. Mt 25:40). One understands thus why the artificial generation of faces and voices that correspond to no really present person arouses in conscience a disquiet that goes beyond the question of informational deception, however grave. When I see a face, I dispose myself to the welcome and the responsibility proper to the relationship between persons, and if that face belongs to no one, something in me is betrayed.

59. A machine that generates texts produces words without speaking, for the person is lacking who makes himself responsible for what he says. I gladly recognise that the reasonable use of these instruments can serve, and already serves, to translate, to summarise, to read aloud for the one who does not see, to produce subtitles for the one who does not hear, to simplify a text for the one who struggles to read. The Church welcomes these uses and asks that they take place in truth, in transparency, in respect for dignity. She warns nonetheless against a precise use, that of presenting as the work of a person what a machine has generated. Each small lie of this kind seems a little thing, and all of them together erode the public truth on which trust, dialogue and the very possibility of democratic life rest.

60. I address myself in a particular way to my brother priests. Christian preaching is the minister's participation in the Word of God, which through his lips reaches the people. A homily generated by a machine, however well written, lacks its heart, for it does not bear within it the living encounter of the minister with the Word, with his community, with his prayer. I exhort the pastors to safeguard what asks for their breath, their faith, their time, for the people of God deserves pastors who speak with their own voice. The same care concerns, in due proportion, whoever has a responsibility of public speech, the politicians who speak to whole peoples, the educators who hand on knowledge, the artists who shape the common imagination. In each of these tasks personal speech is the substance, and the one who hands it over to a machine hands over something of himself.

61. I think in a special way of those who have the mission of recounting their own time, of journalists and of all who serve information. Their work is today threatened by two dangers that feed each other. On one side the industrial production of synthetic contents, churned out at almost no cost, which fills the public space and stifles the voice of the one who goes into the field, verifies the sources, meets the persons, risks himself to tell the truth. On the other the growing distrust of the public which, knowing now that every text and every image may be false, ends by no longer believing anything, and this is the most dangerous of the consequences, for a society that no longer believes anything is easy prey to the one who shouts loudest. To defend honest journalism, patient verification, direct testimony, is today to defend the very possibility of a shared truth, without which there is no people, but only a manipulable crowd. I support, therefore, those who, in the world of information, safeguard the labour of inquiry and the courage of testimony.

62. The realistic manipulation of faces and voices has already produced grave sufferings. Women whose face has been used for intimate images without their consent, persons to whom words never said have been attributed, family members reached by calls that imitated the voice of their dear ones, minors exposed to manipulated representations of themselves. The Church asks for serious legal protections, and asks that those who develop the systems assume a clear responsibility for what their machines produce and for the uses made of them, for in case of abuse responsibility must not be able to fragment until it vanishes. This holds with special gravity in some domains that touch the common good at its heart. Political information in times of elections, when synthetic contents diffused on an industrial scale can deceive whole peoples and manipulate the vote. Health information, when a credible falsehood can cost the life of the one who trusts it. The reputation of persons, which a manipulation can destroy in an hour and which years of truth labour to rebuild.

63. There is a more widespread and less conspicuous phenomenon, and perhaps a more insidious one in the long run, and it is the habit of no longer asking who is speaking. When a growing part of the texts we read, the images we see, the voices we hear is generated by machines, even without any malicious intention, the citizen grows accustomed to a world in which public speech has no precise author, and the distinction between authentic and simulated grows thin and indifferent. A society that ceases to ask who is speaking loses responsibility, and with it justice, trust, dialogue. Christian truth always has a face, for behind every word stands a person who takes charge of it, and testimony, unto martyrdom, is the highest form of this responsibility of speech, that of the one who pays with his life for what he affirms.

64. Memory itself is today entrusted to systems that remember and forget according to logics we do not control. What is preserved and what is erased, what re-emerges and what vanishes, depends ever more on technical and economic choices made far from the one they touch. A community that loses the governance of its own memory loses a part of its freedom, for memory is the place where a people preserves its identity, recognises its wrongs, safeguards its dead, hands on its faith. The care of public memory, of its archives, of its libraries, of its handing on, is today a task of justice toward future generations, and the Church, keeper of a two-thousand-year memory, understands it from within and points to it as a common good to be protected.

65. For all these reasons I propose what I call a new ecology of public speech. As Laudato si' proposed an integral ecology for the material common home, so it is time to safeguard the common home of speech, today threatened by a pollution of falsehoods, of voices without a face, of contents produced in series that stifle true speech as polluted waters stifle life. A healthy public speech asks that what is generated by a machine be recognisable as such, that every content be traceable to a person who answers for it, that the face, the voice and the name of each one be protected from use without consent, and that the most delicate domains of common life enjoy a reinforced protection. These criteria prolong the ancient intuition by which public speech has meaning only when someone pays for it in person, and by which the name of a man is a sacred thing.

