Views on Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI from higher education

Looking back to the days before Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence was presented, on 25 May 2026 in a hall a four-minute walk from the Sistine Chapel, Peter Kilpatrick, president of the Catholic University of America, told University World News that Magnifica Humanitas (MH) “was one of the most anticipated encyclicals of all time”.

The encyclical “creates this framework, saying, ‘This is how you look at complicated social justice issues, you look at it through this framework.’ I thought he laid out the whole of all those principles, and how we in the Catholic tradition think about it.

“But I think it’s really relevant to everyone, including university leaders and AI researchers, who are grappling with the technology’s meaning and its disruption, paying special attention,” said Kilpatrick.

The encyclical will have its most immediate impact on the 5.1 million students enrolled in 1,338 Catholic universities worldwide and on the 59.7 million students attending more than 157,000 Catholic primary and secondary schools, both being the world’s largest educational networks.

But the number of newspapers that published articles about “Magnifica Humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence” supports Kilpatrick’s point about the widespread interest beyond the university community in what Pope Leo said about AI.

Widespread interest, some disagreement

ChatGPT estimates the number of newspaper articles at approximately 1,100, with about 700 being in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese and other non-English language publications.

Secular newspapers such as The New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, Guardian, Globe and Mail and South China Morning Post, as well as Le Monde, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant and dozens of other newspapers published major stories and opinion pieces on the 42,000-word ‘pastoral letter’ that was also covered on secular television networks in numerous countries.

The encyclical also caught the eye of Rabbi A Berman, president of Yeshiva University in New York, who, across the obvious theological divide, spoke in much the same terms as did the Pope about the disruptive aspects and promise of AI at his university.

While Professor Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor who will be taking up his position at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, in August, is a secular philosopher and disagrees with several of Leo’s points, he told University World News: “Overall I think this is a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion of AI ethics.”

Peterson plans on including the encyclical’s third chapter, titled “Technology and Dominance: The grandeur of humanity in the light of the promises of AI”, in a new ethics course he will teach in the autumn.

Peterson disagrees with Leo’s claim that AI technology itself is value-neutral, and that the moral questions pertain to users of the technology or the use of the technology.

But he praised the encyclical and said that the interest it generated outside Catholic circles – and among university professors such as himself – “is due to the fact that the Catholic Church has, in a sense, earned [its] position in our society by writing good text, by having highly educated bishops and leaders who do actually think through things in a way that's worth taking seriously”.

Peterson stated: “I don’t agree with everything they say. But still their intellectual quality is high. Compare what the Pope writes to something said by many contemporary politicians. The intellectual quality is pretty impressive and you don't have to be a philosopher to see that. I think their intellectual rigour is praiseworthy. It’s well-deserved attention.”

AI’s growing role in warfare

Leo’s personal presentation of the encyclical was unprecedented. So too was the fact that he was accompanied by Chris Olah, co-founder of the AI-research company Anthropic, who shares Leo’s concerns about AI’s and the owners of major platforms’ threat to ‘human dignity’.

Equally concerning for the Pontiff (and Olah) is AI’s growing role in warfare: “…the decision to use lethal force cannot be delegated to opaque or automated processes” (MH para 200), which, as was reported by University World News in April 2024, is a major ethical and philosophical issue at war colleges.

Olah has spoken about the first issue several times, and just two months earlier (26 February), Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei informed the United States Department of Defense (DoD) that “we cannot in good conscience accede to their request” that the DoD continue to use Anthropic’s AI system, Claude, in kinetic military actions (that is, bombing and missile attacks) against Iran.

Within hours of Amodei’s statement, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced: “In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a ‘Supply-Chain Risk to National Security’. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic.”

The next day, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, indicated that he is considerably less bothered by these ethical concerns by agreeing to replace Anthropic.

ChatGPT has contracts with universities such as the California State University system (with approximately 470,000 students and 63,000 staff), Harvard, Arizona State, Clemson and Indiana universities, as well as deployment in universities in India, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Japan, the Philippines, Turkey, Britain and the United Arab Emirates.

Encyclical roots, current branches

Magnifica Humanitas is rooted in the Catholic Social Doctrine and its teachings about the dignity of each individual as being part of God’s creation. Since Leo is a member of the Augustinian order, the encyclical is often couched in terms defined by St Augustine of Hippo (present-day Annaba, Algeria), the Church Father who died in 430 AD and is best known as being the author of the influential Christian philosophy text The City of God.

