This dialogue (both in person and online) was the first event of the 2026-27 academic year for the Georgetown Initiative on Catholic Social Thought, and it focused on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas and on artificial intelligence (AI). The panel included Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States; Vilas Dhar, president of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation; Molly Kinder, founder and CEO of the Breakwater Initiative; theologian Anna Rowlands of Durham University; and technology writer Jasmine Sun. Georgetown President Eduardo Peñalver opened the event. Kim Daniels, director of Georgetown’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, was the moderator.
The 90 minute discussion brought differing experience and perspectives, but with a strong common theme: debates about AI must begin not with what technology can do, but with what human beings value and the kind of society they wish to create. AI is neither an autonomous historical force nor a neutral tool. The choices made by engineers, investors, corporations, governments, and users about AI distribute power, wealth, opportunity, and risk. The governing question, therefore, should not be how quickly AI can advance, but whether its development protects human dignity and contributes to the common good.
Catholic Social Teaching as a Moral Framework
Magnifica Humanitas was described from various perspectives as a moral framework that can provoke and promote a much needed public deliberation. Pope Leo does not offer detailed prescriptions for particular models, companies, or laws. Instead, he identifies principles by which technological choices should be judged: the inviolable dignity of every person, solidarity with those most vulnerable to disruption, the social meaning of work, the common good, subsidiarity, accountability, and the priority of human relationships.
Anna Rowlands stressed that the encyclical challenges quasi-religious or “magical” narratives surrounding AI. These narratives portray technological progress as inevitable and suggest that AI will resolve problems that are fundamentally political, social, or moral. Catholic Social Thought highlights the reality that technologies operate within institutions and relationships, and their effects depend on who controls them, whose purposes they serve, and whose interests are ignored.
The encyclical’s wider appeal, several speakers suggested, reflects a hunger for moral language in an AI debate dominated by commercial interests, technical forecasts, and competing predictions of utopia or catastrophe. Jasmine Sun observed that many people in Silicon Valley paid more attention to the document than she had expected. One reason is a growing recognition within the technology sector itself that the profit motive is not an adequate guide to decisions with far-reaching social consequences. The Church can contribute a vocabulary for discussing human purposes without claiming that it alone possesses the technical answers.
Human Judgment Cannot be Delegated to Machines
Archbishop Caccia emphasized the essential difference between computation and conscience. An AI system may process immense amounts of information and identify patterns, but it cannot assume moral responsibility or recognize another person in the full human sense. Moral judgment involves conscience, responsibility, relationships, and an appreciation of circumstances that cannot be reduced to calculation. The sharpest implication concerns lethal and irreversible decisions. Life-and-death choices must not be transferred to autonomous systems because a machine cannot be held morally accountable. But the principle extends well beyond military applications. Caccia pointed to algorithms that can deny people health care, employment, security, or other opportunities on the basis of data already marked by discrimination. Technological systems can reproduce injustice while making responsibility harder to locate: when an algorithm causes harm, companies, designers, and officials may each claim that the system, rather than any human actor, made the decision.
Caccia highlighted Pope Leo’s deliberately forceful call to “disarm” AI. This means opposing autonomous weapons, but also stripping AI of the aura of inevitability and unquestioned authority surrounding it. His formulation captured the event’s moral core: not everything technologically possible should be done, and not everything technology offers should be accepted.
Work, Inequality, and the Danger of Exclusion
Molly Kinder highlighted AI’s effects on employment. She cautioned against focusing exclusively on extreme predictions—either mass technological unemployment or a future of universal abundance. The immediate challenge lies in a “messy middle”: particular workers and occupations may face serious disruption even if employment does not collapse as a whole.
Entry-level employment is an especially urgent concern. If employers use AI to perform tasks previously assigned to junior workers, young people may lose not only jobs but also the apprenticeships through which they gain skills, experience, judgment, and professional identity. This could weaken the pathway from education into productive work and intensify existing inequalities between those who own or direct AI systems and those whose work is displaced or devalued.
Kinder posed questions about the vision of human flourishing implicit in some Silicon Valley rhetoric. Work should not be romanticized, and many jobs are exploitative or monotonous. Nevertheless, Catholic social teaching understands work as more than a source of income: it involves participation, contributions, relationships, purpose, and dignity. A future where a small technological elite directs production while everyone else receives a payment and pursues hobbies would represent a diminished understanding of human agency. The policy challenge is to compensate people after displacement, but also to preserve meaningful avenues for participation and development.
Concentrated Power and Democratic Governance
Vilas Dhar and Jasmine Sun emphasized that the central AI challenge involves governance. Decisions about its future are currently concentrated in a small number of exceptionally wealthy firms and individuals. Private actors have enormous influence over labor markets, information systems, education, public services, physical infrastructure, and even the conditions of democratic debate. Sun cited controversies over data centers to illustrate how digital power has material consequences. Communities experience increased demands for land, water, energy, and public infrastructure, but often have limited influence over whether facilities are built or who benefits from them. In her formulation, powerful technology leaders are designing the future—digitally and physically—for people who have little opportunity to participate in the decisions.
From Moral Principles to Action
The discussion’s principal unresolved issue was how to convert the encyclical’s moral vision into policy. Panelists identified directions: human accountability for consequential decisions, protection of workers and entry-level career pathways, public participation in decisions about technological infrastructure, safeguards against discriminatory algorithms, limits on autonomous weapons, and stronger democratic oversight of concentrated corporate power.
The Church’s role is not to design algorithms or prescribe every regulation. It is to convene groups that rarely speak honestly with one another, amplify the experience of people excluded from technical discussions, challenge exaggerated claims of inevitability, and insist that human dignity comes before efficiency or profit. Catholic engineers, business leaders, educators, policymakers, and workers (not only bishops) must help translate these principles into practice.
A short question and answer period highlighted issues of accountability and translating ideas into practice (including in universities). They also highlighted the challenges that AI appears to pose in two critical: democratic processes and conduct of wars. The panelists returned several times to the implications of the AI revolution for children, including looking with a seven generation perspective.
The event’s tone and conclusions were neither optimistic nor alarmist. AI presents genuine possibilities for serving humanity (Molly Kinder noted that it made her a better cook), but good outcomes will not emerge automatically from technical innovation. They require deliberate moral and political choices. Magnifica Humanitas asks society to determine what must never be surrendered: conscience, responsibility, meaningful work, democratic agency, human relationships, and recognition of every person’s irreducible worth; relational intelligence (Isabelle Hau was cited) takes on central importance. The question is not simply what AI will do to humanity, but what human beings, acting together, will choose to do with AI.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published by the G20 Interfaith Forum and is reproduced here with permission.