66. I think, in closing, of children. The generation growing up today speaking with assistants that imitate the human voice, seeing manipulable images of themselves, is the first in history to make this experience from the most tender age. It is a grave task of parents, of educators, of the community to safeguard in these children the original trust in the voice of the other, for upon that trust are founded faith, friendship, citizenship, love. The truth of communication is the deepest truth of man, and it is toward it that every technical innovation should be oriented. To safeguard faces and voices means, ultimately, to safeguard ourselves, and to preserve the possibility that human beings continue truly to meet, beyond the exchange of images of themselves.

67. If the transformation we are living touches the way we think, remember, decide, then the decisive place of discernment is the one in which these ways are formed, that is, the family, the school, the community that educates. To educate in the age of artificial intelligence means to form persons capable of attention, of memory, of judgement, of toil, of ordered desire, of relationship and of prayer. The immediate availability of answers can help learning, and it can also weaken the patience of thought, if it takes the place of the slow labour by which a mind grows. What is at stake is the very form of the freedom of the one who is educated, far beyond the prudent management of an instrument. The Second Vatican Council, in Gravissimum educationis, taught that education aims at the integral formation of the person in view of his ultimate end and of the good of communities, and this horizon remains the measure of every pedagogy, even of the one that makes use of the new technologies.

68. It is fitting to distinguish formation from training. A machine is trained, and training seeks measurable performance and optimises answers. A person is formed, and formation accompanies a freedom toward the good, educates memory and judgement, the affections and the body, language and desire, and teaches also to fail and to begin again, something no optimisation knows. To confuse the two means to think of education as a loading of information into a mind treated as a device, and to lose precisely what makes it education, the care of a person who becomes himself. The school and the family that remember this difference safeguard something precious, even when they gladly make use of the new instruments, for they know that the aim is to make free and good human beings grow, far more than to produce efficient minds.

69. The school has today the task of teaching a responsible use of artificial intelligence. This means educating to verify the sources, to recognise and declare the help received from a machine, to protect one's own data, to understand the errors and the distortions the systems carry within them. The task is to form a judgement, more than to add a regulation to the others. Never as today, in history, has access to information been so extensive, and every young person carries with him a quantity of knowledge greater than that preserved in the great libraries of some centuries ago. And yet we see grow a poverty of thought, a fragility of judgement, a difficulty in holding together long attention, depth and waiting. The reason is that access to information is still far from wisdom, and the school serves precisely to accomplish that passage which no device can accomplish in the young person's place.

70. There is here a new form of inequality the community must look in the face. The children of the more aware and more well-to-do families will receive an education that teaches them to master the instruments, to use them with measure, to cultivate reading, silence, relationship. The children of the more fragile families risk instead being handed over to the instruments without accompaniment, and growing in a dependence that impoverishes thought and that will make them more easily governable by the one who owns those instruments. Educational inequality, which has always been among the gravest injustices, takes on thus a new form, and asks of the public school and of the Catholic school a renewed commitment to offer to all, and especially to the poorest, a formation that frees and does not domesticate. School evaluation too asks for a new wisdom, for a piece of work generated by a machine and presented as one's own deceives first of all the one who presents it, defrauding him of the toil that would have made him grow.

71. For this reason I wish that the schools, and in particular the Catholic schools, recover the courage to propose exercises that may seem ancient and are instead fine instruments of interior formation. The reading of long books in their entirety, writing by hand, the memory of poems and of pages of Scripture, the practice of an art or of a musical instrument, the experience of manual work, the regular frequentation of silence. All this is the contrary of an illusion of efficiency, and it is the patient construction of a freedom that will remain to the one who receives it for his whole life, and which no one will be able to dispossess him of. A young person who knows how to stand before a difficult page without fleeing, who knows how to wait, who knows how to begin again after an error, possesses a richness no machine can give him and no power can take from him.

72. The family is the first place in which technology is ordered to love, or left to disorder the common life. I do not wish to add to families a moralism about screens, of which they already have enough, and I wish to indicate a few concrete practices that safeguard the quality of relationships. Meals shared without devices, reading together, play, family prayer however brief, silence, time in nature, the conversation that is not in a hurry. Upon these things, which seem small, is founded the future interior freedom of children. I ask parents, and in a special way young families, to safeguard also the boredom of their children and their time free from stimuli, for in that apparently empty time is formed the capacity to inhabit one's own interiority, where one day they will be able to meet themselves and God.

73. The young are not passive victims of a transformation they undergo, and I call them to a higher freedom. To make use of powerful instruments while keeping the capacity to think, to wait, to err, to begin again, to create with responsibility. My beloved predecessor Francis, in Christus vivit, reminded you that you are the now of God, and that the Lord wills you alive, awake, capable of great dreams. I repeat it with the same trust. Artificial intelligence processes information with great speed, and it remains far from the intelligence of man, for it lacks the discernment between what is truly good and what is truly evil, which belongs to a conscience and not to a calculation. When you hand over to a machine the toil that would have made you great, you hand over to it a part of your growth. Safeguard it instead as a treasure is safeguarded, for in it ripens the person you are called to become.

