Disarm: The word at the heart of Leo’s vision

One of the most striking things about Magnifica Humanitas is how often a single word returns, as a lens through which Leo XIV focuses his entire argument. That word is “disarm.” It appears in contexts as different as the governance of algorithms, the culture of war, and the peace of the Risen Christ. Here are five distinct ways Leo deploys it.

The most unexpected use comes in paragraph 110, where Leo announces that the word is “close to my heart.” What he means by disarming AI is first of all freeing it “from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition” — the race for ever more powerful algorithms driven by the desire for geopolitical or commercial dominance. AI, in other words, has already been weaponized. To disarm it is to refuse the arms-race logic that currently governs its development.

In the same paragraph, a second meaning surfaces: “To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.” This is a political claim as much as an ethical one. Leo is challenging the idea — widespread in Silicon Valley and in certain government corridors — that whoever controls the most powerful technology has thereby earned the authority to shape the world. 

The third sense is more constructive. Disarming AI doesn’t mean dismantling it: “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.” It means opening it to “discussion and debate,” freeing it “from monopolistic control” and restoring it “to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.” AI must become, as Leo writes, “welcoming and accessible.” Disarming, here, is an act of “democratization.” 

In Chapter Five, Leo proposes five paths toward a civilization of love. The first is linguistic: “Let us disarm words and we will help to disarm the world.” This is not a metaphor borrowed lightly. Leo means it literally — that the polarizing, dehumanizing language of our current political and media culture is itself a form of armed conflict, and that peace begins in how we speak. “We must say ‘no’ to the war of words and images, we must reject the paradigm of war.” Examining our own vocabulary, our prejudices and the “explicit or implicit aggression” they carry, is a moral task as concrete as any other.

The final and most theologically rich use comes at the very end of the chapter, where Leo recalls his own first words to the Church on the day of his election: the peace of the Risen Christ is “unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering.” The peace Leo is calling Christians to build in the world is not their own achievement; it is first a received reality — the peace of One who chose vulnerability over power, and whose disarmed presence continues to disarm us.

Taken together, these five uses reveal a coherent vision. For Leo XIV, the great danger of our moment is not technology as such, but the logic of domination that has colonized it — and everything else, from language to international relations. To disarm, in all five senses, is to choose a different kind of power: the kind that rebuilds the City of God brick by brick, rather than reaching for heaven on its own terms.