What distinguishes the papal intervention from the standard AI-in-creative-work argument is its precision. Pope Leo XIV did not tell priests that AI homilies are lazy or derivative — he told them AI will never be able to share faith, full stop. That framing positions the Catholic Church as the institution that has most directly answered the hard problem of consciousness as it applies to AI: not 'we don't know if AI is conscious,' but 'consciousness of a specific kind — the kind capable of faith, of authentic witness — is…