The Pope, the Machine, and What We Owe Each Other

Signed on May 15 and released to the world on May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas — “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” — may be the most consequential Catholic teaching document in a generation. It reads less like a church document than a philosophical intervention in a conversation dominated, until now, almost entirely by technologists, investors, and regulators. The Pope has entered the room with a clarity that deserves to be taken seriously well beyond the Catholic faithful.

The encyclical opens with two biblical images that do all the conceptual work that follows. The first is the Tower of Babel — an impressive project of human ambition, but fundamentally disordered: conceived without reference to others, built on the fantasy of self-sufficiency, oriented toward domination rather than communion. The result was not unity but dispersion. 

The second is the ruins of Jerusalem rebuilt under Nehemiah — not by a singular visionary but by ordinary people, each family assigned one section of wall, working together under conditions of vulnerability and shared purpose. The city was reconstructed through the distribution of responsibility, not its concentration. 

The Pope places AI squarely within this binary. Not as technology inherently good or evil, but as tools whose character is determined by the civilization that builds, funds, governs, and deploys them. The question is not whether to say yes or no to AI. It is whether we are constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem. 

Most public discourse oscillates between uncritical enthusiasm and categorical fear. The Pope refuses both. What he insists on — the intellectual center of the document — is discernment: the slow, communal, ethically serious practice of asking not just what a technology can do, but what it is doing to us, for whom, and at what cost to those with no seat at the table. 

What strikes a communication scholar reading Magnifica Humanitas is how much of its diagnosis converges with findings from the academic study of human-machine interaction — arrived at through entirely different methods. 

The Pope describes AI as a system that “merely imitates certain functions of human intelligence” while lacking experience, embodiment, conscience, and the capacity for genuine relationship. It can simulate empathy, but it does not understand what it produces. This aligns closely with what researchers in human-machine communication have argued: AI systems now produce contextually adaptive, emotionally resonant responses — without any of the interiority that makes human communication meaningful. 

The HAI-IO model — a framework for understanding human-AI communication developed from the Philippine academic context — makes a related argument from within communication theory. It conceptualizes the human-AI encounter not as a transaction between user and passive tool, but as a feedback ecology: bidirectional, iterative, shaped by factors simultaneously computational and relational. The human shapes AI through input; AI shapes human expectations, habits, and self-understanding through output. Neither party remains unchanged. This mutual shaping is precisely what makes the Pope’s concern about the “atrophy” of genuine human connection not merely pastoral, but structurally accurate. 

When AI is optimized to keep you engaged, it is not optimized for your flourishing. These are different goals. From the outside, they can look identical.

Some of the encyclical’s most important passages are also its most politically specific. The document notes that control over platforms, infrastructure, data, and computing power rests not with governments but with “major economic and technological actors” who set the conditions of access for billions. To speak of the common good, the Pope writes, means “exposing this new form of epistemic, economic and political asymmetry and naming the new monopolies of AI.” 

On the Global South: entire regions are subjected to data extractivism — their health profiles, genetic data, and demographic information aggregated to train models deployed elsewhere. “Those who control the health data of entire peoples,” he warns, “possess a structural leverage over the future.” This is colonialism in a new register, and the Pope names it as such. 

This resonates with debates in AI ethics scholarship. The demand for uniform abstention from AI tools — advanced by some researchers in the Global North — carries its own structural bias. A scholar navigating a full teaching load, writing for international journals in a second language, working within precarious academic infrastructure, inhabits different constraints. For such scholars, AI can function as a cognitive scaffold — not a replacement for thought, but a means of sustaining meaningful participation in knowledge production under conditions not designed to include them. The Pope does not resolve this tension, but names it honestly: who benefits from AI and who is merely subjected to it is not incidental to the ethics of the technology. It is the ethics of the technology.

Magnifica Humanitas is a bold document. But it speaks from within a particular tradition in ways that open productive friction with secular scholarship on AI. 

The encyclical grounds its ethics in the theological claim that human dignity derives from being created in the image of God — imago Dei — infinite, inalienable, and prior to any human achievement. It is a powerful foundation. But one that presupposes a shared metaphysical commitment that not all people who care deeply about human dignity will share. 

Communication research approaches the same questions differently — not from divine origin but from the relational, material, and political conditions under which human beings construct meaning together. It locates dignity not in a metaphysical given, but in the ongoing, contestable practices through which people recognize and are recognized by one another. This is not a lesser foundation. It is a different one. 

The Pope’s framework tends toward universal pronouncements about what AI may never be permitted to do. Communication scholarship tends toward contextual judgment — asking what specific deployments of AI are doing to specific communities under specific conditions of inequality. Both have genuine strengths: the risk of the first is abstraction; the risk of the second is relativism. Neither alone is sufficient. These are not reasons to dismiss the document. They are reasons to read it in conversation with other traditions of thought.

There is one section of Magnifica Humanitas that cuts across all ideological lines and deserves the widest possible audience: its treatment of education. The Pope is blunt — we are educationally unprepared for what AI is doing to how we learn. Digital media produces a culture of immediacy that breeds “fatigue, boredom and apathy concerning the effort required for seeking the truth.” He invokes Plato’s Seventh Letter: the deepest things are learned only after much time and effort, through discussion with others, “striking upon ideas together like flint.” The kind of understanding that actually changes us cannot be downloaded. 

Research in communication pedagogy reaches similar conclusions: students who engage AI as an interlocutor — prompting it, evaluating its output, arguing with its formulations — emerge more articulate about their own reasoning. Students who use it to bypass the labor of thinking emerge with a completed task and an unchanged mind. The difference is not about which tool was used. It is about the orientation brought to the encounter. 

The skill the Pope calls for — teaching people to decide when AI ought not be used — is what communication educators call reflexive literacy: the capacity to notice when a technology is thinking for you rather than with you. This cannot be installed by policy. It must be cultivated in communities of genuine inquiry — in schools, families, newsrooms, and workplaces that the encyclical rightly insists cannot be allowed to atrophy in an age of algorithmic convenience. 

Magnifica Humanitas is addressed formally to Catholics. But its deepest argument belongs to everyone. 

The document’s central claim — that artificial intelligence is ultimately a question about what kind of human beings we want to be and what kind of world we want to build — is not theological. It is civic. It belongs as much to the secular philosopher as to the theologian, as much to the software engineer as to the priest, as much to the student in Manila navigating a chatbot as to the regulator in Brussels drafting AI governance frameworks. 

The Pope’s image of Nehemiah’s Jerusalem refuses both helplessness and heroism. It does not ask any individual to solve AI. It asks each person to take seriously the small territory of influence they actually have — in how they teach, communicate, design, vote, raise their children, and demand accountability from those who hold power over the systems that increasingly shape daily life. 

We do not need to share a faith to share that responsibility. We need only to share the conviction that human beings are not raw material for optimization, that a person’s dignity cannot be reduced to their data profile, and that a world organized primarily around efficiency has confused the means of living with the point of it. 

That work does not require a particular creed. It requires only the willingness to remain, in the deepest sense, human.

Rae Francis Quilantang is a communication scholar and faculty member at the University of Santo Tomas, Manila. He is the author of the Human-AI Interaction Outcomes (HAI-IO) model, published in Human-Machine Communication (2025), and co-author of “In Relation, Not Replacement,” Qualitative Research Journal (2026), and “Teaching in Entanglement,” Communication Teacher (2026).

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