Does the Church Need Artists?

The Pavilion of the Holy See, “The Ear Is the Eye of the Soul,” Complesso di Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, Venice, 2026. Photo: David Levene.

On October 2, 2026, Pope Leo XIV welcomed some thirty artists and curators to the Apostolic Palace. They had contributed to the Vatican pavilions at the Venice Biennale and to projects organized by the Dicastery for Culture and Education, and were gathered there for a meeting titled “The Art of Possibility: Weaving Together.”1 In an age of technology and hyper-consumption, the pope warned, the danger is no longer simply censorship but homogenization: not only imposed silence but the noise that prevents us from listening. Art, he argued, does not proceed by indexing, but by questioning. The difference between artistic creation and machine-generated output is ontological before it is aesthetic: Artificial intelligence lacks the “human spark” that culture and art, when authentic, can safeguard. He concluded by proposing an alliance: “The Church needs you.”

This phrase has a lineage, one Leo XIV explicitly invokes. In 1964, during the Mass for Artists in the Sistine Chapel, Paul VI had also declared: “We need you.”2 His reasoning was precise: The Church’s mission also involves making the invisible accessible, and artists possess the ability to give form to mystery without dispelling it. More strikingly, however, Paul VI acknowledged that the Church had imposed styles and conventions on artists while failing to communicate the very mysteries it expected them to represent. In the same homily, the pontiff also expressed unease with artistic forms that seemed to threaten the integrity and stability of the human, of which the Church considered itself the guardian. Art was thus invited to renew the language of faith, if not necessarily to challenge the conception of the human it was called upon to represent.

Paul VI also brought the Second Vatican Council to a close in 1965, three years after John XXIII had convened it. Often compared to the Council of Trent (1545–63), Vatican II marked a significant reformulation of the Church’s universalism, opening a more dialogical engagement with a modernity that Christianity itself had helped shape. When he inaugurated the third session in September 1964, Paul VI returned to the theme of Petrine primacy, which rests on Christ’s famous words to Peter: “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my Church” (Mt 16:18). Through centuries of theological controversy and political change, that rock has carried many meanings, which mainly gather around two poles. The first is an act of faith, a relationship with what cannot be guaranteed, possessed, or produced by oneself. The second is the foundation of an institution that has outlived empires: apostolic succession, that is, continuity and belonging built through forms of ownership.

Each generation inherits the rock, but also the question of what it means to build upon it. The distinction between a leap of faith and the logic of ownership is thus never definitively settled; it resurfaces in the different theological and political traditions through which the Church has understood its place in the world.

Defining the Human

During the days of the conclave following Pope Francis’s death in 2025, a part of the world wondered—and placed its bets on—who could possibly live up to Bergoglio’s legacy. The conclave chose an outside bet: Robert Francis Prevost. Videos circulated on TikTok capturing the crowd gathered beneath the balcony and the collective shock that greeted the announcement of his name: “The American?!”

American, indeed, but with a distinctly South American trajectory. Like his predecessor, Prevost had spent much of his ecclesiastical career in Latin America. Both were the first members of their respective orders to become pope: Francis a Jesuit, Prevost an Augustinian. Each tradition offers different understandings of poverty, authority, and grace. Though a Jesuit, Francis invoked Francis of Assisi’s radical renunciation of property through his chosen name, while Augustine’s theology of grace challenged the notion of individual self-sufficiency. As with all modern popes, Prevost’s choice of pontifical name was significant. He explained that it was an homage to Leo XIII, who served as head of the Catholic Church from 1878 to 1903 and published the famous encyclical Rerum Novarum, the Vatican’s foundational text addressing the social conditions created by the first Industrial Revolution.3 

Published on May 15, 1891, Rerum Novarum responded to rapid urbanization, concentration of property, the impoverishment of workers, the rise of trade unions, and the challenge to the Church posed by the emergence of socialist movements across Europe. Widely regarded as the founding document of modern Catholic social teaching, it defended workers’ rights to organize and affirmed the state’s responsibility toward the most vulnerable, while still rejecting both the abolition of private property and class struggle. Exactly 135 years later, on May 15, 2026, Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas.4 Comparing our era to that of the first Industrial Revolution, it argues that technology is not neutral and that the technocratic paradigm, which reaches its fullest expression with AI, risks normalizing an antihuman vision; it therefore calls for artificial intelligence to be “disarmed” of the logic of domination, exclusion, and war. It is not a text against technology—recognizing its potential for breakthroughs in medicine, science, and education—but rather one directed against trans-humanist visions and a form of development driven by the interests of the few.

