Hey everyone, welcome to the Weekly Discernment.
I’m a Catholic dad of three kids in the trenches of work, marriage, and trying to raise little saints in a world that often feels like it’s pulling in the opposite direction. I’ve spent years in corporate life blending creativity, strategy, and leadership but my real formation has come from late-night prayers, chaotic family dinners, kids activities, and learning (often the hard way) what actually matters.
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Your fellow dad in the arena
Tempus fugit, memento mori
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 or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas
Pope Leo XIV just dropped his first encyclical and man it is a real gut check for how obsessed we have gotten with AI and tech.
It is called Magnifica Humanitas which means Magnificent Humanity.
He signed it on the exact 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum that old encyclical that took on the mess of the Industrial Revolution. Now this American pope with an Augustinian background is doing something similar for our AI era. The whole thing is long around 40000 words but it actually feels worth sitting with.
Right from the start it hits you with a Bible contrast that sticks. We are at this crossroads. Keep chasing a modern Tower of Babel all top down control and fake efficiency where everything is uniform and optimized until it falls apart in confusion. Or do we get to work like Nehemiah rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls. Real teamwork everyone pitching in pointed toward something bigger than just profits or power.
That is the energy.
Tech itself is not the villain here. The pope says AI can be an incredible tool for medicine discovery helping people out. But when it is all run on cold technocratic thinking efficiency over everything humans as the messy part to minimize that is when we start losing what makes us special.
He walks through the basics of
Catholic social teaching and updates it for right now. Stuff like the common good solidarity subsidiarity the idea that big decisions should happen close to the people they affect. He even suggests the Church and the rest of us do an honest self check an examen on whether we are actually living this out in the digital world.
The core of it though is how he deals with AI. No knee jerk bashing. He calls it powerful but reminds us tools carry the values of whoever is using them. AI has no body no real emotions no conscience no relationships no true understanding. It is not conscious.
The whole transhumanist thing uploading minds treating people like upgradeable software he rejects it flat out. Our limits our weaknesses our need to connect with each other. Those are not flaws. They are part of what makes humanity magnificent. The real more than human stuff comes through grace and relationships not code and silicon.
He does not shy away from the problems we are already living. Power stacking up in the hands of a few tech giants who basically act like shadow governments. Surveillance everywhere. Algorithms twisting truth messing with elections and public trust. Jobs disappearing fast. And yeah weapons that pick targets on their own. He says AI needs to be disarmed pulled out of anything built for domination and killing.
On the flip side he is pushing for actual rules that work. Make algorithms more transparent protect the most vulnerable treat key digital stuff like data and infrastructure as common goods instead of private gold mines. He talks about an ecology of communication so truth does not just become another product. Keeping work meaningful even as machines take over more tasks. And protecting real freedom from the new addictions and controls creeping in.
You do not have to be Catholic or even religious for this to land. We are speeding toward a future where machines keep getting sharper but the deep questions are not getting answered by the people coding them. What counts as a person. Who gets to hold real power. How do we actually stay free.
Leo XIV’s point is simple. Humans are relational embodied creatures built for more than just hitting metrics. Tech should lift that up not flatten it into something smaller.
The full text is right there on the Vatican site if you want to read it. They have got summaries too. Feels like one of those moments that could spark real talk beyond just church circles.
What do you think. Have you come across any of it yet. Are we heading straight into a digital Babel or is there still room to build something better together.
#MagnificaHumanitas #AIethics #HumanDignity #TechAndSociety