Pope Leo XIV speaks with members of the media outside the papal residence on Tuesday.Vincenzo Livieri/Reuters
Michael W. Higgins is the Basilian Distinguished Fellow of Contemporary Catholic Thought at the University of Toronto’s St. Michael’s College. He is the author of The Jesuit Disruptor: A Personal Portrait of Pope Francis and A Synod Diary: Sixty Days that Shook the Church.
In a time of global political upheaval and relentless technological advances, individuals yearn for stability and the human soul aches for understanding.
Enter Pope Leo XIV, who on May 25 delivered his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. This letter’s intended audience includes all men and women of goodwill irrespective of their faith traditions.
Magnifica Humanitas is not the first time the papacy has addressed the challenges posed by AI. There were conferences, summits, texts, locutions and private meetings during the pontificate of Pope Francis and even Benedict XVI, but Leo’s encyclical is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject.
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This much-awaited papal teaching on artificial intelligence was a first in many other ways as well: the first by an American pope; the first that included a media presentation in the Vatican’s Synod Hall with the Pope representing himself rather than through cardinal-delegates. There were cardinals present, for sure – including Canadian Jesuit Michael Czerny, Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development – but they were joined by two female theologians, Anna Rowlands of England’s Durham University and Léocadie Lushombo of Santa Clara University in California, as well as by Christopher Olah, a Canadian co-founder of Anthropic, one of the major AI safety and research companies in the world.
Leo gave his own oral presentation following commentaries provided by the other panelists. This was all unprecedented and signalled the willingness of the new pope to be more than a cautious lawyer, to be innovative, and by Vatican protocols, breathtakingly available when appropriate.
Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah shakes hands with Pope Leo.ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty Images
The encyclical is a learned piece of work but not inaccessible, shorn of the Vaticanese that often contaminates official documents by compromising clarity of meaning with archaic phrasing. It is detailed without being dense. Magnifica Humanitas is as prophetic as Francis’s Laudato Sí: On Care for Our Common Home. Although it lacks the lyricism and folksy tone of Francis’s encyclical, it shares its urgency and exhortative power.
Leo outlines the history of Catholic social doctrine originating with his namesake Leo XIII with his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum (On New Things). Leo XIII denounced the economic inequities of industrialization, advocated for unions, and championed the cause of workers caught in the vise of unchecked capitalism. The current pope brings the full weight of Catholic papal history since the 19th century to his analysis, highlighting the key social-theological concepts of solidarity, subsidiarity, social justice, and the inviolable dignity of each person in such a way that the encyclical becomes both a canvas and a compendium of Catholic social thought and praxis.
But the core of Magnifica Humanitas is not to be found in the historical antecedents of its argument alone but in the current reality of menace and hegemonic control that define its acute relevance.
Although Leo is clear that technology is not “a force antagonistic to humanity” nor “inherently evil,” humanity should not be seduced into thinking that AI is morally neutral, for “ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.”
In other words, AI – its design, deployment and reach – must be subject to a scrutiny and examination that is not geared alone to enhancing its functionality. Rather, the key questions to ask are metaphysical at heart: What constitutes the essence of the human person? What role do human subjectivity and interiority play in a world that reduces everything to its instrumental usage? Who are the final arbiters of meaning and purpose?
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The pope is especially concerned about what Catholic teaching describes as the “universal destination of goods” whereby all are included and none excluded in the distribution of shared benefits. The concentration of ownership in the hands of knowledge holders whose monopoly ensures their maximization of economic profit and supranational power constitutes a profound threat to human freedom and equality.
On this point, Leo echoes the concern of AI scientist Ilya Sutskever, who said that “any person working to build this civilization-altering technology is taking on unprecedented responsibility. … [but] the people who end up in these positions are often a certain kind of person.”
To prevent AI leaders – engineers, entrepreneurs, salespersons, politicians – from succumbing to libido dominandi, or the lust for domination, a term first defined by St. Augustine in the fifth century, the Augustinian pope eschews easy judgment and denunciation and opts for the creation of mechanisms of state and society that build on human freedom and socio-political transparency, all to the end of dismantling a culture of power and war and creating its replacement with a civilization of love.
This is a bold and clarion call and deserves attention. It is more than a theological blueprint; it is a practical route to human flourishing in a time of confusion and disarray.