Trump’s AI adviser, David Sacks, rejected calls for regulation, while Peter Thiel, cofounder of Palantir, took the debate into explicitly theological territory. In a series of lectures in San Francisco, Thiel described critics of technology as “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” arguing that democracies were holding themselves back with ethical scruples while authoritarian states pursued AI development without comparable constraints.5 He went so far as to accuse the pope of working for the Chinese communists. When an encyclical on artificial intelligence can be accused of serving the Chinese Communist Party by a tech billionaire lecturing on the Antichrist, theology has clearly escaped the confines of the sacristy.

Yet Catholic social teaching did not emerge in a vacuum. By the time Leo XIII affirmed the dignity of workers, the Church had already spent centuries scrutinizing its role in mediating conflicts between rich and poor, Christian and non-Christian peoples, before and during European colonial expansion. These debates were far from settled. In 1452, Nicholas V’s bull Dum Diversas authorized the Portuguese crown to conquer and enslave “Saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ.”6 Yet in 1537, Paul III’s Sublimis Deus affirmed the rationality, freedom, and right to property of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, echoing a theological position shared by Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas and other critics of colonial violence.

This conflict came to a head during the Valladolid debate (1550–51), when Las Casas defended Indigenous rationality and freedom against Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda’s justification of Spanish conquest and subjugation. Early modern Christianity, then, offered not a single position but competing arguments over conquest, conversion, and the status of non-Christian peoples. These controversies show how definitions of the human, and claims to universal authority, were fought over within the political and theological struggles of colonial modernity.

For the Caribbean thinker Sylvia Wynter, this transition marked a crucial turning point in the genealogy of Western modernity: the transformation of a theocentric conception of the human into a secular, political, and rational one, as distinctions between Christian and non-Christian became intertwined with new classifications based on reason, civilization, and social organization. In “Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos,” Wynter traces the genealogy of Western modernity back to medieval Christian cosmology and the principle of propter nos (our property), according to which the world was created for humankind.7 But who is the subject of this “nos” (us)? From the Christian to the rational political subject, and eventually to Homo oeconomicus and the biocentric conception of modern Man (the white, bourgeois, middle-class subject), Wynter identifies a succession of “genres of the human”: historically constituted ways of being human that, through a process of overrepresentation, come to stand for humanity as a whole.8

The secularization of Christian cosmology, then, did not simply replace transcendence with reason, but reorganized its universalizing structures within new regimes of knowledge, sovereignty, and power. Distinctions between Life and Death, Christian and pagan, salvation and damnation were reconfigured through political, racial, biological, and economic classifications. Against this historical process, Wynter proposes the possibility of the “ecumenically human”: a horizon in which different ways of being human are no longer subsumed under a single dominant model. Rather than rejecting universality, she calls for an “ecumene” that does not constitute itself through the exclusion of others.9 When Leo XIV invokes Paul VI and human dignity in relation to art and artificial intelligence, he enters this same historical struggle: not merely over what distinguishes human creation from technological production, but over who gets to define the human in the first place.

Pauline Curnier Jardin, Adoration, film installation, detail: screen and wall painting. Courtesy the Artist, LIAF, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Ellen de Bruijne Projects, ChertLüdde. Photo: Tania Innocenti, 2022.

Conversions

In Venice, the complex of Santa Maria Maddalena on the island of Giudecca, known as delle Convertite (the converted), was established around 1530–34 as a refuge for “redeemed” women. It was relocated between 1542 and 1548 to buildings constructed for Augustinian nuns. Suppressed during the Napoleonic era and initially transformed into a military prison, it became a women’s prison in the nineteenth century.

