If you want to hear an intelligent, nuanced critique of AI, the best one I’ve found so far is from, of all people, Pope Leo XIV. He wrote a 42,000-word encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and I listened to the entire thing in preparation for this episode.
What is in the encyclical?
Jonathan: Let me do a brief overview. I’ll explain what the chapters were about, tell you what the encyclical is about, and then Thomas will go into what to pull out of it.
This document applied Catholic social teaching to artificial intelligence. It urges disarmament, transparency, and human oversight to protect human dignity in an AI-driven world.
- Chapter one traces the tradition from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 through every major social encyclical, grounding the document in the principles of human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity.
- Chapter two examines the present technological moment with deep technical nuance, treating AI as a valuable tool that requires vigilance while rejecting both naive optimism and outright rejection.
- Chapter three applies these principles to concrete realities, including work, surveillance, rare earth ethics, CCP-style data regimes, techno-slavery, and the disarmament of autonomous weapons that remove human moral judgment.
- Chapter four calls for shared international governance, transparency, and accountability so technology serves integral human development rather than domination or profit.
- Chapter five delivers an explicitly anti-Gnostic and incarnational vision, contrasting the flesh made of silicon of transhumanism with Jesus, the Word made flesh, as humanity’s only path to salvation.
What is an encyclical? It’s a pastoral letter written by the Pope to address major theological, moral, or social issues facing the Catholic Church and humanity. It’s designed to be propagated throughout the world, not hidden or held back. This is Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical since his election.
Why should authors care what the Pope thinks?
Thomas: Pope Leo XIV is a mathematician and an American, and you could argue the reason he was elected pope was to write this encyclical and grapple with this issue. Most of the encyclical wasn’t actually about AI, even though that’s all anyone is talking about. I read the whole thing, and he hits a lot of topics, many of them economic, that AI has affected or influenced.
It’s really well done. A lot of the concerns I’ve had with AI, the Pope has had too, and for the same reasons, so it was very encouraging for me.
Full disclosure, I’m not Catholic. I’m a Christian, not Catholic. We should care about this partly because it’s the first really well-reasoned articulation about AI from a Christian source, really from any religious source. This is the initial draft everyone will be reacting to.
Up to this point, AI has mostly been discussed by journalists who don’t understand it very well, technologists who do but can’t communicate, and politicians. I haven’t heard any pastors give sermons on AI.
There was a church in my town that used AI to prepare the service, but mostly it’s been hush-hush. The people I’ve heard critiquing AI from a religious context don’t know much about it. I listened to one podcast episode, actually for authors and about AI, and it was clear the critiques came from someone who didn’t know what AI was. He couldn’t tell the difference between machine learning and a large language model, and he didn’t know what a neural network was.
It was moralistic and emotional, all reacting to the marketing around AI rather than the actual function of AI. It wasn’t a helpful critique because he didn’t know what he was talking about. Which is fine. Not everyone knows what they’re talking about.
I’m going to pull out some things from this encyclical that I thought were valuable for authors. I also have a Q&A I’ll do with Jonathan, specific moral questions for Catholic authors, what they can and can’t do, because the Pope was very clear about what Catholics can and cannot do. It’ll be interesting doing this as non-Catholics.
The Pope demonstrated really deep technical understanding and a surprising amount of nuance. He treats AI the same way I do, as a valuable tool, and he didn’t call for a Butlerian crusade against the machines, despite the memes on X.
Did the Pope use AI to write it?
Thomas: It’s also very likely the Pope used AI to help write this encyclical. Certain sections started sounding very AI to me as I listened. A bunch of people have run tests using various AI detection tools, and certain chapters tested positive for AI use. Specifically, it had a lot of Claudisms.
Jonathan: He’s American, though, not Italian. The Italian version, the original, tested higher for AI use. It was probably translated.
Thomas: The Pope authors the encyclical, but he doesn’t write it. He’s got a whole team of priests and bishops writing these encyclicals with him.
It’s not a papal bull, which is more like a bill that says, “This is what the law is.” This is more like a sermon. It’s not that he himself wrote every word with a quill pen. Italian isn’t his native language, but he’s worked in the Vatican a long time, so he’s probably pretty good with it.
The Italian version tested higher for AI than the English translation. That tells me it’s possible that while he used AI to help draft the Italian version, it was translated into English by humans. The one thing the Vatican is not hurting for is translators, particularly from Italian into English. They’ve got good translators, and they’re not going to use a machine for that.
