NEW YORK – For Matthew McConaughey, meeting the Pope was a bit like going to the Oscars.

While in Italy earlier this month, the “Rivals of Amziah King” actor greeted Pope Leo XIV during the pontiff’s weekly general audience with the public at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City. McConaughey, 56, had a few things in mind that he wanted to tell the Holy Father, although he didn’t prep a whole spiel.

“That’s kind of like preparing a speech for winning an award that you don’t know you’re going to win yet,” McConaughey tells USA TODAY. “It’s a bit of a coup de grâce: Don’t do it because it’s not going to go as you expected. … So I had some ideas. I wanted to talk to him about religion in today’s world and where it sits with him as our moral compass. Where is religion today? Why has it declined? Why do we see a surge in youth running toward it? They’ve tried other things that they’re seeing are vapid and don’t really work because they’re looking for more.”

Nowadays, young people are “looking for some structure; they’re trying to get more than what the world around them has given them,” McConaughey adds. “It’s a good reason to pick some things out of religion, for sure.”

McConaughey, who is Christian, also wanted to speak to Pope Leo about the rampant rise of artificial intelligence and how it reflects our values.

Going forward, “what are the standards going to be with AI?” McConaughey says. “There are already people looking to AI as their digital God. Whether we like what it looks like or not, it is going to represent a true image of mankind by the questions we ask of it and the results we want of it. We may not like what we see when we look in the mirror, but we could also love what we see. It could be a greater truth.

“So there’s great upside and I’m excited about it,” McConaughey continues. “At the same time, there’s a definite need for caution going forward because we’re going to have to be the users of that tool and not let it tool us, so to speak. So those are the subjects, and what we got to talk about will be between [the Pope] and I.”

For years, McConaughey has been asked whether he’d run for political office, including governor of his home state of Texas. The Oscar winner, who has called himself “aggressively centrist,” told People magazine last year that he wouldn’t consider pivoting to politics at least until his three kids are fully grown.

McConaughey remains diplomatic even now, when asked by USA TODAY whether his meeting with the Pope changed his perspective on running.

“Look, I’m going to use this word ‘religion,’ even though some people are going to tune out when they hear that word,” McConaughey says. “Life is essentially a religious experience. There’s a lot of things we can learn about living life – how to treat others and how to treat ourselves – through religious texts and teachings. Even though I agree with the separation of church and state, the values of those should bleed down into the values of any political system.

“There’s still a constitution out there to be written that all religions could agree on,” McConaughey adds. “There’s so much commonality. It’s a constitution that I’m excited about seeing – I don’t know, maybe even adding to or working on. That would be a great thing to share.”