(ANS – Rome) – In his new encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV places artificial intelligence at the center of today’s social question, calling the Church and the broader human family to choose between a technological future built on domination and one grounded in dignity, justice, truth, and communion.

Entering one of the most urgent debates of our time, the Pope speaks with the calm authority of the Church’s social tradition—explicitly situating Magnifica Humanitas within the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum—while also drawing on the prophetic resonance of Scripture. The question facing humanity, he suggests, is not whether artificial intelligence will shape the future—it already does. The real question is what kind of future humanity is building, and what kind of human beings people are becoming.

Babel or Jerusalem

The document’s central image is striking: humanity stands at a crossroads between constructing another Tower of Babel or, like Nehemiah, rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. Babel represents technological pride, uniformity, control, and self-sufficiency. Jerusalem symbolizes patient reconstruction, shared responsibility, communion, and hope.

Pope Leo XIV does not condemn technology. On the contrary, he recognizes its immense capacity to heal, educate, connect, and serve. Yet he insists that technology is never neutral in practice. It inevitably reflects the values of those who design it, finance it, regulate it, and deploy it.

Artificial intelligence can serve the human person, but it can also reinforce a technocratic culture in which people are reduced to data points, productivity metrics, consumers, or instruments of efficiency.

The Anthropological Question

One of the encyclical’s most significant contributions is anthropological. AI may calculate, imitate, synthesize, and respond—but it does not suffer, love, hope, repent, forgive, or discern. It has no body, no conscience, no spiritual interiority, and no moral responsibility. It may simulate empathy, but it cannot become a neighbor.

For this reason, the Pope warns of a subtle yet profound danger: not only that machines might replace human tasks, but that they might reshape humanity’s understanding of what it means to be human.

Concrete Areas of Concern

The encyclical applies this discernment to several critical areas:

• Public communication: AI can amplify disinformation and blur the line between truth and manipulation.
• Education: It may weaken patience, attention, and the discipline of asking meaningful questions.
• Work: While AI can free people from dangerous or repetitive labor, it may also deskill workers, intensify surveillance, and create new forms of unemployment.
• Economics: It risks concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few while generating new forms of slavery and “data colonialism,” including exploitative labor practices, extractive mining for hardware production, and the commodification of personal and health data.
• War: AI can make violence faster, more impersonal, and less accountable through autonomous weapons systems, the expansion of the arms industry, and the normalization of armed conflict.

The Pope’s language becomes especially forceful when he speaks about the need to “disarm” artificial intelligence. This does not mean rejecting innovation, but rather freeing AI from the logic of domination, monopoly, manipulation, and warfare.

AI, he insists, must be transparent, accountable, open to challenge, and socially governed. Above all, it must remain subject to the judgment of human dignity—not the other way around.

A Call to Conversion

For Catholic educators, communicators, and pastoral ministers, Magnifica Humanitas is not simply a Vatican reflection on technology. It is a call to conversion.

The Church, the Pope explains, is called to form people capable of living wisely in the digital age: men and women rooted in truth, silence, critical thinking, embodied relationships, solidarity with the poor, and care for creation.

The encyclical concludes with a four-part Christian vision: the mystery of the Incarnation, the unity of the Body of Christ nourished by the Eucharist, the “construction site” represented by Nehemiah, and the Magnificat as the hymn of hope from which the document takes its name.

Against technological fantasies of transcending human limitations, Pope Leo XIV proposes the Christian vision of a God who enters human fragility. Humanity, he writes, is not saved by becoming less human—more efficient, invulnerable, or machine-like—but by becoming more deeply human in Christ: capable of love, communion, responsibility, and hope.

Ultimately, Magnifica Humanitas is not a document of fear, but of discernment. It calls humanity to stop building towers destined to collapse and instead begin rebuilding a world where every person has a place.

Practical Applications

In practical terms, Magnifica Humanitas invites every sector of the Church and society to renew its sense of responsibility.

Educators are called to teach young people not only how to use artificial intelligence, but also when not to use it, safeguarding attention, memory, patience, creativity, and moral judgment.

Communicators are challenged to rediscover truth as a common good, embracing verification, transparency, and accountability as essential commitments in the digital age.

Youth ministers are encouraged to accompany young people within their digital environments, understanding their online world without abandoning them to it.

Institutions are urged to evaluate every technological adoption with ethical clarity, asking who truly benefits, who may be excluded, how data is being used, and whether decisions remain accountable and open to appeal.

Communities, meanwhile, are reminded to preserve spaces of real human presence—the family table, the classroom, the chapel, the playground, visits to the sick, and service to the poor—as irreplaceable signs of authentic communion.

In the end, the Pope’s appeal resounds with evangelical simplicity: do not build Babel; rebuild humanity together.