Magnifica Humanitas: Catholic faith in the age of AI | Part 2
How do Catholic faith, spiritual growth, and modern crises collide? I
In Part 2 of our Magnifica Humanitas breakdown, we look at Chapters 3, 4, and 5 to see how Pope Leo XIV tackles how to "disarm AI" and reclaim your freedom. This is a practical guide to Catholic discipleship in a digital age, focusing on the three battles reshaping our daily lives: Truth, Work, and Freedom.
READ Magnifica Humanitas: https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
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TRANSCRIPT
Hey rebels, welcome back to the Rebel Saints podcast. I’m Nicole and I am your host where I make it my mission to prove to you that there is nothing more punk than Catholicism.
So, this is part two of a two-part series where I am doing a deep dive into Pope Leo’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. So if you haven’t watched the first part, pause right here and go back and listen.
And also, I do have to tell you that we are now available on video format. So it’s so cool. And I’m sitting here and I’m a little bit hot because these lights that my husband set up for me are so amazing. And you know, I just… I gotta give him a shout out because we are photographers and so we had lights and I was like, “Oh, I’ll just use some of what I had or I can just put a ring light and it’ll be fine.” My husband being super awesome and you know, don’t do things half-assed. If you’re going to do them, do them the right way. And so he went and he got a new set of lights and I feel like I’m looking pretty good here, friends. I’m feeling myself. Although it’s like almost 100 and something degrees outside today and I’m wearing this like leather jacket ’cause it’s green and it’s a vibe and I’m rethinking my life’s choices. Anyway, I’m so glad you’re here. And if you can’t see that because you’re not watching, I’m sorry. I hope… yeah, I’m just going to get on. I’m just going to do my job.
Okay, welcome. So in our last session, we broke down the core of Magnifica Humanitas: Babel versus Jerusalem, the Church walking through history, and that unshakable foundation of human dignity rooted in Jesus Christ, the bedrock of all that is good and beautiful. So today we’re going to be picking up on chapter three of Pope Leo’s encyclical.
And again, this contains five chapters and an introduction and a conclusion. And I’m talking about them all because they all have lots of good information and really beautiful teachings and insights from our amazing Pontiff.
All right, chapter 3. Chapter three. In this section, Leo gets like really practical. And that’s why I say this is so easy to read. Anyone really could read it. And I say that because I’ve only ever read this one encyclical like from start to end. But anyway, we step into chapter 3 where Pope Leo proposes that artificial intelligence must be disarmed. Full stop. And this got so much media attention. As someone who talks about the news and writes the news and lives the news of the Catholic Church, this is all I saw. Nothing about like, “Oh, let’s not worry about the human dignity” from the mainstream media.
At the Vatican launch, Leo even acknowledged just how intense that language sounds. But he argued this isn’t a departure for the Church. It’s completely consistent with her history. For decades, the Church has called for nuclear disarmament because humanity learned the hard way that immense technological power requires ethical limits and public accountability. Leo believes that we are standing at another such crossroads. Not because AI is a bomb, no, but because we are creating systems powerful enough to reshape civilization itself.
To disarm AI means freeing this technology from a mindset of domination, from exploitation, surveillance, manipulation, and dehumanization. To explain this, he points to what Pope Francis called the technocratic paradigm. So technocratic paradigm is a worldview that elevates efficiency, control, and sheer technological power above human relationships and ethics. Under this mindset, the questions we ask change. We stop asking what is good, true, beautiful, and we start asking what scales the fastest, what maximizes output, and what increases control.
Leo draws heavily from the philosopher Romano Guardini who warned that humanity is gaining enormous technological power without the matching moral formation needed to use it wisely. And if I can give just one example of this would be where, let’s say, teenagers took pictures of classmates and then altered those images to where it then became illegal. Okay, that kind of stuff. I’m not saying they didn’t know it was wrong, but this is kind of a very simplistic example of what that means, how I interpret it anyway. So I mean take it for what you want. But let’s be real.
Leo is saying technology is never neutral. It shapes our habits, our attention spans, our relationships, and our culture. Eventually, it shapes us. And through it all, Leo is very clear-eyed about the tech itself. He notes that AI develops so rapidly, he’s not even going to try to define it because the definitions become obsolete almost overnight. He reminds us though of a critical truth: AI is not human. AI is not human intelligence. It can imitate human capacity, but it does not possess consciousness, embodiment, or a soul. It does not suffer. It does not love. And it cannot grow through sacrifice.
