Pope Leo’s Message in Magnifica Humanitas Is One We All Need to Hear

Pope Leo XIV‘s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is perfectly timed. In the document, signed on the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the pope takes up the question that now looms over every sector of modern life: What happens to human dignity when artificial intelligence reshapes how we work, think, and relate to one another?

The short answer the pope gives is the same one the Church has consistently taught: Technology is not “a force antagonistic to humanity,” nor is it “inherently evil.” At the same time, “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.”

That’s a crucial distinction, and one that too many commentators on both sides of the AI debate miss. Tech utopians treat AI as an unalloyed good that will soon bring us vast riches and perhaps even immortality. Tech doomers treat it as an existential threat that must be stopped.

Leo threads the needle: AI is a powerful tool that reflects the nature and intentions of its makers. Our job is to ensure those intentions serve the common good.

On the question of human dignity, Leo is at his strongest. He insists that “the fundamental dignity of each person … is neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified.” He warns that “the pressure of new ideologies or certain highly powerful interests” can reduce the human person to “a resource to be used and exploited” or define people by “what they achieve or produce.”

In a world dazzled by machine performance, it’s tempting to measure human worth by productivity, as if we’re just biological computers competing with silicon ones. The pope rejects that framing root and branch.

One of the key delusions of our age is that humans and smart machines are the same types of things. We are nothing but machines made of meat. It’s no surprise that those who believe all of this worry that the “intelligent” machines we create can, and probably will, replace us.

There are plenty of good arguments that show this line of reasoning is mistaken. One is the late John Searle’s famous Chinese Room thought experiment. Searle explained that computers work at the level of syntax—formal rules and symbols that we provide. They don’t work at the level of semantics—that is, of meaning. A computer, or a large language model, can simulate intelligence in its outputs. But it doesn’t grasp what anything means. It has no consciousness, no intentions, no moral agency.

Pope Leo makes the same point in a theological register: AI can “imitate and simulate the person, but it does not possess a moral conscience, empathy, or affective, relational or spiritual capabilities.”

My favorite part of the encyclical is its critique of transhumanism and posthumanism. Leo warns against ideologies that “interpret progress as the overcoming of human limits.” He insists, instead, that “limitations are not defects to be eliminated, but a constitutive dimension of the human person, because it is in fragility and finitude that relationship and openness to God and to others mature.”

He boldly declares that “humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.” This is a profoundly countercultural claim. In Silicon Valley, finitude is a bug to be patched. For Leo, it’s a feature, the very condition that makes love, growth, and communion possible.

I do have a worry, however, as both a Catholic and a policy analyst who sees how the sausage gets made. Pope Leo rightly stresses the need for “adequate AI policies and legal frameworks, independent oversight, and user education,” along with “an ethical code subject to shared standards of social justice, because ‘a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.'”

This sounds right in the abstract. But AI is very complex. I don’t mean just the technology itself, but also the way it’s interpreted, and what its future effects will be. The prediction of mass unemployment, for instance, is one the pope treats at length.

But this is, at best, a conjecture. Politicians, clerics, and self-appointed experts could use fears of mass unemployment to propose regulations that sound nice but do more harm than good.

There’s also the related risk of what economists call regulatory capture, where dominant corporate and political players craft rules of “good governance” and “ethics” that lock out smaller competitors. In this way, they further concentrate their own power in a corporatist cartel—the very concentration of power Pope Leo decries.

This risk of corporatism is one that the Holy See has, frankly, been slow to recognize. I’m reminded of a February 2020 conference hosted by the Pontifical Academy for Life. It produced a joint statement signed by various political and U.N. officials, as well as executives from IBM and Microsoft. “New forms of regulation,” it urged, “must be encouraged to promote transparency and compliance with ethical principles.”

The principle of subsidiarity should counsel caution here: Centralized global regulation of AI would almost surely become a tool of the powerful rather than a shield for the vulnerable. Policymakers will need to avoid this risk if they are to fulfill the call of Magnifica Humanitas.

Of course, the central theme of Magnifica Humanitas is not policy wonkery. It is about “humanity, created by God in all its grandeur.” Human dignity doesn’t depend on what we produce or how we perform against a large language model. It rests on what we are: Creatures made in the image of God, endowed with reason, freedom, and a capacity for love that no machine can touch. That’s a message our age badly needs to hear.