In the weeks since the release of “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on the protection of our humanity in the age of artificial intelligence, the document has sparked widespread debate in the worlds of technology and theology, as well as among ordinary people who are increasingly subject to A.I. tools and content in their work and personal lives.
The encyclical was presented at the Vatican on May 25 by the pope, alongside a panel of experts from various fields, including Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah. Anna Rowlands, the St. Hilda Chair in Catholic Social Thought and Practice at Durham University, represented the sphere of academic theology.
Dr. Rowlands joined Colleen Dulle on America’s “Inside the Vatican” podcast to discuss the responses to Pope Leo’s now viral encyclical, its reception by the tech industry and its contributions to Catholic theology and social doctrine. This excerpt from their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
CD: You were one of the panelists at the presentation of the encyclical, and you raised some great insights there about the document, its urgency and its appeals to all of us. But before we dig into that, I want to ask you first what you make of how this encyclical has been received so far.
AR: It’s been extraordinary. In one sense, I worried that in parts it might be a little dense. It’s more of the “Caritas in Veritate” style than the “Evangelii Gaudium,” so I wondered whether or not it would have that cut-through, but I think one of the things that is really remarkable is the fact that it has had that cut-through in multiple different sectors that you might imagine would be difficult for one figure to speak to coherently. So you’ve got people who are “tech bro,” profit-oriented individuals who are engaging in a relatively serious dialogue [about the encyclical].
Equally, you’ve got a group of younger people who have picked it up and seen in it a constructive reason for resistance. It’s not just about being against something, but being for something that gives one grounds for resistance. So that then becomes a sense that the pope has offered people something that enables them to feel positive about claiming a moral stance in a reality that is fundamentally reshaping the way in which we live together and share a world and a future.
CD: What do you say to [people], especially tech people, who think that the pope doesn’t have the sufficient expertise or awareness of A.I. to be speaking credibly on it?
AR: The document itself makes clear that finding the solutions and offering a program or vision [is] not what the task of the document is. It’s not the competency of the church to do that. But I think there is an authority and a competence of the papacy to use a social encyclical to be a convening force. One of the things that Chris Olah, in my conversation with him just before the panel, said to me very clearly is that he believes that the church is one of the spaces which is beyond capture, and that desperately there is a need for spaces beyond the capture of the profit motive of capital interest, to convene and have that conversation. I can think of very few other actors, institutions or groups who have that status and who have that capacity to speak to a breadth of humanity, where that authority lies. One has some hope that it’s possible to have the kind of shared future conversation that the document calls for.
The fact that there is not a specific expertise [on the pope’s part] in relation to immediately developing technological solutions or even anti-technological solutions, that’s not ever what a social encyclical should really be trying to do. What it should be trying to do is animate a question about a more human future.
CD: You said in your talk, “‘Magnifica Humanitas’ acknowledges that many do not feel confident to explore these questions.” How can people become more comfortable speaking about these technologies that they feel they’re not experts in?
AR: These technologies are shaping everything we do, including the conversation we’re having now, in various ways. We are experts in knowing that our lives are being shaped, augmented, refashioned by these technologies, and we need to become self-reflective about their entry into our existence and their impact on us.
One of the things that I think—and this is where I’m gonna sound a bit more radical pessimist for a moment, I’m not overall—is in relation to what A.I. is doing to our attachments. If social media came after our data and our attention, A.I. is coming after our attachments.
CD: What attachments are you referring to?
AR: Our emotional attachments, the way in which we relate.
One of the things that is pushing the “Is A.I. conscious life?” debate is the affective attachments that are drawn out of us by the tech, particularly because it’s given an anthropomorphized form. The danger of very anthropomorphized tech—and I know there’s a big debate in the sector about [whether] to anthropomorphize or not, and there are ethical debates on both sides—one of the consequences is that it induces in us certain kinds of attachments to something that, in fact, cannot love you back, cannot sacrifice for you, is not mortal in the same way that we are, but it draws out those attachments, and the danger is that they can appear frictionless. They can appear as if they are far easier than having to do the difficult, but beautiful and rewarding, labor of relating to another fragile, fallible, irritating, cranky, contradictory human being. But that difficult labor is unavoidable, and those should be our primary attachments.
One of the things the document calls us back to is embodied face-to-face relationships, but also to be cautious about what we will give our attachments to. What will we love? What is lovable? What is worthy of love? We so desperately crave to be attached to other people in healthy, reciprocal ways, and we crave things to love, and very often we end up loving the wrong things. Of course Augustine was one of the greatest thinkers we have to help us think about disordered attachments, to think about which goods are appropriate for us to seek, which loves are worthy of us. We have to ask those fundamentally Augustinian questions about what is worthy of our love and how we are forming attachments.
We desperately crave unconditional positive regard. We crave things that look like they’re easily accessible to us through A.I. But in fact—and I think a lot of the evidence is already showing this—once you get over the initial [feeling of] frictionless companionship, it in fact induces anxiety in people. It doesn’t give them back, in the end, what the difficult labor of real human attachments and relationships does.
CD: I wonder how you would characterize the theological contributions of this document, especially of the sections on slavery and just war theory. Do you think that this document is contributing to a greater awareness in the public of how doctrine develops?
AR: Specifically how social doctrine develops. I think there are two separate questions. One is what’s the overall theological narrative or arc of the document, which is slightly different from, but related to, the question of the development and presentation of social doctrine in the text. This encyclical is very distinctive in at least two regards, the first of which is that it chooses to present as a whole the development and narrative of Catholic social teaching, Catholic social doctrine, from “Rerum Novarum,” and indeed before, until now. It makes clear that when the church speaks in the voice of its social doctrine, it’s doing so by meditating on the Scriptures, on the tradition, and also on the living reality of the church as a discerning body in history: that to be concerned with matters of salvation is inherently to be concerned with matters of history. These are not divisible categories. The idea that the church just concerns itself with the sanctuary and with the salvation of souls and doesn’t have things to say about the flow of human history is an incoherent, impossible position for the church to occupy.
