If you can read Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas: On the Protection of the Human Person in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” do so. It offers a decisively important vision for our human future, not only for people of faith but for all people of goodwill.
With the arrival of AI, we are all entering a new moment in history that offers both the promise of a better life and the possibility of a downward spiral for the human family. Everything depends on our response, and Pope Leo offers us a path forward.
Summaries of “Magnifica Humanitas” are readily available, and there are some detailed commentaries. Here, I propose to offer background reflections for the encyclical that might help to situate it and underscore some of its important directions.
Being human
Of course, the arrival of AI prompts the Holy Father to offer his teaching, but the encyclical is fundamentally about our humanity. I detected three fundamental questions embedded in the text: Who are we? What has been entrusted to us? Where should we go?
The question of who we are is the question of our identity. Drawing from our tradition of faith and reason, Pope Leo affirms that we are created good by God, but also marked and affected by sinful brokenness and, in the end, redeemed in Christ. There is, in other words, a complexity about who we are — good, but wounded and redeemed in the Lord.
This same complexity marks the products of our imagination and work, including AI. Along with many technologies, AI can do good. At the same time, through misuse or misdirection, it can generate destructive effects. When we take our right responsibility, AI can lead us to graced opportunities.
The second major question of what has been entrusted to us centers on our purpose and responsibility. From the very beginning of the Bible, in the first chapter of Genesis, God entrusts creation to the human family. Our created human intelligence, the very intelligence that has developed AI, is entrusted to us for our stewardship.
Pope Leo highlights very well how each age must claim and reclaim, sometimes in new ways, what the Lord has given his human family. Our age is no exception. In this moment, we are grappling with what is in our hands and what is our responsibility.
All this leads to the third question of direction: Where should we go? What decisions do we need to make? As Pope Leo outlines it, we face a stark choice. Will we, independent of God, build a new Tower of Babel? Or will we seize this moment to build the city of God? “Magnifica Humanitas” offers a way build the city of God in the entirely new context given to us by AI.
Social teaching
Across time, but especially since Pope Leo XIII at the end of the 19th century, the church has offered “social doctrine,” a way of living and working together that fosters the good of the human family. Pope Leo recapitulates the principles of that teaching: the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice. Together these principles and the teaching overall contribute to human flourishing, because they offer wisdom, an expansive vision of how we can be and act together on this earth.
Because these principles are rooted in human reason, supported by our faith convictions, they can speak to all people across different religious traditions and include those who do not believe. “Magnifica Humanitas” looks, then, not just to members of the Catholic Church, but to the entire human family that stands before the challenges posed by AI.
Human dignity
If we follow the news, we clearly know how fragile human dignity is and how often it is violated. Those who have power — in any of its forms — can build up or, alternatively, tear down human dignity.
AI is a form of power. It can be exercised in a constructive way, especially when people are in respectful dialogue that recognizes the inherent goodness of a human being. When individuals willfully exercise that power, for example, for their profit, that damages human dignity by marginalizing, excluding and even dominating others. Obviously, the stakes are high.
It is no exaggeration to compare the development of AI to the discovery of fire. Both moments have forced humanity to make consequential decisions.
Fire had the capacity to warm, to give light, to cook. Fire also had the capacity to threaten and to destroy. Only a culture of encounter, mutual respect and dialogue enable that power to work for the good. As with fire, so it is with AI.
Human history from the discovery of fire to the discovery of nuclear fission provides a cautionary tale about power and an invitation to move carefully in this time of AI. Pope Leo’s encyclical does not allow us to evade the important choices we need to make.
People rightly worry about the future of labor with the arrival of AI. There is no question about the realignment of work; that is, many tasks formerly entrusted to human beings will be automated.
How this happens is decisively important. Will it be a matter of simply eliminating jobs and leaving workers to fend for themselves? Will there be mechanisms of transition to enable a smoother and less damaging realignment of labor? These are essential questions that touch deeply on our social fabric.
But there is also something more at stake, as Pope Leo describes it. Work, in the Christian vision, is not just work. It represents a collaboration with the creator. It fosters the sense of purpose and the dignity of human beings. Again, there are important choices that need to be made. The stakes are high.
Freedom includes but goes beyond our freedom of choice. Most radically, our human freedom is the capacity to be who we truly are. Constraints on our choices and constraints on our capacity for self-realization can easily result from a runaway AI that limits choice and predetermines the directions we can take.
If we are in dialogue with each other and share a common value that prizes freedom in its most authentic sense, then we can exercise vigilance that will mitigate the most dangerous threats to our freedom.
The question of truth and AI is especially fascinating. Too many of us fail to distinguish between truth and information. AI is undoubtedly the master of information. Its data bits are pieces of information that it collects and rearranges.
Truth is of a different order. Manipulating information in different ways can make things more efficient and helpful. Truth, however, has a distinctive and irretrievable human dimension. You cannot live or die for information, but, in a proper context, you can live and even die for truth. We may need to collectively realign our understanding of the difference and distinction between the information of AI and the truth that resides in humanity.
Civilization of love
As we can see in some of the armed conflicts embroiling the world today, AI is used more and more to wage war and inflict damage and destruction on enemies. It becomes war by proxy, and can grow exponentially and mindlessly destructive, the nightmare of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” come to life. If this is the case, then there is no place for war, even a “just” war. We are summoned to another path of dialogue, collaboration and diplomacy.
“Magnifica Humanitas” concludes with words that summon us to reclaim our faith, most especially in the mystery of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, the eternal Son of God who has taken on our humanity. Certainly, we must apply our human reason to the questions and challenges posed by AI. In that, we can find common ground with those outside of our community of faith.
Still, for us who believe, the key that fully unlocks the questions of our existence, including those posed by AI, is Jesus Christ.
We can retrieve the powerful words of the Second Vatican Council in its “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”: “The Church likewise believes that the key, the center and the purpose of the whole of humanity’s history is to be found in its Lord and Master. She also maintains that beneath all that changes there is much that is unchanging, much that has its ultimate foundation in Christ, who is the same yesterday, and today, and forever” (n.10).