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The Babel Syndrome: Why the Pope Says AI Can Never Truly Think — and Why He Quoted Gandalf to Prove It

In Episode 2 of The Pope vs. The Algorithm, Pope Leo XIV names a disease inside the AI industry — the 'Babel Syndrome' — argues that no machine can ever truly think, and answers Silicon Valley with St. Augustine and a J.R.R. Tolkien quote buried in paragraph 213.

By Nicholas West ⏤

Watch Episode 2 of our limited series, The Pope vs. The Algorithm, [here].

In Episode 1, two worlds collided. A mathematician Pope and an atheist billionaire stood side by side at the Vatican to declare war on the artificial intelligence industry. We ended on a cliffhanger — because Pope Leo XIV didn’t just criticize AI in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. He diagnosed it. He said the entire industry is suffering from a disease, and he gave that disease a name.

To explain what has gone wrong with the smartest machines ever built, the Pope reached back four thousand years — to a story about a tower. And then, in the middle of an official Church document, he did something no Pope has ever done. He quoted a wizard.

This is the Babel Syndrome.

What Is the Babel Syndrome? The Three Symptoms of a Modern Tower

You know the biblical story. Humanity decides to build a tower tall enough to reach the heavens — to make a name for itself, to become like God through sheer engineering. It does not end well.

Pope Leo XIV argues the tech industry is building that exact same tower right now, and he identifies three symptoms of the pathology he calls the Babel Syndrome:

  1. The idolatry of profit — when making money stops being a means and becomes the god the system serves.
  2. The pursuit of absolute power — the biggest model, the fastest chip, the deepest competitive moat, sought for its own sake.
  3. A reductionist anthropology — the chilling reduction of a human being to data points. You are no longer a person. You are a behavioral profile, a performance metric, an output to be extracted.

The Pope’s warning is blunt: a system built this way does not lift everyone up. It amplifies whoever already holds the money, the compute, and the data — and it pushes everyone else to the margins. The tower gets taller. The gap gets wider.

The Machine That Cannot Pray: Why the Vatican Says AI Isn’t Real Intelligence

Here is where the mathematician Pope gets technical. Critics expected the Church to say AI is dangerous. What they did not expect was for the Pope to argue that AI, no matter how powerful it becomes, can never actually be intelligent.

And Leo XIV concedes a great deal up front. He admits these machines beat us at raw computation. They are faster. They synthesize more data. They out-produce us. He is not pretending AI is dumb.

But then he draws a line the entire industry refuses to draw. All of that power, he says, remains statistical data processing — prediction and pattern-matching. The machine has no lived experience, no spiritual depth, no genuine values, no real emotion. And so it can never hold ultimate moral responsibility. It can never sit in judgment over a human being.

To make the point, the Pope does not cite a computer scientist. He cites St. Augustine, sixteen hundred years ago: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.” That restlessness — the ache for meaning, for God — is the thing that defines a human being. And it is the one thing you cannot compile. You cannot train a model to be restless for the infinite. A machine can imitate the words of longing, but it can never possess the longing itself. That is the gap, and the Pope insists no amount of scale ever closes it.

The Pope Quotes Gandalf: Paragraph 213 and the War on Fatalism

Which brings us to the strangest sentence in the entire 105-page document. Buried in paragraph 213, in an official teaching of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV quotes J.R.R. Tolkien — specifically, Gandalf:

“It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.”

Why would a Pope put a wizard in a magisterial document? Because he understands his audience perfectly. When you hear about trillion-dollar companies building minds we don’t fully understand, the natural feeling is powerlessness. What could I possibly do? It’s too big. It’s inevitable.

The Pope names that feeling and fights it. He is targeting fatalism — the paralyzing belief that the machine will roll over all of us and there is nothing anyone can do. Gandalf’s answer is the Pope’s answer: it is not your job to master every tide of history. It is your job to tend the field you can actually reach.

And right after the wizard, the Pope makes the point in his own words. The “civilization of love” — his phrase for the alternative to Babel — will not come from “a single or spectacular gesture.” It will come from “the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.” Small. Steadfast. Acts. Not a heroic war against Big Tech, but a thousand quiet refusals to let the machine tell you what a person is worth.

Babel vs. the New Jerusalem: Why “AI Is Never Neutral”

The Pope doesn’t just diagnose the disease. He offers the cure, and he frames the whole thing as a choice between two cities.

On one side: Babel — the tower of pride, profit, and power, built to make a name for the few. On the other, a quieter figure from scripture: Nehemiah, who returned to rebuild the broken walls of Jerusalem. Not to reach heaven, but to make a home; to repair what was ruined.

And here is the part Silicon Valley really does not want to hear. The Pope insists that AI is — in his words — “never neutral.” Every model reflects the priorities, biases, and financial interests of the people who built it and the boards who own it. There is no such thing as neutral code. Which means you cannot fix this with a compliance checkbox after the fact. The values have to be built in from the very first line. Either you are building Babel, or you are rebuilding Jerusalem. There is no neutral tower.

What’s Next: The Slavery Apology, the New Colonialism, and the Machines That Kill

The Pope has named the disease and drawn the map out. But Magnifica Humanitas has a darker chapter we haven’t touched yet — because Leo XIV does not stop at philosophy.

He apologizes, for the first time in history, for the Church’s own role in legitimizing slavery. And then he turns that apology into a weapon, using it to expose what he calls the “new slavery” hidden inside your favorite AI: the invisible workforce of data annotators, the rare-earth mines, and the autonomous systems now being handed the power to kill.

Why did the Pope demand that the world “disarm AI”? What happened when a Pentagon deal collided with a company’s conscience? And how does a 135-year-old apology connect to the phone in your hand?

Hit subscribe so you don’t miss Episode 3: Disarm the Algorithm. We are not resigned spectators — we’re the ones who tend the field.