Brief political theology of artificial intelligence
In 1245, as ideologues of the Holy Roman Empire threw barbs at Pope Innocent IV, Emperor Frederick II accused him of encouraging sin and interfering in imperial politics. It is true that Innocent had described the sovereign as the harbinger of the Antichristprecursor of the Antichrist, and that his predecessor had excommunicated him. Since then, appearances have undoubtedly evolved – the emperor is naked and the pope wears Nike sneakers – but the scenario remains largely unchanged.
Trump recently declared on social media that Leo XIV is “WEAK on crime and disastrous for foreign policy.” In the public outcry that followed, commentators lost sight of an element that deserved to be emphasized: Trump was absolutely right. But if the American pope is indeed lax on crime, it is certainly not because of a good-natured temperament characteristic of the Midwest, but by virtue of a constitutional limit. The duty of the sovereign pontiff is not to judge and punish, which would amount to usurping divine prerogatives. Its mission does not consist of hastening the advent of the Last Judgment, but on the contrary of making the time which precedes it the expansive horizon for the diffusion of the Gospel and the practice of Christian virtues.
The crisis that has been brewing for some time between the Trump administration and the Pope is linked to this function of retention, which is that of the Church as a historical force. If the Fathers of the Church, and in particular Tertullian and John Chrysostom, saw in the Roman Empire the mysterious catechonthis delaying power to which Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians alludes – a power supposed to slow down the arrival of the Antichrist and the anomie which announces the apocalypse – the collapse of the Empire led their successors from Augustine to identify this force delaying with the evangelizing mission of the Church she