This is why Leo calls for a measured and vigilant approach. He warns against forming emotional dependencies on AI systems. And I mean, and we’ve seen the outcome of people developing emotional ties to artificial chatbots, right? And how wrong that can go especially with respect to people who are struggling with mental health issues. Yes, simulated empathy, Leo says, might be comforting when we are lonely, but it can actually distort our real-world relationships and weaken our understanding of true human connection.
Because humans remain completely unique within creation, we alone possess both intellect and will ordered toward moral responsibility. We are not merely intelligent beings. We are also moral beings. We have the capacity to discern truth, to choose the good, to love sacrificially, and to act ethically for the sake of others.
Okay, I feel like I just had a thought here. What is sacrificial love? I’m going to give a very overarching definition because I feel like there might be some people listening and they hear sacrificial love and they interpret it one way and it might be wrong. Okay. Sacrificial love is not staying with someone because they abuse you. Sacrificial love is not finding out your child is going to be born with Down syndrome and then terminating that pregnancy. That is not sacrificial love. The opposite would have been true. The opposite would have been sacrificial love: bringing that beautiful life that God created—because God does not create junk, friends—into this world. Even though as a parent it might have meant a bit more challenges, it might have meant you would have had to deal with some stuff and not have a perfect baby. Even though yes, God, like I said, God isn’t creating junk and that child was perfect. Sacrificial love is a husband working two jobs to support his family—that kind of stuff. Okay. I will… if you want me to take a deep dive into sacrificial love and what it means with respect to Catholicism, you know, I’m going to do it. I’m going to add it to my list. If you want to know sooner rather than later, tell me in the comments, okay? But I don’t want to get too far off the rails because ADD is wild right now. Okay, moving on.
Humans have the ability to discern truth, to choose good, to love sacrificially, and to act ethically for the sake of others. Conversely, as Pope Leo writes, artificial intelligences, and I quote, “do not know from within what love, work, and responsibility mean.” Those remain unique human capacities rooted in the soul itself. For this reason, Leo warns against allowing technological systems to shape society without first reflecting on these from a moral point of view. The danger is not simply that machines may become more powerful. The danger is that we may surrender over our very humanity to systems driven entirely by efficiency, profit, surveillance or control.
And then he also just boils this straight down to the principles of Catholic social teaching. He argues that the common good means confronting massive tech monopolies. And then, you know, he goes on to talk about this term called subsidiarity. And that basically means local communities must retain power to make their own decisions rather than surrendering everything to like centralized systems. And solidarity, another term he used, means recognizing the often invisible and underpaid workers behind these systems—the people labeling data and moderating content behind the scenes. And some of the content they’re moderating is very traumatic, right?
But Leo also speaks directly to a pressure I know many of us feel every single day and that’s the pressure to constantly optimize ourselves. And I am… I think guilty of this. Technology can slowly train us to look at ourselves not as persons but as corporate projects to maximize better output, better productivity, better performance. This is why Leo approaches transhumanism and tech enhancement movements with deep caution. And so the gist of that is basically where you have the human person being augmented by technology. And I’m not talking about a person who, let’s say, has lost a limb and then they are the beneficiary of a new limb like an artificial limb that allows them to have a more full life and it’s like made of these advanced materials. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about literally like chips being implanted into us and that kind of thing. When I say words like tech enhancement.
Christianity does not root your worth in your efficiency or your processing power. Modern culture treats vulnerability, aging and suffering as design flaws to eliminate. But Christianity understands those realities totally differently. Our limitations are precisely what open us up toward God and toward one another. They are the birthplace of compassion, dependence, and love.
To drive this home, Pope Leo makes another one of these distinctions that like I highlighted and underlined and circled and it was this, and I quote: “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected. For a person, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.” And you know he went on there to say that’s where some of our greatest art comes from and beautiful works of literature and paintings and music and it comes from when we suffer—and again not always, right, we can… it can come from moments where we experience joy—but human suffering is part of the life that we have. It is part of the human experience. And so we can’t essentially take it away. You are a person capable of repentance, growth, forgiveness, and grace.
Rebels, hear me. This is from Pope Leo himself: You are not a machine to be optimized. You are a person capable of repentance, growth, forgiveness, and grace.
Ultimately, Leo brings us back to St. Augustine’s vision of two cities, two different loves shaping two different civilizations. The exact same spiritual warfare playing out right now in the digital age. Will we build another Babel organized around optimization and control? Or will we choose to build a civilization rooted in communion, dignity, and love?
