In First Global Address, Pope Leo XIV Calls for restraint in an Age of Excess
State of the World Address
By, Pope Leo XIV Vatican City
Brothers and sisters,
We meet at a moment of great achievement and great danger. Never before has humanity possessed such knowledge, such power, or such speed. And never before has it appeared so uncertain about the ends toward which these gifts are directed.
The world is not suffering from a lack of intelligence. It is suffering from a collapse of restraint, memory, and mercy.
We know how to build. We know how to calculate. We know how to predict. What we are forgetting is how to limit ourselves, how to remember what has already failed us, and how to see one another not as obstacles, competitors, or abstractions, but as persons.
Across nations and continents, war persists. Entire regions live beneath the shadow of violence that no longer shocks, no longer pauses, no longer asks permission of conscience. Modern conflict is increasingly conducted at a distance, through screens and systems, through weapons that separate action from consequence.
When destruction is delivered remotely, conscience too often follows at a distance.
Peace does not fail first on the battlefield. It fails in language, in imagination, and in the refusal to recognize the humanity of the other. Diplomacy collapses when humility disappears, and humility disappears when power forgets its limits.
Economic life, too, reflects this forgetting. Markets have grown faster than moral frameworks. Wealth has multiplied while responsibility has thinned. Entire populations now live under the tyranny of precarity, uncertain of shelter, healthcare, or dignity, even as abundance accumulates elsewhere beyond accountability.
An economy that treats human beings as variables rather than persons will eventually devour its own foundations. Prosperity detached from responsibility is not progress. It is delay.
We must also speak honestly about technology. Innovation is not an enemy of faith or reason. But systems designed solely to optimize efficiency risk hollowing out judgment itself. Artificial intelligence can assist calculation, but it cannot assume moral responsibility.
A machine may calculate. It cannot repent.
When decision-making is surrendered to systems that cannot suffer, cannot love, and cannot be held accountable, humanity diminishes itself. Tools must remain tools. They must never become masters.
The earth itself bears witness to our disorder. Climate change is not only an environmental crisis. It is a moral one. It reveals a broken relationship between humanity and creation, fueled by the illusion that extraction has no cost and growth has no boundary.
The theology of endless consumption is a false gospel. Creation is not an inheritance to be exhausted, but a gift to be safeguarded.
The Church, too, must examine itself. Faith cannot be reduced to spectacle, ideology, or tribal identity. When belief becomes a performance or a weapon, it ceases to heal and begins to divide.
A Church that seeks applause will soon fear silence. And silence is where God most often speaks.
Our age is loud, fast, and impatient. Yet the deepest human truths still require time, attention, and humility. We cannot shout our way to wisdom. We cannot automate virtue. We cannot outsource conscience.
Still, I do not speak to you without hope.
History has not ended. Moral repair remains possible. But it requires courage: the courage to accept limits, to tell the truth without cruelty, to govern without vanity, and to remember that power exists to serve life, not to dominate it.
The future is not something we inherit. It is something we answer for.
May we choose restraint over excess, responsibility over convenience, and mercy over indifference. And may we remember that the measure of our progress will not be speed or scale, but whether the human person remains at the center of our common life.
Thank you.
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