The Vatican has released the full transcript of Pope Leo XIV’s address to the academic community of the Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo Catholic University in Chiclayo, Peru — and the most striking passage is aimed squarely at the transhumanist project now circulating through Silicon Valley’s longevity start-ups. Exaudi published the complete text of the Friday, 13 November speech, in which the pope told professors and students that the promises of transhumanism and posthumanism — that technology will one day “eliminate all disease and pain, as well as aging and even death itself” — must not become “a privilege reserved for millionaires seeking immortality, while entire peoples suffer from poverty and oppression.”
His counter-formulation is the line the speech will be remembered by: “a limitation is not a manufacturing defect, but rather the very condition of human grandeur.”
The speech, in its own words
The address was delivered on the final leg of an eleven-day, three-nation tour through Uruguay, Argentina and Peru, weeks after the 71-year-old pope underwent lung surgery, as National Catholic Reporter’s trip reporting backgrounded. Breitbart’s field coverage from Chiclayo notes the pope met clergy during the day and had scheduled evening meetings with representatives of the university’s academic community — the audience that heard this text.
Three passages do the real work:
- On the technocratic paradigm: “The most deadly risk is that of submission to the technocratic paradigm, which reduces reality to material data, considering efficiency to be the supreme value.” The pope urged academics to seek “wisdom which neither machines nor computer programs can possess.”
- On technology’s neutrality: “Technology is not always neutral. At times, its forms bear the imprint, interests and ambitions of those who design and control it.” That is as close to a direct critique of AI’s corporate ownership structure as the Vatican has produced in a speech text this year.
- On progress itself: “A progress that is indifferent to justice and the dignity of workers becomes, in fact, a mechanism of oppression and exclusion” — language that ties the AI-labour debate directly into the papacy’s social teaching, in the lineage of Rerum Novarum the Vatican explicitly drew on when Leo launched his AI encyclical five months ago.
Pope Leo also told the students — whom he called “natives of this new era” — to move “beyond mere connection toward authentic relationships that foster communion,” a theme he first developed at scale in the encyclical. Friday’s speech reads as that document’s doctrine applied live, in the diocese where he served as bishop from 2015 to 2023, and delivered to an audience of exactly the kind of young graduates the global AI economy is reshaping.
Why this speech, in this place, matters to the AI debate
The Chiclayo speech is the third act in a deliberate sequence. In May, Magnifica Humanitas gave the Vatican’s structural argument — that AI must serve human dignity, and that the church intends to be a counterweight to unregulated deployment, a position we covered when the encyclical launched alongside Anthropic’s co-founder. In December last year, in St Peter’s Square, the pope told general-audience pilgrims that “death is not opposed to life,” rejecting “immanent immortality” as an anthropological error. Chiclayo is the first time those two threads — AI’s governance and transhumanism’s promise — have been fused in a single set text, delivered not to tech executives but to a Peruvian regional university.
That setting is the point. The communities least able to buy whatever “cybernetic perfection” eventually ships are the ones the pope chose to address about it: Chiclayo is a desert-region city where, as DW and wire services noted during the tour, the surrounding region carries Peru’s highest poverty rate. When the pope says immortality tech risks becoming “a privilege reserved for millionaires,” he is describing a plausible distribution problem, not a hypothetical one — the same distribution question that hangs over AI productivity gains generally, which so far have accrued to capital rather than to the displaced workers the layoff trackers count.
There is also a sharper edge for the builders. “Technology without a soul does not truly improve life,” the pope told the academics — language that will draw little argument from AI-safety researchers, and open hostility from the effective-accelerationist wing that treats any human-limit talk as civilisational surrender. Mistral’s CEO made the counter-case against papal AI arguments in October, when Le Monde carried his defence of European AI sovereignty. The disagreement is now well mapped: the Vatican position is that limits are constitutive of human meaning; the accelerationist position is that limits are problems to engineer away. Both camps now cite the same start-up pitch decks in support.
What the pope did not say
Notably missing from the transcript is any specific policy demand — no call for a treaty on life-extension research, no naming of companies, no ban proposal. The speech stays at the level of anthropology: what humans are for, and who gets to be upgraded. That restraint is consistent with the encyclical’s method and keeps the address readable as philosophy rather than politics. Whether that restraint survives contact with the next generation of longevity-and-augmentation fundraising rounds — several of which are now explicitly marketed with “defeating death” language — is the question the speech implicitly hands to the industry.
❓ FAQ
What did Pope Leo XIV say about transhumanism in Chiclayo? In his 13 November address at the Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo Catholic University, he called transhumanist promises — technology eliminating disease, ageing and death — a “mirage” and warned they must not become a privilege “reserved for millionaires seeking immortality, while entire peoples suffer from poverty and oppression.”
When and where was the speech delivered? Friday, 13 November 2026, in the USAT auditorium in Chiclayo, Peru, during the final leg of a three-nation Latin American tour. The Vatican released the full transcript.
Has the pope criticised transhumanism before? Yes — in a December 2025 general audience he rejected technological promises of “immanent immortality,” and his May 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas argued AI must serve human dignity. Chiclayo fuses the two threads in one text.
Why does this matter to the AI industry? It ties AI’s governance debate to the distribution of future enhancement technology — framed as a justice question — and directly challenges the “efficiency as supreme value” framing that much of enterprise AI adoption currently runs on.
