Reading the Map: A Conversation on Pope Leo XIV’s AI Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas

When Pope Leo XIV released "Magnifica Humanitas,", or "magnificent humanity," he staged a major event in Rome to launch it the encyclical, inviting cardinals, lay leaders, and even a co-founder of the AI company Anthropic to join him.

The University of St. Thomas led a virtual panel conversation on this momentous event. The conversation was moderated by Dr. Tom Harmon, UST professor of theology, and joined by Vincent Higgins, CEO of the Builders AI Forum; UST philosophy professors Dr. Brian Carl and Dr. Tim Furlan; UST computer science professor Dr. Carlos Monroy; UST political science professor Dr. Kevin Stuart; and UST psychology professor Dr. Tim Reilly.

A "Digital Industrial Revolution"

Dr. Harmon set the stage by placing the document in a long lineage. Pope Leo XIV deliberately echoes Pope Leo XIII, whose 1891 encyclical "Rerum Novarum," "of new things," launched the tradition of Catholic social doctrine in response to the Industrial Revolution. The new pope, Dr. Harmon explained, is confronting what he calls the digital industrial revolution, naming three "new things" of our age: digitization, artificial intelligence, and robotics, with AI taking center stage.

Dr. Harmon described how Pope Leo contrasts two biblical construction projects: the Tower of Babel, built in pride, and Nehemiah's rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls after the exile, undertaken in humility before God. The Church Fathers folded that contrast into St. Augustine's enduring distinction between the city of God, a community "oriented toward God even to the point of forgetting themselves," in Dr. Harmon's words, and the city of man, marked by "self-love to the contempt of God." Both cities, Dr. Harmon noted, are built with technology. The image is apt for a document about our newest tools.

A Document Meant for Everyone

The panelists' first impressions converged on a surprising point: how un-technical the encyclical is.

"It is a really beautiful document," said Dr. Monroy, the computer scientist, admitting he had braced for a technical treatise and was relieved not to find one. In an age when AI lets us summarize, generate, and consume "everything immediately," he argued, the encyclical's real gift is "a moment to pause and reflect" from the wisdom of the Church. He flagged a line he loved, that technology "should not be considered in itself as a force antagonistic to humanity," and stressed that the document, though rooted in faith, is "open to everyone," because the technology touches everyone.

Higgins, whose Builders AI Forum convenes technologists and Church leaders, described his organization as "foot soldiers" for Pope Leo's mission of operationalizing Catholic social teaching in the tech world. For Higgins, the encyclical is ultimately "a vehicle for evangelization." It's a way to move from a conversation about AI, to how we think and reason, to Christ and salvation, even over lunch with a non-believer.

Dr. Carl, a philosopher, captured the mood of anticipation. People are "looking to the Church and expecting to be able to receive important guidance at a genuinely pivotal moment," he said. What struck him was the decision to situate AI inside the broader frame of Catholic social teaching rather than treating it in isolation, and to do so with a deliberate reserve. Any document that got too concrete about today's technology, Dr. Carl observed, "would be outdated in a period of time." By returning to durable principles, it is built "to stand the test of time."

Dr. Harmon added a telling detail: where past encyclicals address "all men and women of good will," this one is addressed simply to all men and women of the present age, the broadest possible audience.

A Map, Not a Destination

The interpretive key, several panelists agreed, came from Dr. Stuart. Pope Leo, he suggested, "is drawing for us a map," not taking us on a journey to a fixed destination with settled answers, but charting where today's most pressing questions intersect the Church's centuries-old wisdom. The clearest evidence? AI is everywhere in the title and the text, yet "nowhere is AI defined." A document aiming at airtight conclusions would have begun with a definition and marched through a proof. Instead, Pope Leo sets an agenda and hands out "homework assignments" to universities, industry, and the wider world.

Recovering a True Humanism

For Dr. Harmon, the document's deepest purpose is "to revive a true humanism." The encyclical's very first paragraph cites "Gaudium et Spes:" that the mystery of the human person becomes truly clear only in the mystery of the Word made flesh, a theme reaching back to St. Irenaeus of Lyon. "AI is a tool, and it's a tool that's used by us. If we don't understand us, we're not going to be able to use the tool well." The long preamble about God and the human person is not a detour; it is the foundation, Dr. Harmon mentions

Dr. Reilly, the psychologist, sharpened the contrast with what the document calls the technocratic paradigm. He reached for Dr. Stuart's map image and turned it: tools like Google Maps and Waze are technocratic to the core, concerned only with the fastest route under given constraints. Against that, Pope Leo urges us to "focus on the process," even to "take the scenic route," so that we live well and honor our dignity in whatever we do because for a Christian, the true destination "isn't even in this world." Dr. Reilly heard echoes of the philosopher Josef Pieper on leisure and the modern "culture of total work." The Dignity of the Vulnerable

The panel's most emotional thread came from Dr. Furlan, who was moved by the encyclical's treatment of vulnerability, dependence and human limits. He linked it to Alasdair MacIntyre's "Dependent Rational Animals" and its "virtues of acknowledged dependency." The crisis of late modernity, Dr. Furlan said, "is not merely political or economic, it's anthropological, it's spiritual." We no longer agree on who the human person is, he said.

Modern culture, he said, tends to tie human value to consciousness, productivity, and autonomy, making dignity "functional," something earned by the strong and lost by the weak. He named the people such a logic quietly endangers: the patient with dementia; the unborn child with a disability; the chronically ill; the poor. Against this, Pope Leo recovers the radically countercultural claim of the magnifica humanitas itself, that dignity "inheres in the person simply because he or she is an image bearer," prior to any accomplishment, recognition, or even consciousness. Dr. Furlan noted that Nietzsche saw this Judeo-Christian "moral revolution" clearly and despised it, precisely because it makes the weak morally equal to the strong.

