- The Vatican has long concerned itself, not simply with questions of theology, but with the practical interaction of theology with the world in which its followers live.

Today's guest says the recent message from Pope Leo XIV on artificial intelligence follows in that tradition and offers profound insights for believers and nonbelievers alike.

He's Sean O'Callaghan this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(lively music) (lively music continues) (lively music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

And my guest this week is Sean O'Callaghan, a colleague at Salve.

He's an associate professor of religious and theological studies, and he's also the coauthor of "AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep."

Sean, thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you, Jim.

Great to be here.

- We had you with your coauthor, Paul Hoffman, last year, talking a little bit about essentially ministry in this age of AI.

Along comes Pope Leo XIV.

With an encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas," which is a remarkable document.

- [Sean] Yeah, it is.

It's amazing.

- [Jim] What was Leo XIV trying to do?

- Well, first of all, I mean, Leo's election itself was a surprise.

No one expected an American Pope.

And then a few days later, nobody expected him to talk about AI.

But when his name was announced from the balcony of St.

Peter's, as soon as I heard Leo XIV, I knew exactly what was going on because - [Jim] Why?

What was that?

- Leo XIII back in 1891, I think, he wrote an encyclical of a document called "Rerum novarum," basically about new things.

And it's dealing with the Industrial Revolution, the new inventions, what it's like to live in this new kind of society.

As soon as I heard Leo's name, I knew he's going to do something very similar.

- It was by taking the name Leo, that's a nod to his predecessor.

- Yeah, it's a nod, yeah, because it's, you know, it's a big step to take someone's name.

You're kind of saying, "My papacy is going to mirror this papacy in some way."

And so Leo XIV, as soon as I heard it, I thought, okay, he's going to do something about AI and the digital revolution, you know, because now that's, you know, when we talk about new things, the new things of this age.

AI, cyber, digital stuff.

So I think very early on then, Leo began to speak about AI in his first speech to the Cardinals just a few days after he was elected.

You know, he revealed that he had chosen that name in order to be the Pope who would address the age of AI.

And so that's what he's done in this encyclical.

It is an amazing document.

It's a dense document.

It's a lengthy document.

There's a huge amount in it, but it hits so many things that it's going to be talked about for many years to come.

- So when you think about some of those, I mean, so this is a very scholarly document.

It walks us almost through the intellectual history of Catholic social teaching over the last 150 years.

When you get right down to it, what is he trying to achieve in issuing this encyclical and making this one of the centerpieces of his papacy thus far?

- I think he's kinda trying to force a reset to kinda make us just stop for a moment, think about what's going on, because we've gotten used to technology being in charge of everything.

Back in 2015, Pope Francis wrote an encyclical called "Laudato Si."

And in that encyclical, there's a very interesting word that crops up every now and again.

It's kind of easy to miss it, technocratic.

And it basically means the power of technology.

And he talks about the way in which technology achieves a power which is kind of outsized almost.

It's, you know, a remarkable amount of power.

And it changes the world around us.

And I think what Leo is doing is he's looking at that word, which crops up again in this encyclical.

And he's saying, "Okay, we live in a world in which technology runs everything.

It seems to be very powerful.

It seems to be in charge of everything, but hold on, human beings have a place in this world as well."

And human beings have always had this place, and we're equipped to live in this world.

So we need to kind of do something about the perceived power of AI and put humans back in charge.

- Well, and so the title even of the encyclical, "Magnifica humanitas," means?

- Kind of means the grandeur of humanity.

So in other words, it's okay to be human.

That's what Leo was saying.

It's fine to be human.

There's nothing wrong with being human.

This is how we're created, and we have what we need as human beings to live in this AI world.

But to make sure that AI is not driving the agenda, but we are driving the agenda so that AI works for us instead of us working for AI.

- That's an interesting and an important point.

You know one of the criticisms, I think, of the church in general, and the Vatican certainly, is that it tends to be a little sclerotic.

Things move slowly.

Is this a case where this encyclical was coming and Leo was just the guy who was there when it came out?

Or is this something that reflects some urgency by this pope in this papacy to produce this document, you know, within almost a year of assuming the papacy?

- Yeah, that's a good question.

I think it's more Leo himself, that Leo's own interests and impulses have led him to produce this.