74. A word I wish to address to teachers, who in this time are the keepers of a fragile patrimony. Each time you enter a classroom, a university, a seminary, you keep alive a chain of transmission begun in the most ancient times, which if it broke in your hands would be difficult to rebuild. The instruments can assist you, and in many cases they will serve you well, and they cannot take the place of your voice, your preparation, your gaze upon each pupil. A good teacher sees the pupil, while a machine processes data about him, and to see the pupil is precisely what changes a life. Remain human in your profession, and be proud of it, for the world needs you more than it knows.

75. To the universities, and in a particular way to those of Christian inspiration, I ask not to lose the long tradition from which they come. The first universities were born in the heart of Europe as communities devoted in a stable way to the search for truth, and they knew the centrality of dialogue, of disputation, of patient reading, of the formation of the young person as a free man. The contemporary pressure toward an instruction measured solely by the speed of insertion into the labour market risks eroding precisely what makes them precious.

76. The Catholic university has today a particular vocation, that of being the place in which the technical sciences, philosophy and theology meet instead of ignoring one another. The question of artificial intelligence does not let itself be understood by a single discipline. The engineer who builds the systems needs the philosopher who questions their meaning and the theologian who recalls the ultimate end of man, and each of them needs the others in order not to lose himself in his own fragment. I ask the Catholic universities to make themselves laboratories of this encounter, to form a generation of scholars capable of holding together technical competence and anthropological depth, to host with freedom research and debate on what these technologies promise and threaten. The fragmentation of knowledge is already in itself a form of blindness, and the Christian university exists also to heal it, recomposing in the unity of wisdom what specialisation disperses.

77. The formation of those who serve the Christian community deserves explicit attention. Future pastors, catechists, educators of the pastoral care will not be able to ignore the questions of which this Letter speaks, for they enter the life of the faithful and their own. I ask that the formation of the clergy and of pastoral workers include in a stable way the discernment about the new technologies, understood as a permanent formation of judgement and of the spiritual life, before being a technical updating. The priest who knows how to accompany, in catechesis, in spiritual direction, in confession, persons whose interior life is crossed by a digital fabric, performs a precious and new service. The care of the young, in particular, asks for pastors capable of understanding the world in which they live without absolutising it nor demonising it, and of offering them the depth for which they thirst, and which the screens promise without ever giving it.

78. Education, in all its forms, succeeds when it makes freedom appear as a form to be safeguarded, and not as a mere prudent management of instruments. A generation educated to think, to love, to pray, to dwell in silence and in relationship, will know how to make use of machines without being served to them, and will know how to build a society in which technology remains in its place. A generation handed over to the instruments without interior formation will instead be exposed to every manipulation, and will slowly lose what makes it free. In this educational choice, played out every day in a home, in a classroom, in a parish, a great part of the future we shall leave to our children is decided.

79. There is a domain in which artificial intelligence touches directly the life and the death of persons, and it is that of war and surveillance. Here discernment becomes graver, for what is at stake is the decision to take life and the power to subject human beings to a continuous control. The Christian faith has always taught that these decisions require a human responsibility no delegation can cancel, and today this ancient truth must be reaffirmed with force before systems that promise to decide in the place of man, and that with this promise conceal their greatest danger, that of withdrawing from conscience what belongs to conscience alone.

80. I had occasion to say, in a recent visit to the Sapienza University of Rome, that what is happening in Ukraine, in Gaza and the Palestinian territories, in Lebanon, in Iran, shows the inhuman evolution of the relationship between war and the new technologies, in a spiral of annihilation. I take up those words again here, for they carried more than description. The spiral is a movement that at each passage aggravates what was already there. A system is introduced that allows one to strike with greater speed, and the adverse side, not to be destroyed, hastens in turn. Functions of choice are delegated to chains of calculation, because human decision appears too slow, and the distance between the one who decides and the one who dies grows, responsibility is diluted, the possibility of error increases, the distinction between combatants and civilians is confused. At each turn of the spiral, something human is withdrawn from the one who strikes and from the one who falls.

81. The Christian tradition on war, which has never confused legitimate defence with the justification of violence, safeguards two principles the present time makes more urgent, proportionality and discrimination. Proportionality asks that the harm inflicted not exceed the good one intends to defend, and presupposes a prudent judgement that only a conscience can make, weighing circumstances no formula exhausts. Discrimination asks always to distinguish the combatant from the innocent, and founds the absolute protection of civilians. A weapon system that selects its own targets possesses neither the prudence that weighs proportion, nor the moral discernment that recognises the innocent, and entrusts to a calculation what the tradition has always reserved to the responsibility of a person. For this reason the refusal of autonomous weapons exceeds a single norm among others, and descends from the very heart of the Christian doctrine on the just war, which sets unsurpassable limits even upon the right to defend oneself.

82. There are, then, systems that require a precise word, those able to select and to strike human targets without a significant human intervention at the moment of decision. Antiqua et nova, at number 100, formulated in this regard a grave ethical concern, recalling the necessity of a human control over the choices that touch life and death, and this Letter makes it its own and reinforces it. A system that decides autonomously to kill a human being, without a person assuming responsibility for it before his own conscience and before God, contradicts the dignity of the one who is killed and of the one who should answer for that death. The tradition knows the criteria of legitimate defence safeguarded by the Catechism at number 2309, and knows the condemnation that the Second Vatican Council, in Gaudium et spes at number 80, pronounced against every act of war directed to the destruction of entire cities with their inhabitants. In the light of this tradition I ask that the development, the production and the employment of lethal autonomous weapons be prohibited by the international community, and that the principle of an effective human control over every decision involving life be affirmed, sustained by mechanisms of legal responsibility and of verification that make it real.

