My interviewer at Times Radio began with a telling question: “Why is the Catholic Church talking about AI?” The implication was obvious. Artificial Intelligence belongs to the contemporary world and the Church does not. I proffered the expected reply, saying that the Church has always commented on public issues and on economic changes since Pope Leo XIII in the 1890s. Whenever there is a threat to human dignity, especially to those powerless before the predations of the powerful, the Church has a duty to intervene. The AI revolution is a potential threat, just as the industrial revolution was more than a century ago.

I do not know the interviewer’s politics, but I am going to guess that she shares the typical European view of “been there, done that” with respect to Christianity. Sensing that, I threw out the less obvious and probably unwelcome fact that there is no other global entity besides the Catholic Church positioned to insert questions of morality and human dignity into the discussion of AI. Even after Europe has sloughed off its religion, the Church is the only game in town for such essential matters.

It is easy for Catholics to neglect this aspect of the release of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” Only the Bishop of Rome has the ability to direct the world to consider a secular reality within a religious and moral framework. I suspect that every major news outlet in the world mentioned it, and most ran a substantial comment. Even if the story is about how important people are “dismissing” the pope’s words, those words cannot be ignored. While it is far too early to know what effect Magnifica will have on the direction of AI, there can be no doubt that the papacy retains a unique ability to speak to humanity as a whole. In this sense, Pope Leo XIII’s ambition to find a way for his successors to operate as Pontifex, a bridge between God and humanity, after being stripped of all direct political power, has come true. We call this way Catholic Social Teaching. It arises out of the Church and its traditions, but deals primarily with philosophical rather than theological topics and is addressed not only to the Church but also, as St John XXIII put in Pacem in Terris, “to all Men of Good Will.”

The Catholic philosopher Joshua Hochschild makes the point in an essay for First Things that in Magnifica Leo has “salvaged” Catholic Social Teaching. It needed it. What is often called the Church’s “best kept secret” appears in a variety of papal documents going back to Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum of 1891. Given the different circumstances in which they were written, and despite the reappearance of core themes, these teachings do not comprise a coherent whole. John Paul II addressed this problem with the promulgation of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church in 2004. Leo XIV seemed to acknowledge the need for something more when he dedicated the first two chapters of Magnifica to explicating both the history of the Church’s social teaching and its central principles. Such a clean-up was required if, as Hochschild argues, Leo intends to refound and ratify Catholic “social teaching as a primary mode of the Church’s engagement with the world.” While AI is the occasion for this particular engagement, Leo, according to Hochschild, is seeking to begin a new chapter in the tradition begun by his Leonine predecessor. For those looking for a reliable summary, I recommend Bishop Barron’s and that of Francis X. Maier.

Pope Leo is putting forward the Church as a major player in what he hopes will be a worldwide deliberation over the proper place of Artificial Intelligence in human society. Careful to avoid either fiery condemnations or heady endorsements, Magnifica calmly offers the guiding principles of Catholic Social Teaching, i.e., subsidiarity, solidarity, human dignity, the common good, and the universal destination of all goods. The language is process-oriented, and dare I say, synodal, leaning on terms such as “engagement,” “deliberation,” and “dialogue.” While the goal of upholding human dignity, especially at points of greatest vulnerability, remains, Leo eschews prophetic rhetoric and emphasizes the need for collaboration. As Hochschild points out, Leo now defines Social Doctrine as “shared discernment” between the Church and the world. And here the fights begin.

In a previous Fourth Watch, I noted that in an age of social media, bishops rarely get the first word on topics of general interest, and never the last one. Rather, they enter into a fray already well established with learned, or at least opinionated, champions patrolling the various battle lines. What goes for, say, Cardinal Cupich, goes for the Bishop of Rome, albeit with a difference. Pope Leo, for the moment, occupies a particular place in the Church’s internal conversation, and not simply because he is Peter, but because he is new. He carries the hopes of the conflicting parties within the Church, each eager to see in every appointment and every statement that he is continuity with John Paul II, Benedict XVI, or Francis.

This is a silly game, of course, since Leo will be like and unlike each of these men. He is, needless to say, a wholly different person, leading a Church with different challenges and possibilities. That said, he will be like something, and Magnifica Humanitas gives us Catholics the biggest piece of evidence thus far for what that will be. This means that the Catholic commentary on this encyclical will likely be more intense than with the next—all things being equal. I did my best to read everything I saw, but there is no doubt more, with more coming. It is safe to say that the reception of this pope’s first major doctrinal statement among the Catholic commentariat is . . . lively.

There is an irony here. While encyclicals are addressed to Catholics as an exercise of the pope’s ordinary magisterium, social encyclicals are aimed as well to those outside the visible Church. With Magnifica, that audience is made up of individuals working in AI or with the power and responsibility of regulating its use. Barton Swaim has argued that Leo’s first encyclical is doing pretty well on that score. Not only did he land Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, as a speaker at the presentation of Magnifica, the document also received favorable coverage in The New York Times. For Swaim, laud from such quarters—Olah is an atheist who seems to attribute some form of personhood to AI and the Times is reliably opposed to what the Church is for—is a sign of the encyclical’s inadequacy. This is almost certainly unfair, but it does point to Leo’s clear intention not to alienate any potential allies in the fashioning of AI on a human scale.

