Examining AI, and concerns, through a Christian lens

This fall some Catholics along with other Christians will get together in small reading groups across Canada to think their way together through Pope Leo XIV’s landmark encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas.

Organized by the Canadian Council of Churches, even before a Sept. 18 sign-up deadline these Magnifica Humanitas reading groups had well over 100 participants committed to monthly, in-person meetings to discuss the encyclical chapter-by-chapter.

The reading groups are the brain-child of Anglican theologian and Canadian Council of Churches project officer Michael Buttrey, who also works for the World Council of Churches in Geneva as a project officer for its Faith and Science Working Group. Before Magnifica Humanitas came off the presses, Buttrey was already worried that, driven by the business press, our discussion about artificial intelligence seemed shallow and insubstantial.

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“I was honestly despairing that anyone would have any really thoughtful analysis of what’s going on in the current moment — why we are being pushed into considering AI in this way, as both some kind of a deep intelligence and as a solution to some set of problems that maybe we didn’t know we had,” Buttrey said. “Increasing people’s productivity and putting a bunch of people out of work doesn’t seem like exactly the world I want to live in.”

As he spoke about his own theologically informed anxieties over the development and promotion of AI, he discovered all sorts of Christians shared his concerns.

“It was actually a Mennonite colleague of mine who suggested, ‘Well, maybe we should get together and start reading this (encyclical) together,’ ” Buttrey said.

By “getting together” Buttrey and his friends actually mean getting together — live and in person.

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“When we look at the world today, there’s a real desire to maintain true human contact,” he said.

While online meeting tools such as Zoom and WhatsApp are being used to organize the groups, each reading group of eight to 10 people will sit down together in somebody’s living room or a parish meeting hall, copies of the encyclical in hand, to talk it through.

It’s a small act of resistance against the digital simulation of real life that goes far beyond the technology we now call artificial intelligence, said Buttrey.

“Really, I think, we’re talking about an attack on life — on the sort of holistic, embodied life,” he said. “It threatens the liveliness of life, if I can put it that way. It threatens to reduce us to just interactions with a chatbot. (We become) a producer of words that might not be as fast or detailed as the average chatbot. You know, what place is there for human beings in the kind of economy and society that we’re imagining with the adoption of this technology?”

Catholics should hardly find it surprising that this papal encyclical is finding an audience beyond the walls of Catholic theology, said Fr. Gordon Rixon, Catholic systematic theologian and president of Regis College in Toronto.

“There's an acknowledgement (generally) that the social, political, technological context is changing dramatically,” said the Jesuit scholar. “So whenever you apply a principle to the real world, there are always judgments, perceptions and judgments of fact… He's speaking to the world.”

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Buttrey is not eschewing the tools of modern technology entirely. After several months of in-person, small-group meetings, all participants will be invited to a nationwide webinar featuring Catholic ethicist Corey Labrecque of Université Laval, who has researched and written extensively on artificial intelligence.

The Canadian Council of Churches’ interest in artificial intelligence is not especially new, said Buttrey. In October of 2024 the CCC signed the Rome Call for AI Ethics which had been launched by the Pontifical Academy for Life in February of 2020 in collaboration with tech companies, institutions and governments.

A version of this article appeared in the October 04, 2026 issue of The Catholic Register with the headline "Examining AI, and concerns, through a Christian lens".