Pope Leo XIV's sweeping AI encyclical has urgent implications for HR professionals across Canada
By the time Pope Leo XIV signed his first encyclical letter on May 15, 2026 — choosing, deliberately, the 135th anniversary of the landmark labour document Rerum Novarum — the question of what artificial intelligence would do to workers had already become one of the defining anxieties of the age. The pontiff's answer, contained in the 42,300-word document Magnifica Humanitas, is not a measured maybe. It is a warning, a plea and, in places, an outright condemnation.
"The pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs," Leo wrote. The human person, he insisted, is "an end, not a means."
For Canadian HR leaders navigating one of the most turbulent workforce moments in a generation, those words carry a particular resonance. HRD Canada has been tracking the pattern closely: major employers from Intuit to the big banks are restructuring around AI investment, and the pattern of simultaneous record revenues and falling headcount is forcing a rethink of the assumptions HR teams have historically relied upon to anticipate risk.
The Pope's timing is no accident. Leo — born Robert Prevost in Chicago and the first American to hold the papacy — made artificial intelligence a signature issue within days of his election in May 2025. He chose his papal name explicitly in homage to Leo XIII, the 19th-century pontiff who stood up for industrial-age workers against the tycoons of his era. The parallel he is drawing is not subtle: if Leo XIII gave the world Rerum Novarum at the dawn of the first Industrial Revolution, then Leo XIV is offering Magnifica Humanitas — "Magnificent Humanity" — at the dawn of what he calls "another industrial revolution."
The scale of the challenge
The numbers underpinning the Pope's concern are not theological abstractions. An AI reckoning is already coming for Canadian employees, according to analysis published by HRD Canada, which found that labour's share of total economic output is forecast to fall from 55.5 per cent today to 45 per cent by 2050 if AI advances rapidly. Goldman Sachs has estimated that AI automation will ultimately displace roughly 6 to 7 per cent of the U.S. workforce — approximately 11 million workers — with comparable effects expected across comparable economies. Globally, some 92 million jobs are expected to face displacement pressures, even as new roles emerge.
The Pope described the prospect of mass unemployment caused by digital innovation as "a true social calamity." A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of its population, despite high levels of technical development, he wrote, "risks exposing many to forced inactivity" — a condition he characterised as producing "a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression."
Babel, or Jerusalem?
The encyclical's most striking rhetorical device is a pair of biblical images. Leo invites readers to choose between the Tower of Babel — a top-down, pride-driven project that ultimately fragments humanity — and the rebuilding of Jerusalem as described in the Book of Nehemiah, where diverse workers collaborate under shared responsibility. The choice humanity now faces with AI, he writes, is not between a yes or a no to technology, but "between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem."
The image is a pointed rebuke to a Silicon Valley culture that Leo clearly views as having drifted toward the former. "The concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors must be countered," he wrote. Algorithms, data platforms and technological infrastructure, he argued, should be treated as goods that are universally intended — subject, like land and water, to the principle of universal destination that obliges their benefits to be broadly shared.
What HR leaders should take away
The encyclical is not, strictly speaking, a policy document. It does not prescribe severance packages or mandate retraining budgets. But its framework maps onto the practical challenges Canadian HR teams face with uncomfortable precision.
On governance, Leo calls for "robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility." He specifically warns that calling for the "alignment" of AI with human values is insufficient if that morality is determined by a few — a point that should give pause to any HR team that has outsourced its ethical AI governance to a vendor's terms of service.
On workers, he condemns what he calls the "de-skilling" dynamic — the tendency for AI systems to "force workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work." The result, he writes, is that "current approaches to technology can paradoxically de-skill workers, subject them to automated surveillance and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks."
That observation matches what HRD Canada has reported on the ground. The Forrester finding that half of "AI-attributed layoffs" may ultimately be reversed — with jobs returning at lower wages after companies discover that full automation is harder than promised — suggests that the human cost of the current restructuring wave may be both larger and more enduring than headline numbers imply.
Christopher Olah, the Anthropic co-founder who appeared alongside the Pope at the Vatican presentation on May 25, offered an unusually candid acknowledgement of the industry's own limitations. Every frontier AI lab, including his own, he said, "operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing." His conclusion was direct: "If we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives — people who care about things going well and insist on safety, who are paying close attention, who are willing to say hard things, who are willing to be our earnest, thoughtful critics." He added: "We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend."
For HR professionals, that role — advocate for the human inside the machine — may be among the most consequential their function has ever been asked to play.
The practical upshot
Leo's encyclical will not rewrite Canadian employment law or compel any tech company to change its product roadmap. But its moral authority — the Catholic Church remains the largest Christian denomination in Canada and a significant force in the country's social conscience — means it will shape public and political expectations about what responsible AI adoption looks like.
For HR leaders, the encyclical's most actionable message may be its insistence on transparency and accountability. When AI systems influence hiring, performance management or redundancy decisions, someone in the organisation must be able to explain, justify and, if necessary, correct those decisions. The Pope calls for "clear criteria for discernment" at every stage of AI use. In practice, that means HR cannot remain a passive consumer of AI tools. It must become, as one 2026 trends report from Deel put it, the "architect of the human-machine enterprise" — and that architecture needs a moral blueprint.