Is the Catholic Church really anti-science?
Thomas: The villain of this encyclical was not the technology. There’s a popular meme online that the Catholic Church is anti-science or anti-technology, and this is very ignorant. The Catholic Church invented science.
Before the Catholic Church, we had alchemy, which was Gnostic and secret. It’s the Christian value of revelation, as opposed to hiding information, that’s the foundation of science.
Most people, when they get a science education in school, are really getting propagandized. I can prove this with your own knowledge. The goal of the science education you got in high school was not to teach you useful information. It was to propagandize you.
You probably spent an entire semester on evolution. You’re probably very articulate on evolution, which is not a scientific theory you’ve used at all in your life. There’s not a single question that understanding evolution has helped you solve.
Yet you don’t know the difference between a watt, an amp, and a volt, which is scientific knowledge that would save your life if you understood it. It wasn’t taught to you because it’s not helpful in propagandizing you against the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church invented science, has been doing science, and is pro-science. As a Protestant, as a conservative Evangelical, I see the Catholic Church as too pro-science. They’re too accepting of science for my preference. To be fair to them, though, they’ve always been pro-science from the very beginning. They invented science.
Even the Galileo situation, people can’t really articulate what happened. That entire situation was entirely misinterpreted for you. It was not Catholics crushing Galileo because he challenged their view on how the world works. That’s an entirely wrong take on the historical facts. We can go deep on Enlightenment-era science if we want.
So who are the real villains here?
Thomas: The villains of this encyclical are not the science and not the AI. They’re technocrats, transhumanists, and post-humanists. That’s who the Pope sees as the threat.
Jonathan: Thomas, what is a transhumanist and a post-humanist?
Thomas: First, a technocrat is somebody who sees people as cogs in a machine, as data points, as something to be optimized. The value of a human comes from their economic output. That’s a technocrat.
A transhumanist believes humanity can be augmented with technology, so we can transcend our human limitations. The Borg in Star Trek are a presentation of transhumanism, where they’ve bonded flesh and machines.
Another version of transhumanism is the idea that you can transcend your physical body by uploading your consciousness into a computer. GLaDOS in Portal 2 is a post-humanist or transhumanist character. She was human, but her consciousness was put into the machine.
That’s very Gnostic. It’s the view that you have a spiritual self, a true self, and then a physical body that’s evil and fallen, so you have to change your physical body to better appeal to your true self. Or better yet, upload your true self and ascend into the machine where you can live forever.
Christians reject that. The Pope rejects that. How do Christians transcend their physical bodies? They do it through Christ, and only through Christ. That’s our only salvation.
Thomas: The encyclical warns against technocratic thinking that turns humans into cogs and devalues the human. One of the words the Pope used a lot was dignity. As a Protestant, this Catholic doctrine of dignity was very new to me.
He talks about dignity being innate, where we just have dignity. I assumed we have dignity because we’re made in God’s image, but he didn’t make that case. He said we have dignity because God loves us, which was interesting.
As a Protestant, I haven’t dived deep into the Catholic doctrine of dignity, but he used that word dozens of times. He was constantly using the word dignity.
What is the Pope’s view on disarmament?
Thomas: Another word he used a lot was disarmament. One concern the Pope has, and I share, is AI killing people, and we’re already seeing this.
In Ukraine, initially we had these drones that were controlled wirelessly. You’d put on a headset as a human, fly the drone, and blow up the other guy. Both Ukrainians and Russians are doing this.
The problem with a wirelessly controlled drone is that wireless is just another word for radio, and there’s a way to interfere with somebody else’s radio. It’s the equivalent of shouting really loud. When my wife and I are trying to talk in the kitchen, my children will signal-jam us by shouting so loud we can’t hear each other.
That’s effectively what you can do on the battlefield. One solution is, well, if I can’t talk to the drone, I’ll just give it instructions to kill guys wearing the enemy’s uniform and let the drone decide who to kill.
Currently they have these helium balloons they lift into the air. The drone detaches, glides down, pilots itself, and basically picks a human to kill. The Pope is not a fan of this.
He articulated that civilians could be killed, but there’s also a moral question. Machines are not capable of mercy, and mercy is a high value among Catholics.