I mean, Leo, back in 2012, when Leo was the Prior General of the Augustinian Order, he's talking about the digital world and how the digital world challenges the church in so many different ways, but also challenges the church to kind of sharpen its message.

So he's thinking a lot about these things even back in 2012, long before he, or anyone else, would have thought he would become Pope.

However, he gets elected as Pope in a Vatican which is already very interested in AI.

So in January of 2025, a document came out called "Antiqua et Nova," "Ancient and New," which deals with human intelligence and artificial intelligence.

So that was a major document that came out.

A lot of people in the Vatican have been thinking about AI for a long time.

There's a lot of people there who are technophiles.

They use technology all the time.

They're very interested in it.

So it's been discussed in the Vatican for a long time.

And you have these little working groups sort of cropping up in the different dicasteries.

A dicastery is like a ministry.

And so these little working groups have been working on aspects of AI, talking to each other about it.

And then the Pope also has an advisor, Father Paolo Benanti.

He's a Franciscan priest, who basically he's the Vatican's advisor on AI, but he's more specifically the Pope's advisor.

And he's someone who has strong links with major technology companies.

So the Vatican has really been swimming in the AI space for a very long time.

- I just want to linger here a bit, because when you think of sort of, you know, religion, you think about great questions of theology, great questions of the divine.

Why are they so concerned and so focused on issues of technology and artificial intelligence in this case?

- Because of how it changes our view of the human person.

So like there are some aspects of the technological world that say that as human beings is just not enough to be human.

So we have to have this powerful technology to kind of make up maybe for human defects.

So part of the reason is they see technology as maybe sometimes challenging the centrality of the human being in the world.

But also like in the whole area of relationships, AI is now changing how some people relate in that they relate to chatbots instead of other people maybe.

So there's a concern about the dignity and the safeguarding of the human person.

- Is it a concern that we diminish the value of humanity, of what it means to be human if we become so, if our relationships are primarily with machines and algorithms rather than other people?

Or we're cheapening what it means to be human.

- Yeah, very much so.

And there's also a concern about a thing called dataism, which basically means human beings are just viewed as data points.

- [Jim] So almost commodities.

- Yeah, commodities.

And commodities to be monetized.

So there's a concern about all of that, the fact that humanity is being commercialized in an AI world.

- You know, I think you're talking about this when you, basically the document's critical of transhumanism.

Is that right?

And there's this quote that I found compelling.

"Human beings are not an error.

Weaknesses and human frailty is not a design flaw."

Is the danger in all of that that we might come to see some people as less than human or less worthy of human dignity?

- Yeah, that can happen.

I mean, transhumanism is a strange kind of creature.

It's very difficult to define exactly what it is because it works on a spectrum.

Basically it works on upgrading the human being in some way.

So that can be done through genetic engineering, bioengineering, et cetera.

But the whole kind of philosophy behind it is that human beings are kind of less than that.

We are defective, and therefore we need to be upgraded into some kind of a more perfect state.

- And there are millennia worth of Catholic theology that says, no, that human beings are created in God's image.

- Yeah, and there's a very interesting section at the beginning of the document.

It's very easy to miss it, because we're talking about the first six paragraphs.

And you kind of have this impression this is just like a preamble into the main thing.

But there's a lot in there that's really important, and you have to focus on those six paragraphs to understand everything else.

And there's a place in there where Leo mentions a scripture.

He talks about a scripture, Proverbs 8.

And Proverbs 8 discusses wisdom, and wisdom is speaking in Proverbs 8.

And wisdom reveals that it was there when the world was created.

So there's this kind of a sense at the beginning of the encyclical that human beings from the beginning, even from creation, they've been imbued with wisdom to be able to deal with the things around them.

And so I think Leo was saying, like, we can handle this.

AI is something we can handle.

It's not an issue that is overly mysterious for us.

We just need to know we can do it, and we need to do it.

So human beings need to be at the forefront of managing AI.

- And it's probably worth noting too that he's not saying that the use of AI and the use of technology is sinful or wrong.

- Yeah, that's right.

He's really positive about AI and he's positive about technology.

He acknowledges the good it's done, but he says it's ambiguous as well.

So we have to be aware of that.

