“Mama, what’s an empire?” asked my 3-year-old son from the backseat while driving home from Mass. Where had he heard about empires? I wondered. And how was I supposed to explain empire to a 3-year-old? I wracked my brain: “Sometimes when people are in charge of big groups, they do bad things.” He thought about it. “No mama, what’s an empire?” I wasn’t getting it. Then I realized he was saying umpire.
Perhaps I misheard him because empire has been on my mind lately. As I read Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence), I realized that the document being referred to by many as the “AI encyclical” offers more than a distinctively Catholic approach to AI ethics. In light of the “concrete lives of people,” the pope skillfully weaves together a systematic evaluation of the social, economic, political, environmental, and cultural challenges of the AI era. It’s really an encyclical about a new kind of empire.
As a former management consultant in the technology and manufacturing industries and now a theologian studying the ethical implications of emerging technologies such as AI, I agree with Leo that this era is marked by new forms of exploitation and a technologized political order that makes it harder for us to flourish.
It’s clear from our polarized and divisive online communities that AI has changed how people relate with one another. AI has disrupted the economy, enabled insidious forms of armed violence, and created new ways for small groups of people to dominate the minds, hearts, and bodies of large groups of other people.
Yet in Magnifica Humanitas the pope offers more than a gut-wrenching diagnosis of AI-induced difficulties. Instead, Leo envisions humanity working together at the “construction site of hope,” where “coexistence and peace” are built through direct political action, albeit in “slower, less visible, and less spectacular” ways. Magnifica Humanitas unites the gospel with Augustinian, feminist, and liberationist themes from the Catholic tradition, alongside others, to show that the church can change both itself and the world for the better.
Augustinian theologies
Leo’s new encyclical represents a significant contribution to the political theology of the church. If you want to study how church theologians have historically approached questions of politics, read excerpts from St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica or St. Augustine’s City of God. In City of God, St. Augustine describes the Christian social life in terms of two cities—an earthly city and a heavenly city—which coexist and which inform Christian political action in daily life. In The Confessions, St. Augustine describes his ambitious lust for power—the libido dominandi—as his primary moral failing. Whether we like it or not, without God’s grace humans tend to be prideful, self-interested, and ambitious.
Pope Leo’s Augustinian influences are all over Magnifica Humanitas; the encyclical draws on the image of St. Augustine’s two cities to explain why Christians should be involved in our local and global political communities. Christians have a concrete responsibility to take action in the world, to build a “civilization of love” worthy of the heavenly city, he says. As a result, Christians must involve ourselves in the earthly city.
According to Leo in the encyclical, the AI era is marked by a new transnational political order, in which “the highest level [of governance] is not the State, but rather major economic and technological actors that exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life.” Put simply, big tech has mastered a global supply chain that relies on extractive and environmentally harmful practices around the world to build algorithms that surveil us, exploit human vulnerability, and limit our possibilities for good living. (OK, maybe that isn’t so simple.) These “opposing imperialisms” are reshaping the use of political violence, as countries like the United States go to war and broker peace agreements over the resources needed for corporate computation.
Here Leo offers a traditionally Augustinian warning: The accumulation of technological power does not “automatically [confer] the right to govern.” Just because you have the biggest guns or the most money or the smartest computers doesn’t mean you should get to set the agenda. Instead, the Augustinian voice of the encyclical reminds us that humanity must continually choose between the power to dominate and the freedom to contribute, collaborate, dialogue, and direct technology and our civil institutions according to the common good.
Liberation theologies
This leads us to a second voice echoing in the background of the document. As African theologian Léocadie Lushombo described in her remarks following the presentation of the encyclical in Rome on May 25, the pope draws on the insights of liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutiérrez and Jon Sobrino, who emphasized God’s closeness to the poor and criticized death-dealing political, economic, and social arrangements in which people are denied the material and relational conditions necessary for flourishing. Today, algorithms are used to exploit the vulnerable; they “thrive on human weakness” while generating new forms of human vulnerability.