It gives that articulation, but in order to make that account, it has to then dwell in its own history. It can’t just make that more general observation about the duty of the church in terms of its mission to history. It has to show itself as a historical, thinking, reflecting, discerning body and the document does that. So, it calls for Catholic social teaching to be seen not as a kind of handbook that’s reached down from the shelf, and you flick through it and find some principles to apply to your life, but rather about the body of the church journeying through history alongside all people of goodwill, discerning history, walking together.
It’s an open text; it will have more things to say in the future as more social encyclicals, presumably, gradually emerge. Then within that, as a further development of that theme, it makes clear that there are certain things it might want to say about the status of certain doctrines and certain histories, including the history of slavery and the teaching of the church on slavery.
You get this unprecedented apology, the seeking of pardon in the name of the church institutional, not just individual Christians who thought and did the wrong thing.
CD: Which is the tone that Vatican apologies, papal apologies in the past, have taken on a number of issues.
AR: Yes, that’s right. It’s either been individual Christians and we lament the fact that they departed so far from the Gospel, or it’s been apologies to individual, specific groups of enslaved peoples. This is much more overarching: This is Black Atlantic, Indigenous, this is any instance where the church was involved in legitimating, through Leo’s predecessors—and he specifically notes that—the history of slavery. So, it is a significant movement of language and spirit, one might say, and a performance of the moral conscience that, in effect, the first part of the document is calling for: this historical awareness of the people on the move, who are open to conversion, which also means open to repentance.
The material on just war theory is really interesting. It is the area where I’ve had most questions in the many interviews that I’ve been doing over the last week. One of the areas that people are repeatedly asking for clarification [on] is what it means to say that just war theory is outdated. The church isn’t saying that there isn’t a right to self-defense, but that right now just war theory’s moral performance review is not looking so great. To use Cardinal Cupich’s rather nice line, just war theory was never meant to be a “permission slip” that allowed you to go to war because you ticked all the boxes, and so you could go off with a clear conscience.
The whole point is to minimize conflict and to seek to be a constructive participant in the ontology of peace, the fundamental order of peace that structures the Christian vision of society and the ends of the good. So that conversation is going to have to happen beyond the pages of this document.
CD: Anna, you were deeply invested in the Synod on Synodality process. I wanted to ask you about synodality in this document, particularly that Examen for the church at the end of chapter two. I’m struck that a lot of the document’s denunciation of inequality is then being turned on the church here, an institution that many observers would say is unequal because of its hierarchical structure. Do you think that it gives you any clues or any insights into how you foresee Pope Leo implementing synodality concretely in the church?
AR: It is a really distinctive section. The phrasing at the beginning of that paragraph is basically, “this is a matter close to my own heart,” so the personal voice of the pope feels very strong. He’s owning that in the encyclical very precisely.
Our synodal practice, being a synodal church, is how we are a common good community. That’s the claim of the text, which is [that] every voice must be heard. This is participation. These are the kind of watch words of the synod process itself. It’s basically taking Vatican II ecclesiology of the theology of all of the baptized and saying the common good, read internally, is synodality. And we can’t say we want the world to do this if we’re not doing our distinctively ecclesial version of that.
The bit that’s most controversial, in a way, if you are a kind of Catholic social teaching nerd, is the subsidiarity bit, because several decades ago there was an attempt to say that subsidiarity didn’t apply to the life of the church, that it only applied to the logic of the world—for reasons not dissimilar to some of your setup at the beginning in terms of the structure of the church—whereas this text very clearly says that subsidiarity has its analog form in the life of the church. Now, just to push back slightly on a little bit of your formulation, I think you can still say that elements of hierarchy apply without those being, inherently, inequities of power that are unjust.
CD: Yeah, I think this is a conversation we had a lot around the synod: In the end, a decision still must be taken by someone in a position of authority, and that doesn’t discount all of the consultation.
AR: Absolutely. And there’s a differentiated set of roles in a kind of appropriately Pauline way, that the body works together and that there is a certain kind of hierarchy that you can imagine within that for the sake of the functioning of the whole. And that can be coherent without that being an abuse of power, without that being dominating power over others.
The whole image of this document is shared power against a culture of dominating power. The question is really the kind of power that that one is using. Towards the end of the document, there’s a brief moment where St. Augustine’s two cities, the city of God and the earthly city, make a kind of entrance in terms of thinking about virtue and vice, and the differentiating factor between, “Are you a participant in the shared power of the heavenly city, or are you on the side of the earthly city—that is, is the desire to dominate?” It’s the libido dominandi, the desire to dominate, that marks out the earthly city from the heavenly city.
It’s entirely possible to think that that [libido dominandi], as Augustine made clear, can infect the church too, and its cultures. So how do we in church and society make sure that it’s not the libido dominandi, it’s not the desire for power as domination over others, that dominates, and rather that there’s a reality which may involve some hierarchy of a legitimate kind? And there are those who would want to argue that hierarchies are entirely natural. For others, it isn’t so natural. But how, given that the Catholic Church remains in some sense hierarchical, do we ensure that it is shared power, differentiated roles, properly with the charisms of the spirit? And that the church doesn’t have a culture of [dominating] power and the world isn’t addicted to a culture of power. That’s an integrated theme across this encyclical. And few things could be more timely than that call to a real examination of conscience over the exercise of power.
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