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Pope Leo XIV has warned clergy against using AI to write sermons, urging pastors to engage real people, exercise their intellect, and prioritise authentic pastoral care over digital shortcuts.

Pope Leo XIV has told clergy not to use artificial intelligence to write sermons.

Using AI, he argued, undermined pastoral care and a pastor’s intelligence.

“The brain needs to be used,” he said.

“Just as all the muscles in the body die if we do not use them, intelligence needs to be exercised a little so as not to lose it.”

Pope Leo’s remarks were made during a question-and-answer session in Rome.

His focus was on encouraging clergy to sharpen the cure of souls (care of souls).

Pastoral Care Requires Real-World Presence

Consequently, Pope Leo’s overall directive consisted of telling clergy to get off the internet and get back to work, learning the lived reality (context) of those in their community.

“Knowing their reality, being close to them in this sense, accompanying them informs witness, empowers example and better connects the community with evangelism.”

“Let us call them, let us go and visit them. Let us also make an effort to help these people who are isolated and suffering.”

“Today, with fewer priests and more elderly people, it has become a matter of: ‘Oh well, let’s send the lay people, they’ll do it.’”

While lay people do a great job, Pope Leo explained, “this doesn’t mean priests can stay at home looking at the internet.”

“If we can offer a service that is, let’s say, enculturated, in the place, in the parish where we are working, people want to see your faith, your experience of having known and loved Jesus Christ and His Gospel.”

“This is something we must cultivate continuously.”

Connecting offline is a “very important form of pastoral care.” Especially, “living out a closeness with those who suffer.”

“AI will never be able to share the faith!” he exclaimed.

Therefore, “resist the temptation to prepare homilies with AI!”

Pray, seek dialogue and ground the experiences of life authentically in the Lord. From here, “we can offer something that is not ours,” he added.

Faith Cannot Be Shared by Algorithms

Believing we are practising real-world engagement online is “often an illusion of the internet,” he said.

“‘I have so many followers, so many likes, because they see what I’m saying.’”

Reminding pastors that their goal is to preach the Gospel, not to farm likes, shares and comments, Pope Leo said, “If you’re not transmitting the message of Jesus Christ”, you’re doing it wrong.

“We need to reflect very carefully and with great humility on who we are and what we are doing.”

Elsewhere, clarifying what he meant by humility, the Pope stated that this is an,

“attitude of wanting to recognise that it is not me, it is the Lord who gave me life, it is the Lord who accompanies me and carries me in his arms, even in those moments when I am weakest.

“The Lord is there with us. And living with this spirit gives life, hope.

“With this attitude of love, service, humility and listening, we can truly discover what we can do to respond to the community where we are called to serve.”

On the subject of smartphones, the Pope admitted he had one.

He also suggested that he had an app about prayer, then added the caveat, saying he didn’t consult it in order to pray.

“With the famous smartphone, which probably all of us carry in our pockets today, we live alone. Even if they say, ‘No, my friend is here’, there is no human contact.”

From Online Followers to Genuine Relationships

We all “live in a kind of distance from others, a coldness, without knowing the richness and value of truly human relationships.”

“So there too we must seek to offer young people another kind of experience of friendship,” Pope Leo instructed.

By “sharing the Gospel little by little, with communion, we can invite them to know Jesus, who invites us to be not his servants but his friends.”

“To do all this takes a lot of time, sacrifice, and reflection,” he sympathised.

Pope Leo’s AI remarks are consistent with his call to “reignite the gift of God and rediscover pastoral zeal.”

He said he understood the pressures on ministers.

Being worn down by “fatigue, the burden of routine, and discouraged by the world’s disaffection with faith, only proved this gift of God had to be fuelled and revived constantly.”

Pope Leo’s directive is about adopting the new to fan the flames of the old.

This isn’t about banning technology. It’s about dependency on AI making clergy unfit for ministry.

“A life of links without relationship, or likes without affection, disappoints us,” the Pope later wrote on Instagram.

“We are made for truth: when it is missing, we suffer.”

Hence, the former admonition: don’t use digital shortcuts.

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