First of all, I want to welcome all the new free and paid subscribers to Galileo’s Ghost. I just got notified I am now #49 on Substack for environment and climate, all thanks to you!
Your interest also helps me to keep going - obrigado - so please comment, challenge and continue to be engaged with likes, shares, and more.
A pope for the technological revolution
I will brag about my prediction of Cardinal Robert Prevost’s election as pope later in this post. I want to start with what I got wrong, and what matters the most: his papal name.
The central motive behind choosing the name Leo XIV is (from his first address)
… mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
The first American pope senses that a new technological revolution is upon us and he wants the Catholic Church to respond.
What everyone knows is Pope Leo XIII (1878 to 1903) founded Catholic social teaching (Rerum Novarum) in response to the industrial revolution – and that’s the present pope’s reference. But I have heard no one acknowledge Leo XIII’s role in re-establishing the Vatican Observatory.
The Vatican Observatory goes back to 1500’s after successive popes convoked leading astronomers to re-set the calendar – including (ironically) Copernicus, Galileo and the Jesuit Christopher Clavius. The irony is that Copernicus helped solve a problem for the pope - the Gregorian calendar - but created a bigger one by proposing heliocentrism. Galileo promoted heliocentrism to the point of crisis, and the relation between the Catholic Church and science has never been the same.
I learned of Leo XIII’s interest in science from the Jesuit Astronomers who work at the Observatory (they’re still at it 500 years later, and I had a chance to visit and meet with them last year). Leo XIII saw both the industrial revolution and science as critical for the Catholic Church’s engagement with the modern world. Everybody knows the former and almost nobody remembers the latter.
Today, in Pope Leo XIV, the two frontiers of the Catholic Church’s engagement come together into one focal point – the technological revolution and artificial intelligence (I have thoughts/dissertation on that too).
In Laudato Si’, whose intellectual blueprint is found in Romano Guardini, the environmental crisis and technology are already intimately connected. No surprise then that Pope Francis, to his credit, gave plenty of attention to AI in then last years of his papacy.
AI critic (and fellow substacker whom I recommend) Gary Marcus emphasized what’s important in the present pope’s vision:
The most important question about AI isn’t a technical question.
The most important question is about how to maintain and grow a just society in the age of AI.
Indeed, in the tradition of social encyclicals, the focus of Leo XVI – a mathematician – will be on the social, political, economic and policy implications of the technological revolution.
The challenge before Pope Leo XIV is a great one – this will be fun to watch.
Brag box
I have to say I am surpised by Cardinal Robert Prevost’s election, even though I did call it.[1]
I selected three Cardinals, and in the poscript suggested Prevost had the most gravitas to be pope. But what’s most important to me is the thinkers and ideas that led me to consider Prevost in the first place – Alberto Methol Ferré, Alver Metalli, Pope Francis, Joseph Ratzinger and Guzman Carriquiry.
What I got wrong was the papal name, Leo XIV – I predicted the pope would choose Francis II or Dominic because of the mendicant orientation unleashed by the papacy of Francis.
Mendicants went to the streets and new urban centers following centuries of feudalism where prayer and agricultural work added leaven to daily life. I argue that our present communications revolution resembles the mendicant moment: a time in need of new ways.
Here too, I’m not completely off. At the time I didn’t see the connection, but as an Augustinian, Robert Prevost already belongs to a mendicant order.[2]
I also said the pope would not be American, but made an exception for Prevost because he was Latin American in a certain sense. The American cardinals have now revealed that they didn’t even count him as one of their own:
https://www.today.com/video/cardinal-dolan-talks-election-of-us-born-cardinal-as-pope-239235653981
So Pope Leo embodies some of the best of America: he’s from the heartland, hardworking, intelligent, generous, kind and humble.