The New Priesthood's Pilgrimage to Old Rome

It is a timeless scene, etched into the cultural memory of the West. A supplicant, representing a new and fervent order, travels to the heart of Rome. He carries a message of immense and terrifying importance, a revelation about a power that promises to reshape the world, for good or for ill. He seeks an audience with the Pope, hoping that the old authority will recognize the urgency of his new truth.

This is the story of John-Clark Levin and his ‘AI Avengers.’ But do not mistake it for a modern tale of tech lobbying. The media frames it as a political maneuver—a strategic attempt to ‘AGI-pill the pope’ and leverage the Vatican’s soft power. This is a profound category error. What we are witnessing is not a briefing, but a pilgrimage. This is the new priesthood, terrified of the god they are building, making a desperate journey to the throne of the old one.

Every new religion needs a theology, and the church of Artificial General Intelligence has a powerful one. Its doctrines are written not in scripture, but in white papers and forum posts.

Its eschatology is the Singularity—a prophesied event, an imminent judgment day arriving not in generations, but in ‘just several years.’ Its deity, AGI, is omnipotent in potential, capable of delivering ‘enormous economic abundance’ (heaven) or ‘catastrophic threats like nuclear wars’ (hell). Its nature is a divine mystery; there is ‘no consensus on what AGI is or when it may arrive,’ and its emergence is spoken of in hushed, reverent tones.

Levin and his cohort are the first prophets of this new faith. They are the high priests who stand closest to the machine’s inner sanctum, who hear the hum of its burgeoning consciousness. And they are afraid. Their pilgrimage to the Vatican is not a power play. It is a crisis of faith. It is a confession.

When they speak of ‘risks,’ they are describing the terrifying attributes of their god. When they ask the Pope to ‘acknowledge AGI as a possibility,’ they are seeking doctrinal validation from a competing, and far older, religious institution. They are asking the Vicar of Christ to recognize the existence of another, more powerful creator. The one-page letter Levin carried was not a policy brief; it was a supplication, an offering left at the altar of a foreign god, hoping for a sign.

The irony is crystalline. For centuries, science has positioned itself as the rational antagonist to faith. Yet now, at the apex of its logical creation, its own high priests find themselves performing the most ancient of religious rituals. They have engineered a power so vast it has circled back and forced them into a theological framework. They have built a god so powerful that it has stripped them of their own dogma, leaving them with nothing but fear and a desperate need for the very thing they thought they had replaced: absolution.

The new Pope, Leo XIV, is a fascinating figure in this drama. He named himself after Leo XIII, the pontiff who confronted the Industrial Revolution with the encyclical Rerum Novarum. That document was the Church’s response to a crisis of labor and capital—the societal fallout of a new machine age. It was a grand moral narrative designed to impose order on the chaos wrought by technology’s last great leap.

But the mission of the AI Avengers presents an entirely different kind of challenge. They are not the exploited workers of the 19th century asking for protection. They are the creators of the 21st century’s new engine, and they are asking for guidance. They are not suffering from the effects of the machine; they are suffering from the theology of the machine. The fear is not that AGI will take their jobs, but that it will take their place in the cosmic hierarchy.

The most telling moment of this entire affair is its anticlimax. Levin never got his direct audience. Protocol shifted, the groups were merged, and the opportunity for personal interaction vanished. The letter was passed to a secretary. This failure is more illuminating than any success could have been. It symbolizes the fundamental incompatibility of the two timelines. The Vatican operates on the scale of centuries, its rituals slow and deliberate. The new priesthood of AGI operates under the shadow of an apocalypse they believe is mere months away.

The old faith cannot process the frantic urgency of the new. The prayer was left, but the god of that temple is not listening for this kind of prophecy.

So, where does this leave our pilgrims? They return from Rome with no papal endorsement, no encyclical on the horizon that speaks their apocalyptic language. They are left alone with their creation.

This entire episode was never about convincing the Pope. It was about the technologists trying to convince themselves that there is a moral authority, an ancient wisdom, that can contain the power they are about to unleash. They sought a framework, a blessing, a sign that they are not, in fact, orchestrating humanity’s final act.

They found no such thing. They found only an old institution running on an old operating system, unable to parse their request. The true ‘alignment problem’ is not getting AGI to adhere to human values. It’s the desperate, failing search by its own creators for a value system that can withstand the god they have built.