Like many readers of this magazine, I had high hopes for Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical. When it began to be rumored a year ago that he would write on artificial intelligence, my ears were still ringing with the words he had spoken more than a decade earlier at a gathering of bishops:
The Church should resist the temptation to believe that it can compete with modern mass media by turning the sacred liturgy into spectacle. Here again, church fathers such as Tertullian remind us today that visual spectacle is the domain of the saeculum, and that our proper mission is to introduce people to the nature of mystery as an antidote to spectacle. As a consequence, evangelization in the modern world must find the appropriate means for redirecting public attention away from spectacle and into mystery.
It is important to remember that in May 2025 Cardinal Prevost was a mystery man. These words (dredged up by the indefatigable Frank Rocca) were just about the only thing many of us knew of him apart from the bare facts of his biography. In retrospect, it was probably a mistake to read much into them. This is not to suggest that Prevost did not mean what he said in 2012, or that today the pope would no longer recognize himself in his old words. Prevost is, in the best sense, a “company man.” He seems to care deeply about institutions and order. He is not a bold speculative thinker; he has never (to my knowledge) written a single word for publication in the English-speaking world. We cannot afford to project our own interests or inclinations onto him, or to invest throwaway remarks (however compelling in themselves) with qualities they do not possess.
But that is taking us very far afield from the encyclical itself, which I had actually meant to discuss. How can I describe it, for those who did not cancel their Memorial Day plans to read it? Here I am reminded of poor Harold Macmillan struggling to find something to say about C. P. Snow’s novels: “You have done fine work as others have done before you.” This is more or less how I feel about the text. It is a papal document, as others have been before it.
Like many recent encyclicals, it is more than forty thousand words long, the length of a short book; it contains two-hundred twenty five paragraphs, with two-hundred twenty-four footnotes. Most of the citations refer us back to earlier papal encyclicals or apostolic exhortations or constitutions, whose own texts are in turn largely made up of further out-of-context quotations from the documents of the Second Vatican Council. Experienced readers will find themselves wondering why a phrase like “truth, goodness and beauty” needs to be in quotation marks, and why the fact that Pope Francis used it once (“Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (24 November 2013), 257; AAS 105 (2013), 1123”) requires documentation. Was he the first to convene this trio?
I realize that many Catholics will find any discussion of the “form” or even the language of a piece of writing pointless. For them what matters is not the text or (as they might put it) the “presentation” but the “content” or the “ideas,” which one extracts from the text by a process that probably resembles fracking. These distinctions do not make sense to me, but I will try my best to say what I made of the document without commenting on any of the actual words in it.
Simply put: Magnifica humanitas is not compelling. Who its target audience was I cannot possibly imagine (though I think I can just about hear the sighs of relief coming from entrepreneurs whose “targeted educational products” will still be saleable to Catholic schools). It is not a fire sermon; it is not a cri de coeur; it is not even, by any reasonable definition, “anti” A.I. Someone who bothered to read it slowly and carefully would come away with the impression that A.I. is not anything as simple as “good” or “bad” but rather a product like food dye that will be subject to the kind of regulation that is possible in the European Union but, alas, not in the United States. It would not, for example, convince a computer programmer to have second thoughts about the transformation of his industry (much less its existence), or a doctor to wonder whether there is something inherently vicious about asking patients to describe their symptoms to a chatbot, or a high school student to wonder whether he should use A.I. to take notes on the short autonarrated version of the L.L.M. summary of the essay from which he was assigned extracts. A series of personalist reflections on the uniqueness of our species seems curiously void of interest. It sounds lofty on the page (or in this case the screen) but otherwise has no actual consequences. If the glory of our humanity does not mean that we should never ask our computers to read or write or think or teach for us, what does it mean?
How could Magnifica humanitas have been better? My wife points out that it does not seem to have occurred to Leo or anyone else involved in the drafting to use this opportunity to ban or restrict the use of A.I. in Catholic schools or to institute a standard “bluebook” policy, which seems like a no-brainer. Not only would it be good for its own sake, and perfectly in keeping with all the equally lofty-sounding talking points about education Catholic teachers are expected to mouth along with; it would also allow us a rare opportunity to witness to non-Catholics who share our concerns without the usual culture war distractions.
