Exploring Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas on our opinion page this week, former Catholic Register Publisher-Editor Joseph Sinasac writes that a key to the Holy Father’s recent AI encyclical is its reassertion that a human face is the heart of history.

“I invite everyone to contemplate, in the face of the Son of God, the grandeur of humanity that shines a light also on the era of AI,” Sinasac cites Pope Leo. “(A) human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history.” 

Not even a tech bro full of Silicon Valley prophecies could find just cause to dispute that, although a few sufficiently grounded in the real world might go a vital step further and add that at the heart of the heart of human history is art.

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Indeed, a tiny cohort with their eyes wide open enough would recognize – and argue for – a foundational truth. The creative drive behind the multiple millions of artistic forms humanity has birthed since our ancestors first began painting cave walls is ultimately the Creator creating through us, His creations.

Sadly, it’s a truth lost to many in the last several generations of Catholics whose eyes have grown dim to the extraordinary richness of the arts that Holy Mother Church has given birth to, nurtured, protected, brought to maturity and offered as her maternal gifts to the entire world. The almost embittering paradox is that the secular and non-Christian worlds still flock to our physical churches to revel in the very beauties that we have shared and that far too many Catholics now find wanting.

Yet lest hope be lost, our faith will forever centre on the greatest dramatic artwork ever compiled by human hands moved by the Holy Spirit, guided as free gift by God. That would, obviously, be the Passion of Our Lord, the zenith of the Biblical narrative. Even the atheist Jewish literary critic Harold Bloom, referring to the King James Version, called it “the sublime summit of literature in English.”

And as the Register’s Associate Editor, Quinton Amundson, notes in his column, it is literature whose truth still literally moves human beings when it appears as music, text, or on stage. Faithful to the Passion’s own origins in fishing villages and among ordinary people, the stage need not be encountered in the world’s grand theatrical venues.

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It can be in the desiccated, harsh landscape of Alberta’s Badlands. As Amundson writes, after he and his family earlier this month attended “the immersive reenactment about the ministry, sacrificial death and glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ” the drama “lingered with us long after we departed the prehistorically scenic…Badlands.”

No doubt many of the 300,000 or so spectators who’ve been present before the 400-acre set since the first staging in 1994 have come away with that same inspired sense of dramatic awe. In his column, Amundson calls on readers to provide the host Badlands Amphitheatre Society with urgently needed financial support, and we echo that plea editorially.

But any such gifts would exponentially increase their value if their donors could add an appeal to family, friends, loved ones, wealthy benefactors to reflect deeply on the profound importance of art for faith’s sake. We are living in the heart of a long stretch of history when art has become, and been largely deployed as, a battering ram for disbelief. 

More than a century ago, the creative impulse was corrupted toward the breaking down of even the possibility of truth, much less Truth. For 10 decades or longer, what’s spread in the wake of “advanced art” has been sour cynicism regurgitating the old lie that human beings are no better than beasts. As Pope Leo contends in Magnifica Humanitas, to allow AI and its fallacious “intelligence” to reduce us even further to the level of mere machines would be a species of sin at least as blasphemous as the sin of suicide. 

Deacon Robert Kinghorn, in his column this week that is not about AI but about aiding those who need hope, artfully echoes Pope Leo’s message about the historic place of the human face in warding off that sin, that blasphemy. 

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“As the old saying goes, “God does not make junk,” Kinghorn writes. “Contemplating Jesus on the Cross reminds us that we believe in a God who cares for us, a God who forgives us, a God who brings life and salvation….”

Or as the old hymn that we send heavenward to our Lord and Saviour has it: “How great Thou art. How great Thou art.”