Between Babel and Jerusalem in the Age of AI – Religion & Liberty Online

In his first social encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV offers a compelling reflection on the relationship between artificial intelligence and human dignity. The much-anticipated document, signed on May 25 by a pope who pledged to immediately confront the AI revolution morally and pastorally during his papacy. Written in very plain language, Magnifica Humanitas was not meant merely for theologians, technocrats, or AI specialists but for humanity as a whole. Leo endorses the grandeur of an imperfect mankind while asking the most essential question: What becomes of the human person, in all its limits and frailties, while pursuing flourishing in a civil society increasingly dominated by intelligent machines?

The encyclical is striking for its accessibility and its urgency. Pope Leo recognizes that humanity stands before a decisive threshold: a veritable and vulnerable paradigmatic shift as artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, and gigantic computational devices are playing a huge role in the outcomes of social, economic, political, relational, and military systems—and at unprecedented speed and global reach.

It is, therefore, no surprise that the pope frames the issue in deeply theological and civilizational terms. At the very outset of the encyclical, he writes about two choices: “either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together” (MH § 1).

The Call to Creative Technological Progress

The question before us, then, is not whether technology is good or bad or whether we should rein in its galloping racehorse or not. Rather, it is more a question of what sort of civilization emerging intelligent technologies will shape, since they are already “interwoven into the daily fabric of human life, shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective imagination” (MH § 4).

The Catholic Church has never feared the language of science, economics, politics, or technological innovation, despite some of its historical pitfalls with astronomers. Some of the greatest advances in genetics, cosmology, and engineering were the products of Catholic priests and religious. Catholic Social Teaching, moreover, has consistently wrestled with the “new things” of each age—from industrialization and globalization to epidemics and weapons of mass destruction. She has done so by interpreting them through the enduring truths of the Gospel as well as timeless moral and theological principles. Pope Leo consciously places Magnifica Humanitas within this tradition: It is not a vitriolic debate but a peaceful, constructive dialogue about artificial intelligence.

This latest social encyclical indeed praises the grandeur of our shared technologically innovative humanity. Magnifica Humanitas is not Luddite, reactionary, or anti-modern. Quite the contrary: Pope Leo explicitly rejects simplistic hostility toward technology, observing that it “should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity” (MH § 4).

Over centuries, the American-born pope notes, creative technological development has very often improved the material conditions of life, expanded human capacities, and contributed to global flourishing. Indeed, economists directly correlate it to massive poverty reduction and increased health and well-being globally. Since the first Industrial Revolution just over 200 years ago, and as reported by Tony Morely in his The Great Decline of Poverty Over Time: “Today, it is possible to be poor in the United States, Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, and other developed nations while having access to a mobile phone, a sheltered home with heating and air-conditioning, an inexpensive car, a refrigerator, television, laptop, access to the internet and advanced healthcare.”

Christians, therefore, should not fear technological invention but rather welcome it as a necessary part of civilizational progress. Human creativity reflects something profoundly true about the person made in the image and likeness of God. As God is a maker, so too are we homo faber, even if we are both makers of messes, in our limited intelligence and sin, and of magnificence, in our genius and virtue. This is magnificent humanity at its best, where the self is other-and-good-directed in its full creative potential for improving the conditions of mankind.

The human call to progress in Christian terms is not just to be a creative and daring maker but also transformative in a simultaneous desire to love and help redeem a fallen and suffering humanity. The transformation of the world through ingenuity, labor, invention, and discovery forms part of humanity’s entrepreneurial vocation. “Entrepreneurial initiative can indeed be a true vocation, generating wealth and improving lives,” Pope Leo affirms (MH § 157).

We are not called to maintain the lukewarm status quo of economic stagnation or milk the comfort zones of nanny states. We are called, rather, to embrace bold economic and material change while we steward our civilization toward ever higher growth, ever greater health, ever more well-being, and ever more unity with God’s plan for mankind.

Concentration of Epistemic Power?

Today, Pope Leo argues, humanity confronts a genuinely new historical situation. Digital systems, algorithms, and artificial intelligence are no longer instruments of the elite, though only a few people finance and control their creation and direction. Since digital and AI technologies shape our everyday decision-making and the creative imagination of entire societies, Leo notes, quoting Pope Francis, “never has humanity had such power over itself” (MH § 4).

