Magnifica Humanitas and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
A brief review of the Pope's encyclical.
The publication on 15 May 2026 of the Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (MH) ‘on safeguarding the human person in the time of Artificial Intelligence’ has been widely welcomed both in Catholic and other circles and has already provoked considerable immediate analysis. The main theme of the Encyclical can be summarised in the contrasting biblical images of the threat of the Tower of Babel, and the promise of the rebuilding of Jerusalem by Nehemiah. The former offers a picture of
…a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenisation over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. (MH 7)
The rebuilding of Jerusalem after its destruction by the Babylonians in 586 BC provides the contrasting promise of a building project that produces unity from diversity:
[Nehemiah] did not impose solutions from above. He convened the families, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, listened to their concerns, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition. […] It is an undertaking with God at the centre, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones. Thus, ancient Jerusalem rediscovers a common language — not one of uniformity, but one of communion, namely the harmony that arises when all persons assume their own role and recognise that their strength comes from the Lord. (MH 8)
In short, in a time of a new challenge from the technology of AI to human dignity, our response needs to be one which emphasises human relationships under wise leadership, rather than projects imposed by leaders exerting power unresponsive to other human beings and to God.
It’s long been one of my bugbears that Catholic Social Teaching is too often presented simply as a rule book of instructions which came into effect with Leo XIII’s Encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, rather than the application of the fulness of Catholic theology and philosophy to a particular realm and particular problems. One of the great strengths of MH is its explicit acknowledgement of its incompleteness and tentativeness:
In light of what has been said so far, the Church’s Social Doctrine can be seen more authentically. It is not a handbook of principles and norms to be applied, but a process of shared discernment. It is born from the encounter between the eternal truth of the Gospel and the questions of history. It allows itself to be challenged by the signs of the times, and draws nourishment from the contributions of science, culture and human experience. (MH 27)
I’m going to discuss the Encyclical concentrating on the two themes of human flourishing and wisdom. These should not be taken to exhaust the contents of the Encyclical: one of our responses to AI should be an increased emphasis on the personal and individual, and I can see that this list reflects my own existing philosophical and theological interests. I hope that others will find something of value there, but my main hope would be to encourage readers to do their own thinking about the Encyclical and, more broadly, the issues surrounding AI and the human person.
In the Greek philosophical heritage which underlies much of Catholic thought, the key to ethics is the concept of human flourishing or, in the original Greek, eudaimonia. Our thinking about what we should do is governed by this concept of a flourishing life or human being. Part of human nature is our need to form various communities such as families, villages, workplaces and nations: thinking about our social nature is not an optional extra to thinking about what it is to live well but is an essential part of that reflection. So when there is a major technological and social change, it is to that central idea of the flourishing life that we need to look for our response. That all sounds fine until we start digging into what that deeper good life might be. There, the big problem might well seem to be that, while ordinary modern common sense dismisses God and spiritual values, the Catholic Church is going inevitably to talk about God and more specifically Catholic practices. As an example, MH 229 states:
This avenue [of response to AI] emerges through contemplating God’s plan, living ecclesial unity by partaking of the Eucharist, building a world centred on the common good and praying in union with the Blessed Virgin Mary.
This is something that clearly needs to be said from a Catholic perspective, but which is unlikely to elicit much of an immediate response from a non-Catholic, let alone non-religious public in Scotland. Well, fine. The sort of public discussion that the Encyclical envisages will always involve disagreement and will sometimes end in disagreement. But an unashamed proclamation that, despite all the assumptions of secular materialism, many of us do believe in a supernatural goal for human beings and that this goal is central to a good life is an important contribution to public debate, and one that, even if most will not immediately accept in every detail, many might well find resonates in their own beliefs in spiritual or transcendent values.
Linked to this focus on God in the good life is the emphasis on wisdom.
Let us remain faithful to the truth! Living amid incessant flows of information, opinions and images, we know how easy it can be to influence decisions and preferences through increasingly sophisticated algorithms. […] In this context, it is imperative to cultivate hearts that love the truth, prefer what is right despite the most appealing content and pursue wisdom rather than immediate results. We must always keep before us the truth about God and humanity, just as Christ has revealed them to us […] Fidelity to the truth requires integrating the possibilities offered by technology within a framework marked by wisdom, which is capable of safeguarding both the dignity of each person and the future of our common home. (MH 237)
Wisdom as an intellectual virtue can be contrasted with a mere technical cleverness which emphasises the calculation of effective means to an end without regard to the ultimate value of that end. In particular, the Encyclical emphasises the need to avoid imposing the results of calculation by brute force. Here the discussion of war in this Encyclical takes on a more central place than a mere consideration of the use of AI in modern warfare, important as that is (MH 197-200). War instead becomes part of a wider culture of power (MH 188) which imposes solutions in the manner of Babel rather than of Nehemiah. And as existing Catholic Just War theory can be misused as merely a set of legal hoops to be jumped through to justify war rather than an attempt to find love and wisdom in the most difficult of times (my interpretation of an admittedly brief mention in MH 192), so Catholic Social Teaching in general can be misused as a set of rules to be applied blindly without wisdom and love. It is difficult when reading of the difference between the culture of power and the culture of love to avoid thinking more deeply of the difference between thinking which simply follows the rules (algorithms) and thinking which is directed by the virtues of love and wisdom. And confronting this difference, which is the difference between thinking that merely mimics what it is to be human and thinking that is centred on wisdom which is both the depth of the human being and of God, is an opportunity the challenge of AI gives us: to reverse that shallow image of human beings as calculating machines which is already widely present in the modern world, and to restore our understanding of human beings as partaking in the image of God and particularly of divine wisdom.
Further reading and notes:
The version of Magnifica Humanitas used above is: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html (Orthography anglicised in excerpts.)
The Scottish bishops are preparing study materials on the Encyclical which are not yet available. A currently available set of resources online can be found here: https://catholicsocialthought.georgetown.edu/essays/resources-for-magnifica-humanitas-ai-catholic-social-teaching-and-pope-leo-s-new-encyclical
An initial response to the Encyclical by a non-Catholic academic who specialises in the philosophical ethics of AI can be found here:
I have said more about my understanding of Catholic Social Teaching and its relationship to philosophy in my previous Coracle article here: https://www.stmoluagscoracle.com/p/arguing-about-catholic-social-teaching
By Stephen Watt