Coherence in Continuity – The Catholic Thing

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, was released earlier this week. It is long for an encyclical, and unexpected in some ways. It is worth reading, worth sitting with. What follows is not a summary, still less a “review” of the document, but some reflections provoked by the encyclical.

First a story: At a conference some while back, I met a man who works for a large, Catholic, charitable organization. During our conversation, he made an important point about the work he and his colleagues do every day. Reading this encyclical brought that conversation back to mind.

The goal of their efforts, he said, is not simply to serve the poor; the goal is to meet Christ in the poor they serve.

And to illustrate the point, he told this story. An enterprising and well-meaning manager of a local branch of his organization had implemented a new distribution system by which someone could pull up in their car, receive their allotment of charitable contributions without leaving their car, and be off again in a matter of seconds. 

And that, my interlocutor insisted, was a huge problem.

It was enterprising, efficient, and totally impersonal. What was distinctively Christian, or even distinctively human, about such “drive-thru charity”? Where was the opportunity to meet Christ in another or to be Christ to them?

It is not too difficult to see how such a critique of efficiency at the cost of interpersonal (that is, human) interaction could be applied to artificial intelligence. And Pope Leo does just that in Magnifica humanitas, for example, when he writes: 

When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.

Technology that removes human imperfection and brokenness – or leads us to remove the broken person altogether – removes a privileged place to encounter Christ Himself. In the suffering of Jesus, man’s weakness, his frailty, and even his poverty take on an entirely new dimension. The difference between entering into human frailty and eradicating it has profound implications:

[B]uilding for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected. Today, the human desire for fullness of life is at risk of being misled by deceitful goals, such as the prospect of a technology that promises to free us from all weakness, and models of wellbeing that leave behind entire populations. All too often, we place our hope in unlimited ‘upgrades,’ in forms of progress that exacerbate inequalities, and in immediate solutions incapable of healing people’s wounds.

Notice, while such warnings are appropriate to the uncritical use of artificial intelligence, they are hardly unique to the looming challenge of AI. Many of the critiques of AI in this encyclical are of this kind: more generally applicable to modern technology and less specific to the challenges of AI than some readers (myself included) may have expected.

This encyclical declares its subject to be “On Safeguarding the Dignity of the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” And while this encyclical certainly deals with AI, the heart of the document is much more a positive defense of human dignity than it is a thoroughgoing or definitive critique of AI. 

Which brings us to the next observation about this encyclical: Magnifica humanitas is, in a way, as much an encyclical about Catholic Social Teaching as it is a contribution to that corpus of teaching.

Pope Leo spends the first 15,000 words or so, laying out the history, development, and principles of Catholic social teaching. In doing so, he not only provides a primer on the Church’s social magisterium, but he is also able to highlight the deep continuity which runs from Leo XIII through all subsequent social teaching. That thread of continuity is human dignity, understood in the light of the Incarnation.

This thread continues unbroken through the Second Vatican Council, particularly Gaudium et Spes. And it is this same theme which binds together Pope Leo XIV in continuity with his predecessors, most especially Francis, Benedict XVI, and Saint John Paul II. 

[T]he guiding principle of Pope Leo’s Encyclical, and of all of the Church’s social doctrine, is a correct view of the human person and of his unique value, inasmuch as “man … is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself.”

John Paul II wrote those words, quoting Gaudium et Spes, in 1991 in reference to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, but they apply equally – indeed, emphatically – to Leo XIV’s Magnifica humanitas. 

This truth about man is the Church’s great response to our modern era, an era in which AI is but one threat, albeit an acute and urgent threat, to man’s sense of himself.

Leo signals this continuity within social doctrine and papal magisterium, not simply by equal opportunity citation – citing Francis X number of times, John Paul II Y number of times, and so on – but by building arguments that show the complementarity and cumulative force of various contributions to the tradition.

And that, too, is a significant contribution of this “AI encyclical.” There is reason to believe that Leo sees his own pontificate as an opportunity for synthesis, a chance to tie together many of the disparate and even frayed strands that make up the Church; to hold together the pre- and post- Conciliar traditions, the pontificates of John Paul II and Francis, the robust Thomism of Leo XIII’s social magisterium and the sociological turn of John XXIII’s Pacem in terris and Paul VI’s Populorum progressio.

Maybe that is wishful thinking on my part. Maybe that’s far too much to glean from one encyclical on artificial intelligence. Or maybe that’s exactly what we ought to expect from an Augustinian pope who knows that true peace is not the absence of conflict but the tranquility of order and who has taken the motto, In Illo Uno unum. In the One, we are one.