By March, Thiel had carried his Antichrist lectures to Rome, staging the invitation-only events blocks from the Holy See. The lectures unnerved the Vatican and prompted two Catholic universities to state publicly that they had no role in hosting them.

Peter Thiel Accuses Pope Leo XIV of Working for the Chinese Communist Party Thiel told a nonrecorded Aspen Ideas Festival panel with Francis Fukuyama that the pope’s AI encyclical serves Beijing. The billionaire behind JD Vance has spent a year casting Leo as an agent of the Antichrist. Christopher Hale Jul 03, 2026 Thank you for reading! Letters from Leo is a reader-supported publication and the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country. To receive new posts and support this movement, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Type your email... Subscribe Make A One-Time Gift to Support My Work Peter Thiel stood before the Aspen Ideas Festival on Tuesday and told the crowd that Pope Leo XIV is “working for the Chinese Communists.” The audience laughed, but Thiel was dead serious. CNN reported the remarks Thursday from a non-recorded panel in Colorado, where Thiel appeared alongside the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, and reporters were permitted to take notes. The logic behind the accusation runs through the pope’s own words. In May, Leo published Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, a 40,000-word document declaring that artificial intelligence “must be disarmed” and calling for stronger international oversight of the technology. Because Americans might actually heed that teaching while the Chinese Communist Party ignores it, Thiel argued, the encyclical threatens to slow exactly one side of the AI race between Washington and Beijing. A pope who asks his flock to think before they build becomes, by this arithmetic, an asset of a foreign adversary. The Vatican did not respond to CNN’s request for comment. Readers of this community know the longer arc. Last November, I wrote the story of leaked audio from Thiel’s private San Francisco lecture series, in which he suggested Leo himself might be a manifestation of the Antichrist — and revealed that he has urged Vice President JD Vance to ignore the pope’s moral guidance. By March, Thiel had carried his Antichrist lectures to Rome, staging the invitation-only events blocks from the Holy See. The lectures unnerved the Vatican and prompted two Catholic universities to state publicly that they had no role in hosting them. The encyclical itself arrived on Memorial Day carrying a quotation from The Lord of the Rings — a literary choice that writers from the United States to Italy read as aimed squarely at Thiel, while the Catholic Herald in Britain asked whether the whole encyclical targets his empire. Within days, The New York Times found the billionaire settled into a $12 million mansion in Buenos Aires, steering dinner conversation — once again — toward the Antichrist. JD Vance stands at the center of this collision, whether he acknowledges it or not. In Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, the memoir he published last month, the vice president traces part of his Catholic conversion to a 2011 talk Thiel gave at Yale Law School. “Possibly the smartest person I’d ever met, he identified very openly as a Christian,” Vance writes of the mentor who later recruited him into venture capital and spent $15 million to put him in the Senate.