In brief, artificial intelligence represents something more than just another technological innovation. It is, at its core, a concentration of epistemic power over knowledge industries. It is an unprecedented ability to gather information, predict behavior, process complexity, optimize outcomes, and it promises to solve computational mysteries that have befuddled engineers, designers, and researchers for ages.

Magnifica Humanitas indeed recognizes the revolutionary momentum at which technology is expanding into all aspects of life, and the power wielded by a few giant hands. We therefore might be heading for a wake-up call.

Pope Leo insists that a sort of Hayekian fatal conceit can emerge. His encyclical simultaneously praises the knowledge industry’s capacity to do good while warning against a temptation as old as civilization itself, one that mistakingly “devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of ‘salvation’ here on earth” (MH § 117). Friedrich von Hayek referred to this scenario in his epic book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. In it, he describes a political economic “master” who with a handful of elite central planners foolishly think they can possess all the knowledge needed to design, control, and execute a complex economy that will satisfy millions of worker citizens and facilitate billions of transactions among hundreds of cities and dozens of nations.

Hayek says this is a mortal error that ultimately leads to tyranny and, sadly, economic ruin, as in the case of the dismantled Soviet Union, whose centralized calculations ultimately failed to deliver on Marxist utopian ideals. However, with AI’s gargantuan computational capacity, the temptation to manipulate from above a mind-boggling number of transactions and economic participants has reappeared. Some indulge nostalgic cries for a renewal of Soviet communism “that just could not figure out the right distribution models before, but with Claude as the computation master, we believe it possible again!”

Babel or Jerusalem: Building with or Without God

One of Magnifica Humanitas‘s most important insights concerns the nature and end of knowledge itself. AI can certainly excel at the “know-whats” and “know-hows” of economics, innovation, and invention. It processes information, optimizes systems, recognizes patterns, and has an amazing generative capacity. But human intelligence begins from deeper knowledge: the directional wisdom of the “know-whys.” We want to grasp the moral and theological reasons that ultimately ground and guide the human moral conscience. Pope Leo develops this concern through one of the encyclical’s most compelling images: the contrast between two construction sites, Babel and Jerusalem.

The story of Babel represents humanity’s temptation toward self-adulated mastery. Its builders seek unity through technological power, uniformity, and self-sufficiency in terms of the “know-hows” and “know-whats” of building while ignoring God and his laws –the “know whys” – which should needle their conscience to the contrary of their ambition. If anything, they build a high tower—that is, a high horse— of pride and arrogance, while rejecting God’s wise and guiding authority. The builders of Babel’s tower seek to make a monument to themselves as great knowers and builders but by means of centralized ambition, ideological conformity, and radical autonomy. Pope Leo explains Babel was “a project conceived without reference to God” since it was built on a “uniformity that eliminated diversity and … chose homogenization over communion.” It represented a “city built on [self-referential] pride, and the claim to self-sufficiency [and when] communication breaks down, … people no longer [understand] each other. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency, and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing” (MH § 7). I suspect that for Leo many secularized AI builders largely fall into this camp.

The construction site in Jerusalem, by contrast, offers another model that is social yet does not suppress the individual. It is functional but does not dehumanize its builders by making them cogs of an ideologically designed machine. Under their leader Nehemiah, Jerusalem’s walls are rebuilt not through domination but through free association and cooperation with human and divine will. Diverse peoples, families, and talents (together with weaknesses) unite around a shared purpose rooted in God’s divine design for humanity. Jerusalem’s walls are restored “not through the initiative of one [elite] man, but through the shared responsibility of all” (MH § 7). Jerusalem is more akin to the diversified and free collaboration we read about in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: the cooperation of all working hands on earth according to their expertise, strengths, and even weaknesses, helping to build a common, prosperous, and peaceful home for all.

Jerusalem avoids the Hayekian fatal conceit of Babel, where one omniscient, all-powerful man guides the construction and shuns God’s will. The walls of Jerusalem were still standing when it came time to host God’s ultimate sacrifice and to build up a New Kingdom born inside them. The Tower of Babel did not last long. Having been built on false grounds, it quickly crashed and scattered all its collaborators into a lost state of misery and confusion.

