In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV writes that the ability to care for one another “is learned and mastered through lived experience. Reading stories to a child, offering company to an elderly person and arranging a home so that it is welcoming teach us to value care at a societal level and train us to recognize others as persons worthy of attention” (§114). With these shared practices, we respond to others’ limitations and finitude, and these practices form us as people in relation to one another. When artificial intelligence (AI) systems perform that care, they can erode the very practice through which that formation of caring people happens.
In addition to its review and expansion of Catholic Social Teaching and situating AI ethics and governance within the Roman Catholic tradition, Magnifica Humanitas contains a theology of human limitation that identifies this threat to human moral development. However, it does not quite make the connection between its own observations about the erosion and why it matters. Why should we care that we may lose the ability to care? Answering that question points toward its remedy.
Theology of Finitude
The encyclical situates human formation within a theology of finitude, observing that everything appearing today to be a limit—illness, old age, suffering—“tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship” (§118). Finitude is formative: humanity often flourishes through limitations, not despite them, and that formative work opens itself to relationship. We are formed through our limits and with one another.
Suffering is one way finitude becomes productive, making room for “compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others” (§119). Here, finitude is the broader condition, and to renounce the whole adventure of a finite life “in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits, could mean many things, but it would no longer be human” (§120).
The encyclical applies this theology directly to the question of AI. It draws the distinction between person and algorithm deliberately. “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change. A person’s future is not calculable, but depends on one’s freedom—elevated by the inexhaustible grace of God—and on the relationships cultivated” (§128). A person’s formative work is completed in relation.
This naturally raises a question about AI itself. The encyclical clearly claims that AI has no moral conscience, since it does not “judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences” (§99). Whether that is true in principle is a question I set aside here; this post concerns the formation of persons, and that formation is at stake whether or not a system could ever come to share in it.
The Unmade Connection
The encyclical makes many concrete recommendations: legislative accountability for platforms (§142), social criteria for innovation with verifiable measures (§156), subsidiarity applied to digital platforms (§71–72), social justice shaping design “from the outset” (§109). These recommendations are informed by contributions of Catholic Social Teaching (Social Doctrine) around exclusion, the concentration of power, and human dignity.
The encyclical also names AI as “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). It notes that AI environment is eroding the conditions for formation: the ease of ready answers risks “extinguishing the desire to ask questions,” a process the encyclical says “bears fruit only over time” and “by engaging in discussion with others” (§140). Fragmented knowledge makes it “difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought” (§146). Workers are deskilled and forced “to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work” (§150, quoting Antiqua et Nova).
The encyclical sees finitude as where moral and spiritual life forms and sees the AI as an environment eroding the conditions for formation. But it does not derive from that theology of finitude what that environment must preserve so that formation through limitation can still occur. The recommendations address harms to people, but not the erosion of the formative process through which people learn to respond to those harms. (The treatment of education in §139–147 comes closest, but the individual and policy recommendations do not protect formation through one’s own limitation.)
Optimizing Limitation Away
A system that performs care can erode the practice through which people are formed in it and through which people learn to truly see each other in their finitude. This is not misuse of a tool; it is what optimization does: removing friction, effort, waiting, error, and the slow work of asking and being answered. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, people are tempted to see themselves “as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion” (§112). Even if no one explicitly holds the belief, an environment with a default of optimization can enact that error and quietly dissolve the conditions for formation. No one has to intend this.
This is why no single lever reaches the problem. The encyclical insists a “more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few” and calls for “protecting the opportunities for communities still to be able to participate and ask questions” (§107). But the communities making those determinations are themselves being reshaped by the AI systems they seek to govern. A design to preserve formative limits can only be constructed by a community that still recognizes what they are. Even the call for developers to “embed values in their projects” (§111) requires that someone recognize which values, and which limits, are formative.
Conclusion
The theology of finitude answers the opening question: caring matters because limitation is where moral and spiritual life forms, and caring for others is itself part of how finitude forms us. The encyclical provides the foundation, but it does not use that theological anthropology to shape what it asks us to protect in its social teaching.
The questions then become: what conditions allow human persons to keep maturing in care, wisdom, and the freedom to choose and love (§114, §99, §233)? How can we tell a formative limit, such as the chance to fail and be changed, from a removable inefficiency? And how can that formation happen in communities where AI increasingly mediates how we perceive, deliberate, and act?
These are questions the encyclical’s own theology makes urgent and that its tradition has the resources to pursue.
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
