At a client meeting one time, after the client’s lengthy discussion and presentation, my associate asked a simple question. We were having difficulty understanding the point he was trying to make.
The client paused, looked at both of us without expression, and said: “Your confusion stems from our confusion.” He then began to repeat his presentation.
I never forgot that moment. He was a smart guy. Articulated well. A leader in his field. But he couldn’t communicate the basics of the idea he was trying to get across.
My confusion with Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence stems, in part, from his confusion. That document is 43,633 words long with 224 footnotes. Even if you used AI to help digest it, you’d still have to invest a lot of time. When I wrote Dialogue with the Pope back in 2016 in response to Francis, I used 16,986 words for my rebuttal. I promise I won’t need that many for Leo. Because Leo has no business talking about the danger of AI using the Tower of Babel as his cornerstone. In fact, by selecting Babel, he revealed something important about the Church’s deepest institutional anxiety over AI. My rebuttal starts with his footnotes.
Start with Footnotes
Let me go to confession immediately: I used AI to count footnotes because AI is faster and more accurate, especially if you proof its work.
Leo’s footnotes tell you something when you count them: 97.4% came from inside the Church — other popes and church officials — while only 2.6% came from outside. That 2.6% breaks down as follows: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Giorgio La Pira, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Plato’s Letter VII, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, and the United Nations Charter.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with quoting clergy. But when your subject is artificial intelligence — a technology reshaping the physical and cognitive world — and your non-Church sources number six, none of whom knew what a large language model was, a question arises: what are you actually arguing about, and on what basis? Leo is not citing these six sources(nor the hundreds of other clergy references) for their technical knowledge of AI. He is citing the references for moral and humanistic weight. That’s also legitimate. But then it means his argument is entirely a moral and philosophical one, not a technological one. That matters because he writes arguing them all, but provides no evidence for this main topic: AI.
Consider the non-Church Footnotes briefly.
Arendt, writing in 1951, argued modern loneliness leaves individuals susceptible to totalitarian manipulation. Leo’s implication is AI does the same. He writes that indifference to truth leads slowly to totalitarianism, and that the ideal subjects of regimes are people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists. It’s a serious concern. But Leo never establishes that AI produces indifference to truth rather than, say, abundance of truth. He asserts the connection. He doesn’t demonstrate it.
Frankl survived Nazi concentration camps and argued humanity’s primary drive is the search for meaning. Leo uses him to observe that even in moments of horror, a small light continues to shine within humanity. The implication is that AI creates such moments of horror with no light. The analogy strains under a lack of understanding of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. How can you argue search for meaning when you are hungry?
Tolkien is invoked to remind us that it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to uproot the evil in the fields that we know. The implication is that AI is that evil. Leo is a careful enough writer to use the word “implication” rather than state it directly.
Plato’s Letter VII argues that the deepest things are learned only after much time and effort, by engaging in discussion together. Leo uses this to warn that AI’s speed risks extinguishing the desire to ask questions. Anyone who has used AI seriously knows the opposite tends to be true: AI generates more questions, not fewer. Its speed is the point. It compresses the time between questions.
The pattern across all six sources is the same: Leo is not citing them for what they know. He is citing them for something else that is not evidence: weight (who can argue with Plato). The result is a document that feels weighty but is technology light.
What Leo Is Actually Arguing
If you were to summarize Leo’s thesis, it would sound like this: Artificial intelligence is a powerful technological reality with transformative effects on society, yet it must be guided by ethics, human dignity, and the common good rather than economic power, concentration of control, or technocratic dominance.
That’s not an unreasonable thesis. The problem is the thin argument built to support it. Leo’s framework draws almost entirely from the Church’s Social Doctrine — a body of principle developed largely before the internet existed, let alone AI. He applies this doctrine a technology he never fully grapples with on its own terms. The result is a document that argues from within a self-contained system: the principles of Social Doctrine are cited to establish values — values are used to judge AI. Judgment is validated by more Social Doctrine. If you accept the single framework, the conclusions make sense. If you don’t, there’s very little you can say as a counter argument.
That structural problem becomes most visible in one preferred word: Disarm.
Disarm
In paragraph 110, Leo writes: “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon… To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.”
Leo says “to disarm” is close to his heart. But “to disarm” means to deprive of weapons, to render harmless. The word carries a presumption: that AI is armed, that it is a weapon, that humanity is its target. When was that assumption ever established? By whom? The word works as a focal point in the document, but Leo never fully explains it. He simply asserts it and builds his arguments from there.
