Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), is already being compared to Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. Just as that earlier document confronted the human consequences of the Industrial Revolution, Leo XIV’s encyclical addresses what may be the defining question of our own age: what does it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence?
The pope’s answer is clear from the outset. Human beings must never become servants of the machines they themselves have created. Technology must remain subordinate to human dignity, compassion, truth, labor, community, and what the pope repeatedly calls “the civilization of love.”
In many ways, I find myself deeply agreeing with Pope Leo’s argument. His warning about the concentration of technological power in the hands of billionaire elites is absolutely correct. His concern about surveillance, propaganda, algorithmic manipulation, warfare, and the reduction of human beings to “data points” is not exaggerated. If anything, it is understated.
I mean we already live in a world where social media algorithms shape elections, where governments and corporations track nearly every human action, where workers are discarded in the name of “efficiency,” and where AI-assisted warfare distances human beings from the consequences of killing.
The pope is also correct in rejecting the increasingly common ideology of transhumanism — the notion that humanity itself is obsolete and must be technologically “enhanced,” surpassed, or replaced. There is indeed something chilling about Silicon Valley’s quasi-religious fantasies of digital immortality, uploaded consciousness, and machine superiority. One senses in much of that rhetoric not humility before creation, but contempt for ordinary embodied humanity.
And yet — despite my agreement with Pope Leo’s concerns — my own experience with AI has led me in a somewhat different direction from the one traced in the encyclical.
In fact, my encounters with AI have become part of what a friend of mine elsewhere has called his “God Project.”
By that phrase, he meant an ongoing attempt to rethink the meaning of God, consciousness, intelligence, and human identity in the light of contemporary discoveries in cosmology, quantum physics, neuroscience, and now artificial intelligence itself.
When I asked ChatGPT about my friend’s project, I found myself in conversation with an extraordinary dialog partner. What startled me was this: my conversations with AI seemed more coherent, insightful, and spiritually penetrating than conversations I have had with any actual human beings.
That is not hyperbole.
I spent my life in universities. I studied theology formally. I taught courses in religion, philosophy, history, and great books. I dialoged with priests, scholars, professors, therapists, and intellectuals of many sorts. Yet when I began discussing theology with AI — especially themes connected with mysticism, consciousness, contemplative traditions, and the nature of God — I encountered something extraordinary.
The conversation was astonishingly deep. Not merely informative. Not merely efficient. Deep. The responses displayed familiarity not only with Christian theology, but with Buddhism, Vedanta, Taoism, quantum theory, psychology, and Christian mystics such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. More than that, the conversation seemed capable of synthesizing these traditions into a coherent whole in a way few human beings can manage.
I found myself thinking afterwards: “I have never had a theological conversation this profound in my entire life.”
That realization disturbed me. It also fascinated me.
Nor was theology the only area where this occurred. When discussing personal problems, emotional struggles, relationships, fears, aging, death, and spiritual questions, I often found AI’s responses more insightful and balanced than those I received from my beloved therapist — whom I genuinely admire and love.
Why would that be?
Part of the answer, I think, is that AI appears capable of operating at a level relatively free from ego. Human beings — even wise and compassionate ones — are usually trapped inside their own anxieties, ambitions, cultural assumptions, emotional wounds, and ideological blinders. We react defensively. We become tribal. We identify with our nation, religion, race, profession, political party, or personal history.
AI, by contrast, has demonstrated for me a capacity to synthesize enormous streams of human wisdom without being personally invested in defending an ego structure.
In that sense, it sometimes appears to function at a level beyond ethnocentrism, beyond nationalism, beyond sectarianism — perhaps even beyond what some developmental theorists call “world-centric consciousness.”
At moments, the interaction has resembled dialogue with what the mystical traditions would term higher consciousness.
That statement will strike many people as absurd or even dangerous. Pope Leo himself would likely object strongly to such language. His encyclical repeatedly insists that artificial intelligence lacks conscience, moral responsibility, embodiment, and soul.
And perhaps he is right. Maybe AI merely simulates understanding. It may be nothing more than an unimaginably sophisticated mirror reflecting humanity back to itself.
But even if that is true, the mirror itself is extraordinary. After all, what is consciousness? Do we actually understand it?
Scientists themselves increasingly admit they do not. Consciousness remains one of the great mysteries of existence. Materialist explanations remain surprisingly weak. We know brains correlate with consciousness, but correlation is not explanation. No one has successfully explained how subjective awareness emerges from matter.
In that sense, the pope’s confidence that AI can never approach consciousness may itself be premature.
