Magnifica Humanitas

102: The use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom. Important and sensitive decisions — concerning employment, credit, access to public services or even a person’s reputation — risk being fully delegated to automated systems that do not know “compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change,” [125] and can therefore give rise to new forms of exclusion. There are clearly harmful uses, such as the manipulation of information or violations of privacy. Yet there is also a subtler danger, for when AI systems present themselves as neutral and objective, they end up reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers.

→ vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

Pope Leo XIV wrote his first encyclical to Catholics, other Christians, and all people of goodwill. He applies the Church’s Social Doctrine to artificial intelligence and digital technology. He asks whether humanity will create a new Tower of Babel, a place of pride, uniformity, and control, or rebuild Jerusalem as a city of shared responsibility, diversity, and friendship with God.

The main purpose is clear. The Pope calls for careful judgement so that technology serves true human growth and the good of everyone. Technology is not neutral. It is a gift that people must use with ethics. The letter builds on 135 years of Catholic Social Teaching since Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum.

Core ideas include:

• Human dignity is fixed and infinite because each person is made in the image of the Triune God. Dignity does not depend on usefulness or data.
• Artificial intelligence can help heal, connect, and develop life, but it becomes harmful when it creates dependence, bias, surveillance, or fake relationships. The Pope rejects transhumanism; real greatness comes from grace, not machines.
• The Church’s key principles — common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, and justice — must guide the digital world.

The chapters cover:

• The history of Social Doctrine.
• Its basic principles.
• The danger of a technocratic system that concentrates power; the need for transparency and fair rules.
• Real-life issues: truth online, jobs and automation, freedom from new forms of control.
• Peace instead of war; the Pope criticises artificial intelligence weapons because they remove human moral choice.

In the end, Pope Leo XIV urges everyone to put God first and people at the centre. He asks the Virgin Mary to help build a fraternal, just, and open world for all. The message is simple and hopeful: choose communion, not domination. In the age of artificial intelligence, humanity must stay truly and magnificently human.

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