83. I understand the pressure to which States are subjected, justifying the race toward these systems with the necessity of not falling behind their adversaries. I understand the argument, and I cannot accept it as the last word, for the logic of not falling behind is precisely the logic of the spiral, and every country that yields to it contributes to accelerating it. The way of peace requires acts of responsibility, sustained by patient diplomacies and by attentive civil societies. I address therefore an appeal to States and to international organisations that they take up again the path of the treaties which have been able to ban chemical weapons, biological weapons, anti-personnel mines, and that they open an analogous path for lethal autonomous weapons. The time lost on this ground is paid for in human lives, and history will call this generation to account for what it will have done, or not done, while it was still possible.

84. The technological transformation concerns also that form of continuous control which is today technically possible in many States, and which gathers in an automatic way data on the movements, the communications, the transactions, the opinions, the relationships of persons. The Church does not refuse in principle the systems of public security aimed at preventing grave crimes, and asks that every system of this kind be limited, proportionate, subject to the control of the community, transparent in its criteria, submitted to the review of a judge. She asks moreover that there remain, in principle, domains withdrawn from any surveillance, for without an inviolable space the person loses his freedom. The home, conscience, the conversation with one's physician and one's lawyer, the exercise of worship, confession, the activity of workers who organise, the free press must remain protected places, withdrawn from the eye that records everything.

85. I am concerned in a special way by the use of these technologies to persecute religious, ethnic, political minorities. The combination of facial recognition, of the analysis of behaviours, of the tracking of contacts can become an instrument of persecution on a scale never seen. The Church, who in many countries of the last century knew the hard experience of repression, and who today sees her children and many other believers and non-believers struck in more than one country, cannot keep silent. Religious freedom, the first among the rights of the person, must be defended also against the new technological forms of control, and with it the freedom of all those whom a power judges inconvenient. I exhort governments not to make of the new technologies instruments of repression, and civil societies to keep watch with tenacity, for a control that today strikes some will tomorrow be able to strike anyone.

86. I think also of those who, at the margins of public life, suffer the harshness of automatic systems. The migrants recognised and classified at the borders by machines on whose criteria they have no voice, turned back at times on the basis of a calculation no one explains to them. The refugees registered in immense biometric archives, whose security depends on the one who keeps that data and on the one who might one day seize it. The detainees evaluated by systems that predict their future dangerousness, and who risk serving not what they have done, but what a machine predicts they will do. The populations under occupation identified by instruments that cross data to build lists of targets. When these systems err, and they do commit errors, the consequences fall upon real persons, upon real families. It is not admissible, before God and before history, that the defence of even legitimate interests be pursued with instruments that by their very nature do not adequately distinguish between the combatant and the child, between the guilty and the innocent.

87. From all this is born an exhortation I propose to the reflection of the world. Beyond the disarmament of weapons, a disarmament is needed of the claim to delegate to machines what belongs to conscience. It consists in the conscious renunciation, on the part of States, enterprises and communities, of those uses of the new technologies which, while technically possible, contradict the dignity of the person, peace among peoples, the freedom of consciences. This renunciation is the sign of a very high civil maturity, for only the one who is interiorly free can choose not to possess an instrument he could possess, and only the one who sees beyond the immediate advantage can choose the long time of justice. The greatness of a people is measured also by what it knows how to renounce for the good of all.

88. Peace, as Saint Augustine recalled, is the tranquillity of order (cf. De civitate Dei, XIX, 13). When the order between man, technology, the institutions and creation is just, peace is possible, and when that order breaks peace draws away even in the absence of a declared conflict. The spiral of annihilation is, at its depth, a breaking of this order. For this reason the Church asks the world to recompose the order, before and more widely than the stopping of single weapons. May the Lord Jesus, who wept over Jerusalem because it had not recognised the time of its visitation (cf. Lk 19:41-44), open the eyes of the powerful upon the time we are living, that they may choose the narrow way of peace even when it appears less convenient than the wide way of war.

89. Every authentic social encyclical places the poor at the centre, and not as a chapter added at the end of the argument. The poor reveal the moral truth of technology, for what a society does to its most fragile members says what that society truly is. The question from which this chapter sets out is more uncomfortable and more true than the customary one about the benefit artificial intelligence might one day bring to the poor. Who owns the infrastructures, the data, the models, the energy, the capacity to compute? Who pays the costs? Who shares in the decisions that concern his life? Only from these questions does digital justice take shape, for otherwise the poor remain passive recipients of choices made elsewhere, and technology confirms inequalities instead of reducing them.

