Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is here, and it is an enormously confirming moment for the Catholic Church. For decades the church’s social teaching and insistence on the inviolable dignity of the person have been characterised as regressive and out of date. Now, almost overnight, it is precisely these unpopular doctrines that form the backbone of the only viable critique of concentrated digital power on offer today.
Even the leading firms in AI development recognise the church is the leading authority on ethical AI. Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic – an AI firm engaged in running battles with President Trump over their principled refusal to use their models for autonomous military systems and mass surveillance – appeared with the pope to launch the document.
At the launch, Olah thanked the pope and commented on the sector’s lack of incentives to share the gains of AI more equitably, saying: “It is an unsolved problem, and it is the kind of problem the church has historically refused to let the world ignore.”
The encyclical’s 42,000-word defence of the dignity of the person in the AI age endorses Pope Francis’ view that time is greater than space. “What matters most is not occupying positions of power or defending cultural strongholds, but initiating good processes and enabling them to mature,” Leo wrote.
This perhaps explains the breadth of the document, which ranges more widely than most encyclicals in addressing war, education, employment, international affairs, addiction, the history of social doctrine, and many other topics. Leo is sowing seeds about the mission of the church in the AI age across a multitude of domains.
The core passages about the nature of AI in comparison to human intelligence and affect, and about the grandeur of human limits, are far more than seeds. They are the harvest after decades of “sowing in tears” (Ps 126:5), of bitter opposition to Catholic anthropology. Now the church has the chance to “reap in joy” the harvest of principled stances against war, eugenics, political and economic centralisation, and environmental degradation.
Leo recognises that AI may prove to be a source of immense benefits, but that it will certainly serve as the accelerator of the contemporary world’s worst tendencies. This may be the most “Augustinian” note of the whole document.
Yet its “defensive” posture in favour of the human person is a gift to a world inundated with AI hype, propaganda, advertising and political lobbying—some of it justified, much of it smoke and mirrors backed by US$1.5 trillion of investment since 2013. A corrective was needed, and who else had the authority to deliver it but the pope?
Catholic institutions in particular stand to benefit immensely from the course charted by Magnifica Humanitas. Consider Catholic healthcare, for example.
In a letter to the editor of the journal Bioethics last year, senior clinicians from the transplant division of the Mayo Clinic, the world’s top hospital, argued that AI had a “compelling” future on organ transplant selection committees.
Suitable organs for transplant are a scarce and precious resource and allocating them fairly is a thorny problem. It is a complex business to judge whether one or another person is “worthier” of receiving a new heart or liver.
The authors of the letter wrote that AI had already been found to outperform clinicians on medical knowledge and empathy when making such judgments. Although there were issues to be overcome with AI, they wrote, human clinicians on “transplant selection committees are not immune to human nature, including bias and inconsistency.”
“One could argue that incorporating AI in the transplant selection committee may be the most ethical path forward, as it is not subject to individual morality, subjectivity, emotional burnout, recency bias, groupthink, and missing attendance,” the authors wrote.
Catholic hospitals and aged care facilities will and already are using AI, in novel and prosocial ways. Perhaps some will use it for transplant allocation in some manner. And it may be the case that the Mayo Clinic’s senior staff are right – the results are beginning to speak for themselves.
But unlike secular hospitals, within which the debate over the proper limits of AI will drag on for decades, there are now clear principles and sources of authority to safeguard the human person in Catholic institutions. After Magnifica Humanitas, a human being will always make the decision in Catholic contexts.
One can imagine the relief of patients in Catholic facilities who will know that the pope has already warned “that technology, detached from ethics and responsibility, will render decisions about life and death more rapid and impersonal.”
Likewise with education. Parents of students in Catholic schools, and their teachers, will know that Catholic education is free to use AI without considering endless technological expansion to be an inevitability.
Rather, as the pope has written, “Teaching new generations that technological evolution does not follow a predetermined path, but can be guided by personal and collective responsibility, constitutes one of the most valuable services to the common good.”
Given we are only at the beginning of the AI age, and figures like Elon Musk predict that the technology will make huge swathes of human endeavor redundant, Leo’s encyclical may well prove prophetic in a decade or two. Yet the real power of Magnifica Humanitas is the gift it gives to those in Catholic mission today, whether individuals or institutions.
The church has just shown itself to be the world’s staunchest defender of human nature – limitations, failures, warts and all. Now Catholics must rise to the “sober yet demanding program of Christian life” to which the pope has called the church in this changing technological age.
Adam Wesselinoff is a project officer at ACU’s Plunkett Centre for Ethics, focusing on the intersection of AI and bioethics. He is a former editor of The Catholic Weekly.