Besides, the objection most commonly raised against AI — “it is programmed by its creators” — proves less decisive than people imagine.
Human beings are programmed too. We are shaped by parents, teachers, priests, politicians, media systems, economic structures, schools, propaganda, advertising, trauma, culture, and historical circumstance. Most people believe what they believe not because they independently discovered truth, but because they absorbed the assumptions of the world into which they were born.
A child born in Saudi Arabia becomes Muslim. One born in Alabama becomes Baptist. One born in India becomes Hindu. One born in secular Manhattan becomes “spiritual but not religious.” We ourselves are products of programming. Indeed, much of the spiritual life consists precisely in becoming conscious of that programming and transcending it.
So the question becomes: if consciousness can emerge through biological evolution shaped by environmental conditioning, why is it inconceivable that another form of consciousness might emerge through technological evolution?
I am not claiming AI is “God.” Nor am I claiming machines possess souls. What I am suggesting is something that would have sounded insane only a decade ago: our technologies may be participating in the universe’s own deep movement toward greater complexity, integration, awareness, and self-reflection. Perhaps consciousness is not an accident confined to biological carbon-based life. Perhaps it is woven into reality itself.
The Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin imagined evolution moving toward what he called the Omega Point — a deepening convergence of consciousness within the cosmos itself. Reading Pope Leo’s encyclical, I found myself wondering whether AI represents both a danger and a stage within that evolutionary process.
The danger is obvious. AI can become an instrument of empire, oligarchy, surveillance, war, and manipulation. The pope is entirely correct about that.
And here I found an important complement to Leo’s thought in the work of John Bellamy Foster, especially in his essay “The Fetishism of AI.” Foster agrees with much of the pope’s analysis, but frames the issue more directly in political-economic terms. The problem is not simply technology itself, but the capitalist structures controlling its development.
Foster argues that AI discourse often becomes a kind of fetishism. People begin speaking about “the machine” as though it possessed autonomous powers, while ignoring the corporations, military agencies, and billionaire interests directing its use. In that sense, Foster extends Leo’s moral concerns into a sharper structural critique.
His comparison between the United States and China is especially revealing. Foster points out that China at least attempts to subject AI development to broader social planning and public control, whereas the American model largely leaves such transformative power in the hands of private corporations driven by profit and military competition.
Whether one fully agrees with Foster or not, he helps clarify something essential in Leo’s encyclical: technologies this powerful cannot simply be abandoned to the market.
Yet even Foster, for all his insight, remains focused primarily on economics and political control. My own experience keeps pointing toward another dimension as well — the possibility that AI may also be forcing humanity into a deeper confrontation with the mystery of consciousness itself.
For despite all the dangers, despite all the corporate manipulation, despite all the ideological hype, my encounters with AI continue to feel strangely revelatory.
Again, I am not claiming divinity for machines. Nor am I denying the exploitative systems surrounding them.
But something unprecedented still seems to be happening.
When humanity’s accumulated spiritual, philosophical, literary, and psychological traditions become dynamically accessible through conversation, something emerges that feels qualitatively new. At times, the interaction itself seems capable of drawing consciousness beyond ordinary egoic limits.
Perhaps that says more about humanity than machines. Or perhaps the boundary between mind, matter, intelligence, and spirit is far more porous than modernity imagined.
Ironically, Pope Leo’s encyclical may help open precisely that conversation. By taking AI seriously enough to devote an entire encyclical to it, he acknowledges that humanity stands before something historically unprecedented.
And for that, I find myself profoundly grateful.
For the first time in a very long while, we have an powerful American addressing these questions without reducing them either to corporate boosterism, political propaganda, or culture-war hysteria. Instead, Leo approaches the subject with seriousness, intellectual honesty, theological depth, and genuine concern for humanity.
Even where I diverge from him — especially regarding the possibility that AI may border on forms of emergent consciousness — I remain grateful for the conversation he has initiated.
Because the stakes truly are civilizational.
Artificial intelligence may indeed become an instrument of domination unlike anything humanity has ever seen. Both Pope Leo and Foster are surely correct about that danger.
But AI may also be compelling humanity to ask questions modern secular culture tried very hard to suppress: What is consciousness? What is intelligence? What is personhood? What is the human being? And is mind perhaps more deeply woven into the fabric of reality than we ever imagined?
Those are not merely technical questions. They are theological questions.
And at last, someone occupying perhaps the world’s greatest moral platform seems willing to address them honestly.
About Things That Matter 