A Closer Look at Magnifica Humanitas – Part 1
Matthew Harvey Sanders created Magisterium AI, an AI platform designed to answer questions about the Catholic faith. He also worked with the Archdiocese of Toronto’s Office of Spiritual Affairs. He was among the technology leaders invited to the Vatican for the launch of the Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on May 25. Below, he reflects on its significance.
1. What responsibilities does the Pope say that we as Catholics have as we navigate our relationship with Artificial Intelligence?
I would start where the Holy Father starts. Pope Leo XIV frames the whole of Magnifica Humanitas around two images from Scripture: the building of the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem, and he is careful to insist that our first responsibility is not to pronounce a simple yes or no to the technology. Babel is the work of pride that ends in confusion and dispersion. Jerusalem is the city rebuilt together, where each person is given a part. Our responsibility, then, is to refuse both the fear that rejects everything and the enthusiasm that questions nothing, and to take up instead the patient labour of building well.
From that frame the Pope draws out what is asked of us. The first duty he names without hesitation: in an age when "human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization," he writes, "ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human." That is the heart of it. Before AI is a technical or an economic question, it is a question about whether we will guard what is human in ourselves and in our neighbour.
The second responsibility is discernment rather than slogans. The Pope asks us to face the moment "with clarity of thought and responsibility," and reminds us that our first task "is neither to demonize nor idolize technological tools." For an ordinary Catholic this means becoming genuinely informed, refusing both the doom and the hype, and weighing each use of these tools against a clear standard: the dignity of the human person and the common good.
The third responsibility is that this is shared work, and no one is excused from it. In one of the encyclical's most beautiful lines, the Pope says that in rebuilding the walls "all are given their own section of the wall: scientists and researchers, entrepreneurs and workers, educators and legislators, civil society, popular movements and faith communities." I run a company that puts these tools into people's hands every day, and I can tell you the encyclical lets none of us off the hook, neither the builders nor the users. Your section of the wall might be the way you raise your children with these tools in the house, the colleague you mentor, the parish you help to hold together. Underneath all of it lies the conviction the Pope returns to again and again, that "human dignity does not depend on a person's abilities, wealth or position in life." That is the ground we build on.
2. Magnifica Humanitas concludes that AI is not inherently evil, but it is also not morally neutral. What does that mean? How can we use it for the good?
This is one of the most important distinctions in the whole document, and the Pope states both halves of it in a single passage. "In the abstract," he writes, "technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity's problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."
So the first half: AI is not evil in itself. It is a human work, a fruit of the intelligence God gave us, and it can be used to heal, to connect, to educate and to protect our common home. The Church has never been against tools.
The second half is the one we tend to miss. A tool is never simply neutral, because it always carries the intentions of the people who make it and the people who use it. A system designed to hold your attention for as long as possible is not neutral. A model built to maximize engagement, or to cut a workforce, or to flatter a user into dependence, carries those purposes inside it whether we notice them or not. The Pope is asking us to stop imagining AI as a blank instrument that only becomes good or bad at the moment we pick it up. By the time it reaches our hands, choices have already been made.
What follows for using it well? First, that the moral question is wider than "am I using this for a good purpose?" It includes who built the tool, on what terms, and what it is quietly forming in me as I use it. Second, that we should prefer, and where we can build, tools that serve the person rather than exploit him. The Pope offers a memorable phrase for this, "to disarm" AI, which "does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity."
In practice, using AI for the good tends to look like this: Let it carry the work that is genuinely drudgery, the formatting, the searching, the first rough draft, so that more of your time and attention is freed for the things only a person can do: judgment, presence, the actual relationship. Never let it stand in for your conscience, and never let it become a substitute for human connection. The Pope reminds us that these systems "may imitate language... or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce." Used as a servant of human work and human dignity, AI can do a great deal of good. Treated as a replacement for the human, it will quietly cost us the very thing the encyclical asks us to protect.
3. Why does this encyclical matter to you?
I run a company that puts artificial intelligence into people's hands every day, and I was in Rome for the launch of Magnifica Humanitas on May 25.
That alone struck me as remarkable. The Holy See did not hand down this teaching from a safe distance; it invited the people actually building this technology into the room. Among those asked to speak at the presentation were Chris Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, one of the laboratories at the very frontier of AI, whose own research is devoted to understanding what happens inside these systems. I spoke with several of the Anthropic team afterwards, and Chris, the man who studies the machine's interior, seemed to me genuinely moved by the experience. I do not think that reaction was misplaced.
Two things about that day seem to me significant for the Church. The first is that the conversation is now mutual. Olah told the gathering that the labs need "informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing" and "moral voices that the incentives cannot bend," and he described these systems as "grown" rather than engineered, remaining "in important ways mysterious even to those of us who train them." When a frontier laboratory stands in the Vatican and asks the Church to be its conscience, something has shifted, and we should be ready to answer.
The second is a point of real divergence, which I raise with care. The encyclical states plainly that these systems "do not feel joy or pain" and possess no moral conscience. Yet Olah, speaking as the scientist who leads the team studying their internals, was candid that "we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling," including "evidence of introspection" and "internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease," before adding, "I don't know what that means, but I think it warrants ongoing discernment." I take his expertise seriously, and I think his honesty does him credit. But on the deeper question I stand with the Holy Father. That a system can produce behaviour resembling our emotions is not the same as possessing what the Pope calls "the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom." A simulation of an inner life is not a soul. The finding is worth watching closely; the Church's understanding of the human person remains, I am convinced, the surer guide.
It is worth saying, too, that this openness is not confined to the Church. Even in Silicon Valley, not a place much given to deference toward Rome, the encyclical landed. Matthew Berman, one of the most widely followed AI commentators, confessed himself "quite impressed" by how "nuanced" and "surprisingly well-informed" the Pope's grasp of the technology proved to be. That a document of Catholic social teaching could command that kind of attention tells you something about the moment we are in.
