Recently, the head of an organization with 1.4 billion members released a 75,000-word document on artificial intelligence. The author is Pope Leo XIV, and it’s his first major public statement as pope. That alone tells you something about where this conversation has landed. Ironically, most people probably asked an AI to summarize it, and I’ll confess I did the same for the early chapters. But for Chapter 4, the section most relevant to educators, I sat down with the printed text, highlighted, and annotated the old-fashioned way.
You don’t have to be Catholic to care about what’s in it.
Chapter 4 reads less like a religious text and more like a synthesis of the last decade of research on technology and young people. Three pieces of it hit me hardest as an educator working in AI.
First, Pope Leo names what early and unsupervised screen exposure does to kids, and he names it specifically: damaged sleep, fractured attention, weakened emotional regulation, grooming, cyberbullying, AI-manipulated images, pressure to share intimate content. The encyclical doesn’t break new empirical ground. It reads the same research developmental psychologists, neuroscientists, and pediatricians have been publishing for years and decides it matters enough to make it official Church teaching and put it in front of a global audience.
Second, he calls for ongoing teacher formation, not a workshop or a one-day PD but sustained, career-long support so educators can engage AI critically and creatively instead of getting steamrolled by it.
His point is simple: curricula designed for a different era are becoming obsolete.
Most schools still treat AI training as something you check off in August, and every teacher I know can tell you how that ends.
Third, he writes that schools “are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.”
Schools form people. That’s the job, and AI fits inside that mission or it doesn’t fit at all. Earlier in the same chapter, he writes that teaching kids about AI means teaching them when not to use it. That single sentence reframes AI literacy more clearly than any conference session I’ve attended in the last two years.
The encyclical is a Catholic document, but the classroom problem it describes isn’t.
Children are losing sleep, attention, and the slow time they need to become themselves regardless of what their parents believe or where they go to school.
The pope happens to have the largest platform to say so, but the work of doing something about it sits with anyone who teaches, trains teachers, raises kids, or builds the tools they use.
