Did I Read A Different Encyclical?

We're missing the point of Magnifica Humanitas

Last week Pope Leo XIV released his first papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. If you’re like the vast majority of Catholics, you didn’t read it, but you got the gist from Catholic Twitter, Substack and cable news. The trouble is, I’m starting to wonder if we all got the same encyclical?

To hear the internet tell it, Pope Leo’s first encyclical was a mic drop on AI. You’d think the Pope had named a new deadly sin the way people are talking. Catholic businesses that had previously utilized AI for graphics are now selling their stores of merchandise at deep discounts, promising to use those funds to pay for human artists in their next project. On Instagram, creators who have been making stickers since long before AI was an option are uploading videos showing their creation process in order to avoid being accused of using AI art. It’s The Crucible all over again in the Catholic creator space, and everyone is on edge.

A live look at the Catholic Creator Space: “Did you approve this AI image?!”

Maybe I have a certain set of blinders on, but AI seemed to only be a small piece of the puzzle that the Holy Father was after. I could be wrong, but I thought I read an encyclical that restated the principles of Catholic social teaching. These principles were first laid out by Jesus in the New Testament but during the industrial revolution it seemed people struggled to apply them to the changing world.

Enter Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum.

Now, Pope Leo XIV saw this same difficulty applying Christ’s teachings to the information age and is bringing them to life for a new generation.

At the turn of the last century, humanity was grappling with how to fairly move on in an age of industrialization and tenant farming. These are not concepts that have a lot of meaning for a 21st century audience, particularly not one that is notorious for having a short attention span. The principles of subsidiarity, solidarity, and human dignity were the primary focus on Magnifica Humanitas and AI was one of many issues in which those principles must be applied. But to limit Magnifica Humanitas to simply an encyclical about AI means completely overlooking everything that was said about the affronts to human dignity found in pornography, social media, and optimization.

This was the bad-guy of technology for Leo XIII. Less scary in retrospect.

No, I’m convinced that we are all working with blinders on when we are talking about Magnifica Humanitas. Because AI, and particularly AI art, presents an easy way to signal our solidarity with the Pope, our “good Catholic” status. We’ve taken this document and reduced it to a simple declaration about whether or not AI art is forbidden. But we will continue to use Amazon, to the detriment of local business without a second thought. We will continue to have iPhones and order DoorDash. We’ve lost the plot.

The magnificence of the human person is in his or her complicated nature. There is no one solution that will signal we have perfected the art of honoring human dignity. Like everything else in our Catholic faith, Magnifica Humanitas is asking us to engage in the slow, tedious, incremental and unsexy work of daily reviewing our choices and attempting to conform them to God’s will in an age where we are often interacting with one another in disembodied ways.

As a person who spends most of her time thinking about people lost on the digital continent, this statement from Pope Leo was such a relief. Basically, since Pope Benedict XVI coined the term “digital continent”, the folks who now make up Evangelization Lab have known this was our Calcutta. It’s good to know the Holy Father sees our mission field. The disembodied encounter with Christ is basically all I ever think about. (Once my dad asked me when I would be done working and I told him “I won’t be done until the whole internet knows and loves Jesus.” I suspect he just wanted to know when I could take him to the grocery store, but I digress.) For me, the heart of Magnifica Humanitas is how do we uphold human dignity in an age of effective dualism. When people see their bodies as separate from themselves and most of their interactions are or could be anonymized.

“Duty Calls” by Randall Munroe

I caught myself reading and rereading paragraph 238 which says in part:

“We all need to learn how to engage with the digital world in a human way, as an integral part of our education in the faith and in a life lived according to the Gospel. Indeed, we must consider the digital world as a new continent to be evangelized, one that requires generous missionaries who are mature in the faith.”

This is, to me, the true challenge of Magnifica Humanitas. Not whether or not I’ve used AI art to make a joke on Twitter, but is my online life compatible with what I claim to believe as a Christian. Is my love of Christ so apparent that it seeps out in every encounter I have, face to face or digital? Because what good is a declaration that I will not use AI art, if my very next post degrades someone I disagree with politically? What good is it to employ a human artist if it means my product is now unattainable for the poor? If I continue to harp on optimized prayer life and perfect adherence to the Pious Rules of Katie, to the detriment of those who are just learning to trust Christ for the first time, how have I preserved human dignity?

I haven’t.

Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope’s encyclical about AI, is not about AI. It’s about rediscovering humanity in a world that has lost it. And that’s gonna take a lot more work than just unsubscribing to ChatGPT. We won’t “mend the nets”, as Pope Leo told the digital missionaries and Catholic influencers last summer, by turning away from technology, we will mend them by turning toward one another.