The New York Times recently argued that Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical on artificial intelligence and social justice could help shift Catholicism away from what the article described as its longstanding fixation on “pelvic theology”, a derisive moniker for the Church’s teachings on sexual morality. According to the piece, decades of emphasis on “sins below the waist” have fuelled culture wars, distracted from the Gospel and weakened the Church’s moral voice on behalf of workers and the marginalised against “the predations of powerful financial interests”.