(RNS) \u2014 Like the encyclicals of his predecessors across the last 135 years, Pope Leo XIV\u2019s \u201cMagnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,\u201d addresses the Roman Catholic Church to a present crisis facing all of humanity. Leo reminds us that the church \u201cwalks alongside humanity\u201d and so the church cannot be \u201ca stranger to the forces shaping society.\u201d For these reasons, Magnifica Humanitas comes not just as a message for Catholics but, just as popes before him have offered their encyclicals, as a reflection for \u201call men and women of goodwill.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Catholics, an encyclical letter is an official teaching document. An encyclical defines doctrine, the things that Catholics believe. Popes have been writing them for centuries. Initially, encyclicals were letters directed only to bishops and they were intended to bind the whole Catholic Church together under a coherent, shared teaching. Often, the teaching related to internal theological matters such as the duties of bishops or the interpretation of Scripture. With Pope Leo XIII in 1891, the church began to address important social questions with encyclicals.<\/p>\n
Encyclicals have become a way the Catholic Church presents its moral vision to the whole world, less with hope to convert anyone to Catholicism than as a ministry to the human family. In this way, Magnifica Humanitas joins a long and distinguished line of social encyclicals proclaiming, in Leo XIV\u2019s words, that \u201csocial justice is a concrete way of following Jesus and remaining faithful to the Gospel.\u201d The Catholic Church wants to pursue that vision of justice for and with all people.<\/p>\n
Thinking about justice in 2026, Pope Leo has written a document that names \u201cArtificial Intelligence\u201d as the center of a crisis. Really, Magnifica Humanitas says much more than that. Pope Leo touches on the treatment of migrants and he addresses the evolving and metastasizing reality of war in our time. He also condemns abortion and euthanasia.<\/p>\n
But the heart of the document is not any of those things, and even AI is here in the text only at the service of Pope Leo\u2019s larger concern \u2014 the \u201cequal dignity of all human beings.\u201d The situation of humanity is always the subject of a social encyclical, especially in the face of evolving developments and challenges that arise from economics and technology. Leo writes that we must remember constantly that these things exist to be \u201cat the service of the human person,\u201d they must not \u201cbecome a form of control\u201d or exploitation. The church teaches that the common good of all people is the purpose of social life, \u201cbuilding a world in which everyone can flourish.\u201d Like his predecessors before him, Leo\u2019s attention is on what frustrates human flourishing.<\/p>\n
We begin to understand what holds Magnifica Humanitas and all of Catholic social teaching together where Pope Leo refers to the \u201cPromethean dreams\u201d of those who profit from technology today in our world. Prometheus was the figure in Greek myth who stole fire from the gods of Olympus. Fire was the possession of the gods, it gives heat and light and it is useful for forging tools. In Aeschylus\u2019s tragedy, Prometheus confesses he stole fire so mortals would \u201clearn much craft and skill.\u201d In this way, mortal women and men could become like the gods. This is what \u201cPromethean\u201d usually refers to, the hope to escape from the limitations of our human lives and become like gods. Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein was subtitled \u201cThe Modern Prometheus\u201d as her character Victor Frankenstein gives life as God gives life. And coincidentally, in the month before\u00a0Magnifica Humanitaswas published journalist Karen Hao published her book, \u201cEmpire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination,\u201d where she describes the Silicon Valley search for \u201cartificial general intelligence,\u201d a \u201csuperintelligence [that] could replicate, and then surpass, human intelligence<\/a>.\u201d The Promethean quest goes on.<\/p>\n What comes into focus as we read Magnifica Humanitas is that our contemporary problems may not be as old as Aeschylus, but they are not new either. First industrialization, then the nuclear age, then the explosion of \u201cthe financial intermediation sector\u201d and the rise of \u201cfinance for its own sake\u201d \u2014 these all pre-dated artificial intelligence. They all have worked to reduce a human being to an exploitable factor in production for profit or to make us into helpless hostages to the geopolitics of an arms race. Economic and technological developments have raged across the last two centuries more quickly than we have been able to find what Leo calls \u201can overall vision\u201d for how those developments serve the common good of humanity. We have faced a \u201cdanger of humanity becoming a victim of its own achievements\u201d throughout the modern period. The church has been responding with documents like Magnifica Humanitas, but now with AI the pace of those developments is accelerating. The alarming and gathering danger is real.<\/p>\n The sense of danger in Magnifica Humanitas is palpable, especially in its recurring theme of the inadequacy of governments in the face of these threats. Leo writes that \u201cthe main drivers of [technological] development are private \u2026 parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments.\u201d I might be more tempted to say \u201cmost governments\u201d because, as Leo observes, \u201cAI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.\u201d Technological and economic developments have made the rich richer, the powerful more powerful. Throughout history, in the best of cases, governments have been those institutions that could speak for the voiceless and challenge the power of great wealth. Pointing to the political theorist Hannah Arendt, Leo laments how technology has threatened \u201cthe distinction between true and false\u201d that makes politics possible. Our institutions are not up to the challenge we face as the world contemplates its first trillionaire<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pope Francis condemned what he called \u201cthe technocratic paradigm that seeks to reduce everything to an object to be dominated.\u201d Pope Leo agrees. What dehumanizes us ultimately results from a misguided relationship to technology and economics \u2014 a \u201ctendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic life.\u201d Technology and economics themselves are not bad things so long as we remember that they are at the service of all people, not the few. Leo is clear that we ought \u201cneither to demonize nor idolize\u201d the tools of technology or economics, but see them for what they must be \u2014 instruments of the common good for all.<\/p>\n In a 1995 encyclical, Pope John Paul II famously\u00a0opposed a \u201cculture of life\u201d to a \u201cculture of death.\u201d<\/a> With Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo issues a stern warning that the world is becoming overwhelmed by a \u201cculture of power,\u201d characterized by the technocratic paradigm as well as our increasing tendency to embrace polarization and violence. The needs not just of the most vulnerable people but of all people are being sacrificed for the good of a very few and even governments are not up to the task of defending us.<\/p>\n For these reasons, the moral voice of the Catholic Church and other faith communities never has mattered more. Now in the second year of his papacy, Leo\u2019s voice is clear and consistent. The crisis now is impossible to ignore. And, with\u00a0Magnifica Humanitas, the world has a valuable instrument to reflect on and call us all to action.<\/p>\n (Steven P. Millies is the author of \u201cJoseph Bernardin: Seeking Common Ground<\/a>\u201d and \u201cA Consistent Ethic of Life: Navigating Catholic Engagement With U.S. Politics<\/a>.\u201d The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(RNS) \u2014 Like the encyclicals of his predecessors across the last 135 years, Pope Leo XIV\u2019s \u201cMagnifica Humanitas:…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":50731,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,30025,1198,53,25,1069,24776,2690,27469],"class_list":["post-50730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-ai-encyclical","tag-ai-oversight","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-big-tech","tag-magnifica-humanitas","tag-pope-leo-xiv","tag-tech-billionaires"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50730\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/50731"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}