Matthew Harvey Sanders has long presaged the choice civilization must make between the golden path of artificial intelligence development leading to human flourishing and a dark road defined by existential dread and transhumanism.

In Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s historic first encyclical concerned with “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” the pontiff presented his own two-road metaphorical construct.

Leo warns that “technology has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice.” The Bishop of Rome is foreshadowing the inescapable decision confronting humanity between constructing a new Tower of Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem — a choice “between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.”

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Sanders, the Canadian creator of the world-leading Catholic Large Language Model (LLM) Magisterium AI, was inside the Vatican’s Synod Hall on May 25 for the encyclical signing event. He beheld seeds of the latter collaborative dynamic as Christopher Olah, the co-founder of Anthropic, and Amanda Askell, the Scottish philosopher who developed the Claude chatbot's inherent nature, exhibited their company’s AI ethics alliance with the Holy See. He said many more figures in the AI space are welcoming the arrival of Magnifica humanitas.

“What I'm seeing more than anything else is the industry desperately feels that some moral voice has to step in and just try to activate people because some heads of the biggest AI labs in the world are concerned about the disruption that AI and robotics will cause labour,” said Sanders. “They see this transition could likely be very rough as a result, and they're just not seeing enough (response). We forget that these heads of AI labs are not robots. They're people who have kids and care deeply about the future. They don't want to have to live in large security enclosures and travel with security details because they're the ones who end up breaking the world by releasing this new technology.”

Pope Leo issues a direct appeal in the missive to AI developers. He wrote that innovators “are called to embed values in their projects with due seriousness: with transparency, responsibility toward affected communities and careful attention to ensuring that what is being cultivated is a genuine good.”

Dr. Steven Umbrello, the managing director for the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies (IEET) and a senior research fellow at the University of Turin, considered paragraph 107 of the encyclical as particularly potent. The Pope wrote that alignment with human values is not sufficient. There must be the “courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice.”

Umbrello, a 33-year-old Toronto-born Catholic who co-authored the newly released Can AI Ever Be Human? Consciousness Explored, welcomed the Pope’s entreaty for society to arrive at a “concept of the good.”

“I think the essence is Jesus Christ,” said Umbrello. “The essence is the fullness of the truth that's in the hands of the Catholic Church. Because in the end, the decision is between objective moral values and relativism. And it seems that we're increasingly falling into the relativist trap, which leaves only power. So those who are in power decide what is right and wrong, and that's going to be exacerbated by systems like AI.”

A foundational principle of morality and social justice mentioned 100 times throughout Magnifica humanitas is dignity. The Pope rendered exhortations about the need to “recognize the inviolable dignity of every person” and resist appraising human limits — “incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — as a defect to be corrected.”

Calgary Bishop William McGrattan admired how Pope Leo XIV weaves in his predecessor Pope Francis’ teachings on integral human dignity and how it is tethered to more than just economic structures.

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“It's (tied) to social and political structures, even to the environment and not judging people in terms of what they lack, but realizing that humanity is limited, and this is part of our dignity,” said McGrattan. “We need to appreciate and understand that, and that needs to be part of this conversation as to how technology can either support limitations where we can see AI helping in areas of education or health care. At the same time, it can somewhat erode freedom, erode that sense of dignity and also dehumanize in its application.”

Umbrello said the teachings about dignity and the two divergent roads are epitomized persuasively in the concluding section centred on the Magnificat, the Song of Mary.

“The standard by which we judge AI is not efficiency,” said Umbrello. “It's not productivity. It's not economic growth. It's not my ability to produce more, to consume more.  It's the question of who benefits and who gets left behind. And Mary's prayer is always spoken from below, from the perspective of the vulnerable. And Pope Leo XIV is asking us to evaluate every AI system from exactly that perspective. Does this technology serve the person who has the least?”

Another key takeaway being voiced by those who have examined Magnifica humanitas is that this anticipated encyclical about AI articulates very little about LLMs and robotics technology.

Fr. Philip Larrey, a professor of theology at Boston College who has studied AI for decades, said Pope Leo XIV is honouring his namesake predecessor Pope Leo XIII with a document that could be deemed the 21st-century spiritual successor to Rerum Novarum. Released 135 years ago, during the Second Industrial Revolution, it's considered a bedrock of Catholic social teaching.

“People are beginning to understand (Magnifica humanitas) is Pope Leo's encyclical on social theory rather than Pope Leo's encyclical on AI,” said Larrey. “I think what we're going to see are more pronouncements on AI in the future. But this encyclical will remain as a point of reference. I think the Pope also realizes that the field changes so quickly that anything that he could say now is going to be irrelevant in two or three years if he did not point to the principles.”

McGrattan suggests the Holy See could release pastoral letters on AI for specific fields, such as education and health care, that follow up on the themes introduced in Magnifica humanitas. McGrattan’s next steps on engaging with AI include further study and discussion of the encyclical with fellow stakeholders of the Mission Collaboration Initiative. This network, established by the Alberta bishops in 2018, brings together Catholic leaders from health care, education, postsecondary education, social services and other disciplines to discuss critical issues that impact the Church’s missionary work.

As for Sanders and his colleague’s future work on Magisterium AI and other products developed by his company Longbeard, he said Magnifica humanitas is a call to action for him and his team to optimize their platform to empower lay Catholics to play their role in building up the Church during this emergent AI age.

“One of the things that we realized is it's not enough — it's certainly important, but not enough — to digitize the written patrimony of the Church and make it accessible,” said Sanders. “That is helpful, but it doesn't give people a sense of where the Church is at. How do we help address and contribute to that area?”

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Magisterium AI is now publishing statistics of every country and diocese around the world to give Catholics a snapshot of how their bishopric is faring spiritually (Mass attendance) and temporally (finances). Armed with this information, Sanders suggests lay Catholics can better discern how to respond and contribute.

Read Magnifica humanitas at vatican.va.