And one of the main points of the document is that if we hand the control of AI over to the creators of AI, then they're going to embed in AI their own values and their own morality.

And sometimes we don't even know what that is, because sometimes we're not even sure how AI works.

And sometimes even the people who create AI, once it gets out of the box, they're not sure how it works.

So we don't really know what's going on in there.

So therefore we need to take a step back.

And ordinary human beings closer to the ground need to be the ones who are able to contribute to the development of AI.

- You know, you mentioned Scripture.

There are two metaphors that the Holy Father uses in describing this AI challenge.

One is the Tower of Babel.

- [Sean] Yeah, very interesting.

- And the second is the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity.

What do those two biblical stories mean in the context of artificial intelligence, in these concerns?

- Yeah, he talks about the Babel syndrome, which basically is that AI is in charge, technology is in charge.

He talks about a single language, and that a single language could even be a digital language, which kind of rules everything, which rules our lives.

Like if you want credit, you know, we depend on a credit score to help us to do that.

How is that gathered?

It's gathered through AI processes drawing on everything we do in the marketplace.

And so AI, and technology in general, rules every part of our lives.

This is a big point he makes in the encyclical.

He says that the difference between maybe now and the time of Leo XIII, back in 1891, is that right now we're kind of immersed in technology.

It rules every part of our lives.

It's not just confined to the technological sector.

It rules everything.

I mean, it even takes up our leisure time.

You know, we just depend on it for that.

And the Babel syndrome is when technology rules everything.

And when we hand over control of the technology to those who create it.

He says the Jerusalem model is where people work together in order to create a kind of society which leads to human flourishing.

And he's very, very strong on this.

He talks a lot about the common good.

And another way of understanding the common good is basically to flourish and prosper as human beings.

And so he's very, very focused on that, that we build together to create the kind of technological society we want.

- There's almost a, I hear in that sort of a call to almost democratize the technology.

Am I wrong about that?

- No, that's correct, yeah.

It leans very strong on calling on just ordinary people to have a say in the kind of technological world that emerges.

Otherwise, it's imposed from above.

And that concern comes through over and over again.

- And he talks too about, like, I think the phrase they used is digital colonialism.

Which is a term in parts of the world where the Catholic Church is of increasing importance.

The legacy of colonialism is not a good thing, right?

When he talks about this digital colonialism, what's he talking about?

- I think he means the digital world colonizes every part of our lives.

I mean, it's really hard to escape.

I mean, to get up here today, I relied on GPS.

And we're just immersed in it.

I mean, there's another word that I kind of use a lot in tandem with transhuman.

I talked about transhumanism being kind of on a spectrum.

And on the lower end of that, I would say you have the technohuman, which is, you know, we're always connected to our phones, to our laptops.

We're surrounded constantly by tech.

And we're in the technohuman stage now.

The transhuman stage would bring us even further with a greater connection to machines.

But we live immersed in technology.

We just can't escape it.

And so the digital world colonizes everything.

But then the values of the digital world do as well.

And whoever created the digital environment, the algorithms and the programs, they've embedded their own direction into them.

- So the text of this encyclical is available online.

If folks haven't read it, it's really an intriguing read.

But it is thick, it is scholarly.

If you're not versed in some of the language, it might seem a little overwhelming.

One of the concepts that the encyclical rests on is the concept of subsidiarity.

Which is not something I was familiar with.

Can you just sort of unpack that in a concise way?

- Yeah, it basically means that answers shouldn't be imposed from above.

That answers should come from the ground, kind of horizontally.

That decisions about people should be made as close to the people as possible.

So in other words, local decisions.

So it kind of works in the world of politics as well, okay?

That local politics are key, because the people who live in a particular area know what their needs are.

And you have to consult them.

So subsidiarity, I think in this document, means that the tech companies need to make sure that they're talking all the time to the people that their technology will affect.

- You know, so there are a lot of people making a lot of money right now off of AI.

And the tech companies are economic behemoths.

They are politically favored in the United States right now.

Do we have an indication of how they have responded to this encyclical and the teachings of this Pope?

- I think many of them have responded positively.

Certainly Anthropic.

One of the leaders of Anthropic was present when the encyclical was launched.

So he was on the same stage as the Pope.

And he basically said, you know, we need people outside of our technological world to speak into what we do.