A few other scattered observations:
✥ It is unfortunate that Leo’s comments on just war theory are buried somewhere in the middle of this document; surely such a theme is worthy of its own, perhaps slightly shorter encyclical. The word “outdated” is too strong in English, but one can imagine a more serious version of the same point, a document that attempts to reconcile the Church’s unambiguous support for wars in the past with the argument (which Leo seems to want to make) that the nature of modern warfare has rendered the conditions for just war so hard to satisfy that the phrase is now a slightly interesting hypothetical, like “pure nature.” Cardinal Ottaviani was saying more or less the same thing during the Eisenhower administration (how about a citation for him?).
✥ The same goes for Leo’s brief discussion of slavery. Again, a more focused and historically textured discussion of this topic would have been far more valuable than the off-hand comments we find here. In fact, it would be absurdly fitting if Leo, the first American pope and himself the descendant of slaves and slave owners, were to write the definitive treatment of a subject that in the 1860s had managed to trip up Newman, who struggled to reconcile St. Paul’s words in Colossians and Ephesians with what a friend had written about the evil of American chattel slavery. (Today many of Newman’s admirers will find what he wrote embarrassing, especially given the fact that decades earlier he had shown a great deal of sensitivity in silently eliminating most of the vicious and idiotic racism from Hurrell Froude’s letters when he prepared them for publication.) See how far afield we have gotten from A.I.?
✥ For me the most interesting thing in the text was Leo’s anatomy of the “idealist,” the “debased realist,” and the “authentic realist”:
There is a kind of idealism that, in order to preserve its own worldview, tends to choose facts selectively, distorting and renaming them. Its proponents eventually inhabit a reality constructed to fit their own convictions. Conversely, there is also a debased form of realism that confuses observation with resignation, arguing that since force prevails, it will always prevail. Authentic realism does not give up on changing the world; indeed, it starts by clearly identifying interests, fears, constraints and power dynamics, precisely in order to determine what can be achieved, and the measures needed to achieve it. It does not reduce politics to morality; neither does it surrender to violence. Instead, it seeks viable paths for making peace more than a mere word, through credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiations, conflict prevention and the protection of civilians.
Many of us will probably recognize something of ourselves in his portrait of the “idealist” (which reminds me a bit of Orwell’s description of the “nationalist”). What he calls “debased realism” seems to me the default mode of engagement for most would-be sophisticated political observers; the “authentic realist” in my experience does not exist above the level of, say, a councilman in an ailing medium-sized city.
✥ More than once I found myself wondering what Magnifica humanitas would have sounded like if it had been written by Leo’s most recent predecessor. I suspect I would have preferred the Francis version. “Words,” Keynes wrote, “ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.” When I was looking up this quotation in my little commonplace book, I found that the next entry was from Henry James, who says in a review somewhere that a man always has “the qualities of his defects.” As we try to move past the era of what I have sometimes called the “heroic” conception of the papacy, we will probably have to accept a certain amount of banality and what I feel comfortable calling theological prudishness as the price of competence and probity.
✥ This is perhaps not the space to pose a larger question about what papal encyclicals are meant to accomplish these days. (No one seriously expects them to have the sort of direct influence on politicians which they enjoyed during the interwar era.) But surely the less utilitarian their purpose, the loftier should be the spirit of composition. If these are ultimately rhetorical exercises, why not treat them like any other piece of rhetoric? This of course would involve trying to make the actual text more than accidentally memorable or interesting. My own view of the encyclical is that the genre is historically contingent and probably exhausted, like the lyric poem. Here one is also tempted to imagine what a much shorter discussion of A.I.—one not beholden to the tedious convention whereby a pope is obligated to quote himself endlessly and to justify assertions on the level of “The sky is blue” with copious references to Lumen gentium etc.—would look like. One might call this hypothetical new genre the “papal essay,” a single theme, two or three thousand words, no notes, a minimum of quotations, all of them tasteful and well-chosen, largely for purposes of illustration. But the papal essay is a big “ask” for churchmen today, certainly a much bigger one than the ceaseless proliferation of encyclicals. But Bishop Varden of Trondheim could write such an essay, and so could Bishop Flores of Brownsville. Who else, I wonder?