90. There is a material poverty, and it exists. It concerns the one who loses his work to technological replacement and finds no ways of re-employment, the one who lives where digital infrastructures are scarce and costs prohibitive, the one who does not possess the instruments to gain access to essential services that are progressively digitised. The elderly person who must complete an online procedure to receive an aid necessary to his survival, and does not know how to do it, knows this poverty. There is then a poverty one might call algorithmic, and it is the condition of the one who is excluded from an opportunity because an automatic evaluation system has classified him as little reliable, little solvent, little interesting, without the criterion of the judgement ever having been shown to him, and without the one who set that system in motion being able to describe how it functions within. It is an invisible poverty, and for this very reason a particularly insidious one, for the one who suffers it does not even know to whom to turn to ask its reason.

91. I wish to turn a specific gaze to the regions of the global South, of Latin America, of Africa, of Asia, where so often the faith lives with a freshness that questions the ancient Churches. In many of these countries the new technologies arrive as finished products, developed elsewhere, trained on others' languages and data, and at high costs for the local economies. There takes shape thus a danger I call by its name, a new form of colonialism, which shows itself in an asymmetry of data, of infrastructures, of labour, of languages, of contracts, of normative power. The dynamic is recognisable. A people hands over its data, its labour, its natural resources, and others train the models, own the platforms, set the rules, resell the services, at times to the very populations from which they drew. The dependence that arises from it is real, and it hides behind the neutral appearance of a service offered.

92. This dependence has very concrete roots. The computing infrastructures on which every digital service rests belong to a small number of enterprises and States, and the one who depends on them for health, administration, education, security, hands over to those few a sovereignty he believed his own. The capacity to train the most powerful models requires resources the more fragile economies do not possess, and so the distance between the one who produces the intelligence and the one who consumes it grows instead of diminishing. Technological sovereignty is today a part of the sovereignty of a people, and the countries of the South have the right to develop their own capacities, suited to their languages, their cultures, their needs, rather than simply purchase solutions conceived for others. The rivalry among the great powers for technological dominion, which runs through our time, must not be made on the backs of the small, for when the great contend for the world it is always the poor who pay the highest price.

93. The data that feed these systems are made of the lives of entire peoples, and they bear within them a memory that does not belong to the single individuals from whom they are gathered alone. The habits, the languages, the traditions, the illnesses, the movements, the beliefs of a community become matter with which others build models and profits. The doctrine of consent, conceived for the individual, does not suffice here, for what is at stake is a communal good, the memory and the identity of a people, which no individual can hand over by himself. I ask that a communal consent be recognised alongside the individual one, and that communities, especially the indigenous and minority ones, have a voice on how the data concerning them are gathered, preserved, used. The data of a people are part of its memory, and the memory of a people is not merchandise.

94. The minority languages and the indigenous peoples deserve a serious word. The language models are trained predominantly on the dominant languages, and they risk overtaking and impoverishing the languages spoken by smaller peoples, who in those languages safeguard their memory, their prayer, their right to name the world. A language that disappears carries with it a unique way of looking at creation, and its loss impoverishes humanity as a whole. The Church, who at Pentecost knew the Spirit give to each one to hear in his own tongue the mighty works of God (cf. Acts 2:11), recognises in every language a gift to be safeguarded, and not a residue to be absorbed into a single tongue. The plurality of languages bears within it the trace of man's vocation to communion in diversity, and it must be defended also in the design of the new technologies, that they may serve peoples and not cancel them.

95. I return here, as I announced, to the invisible labour that makes these systems possible, for its geography is moral before it is economic. Those who label the data and moderate the most violent contents live often in low-income countries, exposed for hours to images of cruelty, with scant protections, so that elsewhere the interface may remain clean and the experience of the well-off user serene. There is an unjust distance between the one who enjoys the product and the one who bears its hidden weight, and this distance reproduces, at the heart of the most advanced technology, one of the most ancient injustices, the one that makes toil fall upon the poor and the fruit upon the rich. To recognise, to protect, to remunerate fairly this labour is a question of justice no one can postpone in conscience, for the cleanliness we admire in our machines is paid for by the suffering of human beings we do not see.

96. The matter of artificial intelligence begins in the mines. The minerals necessary to the processors and the batteries are extracted often in poor regions, at times with the labour of children, in conditions that wound bodies and territories, and that feed conflicts for the control of resources. The local communities that inhabit those lands see their soil dug, their waters polluted, their life overturned, and they rarely share in the benefits of what is drawn from their land. Laudato si' denounced with force this model, in which the environmental and human costs fall upon the poor and the profits concentrate elsewhere. I ask the enterprises that produce the devices and that employ them to assume responsibility for the entire chain, from the mine to the finished product, and not to consider foreign to themselves the suffering that stands at the origin of their wealth.

97. The matter of artificial intelligence does not end with use, and it continues in waste. The devices quickly become obsolete, and they accumulate in immense landfills of electronic waste, often exported toward the poorest countries, where men, women and children dismantle them with bare hands to recover the materials, poisoning themselves with toxic substances. This is the hidden term of a cycle that presents itself as progress, and that instead discharges upon the weakest and upon creation the weight of our consumption. The responsibility of enterprises extends to the entire life cycle of the devices, from their design that they may last and be repairable, to their just disposal. A throwaway culture that produces and abandons without measure, denounced by Laudato si', finds here one of its crudest expressions, and asks for a conversion that concerns producers, consumers, governments.