Okay, so now we move into chapter four where Pope Leo shifts from these larger philosophical questions and gets down into the realities of how our lives are already being reshaped during this technological revolution. The entire chapter revolves around three major crises unfolding at the exact same time and that is the crisis of truth, the crisis of work and the crisis of freedom.
Let’s tackle crisis of truth. Leo argues that generative AI and the internet are fundamentally dismantling how we encounter information. The issue isn’t that people suddenly started lying. The issue is the terrifying scale of it. Generative AI can create convincing fake images, audio, video, and entire conversations instantly. I’ve mentioned my husband and I have a photography business. And one of the things I did was generate images that look very much like images I would have taken and I put a whole story in front of them. Like I mean… and honestly these characters I created, they’re kind of still living like rent-free in my head. I might just have to explore that. But it was to prove a point to my clients that we can no longer trust everything that we see with our eyes now. And as humans we’re meant to do that, right? And so this is what Leo is saying. I was trying to warn my potential clients and my clients: Hey, you need to be discerning about what you’re seeing online.
Anyway, back to Leo. Leo is saying, you know, information environments, they can be flooded so quickly, right? I mean, we saw this with Iran putting out fake images of like being bombed and stuff. And ordinary people, we simply lose the ability to distinguish what is real and what is fabricated because we can’t trust our eyes anymore. Leo warns that this is a fatal threat to democracy because a free society depends on a shared commitment to reality.
And then here he draws from the philosopher Hannah Arendt who studied the rise of authoritarianism after the Second World War. Arendt warned that the ideal subject for a totalitarian regime is not someone who believes every single lie, but someone who no longer believes that the truth itself can even be known. Because once a society gives up on truth, manipulation becomes effortless.
To push back, Leo calls for an ecology of communication. The idea is simple. Our digital environment shapes us just as much as our physical environment does. If our digital spaces are toxic, addictive, or driven entirely by outrage, they will damage us spiritually, emotionally, and socially. And I think we’re already seeing that, right? Like we’ve seen with social contagion. We’ve seen how the prevalence of pornography online can negatively impact people’s lives. We’ve seen all kinds of things how negatively it can be impacted, right? And so this is what he’s warning against.
And then here Pope Leo turns the mirror onto the Church itself. And this is where it’s like… it was so much humility and I gained even so much more respect for him because Leo commits the Church to absolute transparency and he explicitly thanks the journalists who exposed abuse and corruption in the Church. And as a journalist, as a Catholic journalist, I think I mean I love that. Like I was like yes, you know, because I think we can all agree that especially with respect to mainstream journalism, what you get is often not unbiased. And so I can get behind that 100%. Leo is acknowledging that the truth cannot survive where transparency disappears.
Next, the chapter shifts to the crisis of work. Leo reminds us that human labor is far more than an economic output metric. Work is how we express our dignity, our creativity, and our participation in God’s creation. Leo is concerned about what he calls a deskilling process where workers gradually lose their creativity, their judgment and agency because they are handing all of their thinking over to machines leaving human beings trapped in repetitive, heavily monitored tasks. He argues that technology should strengthen human agency, not train us into passivity. And he’s very clear when he says societies cannot treat mass job displacement as just an unfortunate unavoidable side effect of progress.
And then with respect to the crisis of freedom, Leo warns against growing digital dependencies and hidden forms of social control. Tech companies exploit our psychological vulnerabilities in a ruthless war for our attention, creating genuine addictions and fracturing our mental health. I mean, I just saw something the other day where TikTok and Instagram like openly admitted to targeting our kids when they’re at school, like during school hours, you know, ’cause… great, right? So that kind of stuff. But Leo pushes even harder to expose underpaid content moderators exposed to traumatic material for hours, vulnerable workers, youth, sometimes children, mining earth minerals under unsafe conditions just to power these devices we hold in our hands. Not saying Apple does it. This kind of just led to like a paragraph where I kind of just like highlighted it and like was like ding ding ding ding ding on it.
And this sets up, I think, something we were all kind of taken by surprise by and that’s kind of where I was talking about the humility of Pope Leo. And that’s where he acknowledges that the Church has often been slow to recognize structural sins throughout her history. He points out that it took centuries for Christians to clearly and universally condemn slavery as totally incompatible with human dignity. And then he wrote, and I quote, “For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask your pardon.” End quote.
And then he uses that failure of the Church as an urgent warning for today where he says don’t repeat the same mistakes blindly. He says basically don’t make our mistakes, right? Don’t repeat the exact same mistake by blindly accepting new forms of technological enslavement just because they’re hidden inside economic convenience.