The stakes, for Dr. Furlan, are concrete and contemporary.

"We talk way too much about autonomy today and we need to talk a lot more about solidarity," he said, invoking Mother Teresa's lament that "we've forgotten that we belong to one another." In bioethics, his own field, the rhetoric of choice often masks "the fear that dependency erodes dignity. The answer to suffering cannot be the elimination of the sufferer." He pointed to a passage (section 117) warning that if the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to deem some lives less useful or less worthy - the road to a new eugenics. Dignity, he concluded, is "intrinsic or it's conditional;" and if conditional, "the powerful always determine whose lives matter."

Dr. Harmon added a scholarly note that will outlast the news cycle: the encyclical formally distinguishes types of dignity, something not seen before in the magisterium. Some forms can grow or diminish, but the "ontological dignity" we possess simply by being made in God's image "never goes away."

Dr. Furlan also drew out the theology beneath all this. God enters the world "not as an emperor in all his power and glory, but as an infant dependent upon a mother." Divinity appears in weakness; salvation arrives "through suffering love." The magnificent human person, then, is neither the autonomous self of modern liberalism nor a mere organism competing to survive, but a creature whose existence is sheer gift, called to communion and self-sacrificial love.

What Is Intelligence? Why "AI" May Be a Misnomer

The most provocative philosophical claim came when Dr. Furlan turned to section 99 and mentioned that artificial intelligence is, "in principle, impossible" if we take seriously what intelligence actually is. The word comes from the Latin intelligere, 'to understand.'" Drawing on the Jesuit philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, Dr. Furlan described knowing as a dynamic, self-transcending process: experience gives rise to questions, questions to insights, insights to reflective judgment, and judgment to decision - an activity "oriented towards truth and value," not "a type of mechanical calculation."

By that measure, today's systems "do not understand in any true sense of the word." They process symbols by statistical correlation and "generate outputs that simulate understanding," but "simulation and imitation is not identical with insight," and "computation is not equivalent to understanding." What they lack, in Lonergan's term, is interiority: a first-person perspective, intentional consciousness, the ability to grasp reason or to assume moral responsibility. Dr. Furlan even set aside the Turing test, long since passed in his view, in favor of a better question: does the system have an interior life at all?

The danger, he warned, is not merely technical misuse, but the quiet redefinition of intelligence itself as information processing, until we start to believe we are nothing more than large language models. And that confusion grows urgent as algorithms are increasingly "entrusted with social authority": screening job applicants, recommending criminal sentences, informing medical diagnoses. "The real danger here," he said, "is the false assumption that computational efficiency constitutes understanding."

Education, Work, and the Battle for Our Attention

Dr. Carl located much of the document's practical force in its section on education (around paragraph 140). He praised its candor about the difficulty of forming students "in an era in which people's attention and memory are being monetized." Education, the encyclical insists, is "a long journey requiring patience," built on trustworthy relationships with mentors - the polar opposite of passively absorbing an algorithmic feed engineered to grip us. Its goal is an encounter with reality "beyond the appearances" and with the great questions of human meaning, anchored above all in the love of truth. Dr. Carl expects the coming years to recover education as something deeply personal, a matter of persons forming one another.

Dr. Monroy connected this to the encyclical's treatment of work, which moved him most. Amid sweeping tech-sector layoffs and rapid automation, he returned to the Catholic conviction that work has value because it is "an encounter with God," a place where we meet Christ, meet one another, and find holiness in the ordinary. Like other panelists, he compared the document to a "road map" that helps someone in a technical field situate his labor within a far broader horizon.

Dr. Reilly pushed the point further into territory the encyclical only gestures at: much real work is done precisely through dependence. Children, the elderly, the infirm, and mothers at home may earn little or nothing, yet "there's enormous value to realizing that they have something to contribute" - work that deserves genuine dignity even when it yields no economic reward.

War in the Age of AI

Dr. Stuart, a political scientist noted how Pope Leo declared just war theory "outdated," in paragraph 192. But Dr. Stuart urged a careful reading. On the very next page, Pope Leo redeploys the same principles he had just called outdated. The point is not to discard just war theory but to insist it "has not fully confronted" how technology has transformed warfare.

That transformation cuts both ways. Some innovations made war more lethal, others less, but it has also reshaped our psychology of war. Dr. Stuart described "surgical strikes done by people who are not on the battlefield," guiding drones with what looks like "a gaming console joystick," in a conflict that resembles a video game. Pope Leo's worry, he said, is that such distance "lowers our threshold for getting engaged" in what remains deadly conflict. It is a vivid case of his central insight that technology reshapes how we understand who we are and what human life is for.

Beginning and Ending in Christ

Dr. Harmon gave the panel its closing frame. The encyclical's "bookends are Christ and Mary." It opens in its first paragraph with Jesus Christ and ends with the Theotokos, the Mother of God, "and by the way, in the middle there's the Trinity." At its center sits a deeply patristic vision of the human vocation: to be caught up "into the Trinitarian dynamic of love received and shared," through the Incarnate Word and in communion with his Mother.

The panel modeled, as Dr. Harmon put it, the discipline is "to resist the immediacy of the hot take," to slow down, read the vocabulary against the tradition, and treat the document for what these scholars believe it to be: a map for living well and remaining human in the age of the machine.

Watch the full conversation on UST's YouTube channel.