(LifeSiteNews) — LifeSiteNews’ own Bruce Sabalaskey continues today his four-part analysis of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. In Part One, Bruce examined what Pope Leo got right about the dangers of AI. In Part Two, he points out what the encyclical gets wrong. 

In Part I of this review, I argued that Magnifica Humanitas (MH) identifies many real dangers of artificial intelligence. AI can manipulate truth, exploit children, weaken judgment, degrade work, centralize power, automate exclusion, intensify war, and create the machinery of social control. Those warnings should not be dismissed.

But identifying a danger is only the first part of the task. The next question is whether the proposed response is adequate.

This is where MH fails. Its diagnosis of many AI dangers is often sound, but its proposed cure relies much too heavily on dialogue, shared responsibility, institutional oversight, global management, and modern social-doctrine language. It does not sufficiently ground its answer in divine law, the Ten Commandments, repentance, grace, Christ the King, and the salvation of souls.

The result is a document that correctly identifies what AI can do wrong but is deficient in explaining what man must do right.

READ: Pope Leo diagnoses the dangers of AI but fails to provide the cure

The central problem: truth is not negotiated

The most serious problem is MH’s reliance on dialogue as part of the Church’s response. Dialogue has a legitimate place. Men can discuss prudential applications. Engineers, parents, lawmakers, priests, teachers, and workers may need to deliberate about how best to apply moral principles to concrete situations.

But dialogue cannot create truth.

This distinction matters. There is a proper place for discussion about applying the moral law in concrete circumstances. But there is no proper place for treating the moral law itself as the product of consultation among conflicting worldviews. Catholics do not need dialogue to discover whether abortion is evil, whether sexual immorality and unnatural vice are evil, whether terrorism is evil, whether idolatry is evil, or whether revealed truth can be reduced to private interpretation. These matters are not waiting for consensus. They have already been determined by divine law, natural law, and the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.

MH says that dialogue belongs to the Church’s vocation and presents it as a means of identifying new paths for the common good and a dignified life for all (13–16). It also speaks of synodality as a space where pluralism can help humanity rediscover its foundations and final end (231–233).

This is where the document becomes deeply problematic.

Truth is not the result of negotiation, discovered by averaging opinions, or generated by a synodal process. Recent synodal documents contain examples of what happens when listening, testimony, and discernment play host to positions that conflict with Catholic moral teaching. Study Group 9’s final report from the Synod on Synodality is one such example. Truth is not produced by dialogue among competing worldviews. The Church may listen in order to understand, correct, and convert, but she does not listen in order to receive doctrine from error. Truth comes from God, is knowable through reason and revelation, and is taught authoritatively by the Catholic Church. That truth should be proclaimed and explained, not mixed with error.

This matters especially with AI. Artificial intelligence will be used by men with false religions, philosophies, and moral systems, corrupt political ambitions, sexual agendas, anti-Christian ideologies, commercial incentives, and military goals. If the Church approaches such a world primarily through dialogue, without clearly demanding divine law as the world’s foundation, then the response will be compromised.

The Catholic Church was not founded by Jesus Christ to negotiate truth with the world. The Catechism says that “in obedience to the command of her founder,” the Church “strives to preach the Gospel to all men” (CCC 849). That is the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” (Mt. 28:19–20). The Church’s mission is proclamation, conversion, baptism, and salvation. Dialogue may assist that mission, but it cannot replace it.

Dialogue may help explain the truth. It may help apply the truth. It may help remove misunderstandings. But dialogue cannot determine the truth.

AI needs commandments, not negotiated ethics

The nature of AI makes this issue more urgent. AI systems do not have conscience. They do not know good and evil. They do not fear God. They do not answer before the judgment seat of Christ. They do not repent. They do not understand truth, justice, purity, mercy, or salvation.

MH itself says AI must not be equated with human intelligence, since it imitates some functions of intelligence while remaining bound to data processing (99). It also says AI lacks experience, embodiment, love, friendship, responsibility, and moral conscience (100). That part is correct. But it is precisely because AI lacks conscience that it must be governed by clear and absolute moral limits.

This is where MH should have spoken more plainly in the language of the Ten Commandments. AI must not kill. It must not steal. It must not bear false witness. It must not corrupt chastity. It must not undermine parents. It must not become an idol or oracle. It must not inflame covetousness. It must not assist blasphemy. It must not become a tool for enslaving man to sin.

Instead, MH tends to speak in softer institutional language: dialogue, shared responsibility, inclusion, social justice, integral development, cooperation, participation, and global common good (60–73, 80–85, 163–164, 185–187). Some of those concepts can be understood in an orthodox way. But they are not a substitute for the commandments of God.

Even some classic science fiction understands part of this problem. Isaac Asimov, an atheist humanist, imagined robots governed by hard laws that prevented them from harming human beings. His fictional laws are not Catholic and are certainly incomplete, but they reflect a basic insight: powerful machines require firm prohibitions. That has been forgotten. Asimov’s laws put the human person clearly above the machine. Modern AI thinking often blurs that hierarchy. It talks about “responsible use,” “governance,” “guardrails,” “alignment,” “values,” “stakeholders,” “rights,” “inclusion,” “safety,” and even possible AI consciousness.

