Scrolling through social media these past few days, I stopped at a post that announced: “Pope Leo’s secret letter to U.S. bishops just leaked. TrumpWorld is not going to like what it says.”
The headline was pure drama – the kind that makes you click before you think, usually called "clickbait."
In a few hours, the claim travelled fast. Commenters applauded the pope’s supposed defiance or condemned his interference in politics. Few paused to ask the simplest question: did any of this actually happen?
The story appeared nowhere in Vatican communications or in trusted Catholic media. It began life on LinkedIn and soon took on a rhythm of its own.
Whether there was a genuine letter or not – most evidence points to exaggeration – the deeper truth is how quickly speculation becomes narrative, and narrative becomes belief.
This is what happens when headlines outpace the heart.
In the same week, two other stories emerged.
The Guardian reported that Pope Leo had condemned “the degrading practice of clickbait,” urging journalists to protect communication as “a public good.” And Politico carried his rejection of a proposal to create an AI-generated papal avatar – “If there’s anybody who should not be represented by an avatar,” he said, “the pope is high on the list.”
Taken together, these events sketch a pope unusually alive to the mechanics of modern communication. His warnings are not just about technology but about temptation – the pull of performance over presence, the seduction of speed over substance.
In less than six months, Leo has already drawn a moral map of the digital world:
- AI must remain a servant, never a substitute, for human creativity.
- Communication must be freed from manipulation and spectacle.
- Dignity – not novelty – is the measure of progress.
It is a manifesto of sorts, and a remarkably consistent one.
The Mirage of Revelation
The “secret letter” story deserves a closer look precisely because it feels so plausible. The idea of hidden papal dissent fits the rhythm of modern storytelling: expose, outrage, reaction. Yet its circulation exposes how our media ecosystem rewards the thrill of revelation over the patience of verification.
That tension – between what is hidden and what is hurriedly exposed – has always existed in religious life. Discernment takes time; gossip does not.
The Church understands secrecy differently from scandal. A letter to bishops, if it exists, would not be a leak but a pastoral act, meant to guide rather than provoke. Turning it into a political weapon says more about the world’s hunger for conflict than about the content of any correspondence.
While some chase rumours of letters, others manufacture appearances. The Vatican has had to contend with deepfake videos and AI-generated “papal” speeches circulating online. A few have been convincing enough to alarm the faithful. The response from Rome was swift: any authentic message from Pope Leo will appear only on official Vatican channels.
Deepfakes strike at the heart of credibility. They imitate the visual cues of authority while emptying them of authenticity. Their very existence vindicates Leo’s decision to reject an “AI pope.” Representation without relationship, he warned, risks eroding the meaning of the office itself.
In this, Leo articulates a profound theological intuition: that the body matters. Presence cannot be downloaded. Embodiment – voice, gesture, vulnerability – is inseparable from truth.
Artificial replication, however skilful, cannot replicate conscience.
The Church’s Social Imagination Revisited
By choosing the name Leo, the new pope aligned himself with Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical that addressed the social upheavals of the first industrial age. Then, the question was the dignity of labour. Today, it is the dignity of cognition – how automation, algorithms, and data reshape human purpose.
Leo XIV’s early teaching already echoes that lineage. He speaks of work as a vocation that expresses human dignity and warns of “a huge problem coming down the line” if automation hollows out meaning.
He extends the same moral logic to communication itself. Journalism, he told global news agencies, must resist “the degrading practice of clickbait” and stand as “an antidote to the proliferation of junk information.”
This is Catholic social thought updated for the digital century: a defence of attention as a moral act, and of truth as a common good.
The Wisdom of the Heart
At the centre of these episodes – the alleged leak, the avatar pope, the clickbait condemnation – runs a common thread: the recovery of interior wisdom in an exterior age.
The “wisdom of the heart” is not sentimentality. It is a mode of perception that joins knowledge to compassion, reason to conscience. It teaches us to listen before we speak, to interpret before we react, and to seek meaning beyond metrics.
In this sense, Leo’s approach to AI and media mirrors a deeper anthropology. The heart, not the algorithm, is humanity’s first search engine. It retrieves not data but discernment. It holds memory, empathy, and moral weight – capacities no model can compute.
So what might this wisdom look like for those of us who work with words and technology?
Perhaps:
- Pause before echoing. Verification is an act of respect, not scepticism.
- Attend to pattern. Authentic voices reveal themselves through consistency, not novelty.
- Preserve embodiment. Real dialogue still happens between people, not profiles.
- Guard against cynicism. To doubt everything is no wiser than to believe everything.
These disciplines sound simple, yet they are increasingly counter-cultural. They amount to a small resistance against the automation of judgment.
Seen together, the stories of recent weeks trace a papacy not defined by scandal but by coherence. Leo’s concern for migrants, his defence of journalism, his scepticism about AI avatars – all spring from one theological root: the conviction that technology must serve the human person, never the other way round.
The noise around him – the viral posts, the fevered headlines – may try to drown that message. But perhaps this is the paradox of our time: that truth must whisper where spectacle shouts.
And so the task for communicators, believers or not, is to model the slower virtue of discernment – to let the heart re-enter the conversation.
The Quiet Pulse beneath the Noise
Whether or not a “secret letter” was ever written is finally beside the point. The real revelation lies elsewhere – in the pope’s insistence that compassion and conscience are the Church’s true technologies.
As algorithms learn to mimic speech and headlines mimic outrage, the heart remains the last uncopyable interface. It is where empathy is processed, where meaning is rendered, where truth is held until it is ready to be spoken.
That may not make for a viral headline, but it may just make for a wiser world.