Leo’s most compelling critiques of AI arise when he grounds his analysis in the perspectives of the poor—children, victims of war, migrants, “and the least among us”—rather than the powerful. He describes how the material reality of AI arises from a “chain of exploitation that remains deliberately hidden.” Yet rather than accepting a politics of invisibility, Leo tries to bring the virtual cloud back to Earth. He turns to the mines, to data laborers, and to electricity–and water-hungry server farms–while arguing that “nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical.”
The encyclical highlights the dangerous working conditions in which women and children extract rare earth minerals. Their labor supplies the resources and infrastructure of modern computing; as Leo describes it, “the bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly.”
Humanity is called to “touch the wounded flesh of those who suffer, look at their faces, listen to their stories and acknowledge their wounds.” Likewise, closing the document with Mary’s Magnificat prayer, Leo invites readers to “look . . . through the eyes of those who suffer rather than the mighty.” Attending to the perspectives of the poor helps Leo describe AI as a global system with material consequences for millions of people. He calls on us to “address the real suffering of the men and women of our time . . . to draw near to the wounds of humanity” as a eucharistic act of belonging.
As liberation theologians have told us, without the perspectives of the poor we cannot fulfill our call to mercy as a Christian community. Nor, says Leo, can we build technologies that serve the common good without knowing and seeing with the poor.
Feminist theologies
The document is also shaped by distinctively feminist theological insights—although if you don’t count Mary, Mother of God, the pope actually only cites one woman in the entire document: Hanna Arendt. Nonetheless, Magnifica Humanitas is very congruent with the work of feminist theological thought.
Leo criticizes the illusion that any person is self-sufficient. Feminist theologians and scholars have long emphasized our fundamental interconnectedness with others and with creation. In line with these thinkers, Leo argues that humans are “created for relationship . . . planned and willed by God to enter into communion with [God], with others and with creation.” The goodness of your life and your value as a human person “does not depend on what [you] achieve or produce,” he says. Instead, Leo invites us to communion and practices of interpersonal presence over productivity, technologically optimized efficiency, or self-sufficiency.
Similarly, feminist and disability theologians have emphasized human interdependence and the counterintuitive value of human limits. According to Leo, “awareness of interdependence” arises when we acknowledge that “the good of each person depends on the good of others.” Leo helpfully distinguishes between coercive forms of involuntary interdependence—facilitated by economic globalization—and desirable forms of interdependence rooted in “mutual care and true solidarity.” As feminist theologians have also argued, care and interdependence are inextricably linked. In Leo’s words, one cannot “simply [pursue] one’s own progress without caring for others.”
Listen and change
In Leo’s view, Catholic social doctrine develops through listening. Catholic social thought “is not a handbook of principles and norms to be applied, but a process of shared discernment.” This is why Leo doesn’t just hand us a series of abstract concepts or rules as superficial bandaids for our AI-induced wounds.
Instead, Leo does something surprising. He offers a full-throated—if wordy—apology for the church’s history of complicity with slavery and for the “immense suffering and humiliation endured” as a consequence. Also in the document, Leo’s shared discernment alongside today’s victims of war lead him to argue that just war theory has justified war for too long.
Leo’s apology and his reevaluation of just war theory are not merely rhetorical moves. He explicitly envisions the church as a “place of living memory for the victims” and the world as a “construction site of hope.” He’s trying hard to put listening into words and words into caring action—warning us that complicity with evil is only preventable when we see, acknowledge, remember, learn from, and attempt not to repeat the past.
In his closing remarks at the encyclical’s release event, the pope described Magnifica Humanitas as “borne from listening.” He described listening to the voices of scientists and engineers, political leaders and public officials, parents and teachers, military decisionmakers, those oppressed by algorithmic injustices, as well as to the “silence of those who have no voice,” in order to discern the signs of the times and make the church a place for the victims of AI. And thus we arrive at a new “construction site of hope.” Magnifica Humanitas demonstrates that our social institutions actually can grow and change, even if it takes an entirely new empire for us to revisit the church’s moral heritage as a “living corpus of truth.”
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Map of colonial territories 1700-1763
