Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas represents one of the most significant contributions to Christian social thought since Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti. More than an encyclical about artificial intelligence, it is an exercise in theological discernment that asks a more fundamental question: What kind of humanity is emerging amid accelerating technological transformation? In doing so, Leo wisely refuses to reduce AI to either a technical problem requiring regulation or a moral panic demanding resistance. Instead, Leo frames the present moment as a profoundly theological moment requiring renewed discernment regarding the vocation of the human person, the common good, and the future of civilization.
I am indebted to my colleague, Dr. Paul Hoard, whose sustained engagement with artificial intelligence through his Substack first encouraged me to take up Magnifica Humanitas. Although I arrived later to the conversation than he had hoped, I am grateful for his persistence. The encyclical proved far richer than I anticipated—not merely an intervention into debates about AI, but a compelling retrieval of Christian social theology for a technological age.
As a practical theologian, I find this methodological move particularly compelling. Practical theology begins not with abstract doctrines but with lived experience, interpreting contemporary realities in conversation with Scripture, tradition, the human sciences, and communal discernment (Browning 1991; Miller-McLemore 2018). Leo adopts precisely this posture. Rather than asking whether the Church possesses ready-made answers to artificial intelligence, he invites the Church to read the “signs of the times” through the living tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. Social Doctrine, Leo insists, is neither an ideological system nor a static repository of moral principles, but an evolving practice of theological discernment rooted in the Gospel while remaining responsive to history.
This dynamic understanding of doctrine deserves sustained attention well beyond Roman Catholic circles. Too often Christian ethics has been reduced either to the preservation of inherited formulations or to accommodation with cultural change. Leo charts another path. Faithfulness is neither repetition nor innovation for its own sake; it is the Spirit-led task of discerning how the unchanging love of God addresses genuinely new historical realities.
Perhaps the encyclical’s most creative theological contribution is its use of the biblical narratives of Babel and Nehemiah as governing metaphors for the digital age. This is considerably more than rhetorical flourish. Babel becomes an enduring symbol of technological power detached from humility, diversity, and communion—a civilization organized around efficiency, self-sufficiency, and domination. The “city in which God and humanity dwell together,” by contrast, is rebuilt not through centralized control but through shared responsibility, covenantal relationships, and participation in God’s reconciling work. The choice before humanity, Leo argues, is therefore not between embracing or rejecting artificial intelligence, but between constructing Babel or (re)building city where God and all humanity dwell together.
This framing resonates deeply with contemporary critiques of the “technocratic paradigm” articulated by Pope Francis (2015), Jacques Ellul (1964), Albert Borgmann (1984), and more recently by scholars examining the political economy of digital technologies (Zuboff 2019). Technologies are never neutral. They embody assumptions about what counts as intelligence, whose flourishing matters, what forms of knowledge deserve authority, and which lives become visible or expendable. Leo rightly observes that technological power increasingly resides not within democratic institutions but within transnational corporate actors whose influence often exceeds that of nation-states. AI, therefore, presents not merely an engineering challenge but a crisis of governance, moral imagination, and public accountability.
Yet the encyclical refuses technological pessimism. This refusal reflects one of its greatest theological strengths. Rather than portraying technology as humanity’s enemy, Leo imagines it as an expression of human creativity whose moral significance depends upon the loves and narratives that guide its development. Here Augustine’s distinction between the two cities quietly undergirds the argument: technologies ultimately serve the city organized by disordered love or the city ordered toward the love of God and neighbor.
One of the document’s most profound contributions is its retrieval of the human person as fundamentally relational. Against contemporary tendencies to reduce persons to productivity, efficiency, data, or computational capacity, Leo insists that dignity is neither earned nor measured. Human worth precedes achievement because it is bestowed by God. The person exists not as an autonomous individual but as one created in the image of the Triune God—called into communion with God, neighbor, and creation.
This theological anthropology carries profound implications for artificial intelligence. If personhood is fundamentally relational rather than computational, then no increase in machine capability can replace those uniquely human capacities for mutuality, vulnerability, moral responsibility, forgiveness, compassion, and love. Intelligence alone has never constituted the image of God. Communion does.
At this point, however, I find myself longing for the encyclical to press its own insights further. Although Magnifica Humanitas speaks eloquently of solidarity, communion, and the common good, its anthropology remains largely human-centered. In an era defined equally by ecological collapse and technological disruption, the relational ontology underlying the document could be expanded toward a richer ecological vision of creaturely interdependence. Practical theology increasingly recognizes that human flourishing cannot be separated from the flourishing of the broader community of life (Conradie 2011; Johnson 2014; Jennings 2010). Our future depends not simply upon protecting humanity from AI but upon cultivating right relationships within the entire ecosystem of creation.
This ecological horizon is already latent within the encyclical’s repeated appeals to the common good and care for our common home. It simply awaits fuller theological development.
Similarly, Leo’s call for dialogue deserves careful reflection. His remarkable assertion that truth is “a good to be shared” rather than “a territory to be defended” may prove one of the document’s most prophetic contributions. At a moment when both ecclesial and political discourse increasingly mirror the antagonisms of digital culture, the Church is called not to possess truth as an instrument of domination but to participate in truth as a shared practice of communion. This reflects a deeply Augustinian—and indeed Johannine—vision in which truth is ultimately encountered in relationship rather than conquest.
For those of us working within practical and public theology, Magnifica Humanitas offers an important methodological challenge. Our task is not simply to produce ethical evaluations of artificial intelligence after technologies emerge. Rather, we are called to cultivate communities capable of discerning together what forms of technological development contribute to God’s peaceable reign. Christian ethics therefore becomes less about regulating machines and more about forming persons and communities whose loves are rightly ordered.
Ultimately, I read Magnifica Humanitas less as an encyclical about artificial intelligence than as a summons to recover what I have elsewhere called a shalomic imagination—the capacity to participate in God’s peaceable dream for the flourishing of all and everything. AI is not the central issue. The central issue is whether humanity will continue to organize civilization around domination, extraction, efficiency, and control, or whether we will rediscover the deeper vocation of becoming communities of mutual belonging, radical hospitality, shared responsibility, and covenantal love.
That, it seems to me, is the real choice between Babel and Jerusalem.
Leo XIV has offered the Church not merely another social encyclical but a theological grammar for discerning that choice. It is now the responsibility of theologians, ethicists, scientists, educators, faith communities, civic leaders, and everyday people longing for flourishing for all and everything to continue the work of inhabiting that grammar faithfully within the unprecedented realities of the digital age.
Selected Bibliography
Albert Borgmann, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life: A Philosophical Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 35–63, 196–215.
Don S. Browning, A Fundamental Practical Theology: Descriptive and Strategic Proposals (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 6–24, 47–69.
Ernst M. Conradie, The Earth in God’s Economy: Creation, Justice, and the Environment (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), 113–145.
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), 3–31, 79–133.
Francis, Fratelli Tutti (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2020), §§198–215.
Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015), §§101–136, 160–162.
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 6–34, 285–294.
Elizabeth A. Johnson, Ask the Beasts: Darwin and the God of Love (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 179–262.
Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, ed., The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Practical Theology, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2018), 1–16, 79–96.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019), 8–27, 329–376.
Peace, dwight
