On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas — his first papal encyclical dedicated to artificial intelligence and the human person. It is a serious document. Dense, rooted, and addressed not just to the faithful but to all people of goodwill.
What struck me most was not that the Church is finally talking about AI.
It’s that the Church appears to understand something deeper than most of the loudest voices in Silicon Valley.
The real AI crisis is not mainly technological.
It is anthropological.
That distinction matters enormously. Most public conversations about AI circle the same practical questions: Will jobs disappear? Will AGI arrive? Will misinformation overwhelm democracy? Will superintelligence surpass us? Those questions matter. But the Vatican is asking something more foundational:
What happens to the human person when civilization begins treating intelligence as something that can be manufactured, scaled, and outsourced?
That is the question underneath all the others. And it is the question the encyclical presses with more clarity and more seriousness than almost anything else I have read this year.
I want to tell you what it actually says — and then be honest about what it has not yet reckoned with. Because the gap between those two things is where most of us are actually living.
What the Encyclical Gets Right
Technology is never neutral
We tend to imagine technology as passive — instruments we occasionally pick up and set down, tools waiting for a human hand to direct them. The encyclical refuses that framing entirely.
“Technology takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”
— Magnifica Humanitas, §9
Technologies eventually become environments. And environments form people.
The internet changed how we think. Social media changed how we compare. Smartphones changed how we attend. Artificial intelligence may change how we understand ourselves. That is not a technical concern. It is a civilizational one.
Nicholas Carr made a version of this argument in The Shallows — that the internet does not merely transmit information but reshapes the neural architecture of attention itself. The encyclical pushes deeper: the formation is not only cognitive. It is moral. It reaches the level of desire — which is to say it reaches the level of who you are becoming in the order of love.
The practical implication is that “it’s just a tool” doesn’t survive contact with reality. A platform engineered to monetize outrage is not neutral. An algorithm that maximizes engagement at the cost of truth is not neutral. An AI companion designed to simulate intimacy for profit is not neutral. Each one carries a vision of the human person inside its architecture. And that vision has consequences regardless of anyone’s intentions.
The human person is not an algorithm with skin on it
This is where the document does its most important theological work. It refuses the reduction.
A human person is not a prediction engine wrapped in biology. Human beings love. Worship. Suffer. Sacrifice. Repent. Discern. Enter communion. We possess moral responsibility, embodiment, memory, and relational depth that is inseparable from the whole person. Intelligence, in the human sense, is not computational. It is personal.
“Never has humanity had such power over itself.”
— Magnifica Humanitas, §4
The danger the encyclical names is subtle but serious: the more powerful artificial intelligence becomes, the more tempting it is to reduce human beings into information systems themselves. If intelligence is defined purely functionally — outputs, efficiency, prediction, optimization — then eventually people begin interpreting themselves the same way.
This is not a new temptation. It is simply accelerating. Long before AI, we had already begun describing ourselves mechanistically — dopamine systems, behavioral outputs, chemical processes, algorithms of desire. Artificial intelligence intensifies this tendency because machines are now startlingly effective at tasks we once considered uniquely human. The risk is that we confuse simulation with personhood. That a machine generating language starts to seem equivalent to a soul speaking.
That distinction may become one of the defining spiritual questions of this century.
Your dignity is not something you earn
The encyclical grounds its entire argument here, and it needs to be stated plainly: human dignity is ontological. It precedes achievement, productivity, efficiency, and moral behavior. It is given by God and cannot be revoked by any system, metric, or market.
“Every human person possesses an infinite dignity, inalienably grounded in his or her very being, which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter.”
— Dignitas Infinita, cited in §53
This is a direct counter to what the document calls the ideology of performance — the assumption, already embedded in most digital systems, that persons must justify their worth through outputs. In an economy increasingly shaped by AI-driven productivity metrics, this is not abstract philosophy. It is the operating logic of the world most people already inhabit.
When persons are evaluated primarily according to what they produce, something essential has been violated. Not just ethically. Anthropologically. The person has been reduced to a function. And a function can always be replaced by a more efficient one.