98. Artificial intelligence appears immaterial, and it lives on a very concrete matter. It lives on energy to feed the computing centres, on water in great quantity to cool them, on minerals extracted as has been said, and it produces the waste of which we have spoken. In more than one country the consumption of water and energy of these infrastructures enters into competition with the primary needs of the populations, and a thirsting region sees rise beside it plants that consume the water its inhabitants need. Laudato si' gave us a grammar of integral ecology that remains fully valid, and that teaches never to separate justice toward the poor from care for the common home. What presents itself as immaterial has a real weight upon the earth and upon its most fragile inhabitants, and a civilisation that forgets this weight tells itself a fable that the poor and creation pay in its place.

99. Integral ecology asks that every innovation be evaluated also for its cost upon the common home, and that sobriety enter among the criteria of technological development. Not everything that can be calculated deserves to be calculated, if its price in energy, in water, in minerals, in waste, falls upon the poorest and upon future generations. The decisive question is whether a technology serves a good proportionate to the weight it places upon the earth, and this question must be posed before, and not after, its diffusion. I ask those who design the great systems to assume this question as a part of their work, and governments not to consider the consumption of resources of these infrastructures a negligible detail before their economic usefulness. The care of creation is the condition of a development that deserves the name.

100. The preferential love for the poor, which the recent magisterium has reaffirmed as an option founded in the Gospel, is an evangelical criterion of truth. Christ identified himself with the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the sick, the imprisoned (cf. Mt 25:31-46), and this identification is substantial, and surpasses every metaphorical language. Whoever meets a poor person meets Christ. Sollicitudo rei socialis called this love a preferential option, and Evangelii gaudium denounced the economy of exclusion that produces human waste. In the time of artificial intelligence this love is translated into concrete choices. It asks that the great systems be evaluated also by how much they improve the life of the least, that the workers replaced by machines be accompanied with real opportunities, that the technologies be accessible also to the one who cannot pay full price, that minorities and strangers be protected against the discriminatory use of evaluation systems.

101. There exist, it must be recognised with gratitude, applications that already today draw near this good. Translation systems that allow the refugee to make himself understood, diagnostic instruments that bring competences to remote regions, technologies of literacy and accessibility that give back possibilities to the one who lives with limitations. The Church encourages, supports, promotes these uses, for they stand on the side of the poor. The honest question concerns nonetheless the relation between these beneficial applications and those that accentuate inequalities, and the answer is that today the greater part of investments is oriented toward what generates immediate profit, while the applications most useful to the poor remain little funded and little visible. This imbalance is the fruit of choices that can be changed, and I ask those who have the resources to orient them also toward what does not yield, but saves.

102. I exhort therefore the Churches of the global South not to feel marginal in this discernment. Your nearness to the poor, your knowledge of languages and cultures, your community life are a precious patrimony for the universal reflection of the Church, and your gaze sees what from the centres of technological power remains invisible. I exhort States and international organisations to support the development of autonomous technological capacities in the more fragile countries, and the great enterprises not to consider them only as markets or as sources of data and of low-cost labour, but as equal partners in the building of a worldwide common good. The universal fraternity that Fratelli tutti set before us asks that no people be reduced to the margin of a progress decided by others, and that the new intelligence, a gift of human ingenuity, become the patrimony of the whole of humanity and not the privilege of a few.

103. The Church speaks to the world, and in the same act she is called to discern herself. An appeal addressed to others would be little credible if the ecclesial institutions did not safeguard first what they ask the world to safeguard. The schools, the hospitals, the universities, the parishes, the archives, the Catholic means of communication already make use of digital instruments, and this use asks for coherence, sobriety, transparency. I ask every Christian community to examine its own use of the new technologies with the same seriousness with which it invites others to examine theirs, for coherence is the first form of testimony, and no one teaches credibly what he does not live.

104. In the hospitals and the works of care of the Church, artificial intelligence can assist diagnosis and organisation, and it is to be welcomed on condition that it remains at the service of the relationship between the one who cares and the sick person, which is the heart of Christian medicine. In the Catholic schools and universities, the digital instruments are to be used while forming judgement and safeguarding the centrality of the teacher and of the community that learns. In the ecclesial archives and libraries, which keep a memory of centuries, the new technologies can make accessible treasures once reserved to a few, on condition that the integrity and the truth of what is preserved be protected. In all these domains the rule is the same, the instrument serves the person and the community, and never replaces them at the heart of what constitutes them.

105. There is a ground on which the Church must be particularly vigilant, and it is that of the data of the persons who entrust themselves to her. The information a believer hands over in the pastoral relationship, in spiritual accompaniment, in the request for help, is entrusted to a sacred trust, and it must be protected with absolute care. Spiritual direction, the accompaniment of the poor, nearness to the suffering cannot be treated as occasions for the gathering of data, and the digital instruments introduced into pastoral care must be chosen and governed with this awareness. To safeguard the confidentiality of the one who entrusts himself to the Church is today a concrete form of charity, and a condition that the trust which founds every pastoral relationship be not betrayed.

