Dear Parishioners and Friends,
Greetings from Malta. We continue our study of Magnifica Humanitas. A question arises whether Pope Leo is offering specific AI governance policies. The answer to that is “no”. No governance blueprints are provided”. Instead, he offers the principles that ground the Church’s Social Doctrine as principles for discerning the development and use of AI, especially regarding its impact on human dignity, truth, responsibility, work, freedom, solidarity, peace, and the common good.
Pope Leo frames the encyclical using two biblical images: the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9) and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah (Nehemiah 2-6). I encourage you to read these chapters. They carry an important message…
Babel represents a project of self-assertion, uniformity, and control: a society that sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and tries to reach heaven without God’s blessing.
Nehemiah represents a different kind of building: prayerful, communal, responsible, and ordered toward communion. Nehemiah does not impose a solution from above; he listens, organizes, assigns responsibility, and helps the people rebuild together.
The Pope warns against the “Babel syndrome”: the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the illusion that a single language (even a digital one) can translate the mystery of the person into data and performance (MH 10).
Pope Leo is not against AI. Neither does he praise AI as inherently good. He addresses the goods and dangers of technology. While supporting innovation, productivity, and business enterprise, he teaches that these advances must remain ordered to human dignity rather than becoming the ultimate measures of value.
Technology can “heal, connect, educate and protect our common home,” but it can also “divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice” (MH 9). While AI can be a “valuable tool” (MH 100), it is not morally neutral in practice because it takes on the characteristics of those who “devise it, finance it, regulate it and use it” (MH 9).
The key question is not whether we use AI or not, but whether our use of AI is ordered toward the dignity of the human person and the common good. (to be continued…)
God bless you.
Fr Silvio