This past spring numerous university commencement speakers were greeted with booing from graduating students. The booing rose in volume each time the speaker mentioned Artificial Intelligence (AI). Why? Anxiety. New graduates searching for jobs worry that AI will eliminate the very jobs they trained for. Have we come to a point in technoscientific progress where the culture is waking up and asking for its voice to be heard?
Public theologians the world over are lifting their voices and joining the choir singing about AI guidelines and guardrails. The Virtuous AI project at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences joins the chorus with the frontier global reach of Pax Lumina’s special May 2026 issue on “Reimagining Humanity in the Age of AI.” “Religion and transhumanism are not simply in conflict; they are in a dynamic process of mutual reinterpretation,” aver Calvin Mercer and Tracy Trothen for AI and Faith.
With his encyclical of May 15, 2026, Magnifica Humanitas, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV wants his voice heard, too. Why? Not for the benefit of the Roman Catholic Church. No. Rather, for the benefit of the human race. Our world is engulfed in an AI tsunami of dehumanization due to technological change, and no one knows for certain who will drown and who will swim. The pope wants to throw a life raft to rescue human dignity and the common good.
The storm surge of dehumanization comes in the form of subordinating personhood to machine intelligence, ignoring human interiority so as to determine decision-making by algorithms, killing populations with autonomous lethal weapon systems, replacing humans with computers at the workstation, and leaving the morality of wielding technoscientific power to those profiting from it. Most concerning of all, pines the pope, there is an underlying mentality dictated by the ideologies of transhumanism and posthumanism. Accordingly, in the name of perfecting what is human, these ideologies plan to make the human species obsolete, extinct, and discarded.
Guidelines and Guardrails
We need guidelines and guardrails. For guidelines and guardrails, we need to insert into culture a moral commitment, a compass to provide technological progress with direction.
“Scientific and technological advances, when detached from moral and social progress, end up turning against humanity. For this reason, a clear distinction must be made. It is one thing to integrate technology within a human-centered, relational vision; it is quite another to be guided by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of salvation” (Magnifica Humanitas, §117).
The moral compass leading us out of the storm surge points us toward the continents of human dignity and the common good. Beyond the church, this common good belongs to everyone on the planet.
“We wish to engage in dialogue with all men and women of our time, with whom we share in the events, questions and aspirations of humanity. Together with them, we seek to identify new paths for the common good and for promoting a dignified life for all” (Magnifica Humanitas, §2).
The release of Magnifica Humanitas is “a little surprising, but I don’t think it’s unexpected,” Brian Patrick Green at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University told Religion News Service. “The Vatican has been cultivating relationships with the tech community for about 10 years.”
Popular America columnist James Martin, SJ, celebrates this papal achievement.
“Pope Leo effectively critiques any systems that would reduce human beings to cogs, machines or even algorithms. Interestingly, his encyclical connects the dangerous idea that human beings are merely workers with the strange goals of transhumanism and posthumanism, through which some believe we can perfect the human being or transcend physical limitations, illness and even suffering itself.”
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance did not read the papal document. Yet, he announced that it “sounds very profound.”
Three Takeaways
I find three takeaways here. First, we should thank Leo’s predecessors, Pope Francis and his colleagues, for issuing a Vatican weather report on the coming AI hurricane. According to Pope Francis, AI should serve “the common good of the entire human family,” which is “the sum total of social conditions that allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily” (Antiqua et Nova, 2025, §55).
Second, both Francis and Leo continue the Vatican pastoral ministry to the world by focusing on the dignity of every human person and by constantly lifting our allegiance to the public common good. Already with the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the Holy See had taken on this particular public ministry: defense of human dignity. Magnifica Humanitas follows right in the footsteps of Evangelium Vitae by Saint John Paul II (1995). Vatican leadership here should be applauded by everyone in the world trying to remain afloat in the AI storm.
Third, the universal protection of human dignity combined with a vision of the planetary common good is the right place to start construction of AI guidelines and guardrails. We will not ask the Holy See to legislate. But we can ask legislators and business leaders the world over to listen to the voice now sounding at Saint Peter’s in Rome.
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.