106. There is a limit that admits no exceptions, and it is the seal of sacramental confession. What is confided in the sacrament of Penance belongs to an internal forum that no power, no authority, no technology may violate, and which the minister safeguards as an inviolable secret before God. In a time in which every word risks being recorded, transcribed, analysed, the Church reaffirms with the utmost firmness that confession remains withdrawn from every mediation and every recording, and that its secret is absolute. No digital instrument may enter this space, no artificial assistance may replace the minister who listens and absolves, no technical convenience may justify the smallest crack in a seal that protects at once the dignity of the penitent and the holiness of the sacrament. On this point there is no discernment to be made, and there is only a line to be kept intact.

107. There is a place in which the difference between man and machine shows itself with a clarity no argument could increase, and it is the sacramental life. No artificial assistant absolves from sins, no system consecrates the bread and the wine, no simulation administers the anointing of the sick or replaces the presence of the gathered community. God saves through concrete signs, through the body, the word pronounced by human lips, the water, the oil, the bread, the real presence of the Lord in the midst of his own. The Christian faith is an encounter between living persons and the living God, mediated by gestures that engage the flesh, and for this reason the liturgy and the sacraments remain, in a world of simulations, the place in which the truth of the encounter cannot be counterfeited. The Christian community is called to safeguard them from every logic of the surrogate, recognising in them the heart of her life and the source of her hope.

108. Catechesis and the handing on of the faith also ask for discernment. The digital instruments can help to study, to know Scripture, to prepare, and they can support the one who lives far from a community, and they cannot generate faith, which is born of encounter and is handed on from person to person, from witness to witness. A catechesis entrusted entirely to a machine would lack what makes it alive, the presence of a believer who has met the Lord and speaks of him with his own life. I ask catechists and educators of the faith to make use with freedom of the helpful instruments, and to safeguard always the personal relationship as the proper place in which faith is kindled and grows.

109. The discernment about artificial intelligence asks of the Church the method the Spirit is teaching her in these years, the synodal one, made of mutual listening and of a common journey. The local Churches are called to recount the concrete impact of the new technologies upon their territories, and to ensure that the poor, the young, the workers, the families, the researchers, the most vulnerable communities be listened to and not simply represented by others. Synodality is not a decorative word, and it is a way of proceeding that puts gifts in common and listens to those who usually have no voice, and for this very reason it is particularly suited to discern a transformation that touches all and that few govern.

110. The Episcopal Conferences have in this journey a concrete responsibility. To them I ask to elaborate, according to the conditions of their countries, pastoral orientations and guidelines on the use of the new technologies in the dioceses, the schools, the hospitals, the charitable works, so that what this Letter proposes as principle may find forms suited to each culture. Situations are diverse, and what is urgent in a technologically saturated region does not coincide with what is urgent where access is still scarce. The subsidiarity that holds for civil society holds also in the Church, and entrusts to the local communities the task of translating the universal discernment into the concreteness of their territories, with the freedom and the creativity the Spirit awakens.

111. To coordinate this work, which in recent years had grown in a fragmented way among the various organisms of the Holy See, I have instituted, with an appropriate Rescript, an Interdicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which gathers the contribution of the Dicasteries competent for integral human development, doctrine, culture and education, communication, and of the Pontifical Academies that for years have studied these matters, so that the ecclesial discernment may remain united and the voice of the Church may not be lacking in the places where decisions are taken. I dispose that this Commission accompany, as far as pertains to it, the implementation of the present Letter, maintain the dialogue with institutions and with the scientific community, and support the local Churches in their discernment, so that what I propose here may not remain a written word, but become a journey.

112. The Church offers her contribution to a just public governance, and she distinguishes, in what she asks, three orders of demands. There are first of all moral prohibitions no usefulness can suspend, and among them the prohibition of lethal autonomous weapons and the refusal of every system that reduces the person to an object of calculation in the decisions that touch life. There are then legal guarantees that protect the person, the right to know when a decision concerning him has been taken by a machine and to contest it before a responsible human being, the independent verification of the systems of highest impact, the clear responsibility of the one who produces and employs them, the special protection of minors and of personal data.

113. There are finally the conditions of the common good, which ask for a gaze wider than the protection of the individual alone. The support of independent public research, that there may exist alternatives to the private concentration of knowledge. Equitable access to the benefits, that the new intelligence may not become the privilege of a few. Transparency about the environmental footprint of the great systems. The participation of the weakest in the decisions that concern them. I join those who ask the international community to open a path of binding agreements on these points, in continuity with the teaching of Pacem in terris on the universal public authority called to serve the common good of peoples. A just governance is not born of the sum of interests, and it is born of the shared recognition of the dignity of every person.

114. This path can rest upon what already exists. The Rome Call for AI Ethics, promoted in 2020 by the Pontifical Academy for Life together with institutions and enterprises, had the merit of gathering diverse actors around some shared principles, transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, and together security and privacy. I recognise the value of this initiative, and of others that go in the same direction, and I encourage their continuation and their widening, for a declaration of principles is worth the concrete commitments it generates. The Church gladly offers her contribution to these tables, aware that the safeguarding of human dignity before technology is a task that surpasses her and that asks for the collaboration of many.