Transhumanism is Babel with better branding
Leo XIV names transhumanism directly, and the rejection is unambiguous. The desire to engineer past human limitation — to eliminate mortality, upgrade cognition, dissolve the boundary between person and machine — is not framed as a neutral aspiration. It is named as an ancient temptation in a technical disguise.
“Building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected.”
— Magnifica Humanitas, §12
The Babel image the encyclical uses is sharper than it first appears. Babel was not a failed project. It was a successful one oriented toward the wrong end — self-sufficiency, the elimination of dependence, the aspiration to reach heaven without God’s blessing. The encyclical reads the transhumanist promise in exactly those terms: technically coherent, impressively resourced, and spiritually catastrophic for the same reason.
Creaturely limitation is not a design flaw. It is part of what makes the human person human — what makes us needful of one another, of God, of the real. Formation happens at the point of limitation, not despite it. The desert fathers understood this. It is precisely why they went into the desert rather than optimizing their way out of the difficulty.
The interior life is the whole argument
The encyclical closes with a line that functions as its theological center of gravity:
“The world once again will come to recognize the human heart as the place where God desires to dwell.”
— Magnifica Humanitas, §16
This is not rhetoric. It is the anthropological claim from which everything else follows. The human heart — the place of interiority, attention, desire, and encounter with the living God — is what is at stake. Not GDP. Not geopolitical dominance. Not even jobs, though jobs matter.
The interior life.
And this is where the encyclical does its most important work: it refuses to let the AI conversation stay on the surface. The threat is not only external — displacement, surveillance, manipulation. The deeper threat is interior. What happens to attention, to contemplative capacity, to the ability to be genuinely present, to desire the true good rather than the algorithmically curated approximation of it — when the entire architecture of daily life is quietly optimized against all of these?
That is the question. It is the right question. The encyclical asks it well.
But there are questions it does not yet ask.
What the Encyclical Hasn’t Reckoned With
Magnifica Humanitas is a document of principle, not prediction. The Church’s tradition operates at the level of anthropology, ethics, and formation — not technical forecasting. That is as it should be.
But the gaps matter. Because the scenarios the encyclical does not engage are not speculative anymore. They are already in motion. And people reading this document hoping for guidance on where we are actually headed will find the principles without the concrete horizon those principles need to address.
Millions of humanoid robots
The encyclical speaks genuinely and well about the dignity of work. What it does not engage is the specific reality accelerating right now: humanoid robots are entering manufacturing, logistics, elder care, and domestic settings at scale. Figure, Tesla Optimus, Boston Dynamics — these are not science fiction. They are production roadmaps with delivery dates.
The question this raises is not only economic. It is formational. What happens to human identity when it has been organized around work — around craft, around the embodied experience of making and doing — and that activity is now physically performed by machines that look like us?
The encyclical is right that human dignity precedes productivity. But that answer requires a great deal more development to speak to people whose entire sense of meaning and social belonging has been organized around the work that is disappearing. For significant sectors of the economy, that world is a five-to-ten year horizon. The tradition has the right answer. It hasn’t yet developed the right pastoral response.
The Star Trek problem
There is a version of the AI future that is genuinely attractive and genuinely dangerous for exactly that reason.
Call it the Star Trek view. AI eliminates scarcity — material, informational, cognitive. Everyone has enough. Dangerous and tedious work disappears. Humans are freed for creativity, relationship, and exploration. Disease is managed. The friction of ordinary survival is largely removed.
This is the future the most serious AI optimists believe is coming. And they may be right.
The danger of paradise is not that it is painful. The danger is that it is comfortable enough to stop the kind of growth that only difficulty produces.
The encyclical rightly insists that human weakness is not an error to be corrected. But it does not grapple with the seductive version of that correction — the one that arrives not as domination or control but as genuine abundance. Not Babel’s pride. Something that actually looks like gift.
The spiritual question the Church has not yet fully answered is this: what does formation look like in a world of material sufficiency? The desert fathers went into the desert because they could not find the necessary resistance in a comfortable culture. Abba Moses wasn’t fleeing poverty. He was fleeing the ease that had made genuine interiority nearly impossible. If the broader culture becomes maximally comfortable — if the friction that has always pressed human beings toward depth and dependence is largely removed by design — where does anyone go?
What does the examined life look like when the unexamined one has been made almost frictionless?