It was here, in a place shaped by successive regimes of discipline, belonging, and exclusion, that artist Pauline Curnier Jardin realized Adoration in April 2022.10 Developed in collaboration with incarcerated women and curated by Francesco Urbano Ragazzi as a satellite project of the Lofoten International Art Festival, the work consists of a large-scale mural and an animated film, collectively written and also available in a “censored version.” According to the curators, Adoration was commissioned by the incarcerated women themselves and conceived exclusively for the prison community: a public artwork inaccessible to the general public, the very opposite of a pavilion.

In 2024, the same prison hosted “Con i miei occhi (Through My Eyes),” the Holy See’s pavilion at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, curated by Chiara Parisi and Bruno Racine, under the patronage of Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education.11 On this occasion, Pope Francis visited the prison, becoming the first pontiff to attend the Biennale. Incarcerated women participated as guides, accompanying visitors through the exhibition. The initiative reflects a vision of the Church that, since the Second Vatican Council, has increasingly embraced an integral humanism, understanding engagement with the world and its marginalized communities as a constitutive dimension of its universal mission. The building once intended for the religious and moral conversion of women once deemed deviant thus becomes a site where the Church, through art, confronts the boundaries of community and the possibility of crossing them. On October 2, 2026, Leo XIV himself recalled the pavilion, suggesting that the aim was not to bring art into the prison, but to allow the prison to teach art—and all of us—something.

The Vatican pavilion, however, followed a different curatorial approach from Curnier Jardin’s Adoration. Conceived as a temporary group exhibition, it brought international artistic practices into the prison, opening an otherwise inaccessible institution to a wider public. Unlike Adoration, none of its works were permanent or intended to serve an ongoing function within the prison, nor did the participating artists conduct workshops in direct collaboration with the incarcerated women. This difference also extended to the spatial organization of the project: Maurizio Cattelan’s monumental mural on the building’s facade was not visible from within the prison, while the public program took place at Palazzo Grassi, beyond the reach of the incarcerated women. These choices point to different understandings of what an artistic intervention within a prison might achieve: whether primarily through visibility, representation, and public engagement, or through sustained relationships and practices developed with the community itself.

By contrast, Urbano Ragazzi emphasized the collaborative nature of Adoration, conceived and developed with the incarcerated women themselves. An institution with the Vatican’s global symbolic authority can bring considerable visibility to a community and its experiences, but such visibility also raises the question of who determines the terms of representation. Recognition alone does not necessarily transform the conditions under which previously excluded subjects are represented. The difference lies between a project that an institution can plan, put on display, and control, and one whose outcome depends on those who make it.

Presented by the Holy See ten years after the publication of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’, “Opera Aperta”—its pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Biennale (2025), curated by Marina Otero Verzier and Giovanna Zabotti in collaboration with Tatiana Bilbao Estudio and MAIO Architects—took the concern of Francis’s encyclical with “our common home” in a more practical and experimental direction.12 Departing from the approach of the previous pavilion, the project shifted attention from exhibition-making to the material and social processes of care. For six months, local artisans and restorers worked on the rehabilitation of the Santa Maria Ausiliatrice complex in Castello (Venice), transforming it into a “collective repair workshop” conceived as an act of social justice. The space subsequently continued to serve local communities and was taken up again for the following edition of the Venice Art Biennale, extending the project’s life beyond the duration of the exhibition.

“The Ear Is the Eye of the Soul” at the 61st International Art Biennale, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ben Vickers with Soundwalk Collective—commissioned, like the two preceding Vatican pavilions, by Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça—unfolds across the Mystical Garden of the Discalced Carmelites and Santa Maria Ausiliatrice.13 Its guiding figure is Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), for whom sound was a form of knowledge bridging microcosm and macrocosm. Hildegard occupies the relatively safe territory of a mysticism sanctioned by the Church and increasingly celebrated by the contemporary art world. Her selection raises an old question: Who is permitted to encounter the divine, and who has the authority to recognize that encounter? More radical than its choice of patron might suggest, the pavilion redirects technology toward the cultivation of attention. It proposes listening as contemplation, anticipating Leo XIV’s October 2 warning about the noise that prevents us from listening. The question is whether such an experience can move beyond the cultivation of the self toward a transformation of the relations through which that self is constituted. A related initiative, ART CUT, the Art Triennial of Catholic Universities, brings its inaugural edition, “Exercises in Empathy,” to seven universities worldwide, fostering collective practices of empathy as a human capacity to be cultivated.