That chapter closes with a cry for shared responsibility. Governments, businesses, schools, ordinary rebel citizens like us. Because for Pope Leo, the real question isn’t whether technology will continue to advance. The question is whether human dignity will remain the absolute center of that advancement.
Onto chapter 5, shall we?
In chapter 5, Pope Leo turns the attention to the global stage and examines how emerging technologies are reshaping warfare itself. Once again, he places humanity before a defining choice. Will we continue to build a new Babel organized around power and dominion? Or will we choose to build what St. Paul VI called a civilization of love where our global interconnectedness becomes an opportunity for solidarity and care.
Leo warns that the modern world is drifting dangerously toward a culture of power, one that is increasingly willing to sacrifice human life for strategic interests and political influence. He points to the normalization of war, the celebration of rearmament, and the terrifying reality of online information warfare driven by disinformation and simplistic friend-versus-enemy thinking. Leo kind of just shakes up the entire world, I think. And this is why I said earlier that this feels like it’s our Rerum Novarum for this digital age. Especially when you consider how in recent months conversations surrounding just war theory have been so strongly discussed with his cardinals, his bishops, world powers.
And so he goes and he does a thing. Rebels. Leo argues that the traditional just war framework, while historically important, is simply no longer sufficient for the realities of the modern world. He says humanity now possesses better tools—things like serious diplomacy, authentic dialogue, and the difficult but necessary work of reconciliation. Meaning, we should have evolved, right? And he says, so basically the just war theory is no longer relevant because we can now communicate more effectively. We have all this information at our hands. We should be able to play nice in the sandbox. We don’t need this just war theory. Go figure. I mean, you know, it just makes sense, right? I think it makes sense.
And then re-engage my Skynet fears because he brings about autonomous weapon systems and AI-driven combat. I’m like, yeah, okay, why does he go there? It’s like the truth, right? The truth hurts sometimes. His concern is direct and unambiguous. And then this is… I really love how he doesn’t mince words, okay? He says the moment life and death decisions are delegated to algorithms, the threshold for violence drops dangerously low. Leo insists that final ethical judgments can never be handed over to machines regardless of how advanced they become. No algorithm can make war morally neutral. Automated warfare creates a terrifying moral distance, he says. When we hand the battlefield over to code, the enemy becomes nothing more than data on a screen. Human suffering becomes abstract. Civilian deaths become mere statistics, cold-bloodedly categorized as collateral damage. Leo warns that humanity could eventually face automated conflicts far more destructive than anything we’ve seen in the past because these systems operate without a conscience. They operate without genuine moral restraint.
Thankfully, he does not end in despair. Leo rejects the temptation towards cynicism. He pushes back against the lie that ordinary people are powerless to shape history. And then in like the coolest like pope thing ever, he quotes Gandalf on the eve of an overwhelming battle. And I quote: “It is not our part to master all of the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set.” The point is beautiful in its simplicity. We are not responsible for fixing every single corner of the globe all at once. We are responsible for confronting the forms of evil directly in front of us rather than surrendering to hopelessness.
For Leo, that global peace begins in a very personal place. It begins with what he calls verbal disarmament—disarming our words, rejecting constant online hostility and aggression, learning how to see conflicts through the eyes of those who actually suffer most from them. He calls for a healthy realism, one capable of honestly confronting violence without surrendering to hatred or fatalism.
Ultimately, Leo reminds us that peace is not merely the absence of war or a fragile truth maintained through fear. Peace is justice lived out socially. And finally, peace is a gift from Almighty God, one that human beings are called to build step by step together.
And then as this encyclical draws to a close, Pope Leo XIV leaves us with what he calls, and I quote, “a sober yet demanding program of Christian life with which we can navigate this apocalyptic change in the light of the Gospel.” And he does this by reviving one of Pope Francis’s more memorable principles, and that was “time is greater than space.” I think like… I feel like my mom loves to say this too and you know it’s a great reminder for us today.
Christianity is not about grasping for control, winning every culture screaming match or dominating institutions. The Christian life is about planting faithful seeds that bear fruit slowly over time with our families, our friendships, our parishes, and our neighborhoods. And if you are like me, any person that’s like worked in catechism that has been a youth minister, if you’re a parent trying to raise your children in the faith, you understand this concept, right? Like I used to always tell my core team that, hey, we’re just planting seeds. God is the gardener. He will sew them. And so it’s like you just had to trust, right? And you never know when something was going to land. And that’s what he’s saying here. Like we have to work in our own gardens. We have to plant our own gardens. The Gospel grows because the Gospel grows through lived witness, ordinary fidelity, and real human connection.