That is not a question the encyclical asks. It may be the most important question of the next twenty years.
Superintelligence
The encyclical names AI as a civilizational turning point. It does not engage the scenario that a growing number of researchers consider likely within this decade: systems that exceed human cognitive performance across every domain simultaneously.
Dario Amodei of Anthropic has spoken of “a country of geniuses in a datacenter.” The forecasting aggregator Metaculus, pooling thousands of independent predictions in early 2026, placed a 50% probability on AGI by 2033 — a median that has compressed from fifty years away to roughly five in just four years. The specific timelines are contested. The direction is not.
The encyclical’s anthropological framework holds at every point on that curve. But the document does not ask what happens when the machine surpasses human performance not in narrow domains but across all of them simultaneously — when intelligence, as the secular world currently measures it, is no longer a distinguishing human feature at all.
When that moment comes, the Church’s answer will need to be very clear: what is irreducibly human is not cognitive performance. It is personhood. The capacity for genuine love. Moral responsibility exercised in freedom. The encounter between a self and the living God that constitutes something no system can replicate, because it requires a subject — someone, not something.
“The splendor of humanity revealed in its fullness in Christ — no machine can ever replace.”
— Magnifica Humanitas, §15
That claim is correct. It is also underdeveloped. Asserting that personhood is irreducible is the beginning of the argument, not the end. The next task is showing — concretely, practically, in the lives of ordinary people — what it looks like to form persons in the capacities that remain irreducibly human when cognitive performance has become cheap.
The encyclical clears the ground. The building still needs to happen.
Why This Matters for You Right Now
I am not writing this for theologians or policy analysts, though I hope both find it useful. I am writing it for people trying to live well in a moment they did not choose and cannot fully understand.
If you are a parent watching your children spend hours in algorithmically managed environments designed to capture attention and manufacture desire — the encyclical is naming what you already feel.
If you are a worker watching your field be automated, wondering what your value is when the skill has been replaced — the encyclical is answering directly: your value was never the skill.
If you are a person of faith who senses that something about this moment is reaching not just for your time but for your capacity for interiority itself — the encyclical is confirming the intuition.
The tradition it draws on has been forming people in precisely these capacities — sustained attention, embodied presence, contemplative depth, moral seriousness, the ability to be genuinely present to another person — for two thousand years. Not as a self-improvement project. Not as optimization. As the slow, irreplaceable work of becoming someone capable of communion with God and genuine relationship with other persons.
As intelligence becomes cheap, wisdom becomes rare. As information becomes abundant, discernment becomes decisive.
That work does not become less important as AI becomes more capable. It becomes more important. Because the one thing the machine cannot produce is a person. And a world filled with increasingly powerful systems still requires persons to inhabit it — people with the roots, the interiority, the presence to remain genuinely human when everything else is changing faster than any of us can track.
This is why I believe the future will not belong to the most technologically advanced people. It will belong to the most formed ones.
The Question the Document Leaves Open
Magnifica Humanitas ends with the Magnificat. Mary’s song. The fiat — here I am, let it be done to me. The posture of receptive, creaturely openness that is the precise opposite of Babel.
It is the right ending. And it surfaces the deepest question the encyclical raises without fully answering: how do you form people toward that posture in a world being engineered against it? How does the fiat survive in an environment optimized for frictionless self-assertion, for the seamless satisfaction of manufactured desire, for an intelligence that answers before the question has fully formed?
The encyclical is right about everything it says. It is also only the beginning of what needs to be said.
Beneath all the headlines about AGI, humanoid robots, and superintelligence lies a quieter danger. Human beings may slowly lose contact with their own humanity. Not through sudden catastrophe. Through gradual reduction.
Reducing persons into systems.
Reducing wisdom into optimization.
Reducing freedom into predictability.
Reducing relationships into simulation.
Reducing the soul into outputs.
The Church sees this clearly. It has seen versions of it before. And it has something to say that the market, the lab, and the policy brief cannot say:
The human heart is where God desires to dwell. That is still true. It will remain true no matter how intelligent the machines become.
The question is whether we will still have the interior life required to receive it.
That is worth sitting with. Not to produce anxiety. To produce seriousness about what formation actually requires right now — and what the cost of its absence will be.