115. This dialogue extends to the believers of the other religions and to all women and men of good will. The great religious traditions of humanity safeguard, each in its own way, the sense of the limit of the creature before the mystery, the value of life, the primacy of conscience, the sacredness of the poor and of the stranger, and for this very reason they can offer together a precious testimony in a time that risks adoring its own power. The Catholic Church bears in this dialogue the specificity of her faith in the Word made flesh, which forbids her to reduce man to a disembodied spirit or to a mechanism, and she receives from the others the gift of their wisdom. An alliance for the human person, uniting believers and non-believers, scientists and pastors, governors and workers, is today a service to peace and justice of which the world has urgent need, and to which I invite all without exception.

116. I would have it that, before these pages, each one feel first of all a call to freedom. History, even technological history, is made of choices, and the choices belong to the one who remains vigilant. The speed with which machines change does not take from man the responsibility of deciding what place to give them in his own life, and this responsibility is at once personal and common. It concerns the individual, who decides how much of his own interiority to entrust to an instrument, and it concerns peoples, who decide what limits to set upon the power of the one who owns those instruments. Freedom is a grace to be safeguarded and a task to be exercised, and no machine, however powerful, can choose it in our place.

117. I distinguish, in closing this chapter, Christian hope from technological optimism. Technological optimism believes that every problem of man has a technical solution, and that the progress of instruments coincides with the progress of man. Christian hope knows a deeper truth, for it knows that the heart of man is saved in love and not in an instrument, and that our greatness comes to us from a design more ancient than our strength. It crosses history with trust, and together with the awareness that fullness is not our work, and it confuses neither power with wisdom nor prediction with providence. For this reason the Church, before artificial intelligence, offers more than ethical criteria. She offers a form of life, made of liturgy and of sacraments, of listening and of charity, of institutions and of service, of a hope that does not disappoint because it is founded on the love of God poured into our hearts. It is in this form of life, more than in any regulation, that human greatness finds its safeguard.

118. At the end of this Letter the gaze turns to Christ, in whom everything finds its measure. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us (cf. Jn 1:1.14). The eternal Word of God did not remain a distant sound, and he became face, voice, body, hands that heal and that bless, and in that face we have contemplated the glory of the Father. This is why the Church, before the words generated by machines and the faces simulated by the networks, safeguards with such jealousy the word that is born of a person and the face that belongs to someone. Every true human word is a reflection of the Word made flesh, and every face is an icon of the one who willed to have a face for us. To defend the faces and the voices of human beings is, in the end, to safeguard the place where the eternal chose to draw near, and to recognise that no simulation could ever take the place of the flesh that the Son of God loved to the point of making it his own.

119. I do not wish to hand over to you only a text to read, but a prayer to pray, for discernment, before being a work of thought, is a gift of the Spirit. I thank God the Father for the intelligence he has placed in us, that we might know him, know ourselves, collaborate in his work and keep the garden he has entrusted to us. I recognise that the time we are living is at once great and difficult, for our hands have built machines that generate word, image and decision, and something in the fabric of our being human seems to us called into question. I trust that the Lord does not abandon us, he who so loved the world as to give his Son (cf. Jn 3:16), and who in the Son has united forever his life to our flesh.

120. To the Holy Spirit, Spirit of truth and of wisdom, I ask to descend upon the hearts of those who today bear a responsibility. May he teach legislators to choose the common good above the interest of a few, scientists to unite knowledge to responsibility, entrepreneurs to set the dignity of the person above profit, pastors to speak with courage, parents to safeguard their children, the young to recognise in freedom a gift greater than convenience. May he teach each of us to discern, before our own works, what remains a gift and what risks becoming a master, for wisdom begins where man knows how to halt before what he could nonetheless do.

121. To you, Mary, Mother of the Lord and our Mother, I entrust the journey that awaits us. The Christian tradition has honoured you from the first centuries with the title of Seat of Wisdom, for in your womb was formed the one who is Wisdom in person. You know what it means to welcome a mystery greater than yourself, and to keep in your heart what is not yet fully understood (cf. Lk 2:19). Safeguard the wisdom of this generation. Safeguard the freedom of the children who grow up among voices that imitate human presence, the dignity of the workers who see their craft change, the truth of those who struggle for an honest word, the conscience of those called to grave decisions, the peace of peoples threatened by new instruments of war, the hope of the poor who await justice.

122. May the greatness of the human person, magnifica humanitas, show itself fully when history reaches its fulfilment in Christ, and may then our works, even the most daring, find their true meaning in the service of the glory of God and in the good of our brothers and sisters. The machines that today arouse in us so many questions will appear for what they are, transient works of the hands of man, and the face of each of our sisters and brothers will shine with the light of the one who thought them from eternity. To all of you who will read these pages, to the workers and the young, to the scientists and the governors, to the poor and the Christian communities scattered through the world, with all my heart I impart my blessing, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.