{"id":13306,"date":"2026-05-27T20:40:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T15:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/building-on-the-popes-great-ai-encyclical-what-comes-next\/"},"modified":"2026-05-27T20:40:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T15:10:23","slug":"building-on-the-popes-great-ai-encyclical-what-comes-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/building-on-the-popes-great-ai-encyclical-what-comes-next\/","title":{"rendered":"Building on the pope&#8217;s great AI encyclical: What comes next"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<p><iframe title=\"Everlit Audio Player\" src=\"https:\/\/everlit.audio\/embeds\/artl_damyZHNvw6a?ui_title_intro=Listen+now%3A&amp;client=wp&amp;client_version=3.1.5\" width=\"100%\" height=\"136px\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" allowfullscreen=\"\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>(RNS) \u2014 Pope Leo XIV\u2019s first encyclical, \u201cMagnifica Humanitas,\u201d is an extraordinary document. Its integration of artificial intelligence within the church\u2019s prior commitments to human dignity, its prophetic call for collective structural responses to systematic problems, and its use of Catholic social teaching to draw attention to labor are essential and timely contributions to one of the most consequential debates of our time. I am so grateful for it and have been writing about it with something close to (for the Seinfeld fans out there) unbridled enthusiasm.<\/p>\n<p>But this is Purple Catholicism. Which means forthright engagement across political and ideological differences. And, in this context, it includes naming what remains to be done.<\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<hr\/>\n<p>But before naming some unfinished business, it is worth recalling how central integration of a fully Catholic moral vision across ideologies is to the church\u2019s social tradition. In #51 of \u201cCaritas in Veritate,\u201d Pope Benedict XVI taught us that \u201cthe overall moral tenor of society\u201d cannot be compartmentalized. When a society loses respect for human life at its most vulnerable (through things like artificial conception, the sacrifice of embryos, the denial of natural death), it simultaneously loses what Benedict called \u201chuman ecology.\u201d He wrote, \u201cThe book of nature is one and indivisible.\u201d It encompasses not only the environment but \u201clife, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development.\u201d To uphold one set of duties while trampling the other, said Pope Benedict plainly, is \u201ca grave contradiction.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Pope Francis used exactly this integrative model. Even in \u201cLaudato Si\u2019,\u201d his ecological encyclical, he found room to address abortion. And when it came to gender ideology, Francis was even more clear and direct: On multiple occasions, he called it \u201cthe ugliest danger of our time\u201d and an example of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/aleteia.org\/2024\/03\/01\/today-the-ugliest-danger-is-gender-ideology-said-pope\/\">ideological colonization<\/a>.\u201d This was not Francis caving to the right or becoming obsessed with \u201cpelvic issues.\u201d It was Francis insisting on the full, nonideological, integrated vision of Catholic teaching.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMagnifica Humanitas\u201d gives us the tools to do the same. The question is whether theologians, pastors and others will pick them up and use them in the places the encyclical itself did not go. Three areas in particular call out for exactly this kind of constructive extension.<\/p>\n<p>First, the encyclical\u2019s treatment of transhumanism and posthumanism is rich: It critiques the logic of unlimited enhancement, the desire to eliminate human weakness and the reduction of people to the greatest efficiency or convenience. Leo insists that a human being is never \u201ca project to be optimized\u201d and human dignity is unconditional.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_4261068\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"width: 750px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-4261068\" src=\"https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/webRNS-Leo-Magnifica-Humanitas1.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"750\" height=\"500\" srcset=\"https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/webRNS-Leo-Magnifica-Humanitas1.jpg 1600w, https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/webRNS-Leo-Magnifica-Humanitas1-427x285.jpg 427w, https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/webRNS-Leo-Magnifica-Humanitas1-807x538.jpg 807w, https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/webRNS-Leo-Magnifica-Humanitas1-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/webRNS-Leo-Magnifica-Humanitas1-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/webRNS-Leo-Magnifica-Humanitas1-600x400.jpg 600w, https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/webRNS-Leo-Magnifica-Humanitas1-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/religionnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/webRNS-Leo-Magnifica-Humanitas1-380x253.jpg 380w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 750px) 100vw, 750px\"\/> <\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text edd-enabled\"><span class=\"caption\">Copies of Pope Leo XIV<span>\u2019<\/span>s first encyclical, <span>\u201c<\/span>Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,<span>\u201d<\/span> are distributed at the Vatican, Monday, May 25, 2026. (AP Photo\/Alessandra Tarantino)<\/span><span class=\"credit\"\/><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Those critiques apply directly to the most concrete transhumanist project currently underway: AI-assisted embryo creation, selection and discarding. Companies like Orchid and Nucleus Genomics are already offering polygenic screening of embryos created through in vitro fertilization. Proof of concept for in vitro gametogenesis (the creation of eggs and sperm from ordinary cells) raises the prospect of a future in which AI analyzes thousands of embryos for preferred traits and discards the rest as medical waste. The encyclical\u2019s anthropology is exactly what is needed to address this. That application now falls to us.<\/p>\n<p>Second, the transhumanism section critiques the desire to transcend the limits of the human body. It strongly critiques thinking of human beings in disembodied ways, as merely projects of self-construction rather than as given and embodied persons called to relationship. John Paul II\u2019s \u201cTheology of the Body\u201d is the tradition\u2019s richest positive resource here: the body as a genuine sign of the person, as the locus of love and gift, as irreducibly normative.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMagnifica Humanitas\u201d invites exactly this kind of application when it insists on embodiment and relationality as constitutive of genuine humanity. The connection to gender ideology \u2014 through its claim that biological sex can be a limit to be overcome through using technology at the service of a dualistic anthropology which imagines that the real person could be born in a wrong body \u2014 is direct and theologically and culturally important. Leo has given us the framework. It is now ours to apply.<\/p>\n<p>Third, the encyclical is deeply attentive to the ways AI can simulate a false human connection and hollow out genuine communion. It warns against mistaking AI intimacy for real relationship. It is concerned with automation and what caving to robots is doing (and may do) to human work and human dignity.<\/p>\n<p>A natural extension of this argument, one the encyclical\u2019s own theology of embodiment and relationality makes readily available, would be to AI-powered sex robots. This rapidly developing technology extends the logic of both pornography\u2019s vicious objectification and the false intimacy of AI chatbots. Here, too, Leo has given us the tools. The application is ours to make.<\/p>\n<hr\/>\n<hr\/>\n<p>What these three areas have in common is that they involve the sexual and reproductive dimensions of the AI and transhumanist threats the encyclical addresses so well. The encyclical, it seems, took on the challenges that were most likely to resonate with a broad secular audience \u2014 labor, governance, objective truth, global cooperation \u2014 and I am so glad it did. The challenges that push more directly against progressive assumptions about sex and reproduction were left for another day, another document, or perhaps another set of voices.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This, actually, is the kind of integrated ethical work that this Purple Catholicism column is all about doing. And Leo XIV has given us better tools for it than we had before. Time to get cracking.<\/p>\n<p><!-- CONTENT END 1 -->\n        <\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/religionnews.com\/2026\/05\/27\/building-on-the-popes-great-ai-encyclical-what-comes-next\/\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(RNS) \u2014 Pope Leo XIV\u2019s first encyclical, \u201cMagnifica Humanitas,\u201d is an extraordinary document. Its integration of artificial intelligence within the church\u2019s prior commitments to human dignity, its prophetic call for collective structural responses to systematic problems, and its use of Catholic social teaching to draw attention to labor are essential and timely contributions to one [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13307,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13306\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/banitoday.com\/hi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}