Autonomous weapons remove human moral judgment, and by removing it, they remove human moral responsibility, or at least the appearance of it. It’s like, “It wasn’t me killing that person. It was this drone I made. The drone decided to kill them. I didn’t commit murder. This drone committed murder.”
By offsetting our moral responsibility, we can kill people without feeling bad about it. That’s very concerning for the Pope, and I think rightly so. Humans should take responsibility for their actions. We can’t blame the machines when we stand before God and give an answer for every deed done in the body, whether good or evil, as the Bible tells us. It’s a very scary passage, that we’ll be accountable to our Creator for our actions.
Does war without mercy just become a numbers game?
Jonathan: On a shallow level, I don’t mind killing people with autonomous weapons, but I do agree with the concern. I have an issue with losing mercy, because when you separate men from warfare, it becomes a numbers game. Stalin told us it’s way easier to kill a million people than 100. 100 is a massacre, a million is a statistic.
When war becomes about numbers of bodies instead of tactical precision and strategic brilliance to break an enemy’s will or logistical capability to keep fighting, something is lost.
I have this problem with Grant in the Civil War. Grant was not a strategist. He just threw hundreds of thousands of men into meat grinders and ran Lee out of ammunition. He had the will to win, but he had no problem with the price it took. I hate Grant as a general.
Lee, by contrast, optimized every position and the limited resources he had to fight numerically superior forces battle after battle. That’s warfare pursued correctly. When you treat it as a numbers game, where you win because you killed more of them than they killed of you, I see less value in that.
Thomas: We covered a story several weeks ago about an event in 2025 where the Ukrainians overtook a Russian position using nothing but drones. One of the drones was basically a bomb on wheels that rolled into a bunker and blew it up.
One of those bombs on wheels didn’t blow up its bunker, because the guys inside surrendered to the drone. The drone was controlled by a human back at Ukrainian headquarters, who saw the surrender through the drone’s camera and accepted it. I think the Catholic Church would say,
That needs to be preserved. Letting the drone go in, see the white flag, and blow up the bunker anyway because its programming said “blow up the bunker,” that’s what the Pope is concerned about. That’s what he means by disarming AI.
At the end he got very peace-and-love, let’s just not have war, and he quoted other popes who were against war. Popes have been against war for a long time. I remember reading about the Hundred Years’ War, with the French on one side and the English on the other, and they’d have to pause at the beginning of the battle while these bishops forced the monarchs to talk and tried to make the war not happen.
Give the Catholic Church some credit. They’ve been doing UN-style, give-peace-a-chance stuff for a long time. It didn’t work, and all the French people died at the Battle of Agincourt. Nobody listened to the bishops.
Credit where it’s due, the Catholic Church made an effort, and the Catholic monarchs on both sides let the effort happen. They got their tent in the middle, white flags, and they talked. Then they said, “No, we’re going to kill you,” told the priest to stand aside, and let the battle happen.
What about Chinese-style surveillance?
Thomas: The Catholic Church is pushing for total peace, but it’s especially pushing for disarmament. I want to move on to another element it pushed back on, and that’s AI-powered, Chinese Communist Party-style surveillance.
This document took a lot of sideswipes at the CCP and the way it treats its people like cogs. That technocratic leadership is very CCP-coded. All that language is very CCP-coded, the way the Chinese Communist Party basically gives you a score generated by AI. It surveils everything you do and gives you a score of how good a citizen you are. The Catholic Church is pushing really hard against that.
Thomas: The Pope quoted Tolkien. I want to share this quote. It’s a Gandalf quote. The ultimate goal for every Catholic novelist is to be quoted by the Pope in an encyclical.
We can give Pope Leo XIV the title of nerdiest pope ever. He’s a mathematician, and he quoted Tolkien in his first encyclical. I don’t know who’s in second place among popes, but we can pretty confidently give the nerd title to Pope Leo.
The quote from Gandalf is, “It’s not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we sow so that those who live after us may have clean earth to till.” I thought that was a really great quote.
One of the things the Pope was pushing back against was this doom idea, that there’s nothing we can do, that there are conspiratorial forces and technology’s so powerful we’re helpless. He says, “No, listen to Gandalf.”
Some people are more powerful than others, and the Pope acknowledged that, but our job is to deal with the field in front of us so those who come after have a cleaner field. I love that attitude. He’s rejecting this Gnostic, conspiratorial view and saying, “Do what you can with what you have.”
