An Encyclical Made for Us?

Unsystematic Reflections on Magnifica humanitas

When Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, arrived on May 25, I was in Athens at an AI-and-ethics conference convened by the American Securities Fund. The room was full of people eager to publish a fresh take before the news cycle moved on. I also felt that pull.

But here’s something I’ve learned, and it’s going to sound a little blunt: exciting news doesn’t make you, the writer, exciting. And that writer might be me.

So I’ve waited a few weeks, hoping that time might let a little wisdom settle and that hope is better than excitement.

At roughly 42,000 words—about the length of a short novel—the encyclical is long even by the standards of the genre, and it took me a while to read. What struck me first was how capacious it is—moving across human dignity, war and peace, and, above all, love.

At the conference I heard a prominent evangelical call the document “anti-capitalist,” and I’ll admit I was startled. Has he not read the Magnificat? Leo closes the whole encyclical with this song of Jesus’s mother Mary’s. It’s worth quoting her directly:

[God] has shown strength with his arm; he has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty. (Luke 1:51–53)

I’ll let Mary’s words stand without more comment. Res ipsa loquitur.

One place where Pope Leo’s argument meets my own is a choice between two cities.

“Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home,” he writes, “but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice…. technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it. Therefore, the primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence” (paragraph 9).

I’m writing this as an interlude to the serial publiching of An AI Made for Us. If you’ve been following, I’ve set up the same fork slightly differently: not Babel or Jerusalem, but Babel or Pentecost. The difference may seem small, and I think it’s telling. Leo reaches for Nehemiah’s rebuilt walls. I reach for the rushing wind of Acts 2, where the languages scattered at Babel are not abolished but translated—each one preserved, each one understood. Walls may speak to neighborly coexistence and the restoration of the city of God. But Pentecost speaks to the many tongues that large language models so easily flatten into one. Both images resist the same idol—technology as self-made transcendence—and yet they walk toward it from different sides.

That difference strikes me as more than aesthetic, because my central worry is human agency.

Paragraph 102 names a danger I keep circling back to: “when AI systems present themselves as neutral and objective, they end up reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers.”

Our resistance to that danger doesn’t mean we outright reject AI or another other technology. It means refusing to let it dominate us—refusing to surrender the very agency that God has given us, that follows what I’ve called the “Jesus Rubric” (Mark 2:27). An AI made for us is one we are still free to question.

Some Catholic theologians I’ve spoken with wonder whether the encyclical came too early. Given the speed at which AI is unfolding, will parts of it sound dated before the pundits have finished commenting? Might AI soon seem more conscious—a different kind of thing than animal or plant?

It’s fair for a Protestant to wonder about such things, and worth remembering that encyclicals aren’t infallible. Lumen Gentium 25 asks Catholics for “religious submission of mind and will,” which means (by my lights) that the document is authoritative, but not irreformable. As Anglican Bishop Martin Warner put it in Athens, a statement from the Pope is probably the best and most widely recognized word we have from the whole of the Christian community across the world. For Protestants it isn’t even specifically authoritative, which frees us to critique the Pope lovingly—as a deeply respected brother in Christ and a world Christian leader. But not as “Holy Father.”

That freedom was evident to me by contrast at a recent event on June 6 in Santa Clara, “From Rome to Silicon Valley: Responding Together to Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas.” When the leading Catholic AI ethicist Brian Green (a friend and really great person… but I digress) suggested that Leo is shifting the Church’s position on just-war theory, another Catholic scholar gently corrected him a few minutes after Brian had left the podium. It was kind, but to my ears, it was still a correction. Have you wavered too far with that comment? As I saw it, they were tussling over how closely they were bound to the Pope’s very words. I am thankful that’s not a burden I, as a Protestant, have to carry.

I began with wisdom, and I’ll end there.

Wisdom moves slowly; AI moves fast.

Has the goldfish news cycle already swum past the encyclical? Probably not, but I’m not sure that’s the right question. A document worth reading that’s the length of a short novel is a piece worth staying with long enough to let us do the slow work that serious reflection requires.