According to Kilpatrick, Leo follows Augustine in at least two ways.

First, Leo uses the metaphor of the ‘two cities’. “A very characteristic element of Augustinian thought,” explains Kilpatrick, “is the transcendence of the heavenly city. As you know, God is God, and we are humans [in the earthly city], and there's a lot of messiness in human society, but the heavenly city is beautiful, true, good, and perfect.”

Secondly, said Kilpatrick: “Augustine was always trying to move towards the unitive. He was trying to build unity among persons, and you see that very much in Pope Leo. If you were to ask, what is the one greatest theme that the Holy Father, that Pope Leo, has focused on in his first year of his pontificate, it's the unity of Christians and Catholics but also the unity of all humankind, and I think you see that in this encyclical.”

Yet, as is the case with the Urbi et Orbi (to the city, Rome, and the world), the papal addresses at Easter and Christmas, Leo reaches beyond Catholic theology and addresses non-Catholics concerned about AI.

Leo does this in two ways.

First, by writing the majority of the document in powerful, at times colloquial, English that characterises AI and its impact on education in terms rather distanced from how AI’s corporate and university boosters use it.

For example, last February, Mildred Garcia, chancellor of California State University, fairly crowed on National Public Radio, “No other university in the US or internationally is doing anything like this, not on this scale,” when interviewed on the university’s $13 million contract with OpenAI for ChatGPT Edu.

Not to be outdone, on the day this article was written, the University of Texas at Austin announced that: “As one of the first research universities to provide both leading platforms [ChatGPT Edu and Claude Edu] to its entire community at no cost, the University of Texas is committed to ensuring every Longhorn, including students, has access to the tools shaping the future of work and learning.”

For Leo, at “the root of these problems [for example, Big Tech’s control of AI and how researchers, including at universities, are apt to use it] lies a technocratic and post-humanist mentality that tends to regard the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimised, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit. What prevails is efficiency, rather than respect for freedom and human dignity”.

“Some post-humanist currents,” Leo continues, “even go so far as to envision ‘second-class’ human beings, subordinate to the interests of elites who consider themselves superior. This troubling prospect becomes all the more serious when combined with technological tools that exponentially increase the capacity for control and selection.

“Even certain forms of structural indebtedness, which keep entire peoples in conditions of dependence, reflect the same mentality, in new forms, that tolerates relationships of subordination akin to slavery” (MH, para 172).

Encyclicals do not name names. But among those Leo had to have had in mind here is Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of Palantir, a software service company that has contracts with the US DoD and has developed AI surveillance systems, and whose public statements about the Antichrist are, according to Italian theologian Father Paolo Benanti, “a sustained act of heresy”.

Thiel, who was openly contemptuous of the late Pope Francis’s emphasis on the poor and marginalised, has argued that “freedom and democracy are incompatible”, with freedom in his view meaning unfettered economic support for technology, and laments the fact that women and the poor are enfranchised.

Human dignity must “not be obscured by the pressure of new ideologies or very powerful interests in today’s world”, wrote Leo.

“Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective.

From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognised as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalised.”

These last words evoke an echo of Immanuel Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ – the injunction that individuals should never be treated as an externally determined ‘means’ but, rather, are ‘ends’ in themselves.

“The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them,” writes Leo.

The second reach-out to non-Catholics

The second way that Leo reaches out to non-Catholics is found under the heading, “The supreme value of human rights”. Here he follows Saint John Paul II, who said, “one of the most significant attempts to respond effectively to the inescapable demands of human dignity” is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Leo characterises the declaration, proclaimed by the United Nations in December 1948, as “one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time” and as demonstrating that “human rights are not an external addition to the person but an expression of intrinsic human dignity, which the international community is called to protect and promote” (MH, para 54).

Martin Peterson praised this strategy and described it in terms defined by the late Oxford University professor Derek Parfit, whom Peterson says was the most influential moral philosopher in the analytic tradition.

“You can climb a mountain from different directions. You can use different foundational systems and reach the same conclusions. You can ground it in Christian theology or you can focus on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” explained Peterson.