Rebels, we have to be the example of what a joyful Catholic Christian looks like. And to anchor that vision, Leo brings us right back to the bleeding heart of our faith, the Incarnation, the mystery of the Word becoming flesh. At a moment when our culture is increasingly intoxicated by transhumanism, technological enhancements, and fantasies of escaping the human body altogether, Leo points directly to Jesus Christ. Because in Christ’s humanity, we see the full grandeur of what it means to be human. We are not a broken prototype waiting for a Silicon Valley upgrade. No glow-up needed, rebels. We are humanity already flooded with dignity, meaning, and glory.
Leo calls us all to dive into having a Eucharistic spirituality because the Eucharist draws us out of our screens and back into real communion. Communion with God and with the flesh-and-blood people sitting next to us. It roots us in embodied relationships, shared sacrifice and solidarity. And from that communion rose a fierce authentic concern for the poor, the lonely, and those who’ve been digitally marginalized by this new economy.
Leo invites us to step into the construction site of this historical moment. Likewise, architects working for the kingdom of God. To explain his vocation, he returns one last time to Nehemiah. Remember Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem wall by wall, section by section with ordinary people taking absolute responsibility for the specific portion of the wall directly in front of them. That’s our task right now. We rebuild community where we are. We strengthen families by starting with our own. We speak truth and remain faithful to the people in our immediate circle.
If you look at anything in this encyclical, I want you to go to the back and read the footnotes, okay? Because if anything, it’s just kind of like a proof that the civilization of love is built through daily fidelity. It grows when you choose a real friendship over endless digital distraction. When you practice restraint in a culture engineered for non-stop consumption. When you continue serving the poor, telling the truth, and simply showing up for one another.
We are not called to save the world through our own power. Christ has already conquered sin and death. Our task is to simply be the leaven in the dough within the exact time and place we have been given. Pope Leo closes his document with the Magnificat and that’s the radical hymn of praise spoken by the Virgin Mary. I actually covered it in episode 32 like the one right before part one of this series. So if you want to kind of learn more about that or learn more about the Virgin Mary or what Catholics believe specifically about the Virgin Mary, go check that out. But he ends with the Magnificat for a reason. The Magnificat reminds us that God has always flipped the world upside down through ordinary human faithfulness, working through the very people the world overlooks. Have you ever heard that phrase? God qualifies the called, not calls the qualified. That’s what I’m talking about here, friends. Or that’s what he’s talking about.
Leo ends kind of with like his hope for the technological age. And it’s obviously that it won’t be our undoing, right? But will instead become the moment the Holy Spirit forms a genuine civilization of love, not somewhere far away in the cloud, but right here within our ordinary lives.
And then I want to take this moment to pray with you all. I did write a prayer for this, so I’m going to just pull it up real quick.
Of course, I ain’t got my reading glasses for this, y’all.
Okay, let’s pray. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Heavenly Father, you have made us for yourself and our hearts remain restless until they rest in you. As we step away from this conversation, help us remain fully human in a world moving faster every day. Guard us from becoming numb to one another. Protect us from the temptation to measure human worth through productivity, power, efficiency, or influence. Teach us to see your image in every person—in the vulnerable, the forgotten, in the worker, the child, in the stranger, and in the person standing right in front of us. Give wisdom to those building new technologies. Give courage to those speaking truth. Give protection to those most at risk for being left behind. Help us build something better together. Not another tower of Babel built on pride and self-interest, but communities rooted in truth, justice, mercy, and love. Lord, keep our hearts soft. Keep our consciences awake. Keep our eyes fixed on what is good, beautiful and true. And as the world changes around us, remind us that no machine, no system, and no technology can ever replace the dignity of the human person created and loved by you.
St. Augustine, pray for us. Our Lady, Seat of Wisdom, pray for us. Jesus Christ, Lord of history, guide us always. Amen. Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
How are you guys doing? You’re doing okay. Thank you so much for trusting me. I hope I did okay. That was a lot of pressure. I ain’t gonna lie. I hope this deep dive into Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas helped you understand it a little bit better. I do encourage you seriously to go read it. It’s not… I promise you it’s not that bad. Just read a couple of chapters a day. You can do it. This document—the full title is Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence—and it’s like 10% it talks about technology, the rest is all about the human person, the human magnificent person.
So you beautiful magnificent rebel with your beautiful restless heart. I’m so glad you’re here. This is Rebel Saints. For restless hearts called to be saints. Restless heart, you’re welcome here always. Bye.
