Pope Leo’s new encyclical offers hope, call to shared moral discernment, say experts

(OSV News) — Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on artificial intelligence is now a core document on AI ethics — one that offers hope amid grave warnings, while serving as a call to a shared moral discernment, Catholic experts told OSV News.

The pope officially released “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence” May 25 during a press conference at the Vatican.

In the highly anticipated document, Pope Leo invokes the wisdom of the Church’s social teaching — which articulates the means of building a just society and living out holiness in modern life — as a framework for shaping AI amid rapid technological advances, a fractured global order and accelerating threats to human life and dignity.

The encyclical is “a defining document of our era,” Paolo G. Carozza, professor of law and political science at the University of Notre Dame, told OSV News.

Carozza said “even the criticisms” of the text he had seen in places “show that you can’t talk about the ethics of AI, as of today, without taking this document into account. It’s that important.”

Pope Leo himself is “one of the only coherent moral voices on the global stage at this point in an era where that’s desperately needed,” said Carozza.

“The reception of AI is becoming kind of entangled in the political snarl of U.S. culture,” said Nancy Dallavalle, director of the Center for Catholic Studies and associate professor of religious studies at Fairfield University.

However, she added, “the Vatican is the one place that is seen as a moral voice that can address ‘urbi et orbi,'” referencing the Latin term for “to the city and to the world,” a solemn papal blessing given at key moments and accompanied by a papal message.

“Pope Leo makes it clear that he wishes to engage in dialogue, not just with Catholics, but with, as he says, all men and women of our time, and people of goodwill,” said Jesuit Father Kevin O’Brien, vice provost and executive director of Fairfield University’s Bellarmine campus.

Father O’Brien pointed to Pope Leo’s insistence that “AI is itself not morally neutral because of how it is constructed. … Embedded within AI is a certain understanding of the human person.”

The pope also invites the human community to challenge and shape that understanding, and its manifestation in AI’s broad range of applications, for the common good, said Daniel Daly, executive director of the Center for Theology and Ethics in Catholic Health.

Except for “pretty pointed” language on modern warfare, Pope Leo “offers no ready-made solutions,” said Daly.

Instead, he said, Pope Leo is “really interested in raising up values that stimulate that participatory discernment.”

In the U.S., that process will also require a hard look at ways in which AI is being used to “justify the centralization of power and the short-circuiting of norms,” said Dallavalle.

Such moves, she added, “really put at risk the notion of subsidiarity,” the Catholic social teaching principle holding that society’s larger institutions, including the state, should not overwhelm or interfere with smaller ones (including families and Church communities).

Yet the encyclical, while raising deep concerns and questions about AI, offers hope that is no less profound.

The “beautifully written” encyclical reflects “an insistence of neither rejecting nor embracing not just the technology and the culture around it — but instead our call to transform it,” said Fernanda Psihas, assistant professor of computer science and physics at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio.

Psihas told OSV News that Pope Leo’s discussion of nuclear power in the encyclical is “very close to my heart,” since particle physics — her field of research — “is really the granddaughter of the Manhattan Project,” the U.S. government’s Second World War project to develop the atomic bomb.

“I’m very familiar with that landscape where we can talk about atomic physics or particle physics and think about nuclear weapons — but we could also think about the immense potential of nuclear energy, or the efforts to understand our universe and the laws that God wrote in nature,” said Psihas.

She pointed to Pope Leo’s call to “disarm” AI, which the pope explained in section 110 of the text as “freeing” the technology “from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon.”

“As a scientist very familiar with fields that can be used for great good or great evil, that seems like exactly the call to make now,” Psihas said. “And that’s why I love this tone throughout the document, that it’s not a choice of rejecting or blindly accepting the technology as is, but that we can really do something to engage and transform the culture and how we approach AI going forward.”

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