Pope prays at tomb of predecessor during first outing since election

Pope Leo XIV made his first outing since his election on Saturday, making a surprise stop to pray at the tomb of his predecessor.

On Saturday afternoon, the new pontiff travelled to a sanctuary dedicated to the Madonna in the town of Genazzano.

The sanctuary is managed by Augustinian friars, the order the pope belongs to, and has been a place of pilgrimage since the 15th century.

The pontiff's namesake. Pope Leo XIII, elevated it to a minor basilica and expanded its convent in the early 1900s.

After praying, Leo greeted the faithful gathered outside and offered a blessing.

On his way back to the Vatican, he stopped to pray at Pope Francis's tomb at St Mary Major Basilica.

Earlier in the day, Leo held his first formal audience and said the Catholic Church must take the lead in facing threats to workers, such as AI.

The 69-year-old said the technology posed "new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour".

The leader of the world's 1.4 billion Catholics referred to AI as he explained his choice of name to the cardinals who elected him.

He said he identified with his namesake Pope Leo XIII, who was pontiff from 1878 to 1903 and addressed workers' rights and capitalism at the dawn of the industrial age in the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.

The late pope, who laid the foundation for modern Catholic social thought, criticised both laissez-faire capitalism and state-centric socialism.

"In our own day, the church offers everyone the treasury of its social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour," Leo said.

The Pope also made clear he will follow in the modernising reforms of his predecessor Pope Francis to make the Catholic Church inclusive, attentive to the faithful, and an institution that looks out for the "least and rejected".

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Leo said he was fully committed to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the 1960s meetings that modernised the church.

Toward the end of his pontificate, Francis became increasingly vocal about the threats to humanity posed by AI and called for an international treaty to regulate it.

Francis brought his message to the G7 summit of world leaders last year, insisting AI must remain human-centric so decisions about when to use weapons or even less-lethal tools always remain made by humans and not machines.

(c) Sky News 2025: Pope prays at tomb of predecessor during first outing since election