The nature of work

The first part of Magnifica Humanitas may appear to feature a recondite discussion (MH para, 30 and 32) of Leo’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum. Released in 1891, Of New Things was a response to the rapacious capitalism of the Industrial Revolution. Workers, this Leo declared, had the “right to a fair wage” and their “fundamental value … takes precedence over capital and profit.”

The purpose of the discussion is, however, to provide an historical background that supports Leo’s discussion of ‘work’, which is not just a “means of generating income”. Rather, it is the means by which “human beings bring their freedom, creativity and capacity for cooperation into play”.

Automation, which includes AI, he continues, “must not be evaluated solely in terms of efficiency but in relation to the dignity of the worker”. Earlier Leo had defined ‘efficiency’ via a reading of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which privileged “uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenisation over communion” (MH para, 37 and 7).

Digital technology, whether in robotics, AI or by making jobs obsolete, undermines this dignity. And, more alarmingly, for universities and the AI developers in them, “new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data” widen the “gap between the included and excluded, between those who can participate in the digital revolution and those who remain on the margins”.

Accordingly, Leo writes, “we cannot allow a handful of actors [including university-based researchers] to dictate these processes on their own” (MH, paras 67 and 72).

In an interview with Forbes magazine a few days after the encyclical was released, Professor Alex Chan, who teaches in the Business Faculty of Molloy University in Long Island, New York, explained how Leo’s analysis pertains to education.

“The way these risks are played out is that elite universities forge exclusive partnerships with governments and corporations, securing privileged access to advanced AI tools and proprietary data while most public institutions and students fall further behind.”

To help judge AI’s effect, Leo provides a litmus test, the examples and tenor of which are strikingly different from what might be expected.

“A litmus test for social justice is the treatment of migrants, refugees and those forced to move due to poverty, violence, climate change and environmental disasters. The way a society treats them reveals whether its sense of justice is driven by fear or the spirit of fraternity.

“Pope Francis urges us to see migrants not simply as a problem to be managed but as a living image of the People of God on the move. They are people with dignity, resources and dreams, who have the right to be treated with respect” (MH, para 81).

Leo’s words cut two ways. First is the rejection of the attitude toward migrants in his homeland, the United States, under the presidency of Donald J Trump, as well as in many other countries. The second meaning casts Leo’s net wider: those displaced and who will be displaced by AI are akin to migrants, the protection of whose dignity is the scale upon which the brave new world will be judged.

The digital world

Leo’s characterisation of the digital world and AI as constituting “a new form of slavery” (MH, para 173) runs directly counter to the emancipatory rhetoric of AI cheerleaders like venture capitalist Marc Andreeseen, the title of whose self-published essay, “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, signals his train of thought, and to the description of AI programmes in universities.

In a much-commented upon, section in which the Pontiff “sincerely ask pardon” for the Church’s role in the African slave trade and for it taking “eighteen centuries” for the Church to recognise the “full incompatibility” of slavery with its doctrine of the dignity of every human (whether a member of the communion or not), Leo demystifies the powerful tool that Kilpatrick notes “is neither artificial nor is it intelligence”.

There are “various forms of servitude directly linked to the digital economy”, according to Magnifica Humanitas, at the beginning of a trenchant materialist analysis of AI that bears many indications of the decades Robert Francis Prevost spent in the Global South, mainly in Peru, before he became Pope Leo.

“Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical. Every seemingly immediate and flawless response is the result of a long chain of mediation, involving vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure and, above all, people.

“A significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities, such as data labelling, model training and content moderation, often involving disturbing material. In many cases, these workers are young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages.

“Added to this invisible labour is the even harsher work of extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends. In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted. The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly,” writes Leo (MH, para 173).

The Pope then defines the new – and largely invisible – colonialism in which university-based demographers and medical researchers and others are enmeshed. This new colonialism “no longer dominates only bodies but appropriates data, transforming personal lives into exploitable information.

“Entire regions [that is, the Global South; Leo served the Church for twenty years in Peru], especially those marked by structural fragility and limited geopolitical relevance, are currently subjected to a new mindset of extraction: that of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps and demographic information.

“These have become the new ‘rare earths’ of power: vital data which, once aggregated and analysed, can be used to train predictive models, guide investment strategies, anticipate crises and, above all, determine who and what is deemed to matter.

