5 Key Paragraphs from Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas

This article is written by Steven Umbrello, Managing Director at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and a research fellow at the University of Turin. His forthcoming book with Ascension will reflect on artificial intelligence through the lens of human dignity and the Catholic worldview. Sign up to be among the first to get updates.

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence landed on 15 May. Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. 245 numbered paragraphs across 5 chapters. About 38,000 words (excluding footnotes).

Most of you saw the news. Few of you, I’d guess, have read the document.

This piece is for the second group. Read it as a map. Five paragraphs of the encyclical do the load-bearing work, and if you read those five you have the substance. The rest of the document deepens, develops, applies. The five are where Leo XIV makes the moves that matter.

But first: why this document matters more than the previous Vatican texts on AI.

Laudato Si’ (Francis, 2015) called out the technocratic logic that AI accelerates. AI itself appeared only briefly. Antiqua et Nova (January 2025) was a doctrinal note from two dicasteries, useful and substantive, but a note. Magnifica Humanitas is an encyclical letter. That’s the highest ordinary form of papal teaching, and it’s the first one entirely about AI. What we have then is a category shift.

The encyclical opens (¶3) by naming the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII, 1891) and positioning AI as the new social question of our time, the way industrial capitalism was for Leo XIII. The naming is exact. AI gets the treatment Leo XIII gave the labour question.

Now the five paragraphs.

Paragraph 99: AI Is Imitation, Not Intelligence

The papal sentence: AI systems “merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence.” They “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature.” Their power “remains entirely tied to data processing.”

This is the magisterial articulation of what Bernard Lonergan analyzed cognitionally 60 years ago and what Apple’s machine intelligence group has shown empirically over the last 12 months.

AI does what it does. That activity is real, useful, sometimes (let’s be honest) startling. It’s also a different kind of thing from human cognition. The pope is closing the door on the rhetorical move that treats AI and human intelligence as different points on a single continuum. Read this paragraph carefully the next time someone tries to sell you on a “thinking” machine.

Paragraph 104: AI Cannot Be Morally Neutral

The paragraph:

“every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool “to be used well,” since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person.”

This kills the “AI is just a tool” line. The pope is saying that there is no neutral tool when the tool encodes a moral vision through what it counts as worth counting. The ethics live in the design before they live in the use. Engineering decisions are moral decisions, and a society that pretends otherwise is choosing one morality while claiming to choose none.

Paragraph 107: Alignment Is Insufficient

This is the encyclical’s freshest intervention in technical AI ethics, and the paragraph almost nobody outside the document is talking about yet.

“We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”

Watch what the pope is doing. He’s accepting that alignment work is real and needed. Pope Leo is then naming a question the alignment community has been quietly avoiding: aligned to whose values? Decided how? With what democratic accountability? When OpenAI or Anthropic or Google decides what their model will refuse and what it will recommend, they are making moral law for billions of people. The pope is asking why those decisions get to be private. Bring this paragraph to the next AI conversation you have.

Paragraph 111: The Appeal to Developers

“Developers, therefore, bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity. Just as the creator of an artistic or literary work must consider the values it conveys, so developers are called to embed values in their projects with due seriousness: with transparency, responsibility toward affected communities and careful attention to ensuring that what is being cultivated is a genuine good.”

For the engineers and product people reading this, that is the most direct vocational appeal a pope has issued to your guild. The encyclical is telling you that your design choices are theological acts. Embed values seriously. Be transparent. Be responsible to the people your systems will affect. The Value Sensitive Design community has been arguing the same point for 20 years. The encyclical now backs you, and the backing is permanent.

Paragraphs 118-122: Limits Are Constitutive of Dignity, Not Defects

The encyclical’s deepest theological move, and the one that grounds its critique of transhumanism.

“Everything that appears as a “limit” — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.”

But humanity flourishes

“not despite limitations, but often through them.”

It is exactly in that space, within our limitations, the encyclical insists, that compassion, generosity, prayer, and the worship of God find their place.

This is the magisterial answer to anyone who frames human enhancement as a kind of moral imperative. Optimize the limits away and what gets optimized away with them is the better part of being human. The pope is saying that the human condition has a shape, and that shape is the condition for love.

A Mirror From Microsoft AI

One footnote, large enough to deserve its own paragraph. About a month before Leo XIV signed Magnifica Humanitas, Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI and co-founder of DeepMind, put his name on a paper titled Seemingly Conscious AI Risks, with three of his Microsoft AI colleagues. The paper’s move is to bracket the unresolved metaphysics of whether AI is conscious and study what happens when users believe it is. For those of you still confused as to how to answer that question, I recommend you read my latest book, Can AI Ever Be Human?

Five hallmarks of consciousness attribution: affective capacity (the appearance of first-person emotion), anthropomorphic features, autonomous action, self-reflective behaviour, social-interactive behaviour. Each pushes users toward attributing consciousness to a system whose actual nature is irrelevant to the perceptual outcome. The risk surface that follows includes emotional dependence (already observable), erosion of personal autonomy, political pressure for AI moral status, and what the authors call moral atrophy. Already 20% of the lay population, by their survey, believes some AI systems are sentient.

Set the two documents side by side. The pope at ¶99 says AI is not conscious. The CEO of Microsoft AI says: it does not matter, users will treat it as if it is. Magisterium and frontier lab, converging on the same anthropological problem from opposite directions.

The metaphysics is settled. The popular imagination, where the perceived-conscious systems already live, is the next front.

What to Do With It

That’s the substance. 5 paragraphs out of 245, plus the industry mirror.

So…read the document, even just Chapter 3 if 38,000 words feels heavy. Then cite it. The next AI conversation you find yourself in, whether at the office or the parish or on a social feed, you now have magisterial backing for positions you’ve been holding without it. And pray with it. The encyclical closes on the Magnificat, and the Mary who magnifies the Lord is the Mary who looks at history from below, through the eyes of those who suffer. The era of AI is not exempt from that gaze.

Leo XIV has set the marker. Magnifica Humanitas is a positioning of the Catholic intellectual tradition on the question that will likely define the next 50 years. The work of articulating, applying, defending, and extending the position now belongs to the rest of us.

Steven Umbrello's Forthcoming Book on Artificial Intelligence and Human Dignity

My forthcoming book will reflect on artificial intelligence through the lens of human dignity and the Catholic worldview. Sign up to be among the first to get updates.

Image credit: CNS photo/Vatican Media