Disowning the Human

The modern system of the fine arts only crystallized in the eighteenth century, setting art apart from craft, the mechanical arts, and the other forms of productive labor once gathered under techne, a separation that has since become so deeply rooted that it keeps calling for new attempts to overcome it. Leo XIV’s address of October 2 seems to take this separation for granted, while his encyclical recognizes technology as a constitutive dimension of human experience. Peter Thiel, meanwhile, has recast the Antichrist as a political-technological figure: a one-world state that, promising peace and safety, would regulate technological progress to a standstill. As tech companies turn to religion to lend artificial intelligence moral authority, the Church correspondingly turns to artists to defend what it regards as irreducibly human.

An older anxiety resurfaces in this contemporary confrontation: the possibility that capacities once considered the expression of an exclusively human interiority might be reproduced without the spirit presumed to animate them. What is at stake is then not so much the difference between human and so-called artificial intelligence as the authority to determine what constitutes a thinking spirit. The binary itself deserves suspicion. These systems are not simply nonhuman. They are made and shaped by humans and trained on the accumulated intellectual and artistic labor of humans, much of it appropriated without prior consent or subsequent compensation. Without that labor they are nothing.14 Nor does this make them thinking or spiritual beings. What confronts us may be neither a human nor a nonhuman other, but human labor returned in estranged form, as a power that appears to stand on its own. The question, then, is perhaps less whether machines have a soul than who claims the right to decide where a soul is present, and who profits from that decision. When Leo XIV asks artists to safeguard the human spark, he thus enters a historical dispute over the soul and the power to claim its possession.

The question of who has the authority to recognize the full humanity of the other runs through the history of the Church, from the Valladolid debate to the emergence of a new otherness, one that is now genuinely nonhuman. In the history of European colonial expansion, the category of “pagans” helped legitimize subjugation and dispossession. Yet it also served as a rubric for grouping together ritual worlds, images, and techniques for engaging with the visible and the invisible, whose efficacy did not depend on Christian authority. The power to classify and subordinate these practices, or to appropriate them, does not necessarily confer the power to possess what animates them. Owning things and having the authority to determine their meaning are not the same, although the history of colonization shows how often the former has been exercised through the latter.

A reversal now comes into view. The same institution that once took part in classifying other cosmologies now turns to art to defend an order of the human that it sees as threatened by technological logics. The question of labor returns here in a different form. In 1891, the first social encyclical affirmed the dignity of human labor against its reduction to a commodity, while defending private property in the face of the labor question and the transformations of industrial capitalism. Today, the contested ground is the very possibility of appropriating human capacities: extracting them from the labor that produced them, reproducing them, and claiming the authority to define them. What for Marx was “alienation”—the separation of workers from the products of their labor—assumes a new form when those products include language, images, and indeed thought itself.

But if the universal has historically been constituted by raising one particular genre of the human into the measure of all others, Sylvia Wynter’s “ecumenically human” opens the possibility of telling another story of who we are. An ecumene cannot arise simply from extending a preexisting definition of humanity to those who have been excluded from it. It requires encounters capable of transforming the very terms of belonging.

“Upon this rock I will build my church.” In the succession from John Paul II and Benedict XVI to Francis and Leo XIV, a different reading of that promise seems to have emerged, despite the seeming continuity of the Catholic Church. The emphasis falls less on defending the boundaries of ecclesiastical authority and more on faith as openness to an encounter with that which cannot be fully foreseen or possessed. Seen in this light, the rock can be understood not so much as a title deed to whatever will be built upon it, but as an act of faith in the very possibility of building. A foundation does not determine what may emerge from it, nor does it necessarily grant the right to possess or define it. The question, then, is not only whether art can safeguard what makes us human, but whether it is possible to safeguard the human without claiming ownership of it, and without foreclosing what it might yet become.