Updated: September 15, 2026
Chapter 3 of Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV takes a closer look at AI, technological advancement, and the technocratic mindset that can reduce everything—including human beings—to efficiency, optimization, and control.
Amanda and Jonathan unpack what the Church’s social teaching has to say about AI, including:
- Why more technological power doesn’t necessarily mean more human progress
- How AI can concentrate economic and social power
- Why AI should not be confused with human intelligence
- The importance of prudence, transparency, and moral responsibility
- How AI can affect creativity, relationships, and our ability to exercise judgment
- What transhumanism and the desire to “optimize” humanity have to do with our understanding of human limits
- Why our weaknesses, suffering, and dependence on others are part of what makes us human
The deeper question is one Pope Leo keeps bringing us back to: Does this technology make human life more human?
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Music in this episode is by Dylan Gardner – check out his album Almost Real on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to great music.
Artificial intelligence is changing how we work, communicate, learn, and make decisions. But as AI becomes more powerful, a deeper question needs to be asked: Are we becoming better at using the power we have?
In Chapter 3 of Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV moves directly into the question of artificial intelligence and the technocratic paradigm behind it. Amanda and Jonathan explore what Catholic social teaching has to say about a technology that can concentrate enormous amounts of economic, social, and informational power.
More Power Doesn’t Necessarily Mean More Progress
Pope Leo warns that scientific, technological, and economic progress can move ahead without corresponding moral and social progress. We can have more tools without becoming better at using them.
That raises an important question: What happens when our technological capabilities grow faster than our wisdom?
The chapter looks at how major technological and economic actors can shape access, visibility, participation, and even economic and democratic life. Catholic social teaching gives us principles for evaluating that power, including the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, social justice, and the universal destination of goods.
AI Is Not Human Intelligence
Pope Leo is careful to distinguish artificial intelligence from human intelligence. AI can imitate certain functions of human intelligence and exceed human beings in speed and computational capacity, but it does not possess the relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.
That distinction matters because the way we talk about AI can shape the way we understand it—and ourselves.
Amanda and Jonathan also discuss the danger of becoming overly dependent on AI for ready-made answers, allowing it to weaken our creativity and judgment. They explore another concern Pope Leo raises: AI can simulate friendship, empathy, and communication so convincingly that people may gradually lose their desire for genuine human relationships.
AI Is Not Morally Neutral
One of the central points of this chapter is that we cannot simply ask whether we are using AI for good or for bad.
We also have to ask how the system was designed, what assumptions are embedded in it, who is responsible for its decisions, and who has the power to shape it.
Pope Leo calls for prudence, transparency, rigorous evaluation, and sometimes even a slower pace of adoption. Slowing down to make sure we are moving in the right direction is not the same as opposing technological progress.
What Does Catholic Social Teaching Have to Do With AI?
This is where the chapter becomes especially practical.
Pope Leo applies the principles of Catholic social teaching directly to artificial intelligence:
- The common good calls us to recognize new forms of economic, political, and informational inequality.
- The universal destination of goods calls for broad access to technology and the education needed to use it.
- Subsidiarity means communities should have a meaningful role in making decisions that affect them.
- Solidarity requires us to recognize the often-hidden workers who sustain AI systems.
- Justice requires us to ask who has the power to train these models—and who is simply subjected to them.
Social justice, Pope Leo argues, cannot simply be something we think about after a technology is deployed. It needs to shape how the technology is designed from the beginning.
What Does It Mean to “Disarm” AI?
Pope Leo uses the striking language of “disarming” AI.
This does not mean rejecting technology. Instead, it means resisting the economic, cognitive, and political competition that allows technology to become concentrated in monopolistic control.
AI should remain open to discussion, debate, human oversight, and the diversity of human cultures and communities.
The Problem With Optimizing Humanity
The chapter eventually moves beyond technology itself and asks a much deeper question: What happens when we start treating the human person as a project to be optimized?
Pope Leo warns against a vision of life where having more, eliminating weakness, reducing uncertainty, and exerting control become the measures of human flourishing. Human beings can begin to see themselves as projects rather than persons called to relationship and communion.
Amanda and Jonathan spend significant time discussing this idea of optimization. In a culture where everything can feel like it needs to be improved, elevated, optimized, or made more efficient, even ordinary human limitations can start to feel like problems that need to be fixed.
But Christianity offers a different vision.
Our Limits Can Make Us More Human
Pope Leo makes a striking argument: our limitations are not simply defects to eliminate.
Illness, suffering, vulnerability, failure, and mortality can open us to compassion, generosity, dependence on God, and deeper relationships with other people. Amanda and Jonathan discuss what could happen if technology allowed us to continually curate suffering and difficulty out of our lives.
The goal of Christian self-transcendence is not to escape being human. It is to be transformed in love through God’s grace.
As Amanda and Jonathan discuss, the ultimate source of that transformation is not artificial intelligence. It is the Holy Spirit.
Babel or Jerusalem?
The chapter closes by returning to the two images that frame Magnifica Humanitas: the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem.
The question is not simply whether AI will become more powerful. The question is what that power will do to human beings and our relationships with one another.
If AI helps make human life more human, Pope Leo says it can be embraced responsibly. But if our power grows while the human heart withers and our relationships fray, we may be building another Babel—something impressive on the outside but fundamentally dehumanizing.
So, can we moralize the machine?
More importantly, can we make sure that as our machines become more capable, we remain fully human?
