There may be circumstances in which a person should have the genuine choice to speak with another human being rather than an AI system, because human presence is not merely an inefficient delivery mechanism for information but can itself be an expression of care. Photo: Pexels.com.
I was privileged recently to participate in a roundtable convened by the University of Notre Dame Australia’s Centre for Technology and Human Futures, launched in March this year.
Led by its inaugural director, Associate Professor Victoria Lorrimar, the centre brought together a diverse group of leaders and practitioners from across Catholic healthcare, religious life, diocesan life and mission.
The roundtable created a rich space for conversation and reflection on the human questions raised by artificial intelligence.
The work of the centre has been enriched and encouraged by Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which provides Catholic organisations with a rich and necessary stimulus for thinking through the uses and implications of AI through the lens of Catholic social teaching.
What struck me about the roundtable was the importance of bringing different parts of the church together to wrestle with a technology that is evolving faster than our institutional responses to it.
AI is already shaping our mission, while continuing to raise questions for the wider church and society for which there are no settled answers.
I was grateful for the opportunity to think with others about those questions, because the conversation about artificial intelligence can too easily become a conversation about adoption, capability and efficiency, when the more fundamental question is one of purpose and mission.
An organisation can become extraordinarily busy implementing AI without ever asking what its use is ultimately for, and this is where Pope Leo’s image of the Tower of Babel in Magnifica Humanitas seems apt: there can be enormous ingenuity and activity, yet no common horizon capable of giving that activity meaning.
An organisation’s board may reasonably ask how it should use AI, but a more searching question is what kind of organisation it wishes to become, and whether the technology is actually serving that end.
This is particularly important, as the roundtable acknowledged, because the dominant cultural narrative increasingly presents AI as a general solution to almost every problem, known and unknown, and there are obvious commercial interests in sustaining that confidence.
Yet technological possibility is not the same thing as human necessity, and an AI system can solve a problem in one part of an organisation while creating a larger one somewhere else. The increasing use of AI in recruitment provides a simple illustration.
If applicants can generate highly tailored applications and apply for many more positions than was previously possible, the efficiency gained by the individual can become an overwhelming volume of work for those receiving and assessing applications.
What appears as efficiency when viewed locally can become dysfunction when viewed across a whole system, reminding us that the consequences of technology are often delayed and distributed rather than immediately visible.
There is a related question of trust, particularly when those most affected by technological decisions have little influence over them.
Workers who use technology in their daily practice are often well placed to understand what might genuinely assist their work, yet organisational decisions about systems and vendors can be made at a considerable distance from that practical knowledge.
From Babel to Jerusalem: Digital evangelisation in light of Magnifica Humanitas
If participation means merely teaching people how to use a technology once a decision has already been made, then we have confused implementation with genuine participation.
An abiding question is whether people have a voice in determining what technology is introduced, what purposes it serves, and what boundaries should govern its use.
For Catholic institutions, this takes us inevitably towards the question of human dignity, understood within a distinctly Christian vision of the human person. Our institutions and ministries cannot simply ask whether AI makes a process faster or cheaper. It must ask what its use communicates about the person who encounters it.
In healthcare, for example, there may be circumstances in which a person should have the genuine choice to speak with another human being rather than an AI system, because human presence is not merely an inefficient delivery mechanism for information but can itself be an expression of care.
This also helps explain why purely technical solutions can fail when they are removed from the history, culture and relationships of the people they are intended to serve.
The more technologically mediated our lives become, the greater the temptation to treat human beings as disembodied collections of data, preferences and predicted behaviours, or even ‘obstacles’ to productivity.
We may therefore need to recover an instinct for the moments when something feels wrong even though it is technically possible. We may need to develop the “ick”, as it was described, that tells us there are forms of automation we should resist before we can yet formulate the argument for why.
This is where I suspect theology and philosophy will become more important, rather than less, as organisations try to navigate the ethics of AI.
We sometimes speak as though ethics is something that can be added to technology at the end of the development process, as though we first build the machine and then ask whether its use is permissible and fitting.
Yet every ethical judgement rests upon prior convictions about reality, knowledge and the human person; in other words, every ethics has an underlying metaphysics, whether acknowledged or not.
What we believe a human being is will inevitably shape what we believe can legitimately be done to, for or with a human being. This is why the philosophical question of whether intelligence is reducible to computation matters, just as the theological claim that the human person is created, embodied, relational and endowed with an irreducible dignity in Christ matters.
These are not merely questions for academics.
They become practical when we ask whether an algorithm should determine someone’s employment, whether automated decision-making diminishes human agency, whether simulated empathy can substitute for presence or the community of the parish, whether generated information changes our relationship with truth, or where responsibility ultimately lies when a machine participates in a decision whose consequences are borne by a person.
Pope Leo XIV signs “Magnifica Humanitas” at the Vatican’s Synod Hall May 15, 2026, the first encyclical of his papacy, which focuses on the rise of artificial intelligence. (OSV News photo/Simone Risoluti, Vatican Media)
The deeper question is what an AI-shaped world might gradually teach us to believe about ourselves. All of this makes AI both an invitation and a confrontation for the church. There is an intellectual response that needs to be developed now, and Pope Leo has already given us beginnings for that work.
However, there will also be responses prompted by crisis as technology alters centres of authority, expertise and influence within our institutions and in the wider community.
The church will need more than policies to navigate this complex terrain. It will need formation capable of cultivating discernment, governance capable of holding principles together with lived experience, and experimentation that allows new technologies to be explored without surrendering what cannot be compromised.
Ultimately, the church’s credibility may depend less upon whether it becomes an exemplary adopter of AI than upon whether it can lead both intellectually and practically: offering a compelling account of those dimensions of human life that cannot be measured, optimised or reduced to efficiency, while embodying that vision in the way our institutions use technology.
My hope from the roundtable discussions is that they might help build a shared Catholic vision that does not simply respond to the AI revolution, but helps to shape it – bringing together our intellectual tradition, our institutional practice and our defence of the irreducible dignity of the human person.
That same question of what we are willing to optimise, and what we must refuse to reduce to efficiency, reaches well beyond AI.
Consider euthanasia: it may be presented as an efficient response to suffering, but efficiency alone cannot tell us what a genuinely human or grace-filled response to suffering requires.
Beauty is inefficient, love is inefficient, worship is inefficient, and yet these are not peripheral features of human existence. They disclose something about what human existence is for.
Perhaps, then, the most important question AI places before the church is not simply what this technology permits us to do, but what, in fidelity to our understanding of the human person, we are unwilling to do with it.
In answering that question, we may discover that the church’s contribution to the AI age is not principally to offer another technology policy, but to recover and proclaim a vision of the human person profound enough to withstand the pressure to optimise everything.