This post completes a three-part series amplifying Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas. The first post traced the encyclical’s theology of limitation, a reality “through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship” (§118), and the AI environments that quietly erode the practices forming us. 1
The second offered three marks of a formative limit: it opens to relationship, it is where a capacity is learned, and it can change the person. 2
That post ended with a puzzle. A thousand small frictions can each bear no mark, and yet, removing them all leaves an environment with no waiting anywhere, and so nowhere left for patience to form. No single removal did harm, yet together they still eroded something. The marks weigh practices one at a time. If some formation belongs to the whole rather than to any single practice, what is the unit of protection, and who tends it?
The encyclical has already named the scale of the problem. AI is “already an environment in which we are immersed,” and responding to it is a task “ecological in the deepest sense, for it concerns a new dimension of our common home” (§110). An ecological problem needs an ecological answer.
Formation Lives in Rhythms
The encyclical supplies the unit in a single phrase. “A genuinely healthy attitude is needed,” it says, “requiring rhythms that incorporate silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis, for without these elements inner freedom may be compromised” (§146). The sentence was written about education, but it names something older and wider. A rhythm is not a single practice. It is a pattern held in common over time.
The marks do not fail at the environmental scale; their object scales. Asked of the shared rhythm rather than of each friction inside it, the same three questions still govern. Does the rhythm open persons to relationship? Is it where capacities are learned? Does it leave room to fail and be changed? The thousand-frictions puzzle dissolves under this move. No single wait bears a mark, but the rhythm that keeps waiting inside common life does. The frictions did not form us; the pattern did.
The encyclical grounds the move in its own claim: “every technology shapes those who use it” (§140). What shapes a person is rarely the single use. It is the texture of use over time, and the texture of restraint, of what a community leaves undone, and when. A rhythm is that texture, given a form, that can be kept.
Rhythms Communities Already Keep
Keeping formative rhythms in common is among the oldest things communities do: the Sabbath and the liturgical year, the family table where no device comes, the choir that rehearses every week, the school term with its seasons of effort and rest, the classroom that keeps first drafts in the student’s own hand, or the workplace that holds its mornings free for undistracted work, honoring the encyclical’s insistence on systems “centered on the human person and not solely on performance” (§150).
Each of these is a rhythm, not a private discipline. Many are rituals in the fullest sense, patterned and repeated, and what a community repeats together it becomes. Each binds a community, forms capacities across it, and leaves room within it to fail and be changed. The marks apply to each rhythm as a whole, even where the single practices inside it carry none. No single rehearsal forms a choir; the kept weekly practice does. AI can supply the song in seconds, voices and all; it cannot supply a choir, people who have learned to sing together.
Three cautions temper the picture. A rhythm that the strong impose on those who must live under it deserves suspicion, just as any imposed hardship does. But a rhythm left entirely to those inside it, with no help from anyone who sees the whole, is vulnerable in the opposite way; the people inside a rhythm rarely see all that it touches. And not every inherited pattern forms; some merely grind, and the marks weed those out.
Who Tends the Rhythm
The encyclical names the tenders. It calls for “an alliance among policy-makers, educational institutions and families” (§142); it places rhythms of silence and study at the heart of education (§146); it asks that work itself be designed around the person (§150). These are the same places where the marks of a formative limit are asked. Here they become the keepers of the rhythms the marks approve.
And this is where the hardest problem an AI environment poses begins to loosen. The communities that must govern AI are themselves being reshaped by it, and a community can only protect formative limits it still recognizes. A rhythm held in common is how a community keeps producing people capable of asking the marks’ questions. The rhythm forms its own tenders. Every choir knows this: rehearsal makes the very singers who keep the rehearsal. That is why the unit of protection must be communal. An individual discipline forms one person and dies with one lapse; a shared rhythm carries the recognition across persons and generations. And it is why communities can take part in shaping the standards that govern AI only so long as their common life still forms the capacities that shaping requires.
The encyclical opens with an image of exactly this. Against the tower of Babel it sets the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls, where Nehemiah, who “did not impose solutions from above,” “convened the families, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, listened to their concerns, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition” (§8). The city was reborn “not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all,” an undertaking “with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones” (§8). The biblical account adds a detail worth reading closely: many rebuilt the stretch of wall opposite their own house (Nehemiah 3), each family tending what stood nearest its own life. Yet it was one wall, and a breach anywhere endangered everyone. Together, the family’s stretch and the single wall are a picture of what Catholic Social Teaching calls subsidiarity: decisions belong at the level closest to those who live with them, and those who see the whole owe them coordination and help, not imposition or neglect (§68–70). And the story does not end at the wall. Once it stood, the people gathered to hear the Law read aloud, restored the feasts, and bound themselves by covenant to keep the sabbath (Nehemiah 8–10). At its dedication, two companies of singers walked the top of the wall itself, giving thanks (Nehemiah 12). The wall made room for the rhythms.
What would it mean to repair the stretch nearest your own home; to name the rhythm before you optimize the friction? When an AI tool arrives at the family table, the classroom, the parish, or the team, first, name the shared pattern it enters—the meal, the drafting, the visit, the meeting—rather than the single inconvenience it removes. Then, ask the three marks of the rhythm as a whole: does it open persons to relationship, is it where a capacity is learned, does it leave room to fail and be changed? And let the people who live inside the rhythm decide together, with the help of those who see the whole, what enters it and what stays out, a shared discernment the Catholic Church calls synodality (cf. §10). A friction that belongs to no rhythm may go without ceremony. A rhythm that bears the marks deserves a discernment, not a default.
Conclusion
The refrain of this series has been that no one has to intend the erosion. The optimization default runs by itself, removing friction, effort, and waiting wherever it finds them, however unintentionally. The rhythm is different. It is kept on purpose and together, or not at all. That is hard, and harder now, since most of our tools are built to let us work alone. No one has to intend the erosion; someone has to intend the rhythm.
This series began by asking what conditions allow human persons to keep maturing in care, wisdom, and the freedom to choose and love. Its answer: formative limits, discerned by the three marks, held inside rhythms that communities keep in common. These are rhythms as old as Nehemiah’s families, and they still ask to be kept. Name the rhythm, ask the marks of it, and decide together what enters it, before the default decides for you. Communities that keep such rhythms will also face a question this series has deliberately set aside: whether and how AI itself can contribute to the common life it now inhabits. That question deserves its own careful treatment.
- Mark Graves, “Formed Through Limitation: Amplifying Magnifica Humanitas,” AI and Faith (June 25, 2026). https://aiandfaith.org/insights/formed-magnifica-humanitas/
- Mark Graves, “Discerning Formative Limits: Amplifying Magnifica Humanitas,” AI and Faith (August 5, 2026). https://aiandfaith.org/insights/discerning-formative-limits-magnifica-humanitas/ ↑
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