“Those who control the health data of entire peoples – often collected under the pretext of aid, research or innovation – possess a structural leverage over the future, for they can shape needs and markets. They can also decide, before others, to whom medicines, investments and protections will be allocated. Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our time: to ensure that shared knowledge becomes a true common good rather than an instrument of dominance,” Leo continues.

Finally, the Pontiff declares that unless the control of the data harvested from people without their approval is relinquished so that they can decide how it is used and by whom, “the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form” – words, no doubt, that would shock most researchers on pandemics and other international medical areas of concern (MH, para 178).

AI and ‘just war’ theory

According to Father Andrea Spatafora, a member of the order of Missionarii a Sacra Familia and an emeritus professor in the faculty of theology at St Paul’s University in Ottawa, the section of Magnifica Humanitas that declares “that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated” (MH, para 192), came as a “surprise” given the encyclical’s nominal subject.

However, in mid-April both US Vice-President JD Vance and Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House of Representatives, invoked ‘just war’ theory to justify America’s and Israel’s pre-emptive war against Iran.

So Spatafora thinks Leo took the occasion to extend his critique of AI-directed lethal force (by what the military calls ‘autonomous killing machines’) all the way to jettisoning a doctrine that was first developed by Augustine and refined by St Thomas Aquinas (died 1274) and later Catholic thinkers.

“The Holy See has recently observed that the growing ease with which autonomous weapons systems can be deployed makes war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control. This violates the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort in cases of legitimate self-defence. For this reason, the development and use of AI in warfare must be subject to the most rigorous ethical constraints, to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life and to avoid a race to develop such arms,” writes Leo (MH, p 197).

This is not a modern equivalent to the old saw of mediaeval Catholic theologians debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Rather, it has real-world consequences, not just in the philosophy and history classes in Catholic universities but also in the halls of the war colleges like America’s Army War College at West Point, America’s naval and air force colleges and, indeed, in similar colleges in many other countries.

War colleges found their teaching about ethics in war on understanding the ‘just war’ doctrine and understanding it on both tactical and strategic levels, albeit after removing the doctrine’s theological gown.

Father Andrea told University World News that Leo extends his analysis of the dehumanising aspects of AI to today’s high-tech battlefield. “We’ve ‘sanitised’ war in the sense that you don't have troops on the ground. Somebody is ‘playing’ on a computer that fires missiles, and so there isn't that sense of the real cost of it. Yes, buildings falling down, and whatever, but it's somewhere else; there is a detachment there. I think what he's warning against is that AI and all of the technology makes, in a sense, war easier,” says Spatafora.

As Sally Scholz, a philosophy professor at Villanova University, a Catholic university in Pennsylvania, wrote in an email to University World News, the Pope “is asking us to act in ways that promote relationships and, in so acting, we establish the conditions for peace: a mutual trust that ‘safeguards the concept of a common future for all peoples and a global common good’.”

Ethical guidance

Yet, Leo is a realist and knows that his words alone won’t put the autonomous weapons genie back in the bottle any more than AI can be banished from universities.

Accordingly, he provides guidance both for active military men and women and for war colleges where they study and university AI researchers around the world who work on projects dealing with autonomous killing machines.

These people are, he says, ethically responsible for the weapons they design and how they are used. “The first such [ethical] criterion concerns personal responsibility. When a decision to strike becomes automated or opaque, the risk of abdicating responsibility increases. For this reason, the chain of responsibility must be identifiable and verifiable; those who design, train, authorise and employ technology must be held accountable for their decisions.

“The second criterion pertains to the moral timeframe for making judgements. While AI tends to expedite the decision-making processes, speed and efficiency should never be the supreme motivating force for the irreversible decisions made in the context of war.

“The third criterion is the identification and protection of civilians. Any technology that facilitates attacks without seeing the face of human beings lowers the moral threshold of conflict. Target selection and the use of force must not confuse combatants and non-combatants nor ignore the impact on defenceless populations,” Leo writes (MH, para 99).

Edgar Antonio López, who teaches theology and philosophy at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, wrote, “I believe nothing justifies war. Both the international and Colombian contexts show that the use of violence only generates more violence. Hence, the importance of Pope Leo XIV’s call to disarm artificial intelligence, to remove it from the arms race logic that promotes militarisation of societies and mistrust among nations.”