Sohrab Ahmari, in contrast to Swaim, sees great benefit in Leo’s conciliatory approach. For him, Magnifica is “nothing less than a defense of moral and political universalism,” by which he means the shared struggle to determine the good for all by means of a reason available to all:

One of these achievements is the United Nations’ proclamation in 1948 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, for Leo, “remains one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time.” With respect to the United Nations, the pope says that it and other international organizations “are essential instruments for promoting a civilization of love, for they can foster dialogue among nations and promote the peaceful resolution of conflicts, the integral development of peoples, the protection of the most vulnerable, disarmament and the care of creation” (MH 226).

Ahmari acknowledges that such language “renders the encyclical supremely unfashionable” in some circles. These “neo-traditionalists” and “Christian malcontents” reject anything that smacks of the post-World War II efforts to build global governance. He points to Jacob Phillips’ comment for First Things that describes Leo as an “Augustinian Boomer,” and to Matthew Walther’s essay for the New York Times, which faults the pope for failing to see that “the days when papal encyclicals meaningfully affected public policy—for example, in the interwar period, when they helped to shape the New Deal—are long gone.” For Ahmari, such criticism neglects the fact that Leo is working firmly within the tradition of Leo XIII, which both accepts the necessity of technological development and the need for classical learning to serve as a ballast against its excesses. He is not naïve about the dangers that await if the technology of Artificial Intelligence is allowed to develop according to the laws of the market or as a prize in a competition between nations for military advantage. His point, rather, is that only government, in some form or other, has any chance of domesticating these forces.

I always find Ahmari interesting, even as he tends toward the pugilistic when discussing other Catholics less enamored than he is with the Vatican’s post-war support for the Social Democratic model. Interestingly, Ahmari finds a fellow-traveler in the Jesuit priest, Fr. James Martin, who describes Magnifica as “the most cogent Catholic critique of capitalism that I have ever read.” The difference is Martin outs himself as a capitalist. Who knew? That said, one need not be a radical free-marketer or, in the words of Ahmari, a “hobbit-y, antidevelopmentalist” to raise questions about Leo’s approach. A particularly respectful analysis of the economics operative in the encyclical comes from Stephen Barrows of the Acton Institute, which seeks to align Leo’s teaching with the best of capitalist thought. Michael Pakaluk, a professor of political economy at the Catholic University of America, wrote a very snippy piece about the economics of the encyclical, among other faults, but thought better of it and removed the post from his Substack.

With respect to the “hobbit-y, antidevelopmentalist” camp, we find a number of commentators who believe that Leo is too optimistic about the possibility that AI can be developed without threatening humanity. Some, such as Ned Desmond, who works in Silicon Valley, likes much in the encyclical but fears that the pope has not come to grips with how fast this technology is moving or how uninterested its developers are in halting progress for the sake of deliberation. He was looking for a more prophetic critique of the idea that Artificial Intelligence is anything other than artificial. In other words, he wanted more of the kind of criticism Leo gives in the much-praised ninety-ninth paragraph of the encyclical. Here the pope instructs his readers to “avoid the misconception of equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence. In doing so, they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing.” While strong, the good work of this paragraph is attenuated, according to Desmond, when Leo allows that “the artificial imitation of positive human communication—words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love—can be engaging and at times genuinely helpful” (MH 100).  

Desmond points to a recent essay in the journal Nature by Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of the AI startup DeepMind and now chief executive at Microsoft AI. It is brief and brilliant. I was impressed by the simplicity of Suleyman’s logic. AI can seem human, give the impression of an inner life, because it is programmed to do so. Since the consequences of a significant portion of the population being fooled into believing these programs possess personhood are dire, the only solution is a new conceptual framework that ensures that AI “remains fundamentally accountable to humans” and that developers “actively engineer the illusion of consciousness out of the products.” Desmond prefers that Leo had declared that anything short of this to be sinful. That might have cost him some support among the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley, but it would have been truer to the reality of the threat.

The claim that Pope Leo’s eagerness not to alienate AI developers led him to underplay the potential sinfulness of AI can also be found in the essays of Dan Hitchens, Clare Coffey, and a second essay by Matthew Walther. To this general critique, one can add the contributions by Ross Douthat and Yuval Levin. Both highlight the strengths of Magnifica while challenging what they see as aspects that should have been more sharply developed. Douthat, for his part, worries that Leo underestimates the extent to which “transhumanism”—which the encyclical forthrightly condemns in paragraphs 115 and 116—is “built into A.I. culture.” Levin, as one might expect from a Jewish scholar, focuses on Leo’s contrast of the Tower of Babel and Nehemiah’s wall-building. He has some interesting things to say about both, but I was particularly struck by his suggestion that Leo contemplate the non-canonical (for Catholics) Psalm 151 on idolatry:

The last two lines hold the key to why idolatry is such a fearsome sin in Judaism. In making idols for worship, we become like them. This is, of course, Leo’s point that we should not lower the magnificence of humanity by comparing how we think to the soulless calculations of a computer.

In reading through the commentary on the pope’s first encyclical, I cannot help but feel hopeful. Some Catholics have been critical, but the vast majority represent a serious engagement with a serious text. I realize, of course, that I have left out commentary on Magnifica’s statement on Just War (MG 192) and apology for the Church’s slowness in forthrightly condemning slavery (MG 176). That’s for another time. For now, I suggest Catholics take in the fact of the papacy’s continued relevance.