A CCP essay and a papal encyclical both warn about AI’s promise and peril, yet their moral universes could not be farther apart.
by Massimo Introvigne
The appearance of a long theoretical essay in “Study Times,” the Central Chinese Communist Party School’s flagship newspaper, is always a signal. It means the Party is staking out an ideological line that will guide cadres, academics, and policy makers. When “Study Times” devotes thousands of characters to artificial intelligence and Xi Jinping’s Thought on AI (there is a Xi Jinping Thought for everything), as it did in its May 25 meditation on “building China’s autonomous knowledge system,” signed by Zhang Donggang, Party Secretary of Renmin University of China, it is telling us that AI is more than a technological frontier. It is a battlefield of epistemology, ideology, and global influence.
It is probably a coincidence—but a revealing one—that the Chinese Communist Party and Pope Leo XIV have, almost simultaneously, addressed the same subject. The Pope’s encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” and the CCP’s “Study Times” essay both acknowledge the extraordinary potential of AI and the equally extraordinary dangers it poses. But from that point on, the two texts diverge like parallel lines drawn on different planets.
The encyclical approaches AI from the standpoint of Christian humanism, insisting that technology must remain subordinate to the dignity of the human person. It warns, among the several risks of AI, against “communities exposed to invasive surveillance,” the “power to profile, predict and influence behavior,” and systems of control exercised “through the architecture of visibility.” These are the lived experiences of millions of people in the twenty‑first century, and the Pope names them with pastoral clarity.
The “Study Times” essay, by contrast, is a tour de force of Marxist‑Leninist scholasticism. It speaks of AI as a new form of “general intellect,” a force reshaping the superstructure, a catalyst for the “systematization, theorization, and signification” of China’s autonomous knowledge system. It is earnest, elaborate, and unmistakably orthodox. Where the Pope invokes the human person, the CCP invokes the productive forces. Where the encyclical speaks of conscience, the Party speaks of epistemic sovereignty. Where the Vatican warns of the moral risks of surveillance, the CCP text is spectacularly silent on one of the dangers that most concerns the Pope.
And the silence is not accidental. Nowhere on earth is AI more deeply integrated into systems of state surveillance than in China. Facial recognition, predictive policing, algorithmic profiling, and the monitoring of digital behavior are daily realities. The encyclical’s warnings describe, with uncomfortable precision, the very tools that underpin China’s governance model. For the “Study Times” to acknowledge this would be to question the legitimacy of practices the Party considers indispensable.
Instead, the essay frames AI as a dialectical partner of Marxist philosophy. This force can help China build a knowledge system rooted in “Chinese characteristics” and Xi Jinping’s thought, while Marxism, in turn, ensures AI develops along the “correct value orientation.” It is a vision in which technology and ideology co‑evolve, each reinforcing the other, and in which the Party remains the ultimate arbiter of truth, ethics, and epistemology.
Yet the juxtaposition with “Magnifica Humanitas” is illuminating. Both texts recognize that AI is not just a tool but a shaper of civilization. Both see that it can elevate or degrade humanity. But one insists that the measure of technology is the human person, while the other insists that the measure of technology is the Communist Party’s ideological project. One speaks the language of moral anthropology; the other the language of historical materialism.
AI is rapidly becoming the nervous system of our society, and these differences matter. They shape how nations deploy technology, how they regulate it, and how they justify its use. They determine whether AI becomes a servant of human dignity or an instrument of social control.
That the “Study Times” and the Vatican are thinking about the same problem at the same moment is not surprising. That they arrive at such different conclusions is not surprising either. But reading them side by side is a reminder that the future of AI will not be determined only by engineers. It will be determined by the moral and political visions that guide those who wield it—and by the courage of those willing to name the dangers others prefer not to see.
Massimo Introvigne (born June 14, 1955 in Rome) is an Italian sociologist of religions. He is the founder and managing director of the Center for Studies on New Religions (CESNUR), an international network of scholars who study new religious movements. Introvigne is the author of some 70 books and more than 100 articles in the field of sociology of religion. He was the main author of the Enciclopedia delle religioni in Italia (Encyclopedia of Religions in Italy). He is a member of the editorial board for the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion and of the executive board of University of California Press’ Nova Religio. From January 5 to December 31, 2011, he has served as the “Representative on combating racism, xenophobia and discrimination, with a special focus on discrimination against Christians and members of other religions” of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). From 2012 to 2015 he served as chairperson of the Observatory of Religious Liberty, instituted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in order to monitor problems of religious liberty on a worldwide scale.