And so he was grateful for it, and very, very positive about it.

Stuff I've read in general from people that has been really positive.

People like it a lot.

You know, there's a lot of it, maybe they don't fully understand the kind of theological side, but they like what they see when he talks about the human being.

- So the one counterpoint there, that I've seen anyways in reporting, is Peter Thiel, who's a Silicon Valley billionaire, who has issued the critique recently at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

That what the Pope has to say about AI, in particular the regulation of AI, he associates with the Communist Party of China.

- Right, okay.

I don't think the Pope says much about regulation of AI.

He says regulation would be good, but he says it's more important.

Like, yes, regulation is fine.

We need it, but we also need to fix the morality of AI, because there's no use regulating something which at its base doesn't reflect the right moral values.

So he says regulation is great, but we need to do a lot of other things as well.

- You know, so we recently had on the show, Jamie Metzl, who's written a book with an AI, a large language model about the, it's called "The AI 10 Commandments," where he challenged this platform to develop, you know, 10 universal rules for governing human behavior.

You know, there is a lot of wisdom in what it's produced.

But it's also the work of a human and a machine, right?

Are there specific applications where, you know, we just should say, "Nope, this should just be exclusively the domain of human endeavor?"

Or is it safe to say that there's a place for technology in everything that humanity does?

- I think in our book, when we published our book, the book that you mentioned earlier on, one of the things we said in there, and some people just disagree with this, is that like in sermons, because we're writing it for ministers, when you write a sermon, it should really come from you, 'cause you know your congregation, you know your people, you know the circumstances.

Maybe you can research some things using AI to kind of complement your sermon, but the whole sermon itself shouldn't come from AI.

And I think if we hand over the power of our creative writing of our artworks completely to AI, then we will never have those skills.

We will lose those skills.

And that's one of the dangers, I think.

- Yeah, I find myself, you know, it's easy to use AI to complete a task.

I am not convinced that it's useful to us as a means of actually advancing knowledge, because it's ultimately a probabilistic algorithm that predicts what you wanna hear it to say, not necessarily what the truth is.

- That's right, yeah.

We have to learn how to learn.

And this is something the Pope talks about.

There's one section of the encyclical that deals with education.

And basically he says education is this kind of slow formation.

And you can't hothouse it.

It has to be slow.

It has to be deliberate.

Has to take place over time.

There has to be development.

And so AI is a shortcut sometimes.

You know, when we write stuff using AI, yes, I'm sure it can be good in certain circumstances, and people do it, but if we rely on it completely, we lose those really important skills.

- So you mentioned in our pre-interview that you had been mindful of the fact that there was some concern about, or some attention paid, to the fact that the Pope had used the word disarmed in the context of artificial intelligence.

What was he saying?

And how has that been interpreted more generally?

- It's kind of been interpreted by some people as referring specifically to autonomous weapons, but that's only a part of the picture.

He does talk about the dangers of using autonomous weapons powered by AI to make decisions that only human beings should make.

But when he talks about disarm, he's really meaning disarming the monopoly of AI.

The power of it, the technocracy, the way in which algorithms can run everything without us really having a say in it.

And so disarming for him means to hand the power back to ordinary people.

- Will non-Catholics listen to what the Pope has to say about this?

- I think so, and I think they already are.

I mean, a lot of what I've read are mostly from non-Catholics, and they've been very, very positive about this encyclical, because I think this is the first kind of major global document that everybody has been able to access.

You know, as we said when we talked earlier, the European Parliament has had its own debates, you know, Congress has had its own debates.

But the Pope is able to bring a lot of people together in a way in which no one else can.

And I think this document is a kind of a, like there's an awful lot in this document.

Some people might say there's too much in there, but I understand why it's there, because the Pope wants to highlight lots of different areas.

Even if he doesn't totally unpack all of them, he wants to say, "Look here, this is important.

Look there, that's important."

And so I think for people in general, it's a really useful document to have where everything pertaining to AI and humanity is contained in a single place.

- Sean, you're a great colleague and a great guest.

Thank you so much for spending some time this week.

That's all the time we have, but if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media, or visit salve.edu/pellcenter where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

And I wanna thank you for spending some of your week with me.

I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join me again next time for more "Story in the Public Square. "

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