- A shared warning against technological domination. Both India’s AI diplomacy and Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas reject a future in which artificial intelligence is controlled by a small number of states or private actors.
- Two civilizations, one concern. Despite profound cultural and theological differences, New Delhi and the Vatican both fear that AI could produce a deeper crisis of human dignity, identity and social cohesion.
- AI is becoming a geopolitical and moral battleground. The convergence between Modi’s India and the Catholic Church reflects a broader shift: artificial intelligence is no longer just about innovation, but about the future shape of global order and humanity itself.
Artificial intelligence has become the most unexpected meeting point between Rome and New Delhi. Not through theology. Nor through traditional diplomacy. But through something subtler: a shared intuition, emerging from two profoundly different civilizations, that the AI revolution risks becoming an anthropological crisis before it fully becomes a technological one.
On one side stands Narendra Modi’s India — a rising power determined to shape the global governance of artificial intelligence not merely as a market or a software hub, but as a civilizational state with its own philosophy of modernity. On the other stands Pope Leo XIV, the first pontiff to dedicate an entire encyclical to artificial intelligence, significantly titled Magnifica Humanitas: a document that does not reject technology, but fears a future in which technological progress empties human beings of meaning.
At first glance, the distance between the two worlds appears immense. Contemporary India speaks the language of power, infrastructure, digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy. The Vatican speaks of dignity, fragility, moral limits and the soul. Yet reading Magnifica Humanitas alongside the declarations emerging from the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi reveals an unexpectedly sophisticated convergence. Not ideological alignment, but philosophical resonance.
The summit hosted at Bharat Mandapam gathered heads of government, tech executives, researchers and diplomats around a recurring set of themes: inclusion, shared responsibility, equitable access to AI, and the need to prevent the technology from becoming the monopoly of a handful of powers or private conglomerates. Modi framed artificial intelligence not as a zero-sum race, but as a collective challenge requiring cooperation and common rules.
It is a language that echoes, almost uncannily, parts of Leo XIV’s encyclical. The Pope warns against the unprecedented concentration of “technological power” in the hands of transnational private actors and criticises a technocratic paradigm capable of reducing human beings to data points, functions or performances. The core issue, for the Vatican, is not the machine itself, but the architecture of power surrounding it.
Here lies the first deep affinity between Rome and New Delhi: a shared unease toward an oligarchic technological order dominated by a small number of actors.
For India, the issue is geopolitical. New Delhi does not want the digital century to be written exclusively in Silicon Valley or Shenzhen. Its ambition is to shape a form of technological multipolarity in which the Global South participates in defining the rules, standards and infrastructure of AI governance.
For the Vatican, the concern is moral and anthropological. Leo XIV fears that the concentration of technological power may generate new forms of dependency, exclusion and dehumanisation. Yet the political implications of the two arguments are remarkably similar: no single actor should exercise absolute control over the future digital order.
The convergence becomes even more striking at the philosophical level. The encyclical revolves around a symbolic tension between Babel and Jerusalem. Babel represents uniformity, technocratic self-sufficiency and the illusion that humanity can master reality through the universal language of technology. Jerusalem, by contrast, symbolises plurality reconciled through shared responsibility and communal construction.
India’s AI narrative, despite emerging from an entirely different intellectual tradition, carries a comparable instinctive rejection of technological uniformity. The language of “inclusive AI”, “shared governance” and “distributed innovation” advanced at the summit conceals a broader Indian strategic message: modernity does not necessarily have to mean Westernisation.
This is where the implicit dialogue between a Hindu-majority civilizational power and the head of the Catholic Church becomes particularly fascinating. Both reject — for entirely different reasons — the idea of technology becoming a new universal religion. For the Vatican, that would amount to the idolatry of technique. For India, it would imply cultural and strategic subordination.
The differences, of course, remain profound. Leo XIV places at the centre the Christian understanding of the human person as transcendent, irreducible and endowed with intrinsic dignity. India’s worldview is more plural, civilizational and less dependent on the Western philosophical concept of the individual. Moreover, while the Vatican primarily approaches AI as a force that must be ethically restrained, India also sees it as an instrument of national ascent, economic transformation and geopolitical influence.
Yet it is precisely this distance that makes the convergence meaningful. Because what connects Rome and New Delhi is not a common theology nor a shared geopolitical agenda. It is the growing perception that artificial intelligence is no longer merely transforming economies or military balances, but redefining the meaning of the human condition itself — and, with it, the future architecture of global order.
It is no coincidence that both the India AI Impact Summit and Magnifica Humanitas insist on multilateralism. India seeks to avoid a fragmented digital world divided into rigid technological spheres dominated by Washington and Beijing. Leo XIV fears that the collapse of multilateralism could accelerate what he calls a “culture of power”, in which AI becomes absorbed into the logic of war, surveillance and social control. In both visions, technology is inseparable from the question of power.
And perhaps this is the most revealing development of all. While much of the Western debate around AI remains focused on productivity, competition and innovation, two seemingly distant actors — Hindu-majority India and the Catholic Church — are attempting to move the conversation onto a deeper plane. Not simply what artificial intelligence can do. But what humanity may become because of it.