✥ Perhaps there is a lesson here in Humanae vitae and its (shall we say) mixed reception. Paul VI must have known that his words were unlikely to persuade people, least of all millions of Catholics who had already been told by the overwhelming majority of bishops to make use of a convenient, ostensibly life-enhancing technology. Today it is not the force of a half century-old encyclical that is leading hundreds of thousands of non-Catholic women (in Britain for example, where prescriptions have declined by something like fifty percent between 2007 and the present) to abandon the pill. It is simply reality asserting itself, remarkably without regard for the papacy, whose only role was prophetic. In the future popes who do not think their tentative conclusions will hold up sub specie aeternitatis would be better off taking Wittgenstein’s advice (or at the very least, restricting themselves to juridical and legislative speech-acts).
✥ There is a very real, if largely unspoken, tension between what I will call “Faustian” Catholics and the rest of us. By “Faustian” I mean people who see Catholicism (often in a legally inflected version of Thomism) as a kind of ur-science, a master tool for apprehending all of reality and subjecting it to a pitiless exercise in categorization. It is a baptized version of the will to power, an invitation “to become as gods.” By the rest of us, I mean, of course, partisans of what Cardinal Manning scornfully referred to as the “the old Anglican, patristic, literary Oxford tone transplanted into the Church,” but I also mean doddering old conservatives, old-fashioned liberal Catholics, and millions of ordinary decent men and women in the pews who have never given a thought to any of these questions. Faustian Catholicism has its obvious appeal; even someone as clever as Charles De Koninck briefly fell for it. In the years and decades to come, I suspect that the division between Faustian and non-Faustian Catholics will become at least as significant as others before it.
✥ ✥ ✥
So much for Magnifica humanitas. In case you haven’t guessed, for the editor of a magazine that describes itself as opposing “utilitarianism, techno-optimism, reductive accounts of human nature, attempts to sand down the crooked timber of humanity or subsume our aspirations into political, social, and economic frameworks” and declares its sympathy “with the human race rather than the chatbot,” the document was something of a letdown. This is not the same thing as saying that Magnifica humanitas was in any way surprising. If you are still reading this, I am going to guess that broadly speaking you share the view expressed by my colleague Nic Rowan in his essay on “the A.I. mind meld.” Likely you will agree with Fr. Jim Morin, who has argued that priests should not use A.I. in composing their homilies, and with many other pieces we have run in more or less the same vein. Since we began this magazine six years ago, we have been publishing criticisms of the ever-renewable project of “cleaning up human behavior,” as Stanley Fish has put it in our pages.
Magnifica humanitas has led me to reflect in a more general way on this magazine. When we call The Lamp “Catholic,” we do not mean it in narrowly sectarian terms. The Church’s claims are universal; the whole world is Her ken. And, in the face of the technological destruction of human relationships, literacy, and contemplation, we believe that the Church might end up being the only guardian of Erasmian humanism, even for secular people. We are under no illusions that She can do this through the publication of encyclicals.
How then? The task cannot be carried out credibly by popes or bishops, or even by most priests. At a certain point even dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists are going to have to take the Church at Her word when She tells us, as She has since the Second Vatican Council, that the laity are in the driver’s seat now. There is no point in looking for direction where it will not be found. We have to do it ourselves.
This should not be cause for despair. It may, in time, even be cause for rejoicing. But in the near future our coalition will look strange; in fact, it will not even be a coalition so much as an ad hoc assemblage of people who do not necessarily believe the same things, but sometimes accidentally end up doing the same sorts of work. The Lamp is a small publication, but we have always seen it as a magazine that can gather disparate groups into its pages. And we believe that our work represents only a portion of a larger—sometimes half-conscious—effort to preserve human thought and expression in all its wondrous breadth and capacity.
Those who read us regularly probably know by now that we have never been especially strict in our methods. We think of this necessary work more as an approach or orientation than a program. But if putting down (or even abandoning) your smartphone and reading more books and taking more long walks and spending more time in conversation at parks and the closest bar sounds like a “program” compatible with the ordered worship of God in the liturgy and the pursuit of holiness, then I suppose we might have one after all. It is at least a good time.
Whatever the human future looks like, and wherever it is happening, we plan on being there:
Flieh! auf! hinaus ins weite Land!. . .
Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
Fly, out into the wide land!. . .
Dear friend, all theory is gray,
And green the golden tree of life.