A Catholic document should go further. It should say that no AI system, platform, government, military command, corporate policy, or dialogue process may authorize what God forbids.

A Catholic AI ethic must be bound to divine law because man is fallen.

READ: Leo XIV’s new encyclical makes Christ equivalent to mere human beings

The problem is fallen man, not technology alone

MH correctly says technology is not neutral in practice because technology carries the purposes, incentives, assumptions, and power structures of those who design, finance, regulate, and use it (85, 92–96, 102–105). That is true as far as it goes. But a Catholic document must press deeper.

AI is not the moral agent. AI does not sin. Men sin.

The programmer sins when he designs deception into the system. The executive sins when he monetizes addiction or impurity. The ruler sins when he uses surveillance to punish conscience. The soldier sins when he delegates killing to an automated system. The user sins when he uses AI to slander, lust, steal, cheat, or manipulate. And those in authority sin when they hide behind the machine to evade responsibility for the decisions they made or permitted.

MH does affirm that those who design, train, authorize, and use technology remain accountable, especially in military contexts (199–200). But accountable to whom? That principle should have been made central to the whole document.

In a fallen world, misuse of AI is not merely possible, it is predictable. Every powerful tool created by man will eventually be used by some men for pride, greed, lust, deception, domination, or violence.

That means the cure cannot be merely procedural. It cannot be merely better governance, dialogue, or a wider table of stakeholders. The cure must begin with moral law and conversion.

Sin must be named. Repentance must be preached. The commandments must be applied. Grace must be sought. Jesus Christ must reign over technology as He must reign over every human work.

Human dignity is not enough by itself

MH frequently speaks about human dignity. Much of that language is true. Man is made in the image and likeness of God. He must not be reduced to data, productivity, utility, or technical performance. AI must remain subordinate to the human person (48–59, 97–100, 115–118).

But “human dignity” alone is not a sufficient Catholic framework.

In modern Church documents, human dignity is often used as a broad social principle detached from the sharper doctrines that give it full Catholic meaning: creation, sin, grace, redemption, the commandments, judgment, heaven, hell, and the supernatural destiny of man.

A purely humanist language of dignity can easily become vague. Many groups claim to defend dignity: secular humanists, progressive bureaucrats, global institutions, AI companies, abortion supporters. (Amnesty International argues that abortion access can allow people to live with “dignity and autonomy,” and its abortion policy says criminalizing abortion is “a profound violation of human dignity.”) Even a state that surveils and censors its population may claim that it does so to protect dignity, safety, equality, or inclusion.

Catholic teaching must say more.

Man has dignity because he is created by God, made in His image, redeemed by Jesus Christ, and called to eternal life. But man is also fallen. He is not merely vulnerable; he is sinful. He does not need only protection from dehumanizing technology. He needs conversion from sin and salvation in Jesus Christ.

That distinction changes the response. If AI is treated only as a threat to dignity, the proposed solution will tend toward policy, oversight, inclusion, and governance. But if AI is understood also as a tool by which fallen man can commit sin at scale, then the solution must include divine law, natural law, and moral absolutes.

MH does not give sufficient weight to that second frame.

The social language drifts toward collectivism

Another weakness is MH’s repeated use of modern social-doctrine categories with collectivist tendencies.

The document speaks often of shared responsibility, social justice, inclusion, integral development, universal destination of goods, institutional cooperation, and global common good (60–73, 80–85, 163–164, 185–187). Some of these terms have legitimate Catholic meanings. Properly understood, social justice is not socialism. Solidarity is not collectivism. The universal destination of goods does not abolish private property. Subsidiarity forbids higher authorities from absorbing the functions of lower bodies.

But in MH these terms often feel tilted toward a global managerial solution, as globalist elites want. MH’s solution seems to be: because AI concentrates power, the states, transnational institutions, and international frameworks must coordinate the response (64, 71–72, 108–109, 163–164, 185–187).

That may sound reasonable until one remembers that states and transnational institutions are themselves major sources of danger. A private technology oligarchy is dangerous, but so is a public or international technology bureaucracy.

The answer to AI domination is not a larger system of digital governance managed by the same class of officials who already believe speech, financial access, family morality, and religion should be supervised for the “common good” as they define it.

For example, in Canada, a liberal democracy, Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, would, if passed, expand Criminal Code hate-propaganda and hate-crime provisions.  These expansions would pose an obvious danger for Catholics and other Christians: traditional teaching on homosexuality, transgenderism, marriage, and the family could be treated not as religious and moral doctrine, but as criminal “hate.” Canada’s Online Harms Act debate offered a similar threat in the digital sphere, where “safety” language can become a framework for broad speech regulation. The Emergencies Act response to the Freedom Convoy, which included freezing personal bank accounts, showed that financial access can also be restricted during political crises. These are not theoretical concerns.