Being human

While Leo was working on Magnifica Humanitas, in an interview with Business Insider, Sam Altman said: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility like electricity or water and people buy it from us on a meter and use it for whatever they want to use it for.”

For university leaders like Kilpatrick, Altman’s is a dystopian view. Speaking for his fellow university leaders of all faiths and those with no faith, he held little back: “They’re all concerned about guys like Sam Altman. Are we going to be able to keep a lid on him?”

Further, Kilpatrick told University World News, to say that intelligence is a ‘utility’ indicates that Altman does not “understand intelligence properly” because machines will never make human judgements.

For, as Leo wrote, we “must avoid the misconception of equating this type of ‘intelligence’ with that of human beings. These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence”.

Leo avers that “they often surpass human intelligence in speed and computational capacity, offering tangible benefits across many fields. Yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing.”

Accordingly, “So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.

“They may imitate language, behaviour and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.

“Even when these tools are described as capable of ‘learning’, their way of doing so is different from that of a human person. It is not the experience of those who allow themselves to be shaped by life and grow over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness and fidelity. Rather, it is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective but does not imply inner growth” (MH, para 99).

The strategies employed at Yeshiva and the Catholic University of America, to not only lessen the possibility of students using AI to write their essays but also to support their inner growth, are similar.

Rabbi Berman told University World News that Yeshiva University recognises that in “times of turmoil”, such as those we live in, “people look for a map to know where the end goal is, where the destination is. We cannot offer a map of the end destination at this time [because] it’s too unpredictable.

“What we give them is a compass that includes skill sets, includes character, includes relationships that they’re going to need in order to succeed,” he said.

In part, Yeshiva uses ‘blue books’ (in-class essays) , but what’s more important, Berman explained, is the teaching of critical thinking that is cultivated in the “professor-student or rabbi-student relationship” and in “personal study, not just alone in the library, but together with other students in our House of Study. Here we have a vibrant, dynamic [place] that requires human interaction,” where the individual has to know and understand the material and speak about it in public.

At Catholic University of America, Kilpatrick explained that by focusing on what Aquinas called intellectus, exemplified by such questions as, “What is the purpose of the rose or its beauty?”, professors cultivate habits of mind unattainable for Large Language Models like Claude or Gemini.

“One of the ways to do that,” says Kilpatrick “is the seminar, the open discussion in the seminar. Another way to do it is the oral examination, where the professor, who was intended to be the tutor, the master, the scholar, who’s seen this 1000s of times, quizzes the student to see, does the student have the habits of mind, the habits of intellection that they need to be well formed in this discipline.

Kilpatrick adds that “what makes Catholic universities a little different is, in addition to the discipline, we want to see them integrate all forms of knowledge into a whole; you know, we want to see them contextualise their disciplinary knowledge across other disciplines, be a Renaissance person, so to speak, that idea really came out of the mediaeval times, when the liberal arts were originally formulated, and we kind of insist that you have these habits of mind that are integrative, as well as being discursive”, and were nurtured in the mediaeval Catholic universities.

‘Algorethics’

Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, López wrote in an email, has implemented policies on how to use AI responsibly in university mechanics. As well, in 2025, the university developed a policy that grounds the use of AI in fundamental human rights and with respect for ‘Our Common Home’.

The policy “establishes that technologies such as artificial intelligence must serve all people through knowledge management processes. We are aware of the potential biases resulting from the collection and production of data through algorithms.

“We are currently training in the creation of ethical use of algorithms,” what Pope Francis popularised as ‘algorethics’.

For his part, Father Andrea told University World News that professors at St Paul University are concerned about students losing the ability to think critically because of AI; he hopes that the Dicastery for Culture and Education will provide technical guidance. Andrea also noted that while the Pope did not discuss cheating on an essay, his discussion of the dignity of work applies to students too.

“His concern about what this technology is doing to our understanding of our humanity, of human beings, of who we are, the dignity of work, and the creativity of the human beings, goes down to the question of what does it mean to be human. He says that work is more than just something we do. It’s inherent, it's important, it's fundamental to human beings.

“We learn through work that there’s a dignity that’s acquired. We need to work. It’s part of what makes us a human being, a fulfilled human being.”