Hence, the rise of AI also compels us to confront an older philosophical temptation: the identification of knowledge with power, as articulated by Friedrich Nietzsche, for whom human flourishing became closely tied to the exercise of an enlightened intellect and the assertion of the human will to dominate. In many respects, AI appears to embody this aspiration. With near infinite computational power, artificial intelligence promises greater mastery over uncertainty. Many avid AI devotees might believe they can master God’s own intelligent design for the universe for their own benefit.

It is for this reason that Pope Leo urges us to “disarm” artificial intelligence. By this he means “freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance” (MH § 110). He concludes by urging a balance of power: “To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern [but it ] does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity… [and] making it human-friendly” (MH § 110).

The Power to Deceive and Infringe

Magnifica Humanitas also asks whether this newfound power conceals a deeper illusion. Artificial intelligence may indeed amplify human mastery, but unless ordered toward truth, virtue, and the common good, it may intentionally deceive as disordered by its designers and users.

We have seen this already in the proliferation of “deep fake” videos. Even Pope Leo himself experienced this phenomenon shortly after his election. As we read in the Detroit News on May 22, 2025:

The Vatican News site published the warning in several languages May 21 after a 36-minute ‘deep fake’ AI-generated video was posted on YouTube. The post, which used manipulated video of Pope Leo and an AI-generated voice with an accent that is not Pope Leo’s praises Ibrahim Traoré, the military ruler of Burkina Faso. Vatican News said the post was produced using footage from Pope Leo XIV’s audience with journalists on Monday, May 12. A “morphing” technique was used—that is, transforming the image so that the movement of the lips matches the AI-generated words.

Pope Leo calls “insidious” this “use of fake profiles, algorithms that facilitate dangerous contact, and AI tools capable of manipulating images and videos” (MH § 141). This abuse of the technology not only violates our personal dignity—literally our own image made in God’s image—it also infringes upon the economic rights we have to sales involving our words, our advice, and anything we create with our minds and register as our own intellectual property.

The Defense of Limitation and Rejection of Technological Messianism

Finally, the papal encyclical tradition asks us to think about repeated historical lessons in the face of timeless principles. The Roaring Twenties of the 20th century, built on the revolutionary electrification of the world and industrial assembly lines, generated not only breakthroughs in mass production but also immense economic growth, technological innovation, and cultural confidence (though naive in retrospect). Yet beneath the thin veneer of a decade of immense prosperity lay structural fragilities, moral confusion, and unresolved tensions that eventually culminated in the economic and political disasters that were the Great Depression and Second World War. Now we find ourselves in the Roaring Twenties of the 21st century, where the future looks bright and glowing and with newly promised prosperity, peace, and well-being. What could go wrong?

History’s warnings notwithstanding, Pope Leo rejects both overt technological optimism and pessimism. He recognizes that science and technology can heal, educate, connect, and improve human flourishing. Christians are not called to stagnation but to earthly growth and, ultimately, a pilgrim’s progress to what theology understands as perfection in communion with God.

The temptation of every age, however, is to confuse progress with salvation. In previous centuries, political ideologies promised paradise through revolution. Marxist visions imagined a future in which scarcity disappeared, labor became radically diminished, suffering was largely overcome, and history itself culminated in a kind of inevitable earthly fulfillment.

Today similar hopes increasingly reappear in technological form. Yet the Catholic social magisterium offers a more sober—and ultimately more hopeful—understanding of the human condition. Human suffering, limitation, toil, and fragility are not merely technical glitches awaiting elimination through more sophisticated systems. They remain part and parcel of the drama of human existence and, mysteriously, form pathways through which persons grow in virtue, solidarity, sacrifice, wisdom, and love. In essence, Pope Leo says: “We must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them (MH § 131). This is humanity’s paradoxical grandeur.

Economics, politics, and technology exist precisely to help humanity manage hardship and scarcity that will ever persist on earth. Loss, sacrifice, loneliness, and misery cannot simply be engineered away as if they were the lot of unfortunate and unsophisticated previous generations only. Even the most advanced technologies cannot satisfy humanity’s deepest longing for meaning, reconciliation, love, transcendence, and communion with God.

Magnifica Humanitas firmly resists this illusion. The grandeur of humanity lies not in escaping or surpassing its humanity through the help of AI agents, but in living it well—in freedom ordered toward truth, responsibility, solidarity, and love, and with the assistance of God’s grace and inspired wisdom. Fresh walls of Jerusalem call to be rebuilt.