What can Catholics actually do with AI?
Thomas: With that, let’s go into a Q&A. I generated some questions specifically about Catholics. What can Catholics do and not do regarding AI? Then we’ll debate whether the rest of us can do it as non-Catholics. Jonathan, hit me with the questions.
1. Can Catholic authors use AI for editing?
Yes, as an aid for grammar, style, or suggestions, while the final edit and moral judgment remain with the author. The encyclical describes AI as a valuable tool whose power stays tied to data processing (¶99), and it stresses that human intelligence, with its conscience and freedom, guides technical innovation (¶97).
2. Can Catholic authors use AI for drafting a book?
Yes, for initial drafts or idea generation, provided the author retains creative vision and spiritual oversight. The encyclical notes that these systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence while offering tangible benefits (¶99), yet it insists that moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation (¶198) and that the human person must guide the work.
3. Can Catholic agents use AI to read the slush pile?
No, not if the AI makes autonomous accept or reject decisions without human review. The encyclical warns that important and sensitive decisions risk being fully delegated to automated systems that cannot show compassion, mercy, or forgiveness (¶102), and that handing an algorithm the power to select who is worthy, with no one accountable for the judgment, surrenders the task of defining the boundaries of human possibility (¶103).
Thomas: The Pope gave a limiting principle here. A spam filter is acceptable, because as a human you can still review the spam folder, and that review acts as a final appeal and a chance for human mercy.
4. Can Catholic publishers use AI to read the slush pile?
No, not for final rejections or acceptances without meaningful human oversight and accountability. The encyclical argues that a system designed or used to treat some lives as less worthy, or to exclude them with no possibility of appeal, is no longer merely a tool to be used well (¶104), and it insists that responsibility be clearly defined at every stage so that someone can account for each decision (¶105).
5. Can Catholic authors use AI for research?
Yes, as a research assistant, while the author still exercises personal discernment and spiritual reflection. The encyclical celebrates technology’s power to heal, connect, educate, and protect our common home (¶9), yet it again roots that power in human intelligence guided by conscience and freedom (¶97).
6. Can Catholic authors use AI for plotting and story development?
Yes, for generating plot suggestions, while the author supplies the unifying vision and moral framework. AI can be a valuable tool (¶100), but moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation (¶198) and must remain under human conscience.
7. Can Catholic authors use AI to generate book blurbs and marketing copy?
Yes, as a drafting aid for communication, with final approval resting on the author to ensure truth and dignity.
8. Can Catholic authors use AI to create study guides, discussion questions, or companion materials?
Yes, for generating supporting materials, while the author ensures they deepen genuine human and spiritual engagement. The encyclical favors tools that foster dialogue and participation (¶192), provided they serve the common good without replacing personal catechesis or conscience.
9. Can Catholic publishers use AI for developmental or copy editing?
Yes, as an efficiency tool, while human editors retain final responsibility and accountability, since the encyclical requires that responsibility be clearly defined at every stage so someone can account for each decision (¶105).
Thomas: Based on this, I think the Pope would approve of my Patron Toolbox editing tools, because they force the human into the loop. There’s no auto-accept button, and human judgment is required to implement any of the suggested changes.
10. Can Catholic authors use AI for initial book-cover concepts and design ideas?
Yes, for visual concepts, while the final design decision belongs to the human creator or designer. The encyclical calls on developers to embed values in their projects with transparency and responsibility (¶111).
11. Can Catholic authors use AI to translate their books into other languages?
Yes, for translation assistance, while the author reviews for doctrinal accuracy, cultural sensitivity, and human voice, since the encyclical’s treatment of responsibility, transparency, and governance in Chapter Three requires human oversight.
12. Can Catholic authors use AI to create social media posts and author branding content?
Yes, as an aid for content, while the author ensures authenticity and avoids deception. The encyclical notes that those who control digital platforms hold a considerable ability to affect the collective imagination (¶136), so human conscience must direct the work.
Sources
- Vatican: Full Text of Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
- The Verge: “Did the Pope use AI to write about the dangers of AI?” (27 May 2026)
- Linch Zhang / Substack: “Claude, Author of the Humanitas” (detailed Pangram analysis)
- Cybernews: “The Pope’s AI encyclical is triggering AI detectors” (GPTZero results, 27 May 2026)
- National Catholic Register: Full Text and Expert Reactions (27 May 2026)
