What This AI Encyclical Is Actually Getting At

I kept coming back to one line in this essay, even while doing ordinary parish stuff, unlocking a side door, looking for the good coffee filters someone always hides, answering an email I probably should've answered two days earlier. The author says the center cannot hold because the center was never just procedure. That's strong coffee. And honestly, I think he's onto something.

The piece reflects on Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica humanitas, which it says uses Babel and Jerusalem to frame the crisis around artificial intelligence. Not AI as a gadget problem. Not AI as a policy memo with a Vatican seal on it. Something deeper. A crisis about the human person, about whether we still know what we're protecting when we talk about dignity, freedom, work, truth, community.

That lands with me because I've noticed how quickly people want to make every moral question into a systems question. If we just get better rules, cleaner processes, smarter tools, then things will calm down. Maybe. Sometimes structure helps. Parish life would collapse without structure. Try running Holy Week with pure spontaneity and see how that goes.

Still, there are moments when all the process in the world can't save you from confusion about first things. If nobody agrees what marriage is, what children are owed, what authority is for, what work does to a soul, then management becomes theater. Expensive theater.

Babel wears a lanyard now

What struck me in this essay was its insistence that Babel isn't just ancient imagery for overachievers with bricks. It's unity without God. Coordination without communion. Power that can organize everything except love.

I've seen little versions of that everywhere. Not just in politics or global tech culture. In church circles too, if I'm honest. We can become obsessed with efficiency, branding, messaging, rollout plans. We start talking like managers of a religious product instead of disciples entrusted with mysteries. The vibe gets thin fast.

The author contrasts Babel with Jerusalem, as presented through rebuilding under rightful authority and differentiated roles. Families doing one thing, priests another, leaders another, artisans another, all ordered toward a common good under God. That's not chaos pretending to be freedom. It's not central control pretending to be peace either. It's a form of belonging where difference doesn't automatically mean conflict.

I think that's why so many people feel spiritually carsick right now. We're told our choices are basically these: total fragmentation or total administration. Tribe or machine. Rage or spreadsheet.

And no offense to spreadsheets, I've met some parish secretaries who could probably run a small nation with one color-coded tab set... but nobody wants to live inside one.

The center was never neutral

The essay makes a bigger claim too, that what used to hold nations together was not mere compromise or moderation but participation in a moral order larger than themselves. It reaches back to Chesterton's point about Christendom and argues that once that wider order disappears, political life swings between empire and tribe.

Now, whenever people start talking about Christendom, I get cautious for about six reasons at once. Some folks use that word like they're shopping for a fantasy version of history with cleaner streets and fewer sinners than actually existed. That's not my interest at all. Old Christian societies had cruelty in them too. We don't help anyone by airbrushing the past.

But if by Christendom we mean there was once some shared sense that nations answer to something above appetite and force, then yes, losing that matters more than many people want to admit.

Because neutrality doesn't stay neutral for long. Somebody's vision of the person always sneaks in through the side door. Somebody decides whether human beings are consumers, data points, workers to be optimized, problems to be managed, images of God... pick one and you'll eventually build institutions around it.

That's why I find these conversations about AI weirdly clarifying. The technology is impressive, sure. Sometimes unsettling too. But it also acts like a bright flashlight pointed at assumptions we were already living with half asleep.

Do we believe thinking is just processing? Do we believe relationships are interchangeable? Do we believe wisdom can be reduced to pattern recognition? Do we believe faster answers make us more human?

I'm not sure most of us would say yes out loud in church on Sunday morning. Yet weekday life often runs on exactly those instincts.

Communion is slower than power

The part of the essay about complementary principles in Catholic social teaching could sound abstract if you're not careful with it. Unity and plurality together. Person and communion together. Difference held inside an ordered whole rather than smashed flat or split apart.

Academic language can lose people here. Fair enough. I've preached enough homilies to know when eyes glaze over.

Still, in ordinary life this is not abstract at all. Every healthy parish knows it in practice when it's working well enough for five minutes at a time. You need authority and participation. Tradition and creativity. Personal devotion and public worship. Mercy and truth spoken in the same room without flinching.

When one side gets absolutized, things go strange fast.

And that's where I think this essay earns its keep. It isn't panicking about AI because robots are spooky or because change is scary and we'd all prefer rotary phones and handwritten ledgers from 1952. It's saying our technical power now far exceeds our moral coherence.

Yes. Exactly.

A teenager can generate synthetic intimacy on a phone before he's learned how to sit through silence or apologize face to face. A company can automate judgment before anyone has answered what judgment is for. A government can coordinate behavior at scale while sounding utterly blank on what constitutes human flourishing.

That's not progress with side effects. That's confusion with electricity running through it.

Last week after Mass I had one of those parking lot conversations priests end up carrying around all day after everyone else has gone home for lunch. A man said he feels like everything is becoming less personal while constantly pretending to be more personalized. That may be one of the cleanest descriptions of modern life I've heard in months.

Maybe that's why this essay stayed with me.

If the center is reality itself, as the author argues, then no algorithm will save us from lies about reality. No administrative system will reconcile us if we've forgotten what communion is for. No nation can hold together on technique alone forever.

So maybe the question isn't whether we're strong enough to control our machines.

Maybe it's whether we've become thin enough inside that we'd rather be controlled by them.