Traditional Catholic teaching offers a better framework: moral law, personal responsibility, family authority, private property rightly ordered, subsidiarity, local associations, national sovereignty, the rights of the Church, and the Social Kingship of Christ.

MH mentions some of these ideas, especially subsidiarity and the family (69–72, 143), but its emphasis lies elsewhere.

The ‘universal destination’ problem

One of the clearest examples is MH’s treatment of digital goods. The document extends the universal destination of goods to patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure, and data (66–67, 108–109).

This is a serious error in application.

READ: AI detector finds Pope Leo’s new encyclical was partly AI-generated: report

The traditional Catholic doctrine of the universal destination of goods is rooted primarily in the goods of creation: the earth and its resources, given by God for the sustenance of mankind. It does not abolish private property. It does not mean everything belongs to everyone collectively. Catholic teaching strongly defends private property, especially property acquired through labor, saving, invention, inheritance, gift, and family responsibility.

Digital goods are not like rivers, forests, or farmland. A patent, an algorithm, a code base, a platform, a data center, and a software system are the fruit of human intellect, labor, capital risk, skill, maintenance, and ownership.

Such goods certainly have moral obligations attached to them. They may need regulation in cases of fraud, monopoly, exploitation, national security, grave public necessity, or abuse. But it is wrong to treat them broadly as goods “universally intended for everyone” in the same way as created earthly goods necessary for human life.

That language damages the Catholic defense of private property and gives theological cover to collectivist claims over digital labor.

For a software engineer, this is not abstract. Code is work. Architecture is work. Infrastructure is work. Data stewardship is work. Platform maintenance is work. Security is work. To classify these things under a broad universal claim without careful protection of ownership, privacy, contract, and subsidiarity is not justice. Taken literally, such language would imply that privately written code, business systems, architecture, data assets, and data stewardship somehow fall under a universal claim of access by others, including foreign states, hostile regimes, competitors, or ideological opponents. That is not Catholic social teaching. It is wrong.

The missing supernatural end

The deeper problem beneath all of this is that MH’s horizon is too earthly.

It speaks often of safeguarding humanity, building fraternity, protecting dignity, ensuring inclusion, promoting justice, and ordering technology toward the common good (1–16, 60–73, 185–187, 229–245). Again, many of these concerns are legitimate. But the dominant tone is humanist and institutional, not penitential and evangelical.

Where is the clear call to repentance? Where is the centrality of the salvation of souls? Where is the warning that AI can become an instrument of mortal sin? Where is the insistence that man must obey the commandments of God? Where is Christ the King, not merely as a devotional idea, but as the ruler of technologies, societies, economies, and states?

The Church’s mission is not to help mankind build a safer technological civilization. The Church’s mission is to bring men to Christ so they may be saved. Technology can assist that mission when rightly ordered, but it cannot become the horizon of the mission.

That does not mean the Church should ignore AI governance, labor, education, children, warfare, privacy, or social control. She should speak about all of these. But she must speak as the Church, not as a chaplaincy for global humanitarian ethics. Unfortunately, that latter point seems to be MH’s goal.

Feet of iron and clay

MH uses the image of Babel, and that image is appropriate (7–10). A purely secular AI project can indeed become a new Tower of Babel: man building upward by technical power, and trying to recreate himself via transhumanism, while excluding God.

But another biblical image also comes to mind: the feet of iron and clay in Daniel 2:33.

MH contains iron. It says true things about AI, human dignity, technological domination, work, war, children, surveillance, and the limits of machine intelligence (80, 85, 97–100, 132–142, 150–155, 170–171, 197–200). Those warnings should not be dismissed.

But it also contains clay. Its solution is undermined by modern humanist assumptions, collectivist social language, misplaced confidence in dialogue, global institutional thinking, and a failure to ground AI ethics clearly in the commandments, repentance, grace, and salvation.

That fragile mixture is not strong enough to support a truly Catholic response to AI.

Conclusion: the cure must be fully Catholic

MH is right that AI must be morally governed. It is right that man must not be reduced to data. It is right that machines must not replace conscience. It is right that AI can become a tool of domination (85, 97–100, 170–171, 197–200).

But MH does not give the cure with sufficient Catholic force.

The cure is not dialogue as though truth were negotiable. The cure is not global management dressed in the language of shared responsibility. The cure is not a humanist social order with Catholic vocabulary added to it. The cure is the rule of Jesus Christ over man and all his works.

AI must be judged by God’s law. It must be subordinated to the Ten Commandments. It must serve truth, chastity, life, family, property, work, justice, and the salvation of souls. It must never become an idol, an oracle, a weapon against conscience, or a machine for sin.

That is what MH should have said plainly.

Part III will attempt to state that missing framework directly: Ten Catholic Commandments for AI.

Bruce Sabalaskey is LifeSiteNews’ Web Development Engineer. He has been a member of the LifeSiteNews IT team for over 8 years.