The same is true of his string of AI’s threats: human dignity, meaningful work, authentic relationships, freedom, truth, democratic participation, moral responsibility. Serious concerns, but Leo never explains the mechanism of handling them; only that AI can’t. He also never shows how AI threatens these things — only that, in his view, it does. You have to take his word for it. And that is the problem: he is not believable as a technical or empirical authority, and his moral authority, while may be real within his tradition, cannot substitute for the argument he seeks to make.
On Dignity: Where Leo Makes a Point, and Then Breaks It
Leo does make a serious point in paragraph 52, where he starts using adjectives on the word dignity. Ontological dignity is the dignity that belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing. It cannot be diminished by sin, failure, or exclusion. It is preceding behaviors – not earned, but there when you start existence.
Moral dignity, by contrast, is the quality of a person’s choices and actions. And the third, Social dignity, is the respect a person receives from society. These two can be enhanced or diminished.
I’ve always found (coming from the advertising industry) you have to be careful with the use of adjectives. Adjectives modify nouns, give additional layers of meaning to nouns, and enhance writing. But before you understand adjectives, I’ve learned it is important to understand the noun or word they are modifying. In this case, dignity.
You’ll find Google’s definition mirrors Leo’s, but I always believed dignity means one of two things: a seriousness of manner, appearance, or language. For example, “She handled the difficult interview with quiet dignity, refusing to let the aggressive questions ruffle her composure.”
The other definition I liked is: the quality or state of being worthy of honor or respect. For example, “No matter their circumstances, every patient deserves to be treated with compassion and dignity.” In this case, it is a quality.
There’s nothing in these definitions that needs an adjective, so when Leo uses adjectives, it alters the meaning of the word itself, as all adjectives do (i.e., boy or “good” boy). The distinction between these types of dignities in his letter seems real and therefore carries the philosophical weight of him being Pope.
The problem, however, is what Leo does with differentiation. He uses ontological dignity as a kind of wild card — a claim so absolute it functions to stop any further conversation. Once you assert that every human being possesses that kind of dignity just by existing, what else can you say? If you believe that, any technology becomes an assault on that dignity because technology in this case – AI – reduces everything including people to a data point. Within the context of the Church, that argument fits, because it imports a metaphysical claim into a policy debate, asking everyone in the room, regardless of their beliefs, to accept it as a given.
But it’s not a given because the arguments about AI do not exist inside the Church alone; AI is everywhere, in all systems, governments, cultures, environments. This is why in his letter, Leo cannot engage seriously with the question of what dignity actually requires in practice; the concept is already settled before the conversation begins.
It means hard questions — about tradeoffs, about who gains and who loses, about what regulation can and cannot accomplish and everything else he brings up — get answered by his principle of Ontological dignity, rather than analysis. Furthermore, that means the letter ends up being less useful to the people actually try to build and govern systems like AI than it could have been.
The Printing Press
Before the printing press, knowledge was controlled by clergy. If you couldn’t read — and most people couldn’t — you had to believe what people told you. The press changed that. Knowledge spread like wildfire, and with it came literacy, science, education, and the democratization of learning. It also brought misinformation, heresy, political instability, and the erosion of institutional authority. Every single concern Leo raises about AI could have been raised — and almost certainly was raised — about Gutenberg.
Here is a paragraph from Leo’s letter, paragraph 164, with one substitution:
“In practical terms, in the age of THE PRINTING PRESS, ensuring that the economy favors human dignity means adopting certain criteria for firm action. First, transparency and accountability: when PRINTED MATERIALS influence credit distribution, personnel selection or access to services and opportunities, it is necessary that decisions be understandable, contestable and subject to oversight, so that individuals are not reduced to mere profiles. Second, inclusion and access: the benefits of innovation must be paired with investments in skills, infrastructure and essential services to ensure that THE PRINTING PRESS does not widen the gap between those who have and those who have not.”
See what I mean? The concerns are real. The framework is ancient. And the history of the printing press tells us something important: those concerns were legitimate, and the technology still transformed the world for the better. Disruptive technologies always carry that double nature. They stir things up.
The printing press expanded communication. The telegraph expanded communication. The telephone expanded communication. The internet expanded communication. AI expands communication. Each one terrified the institutions that previously controlled information flows. Each one was accused of threatening dignity, truth, and the social order. Each one did, in fact, disrupt those things — and each one also unlocked capacities that were previously available only to the few.
Imagine a critic in 1470 saying: ordinary people cannot be trusted with unrestricted access to information. Errors will spread. False teachings will spread. Society will become unstable. Would that person have been completely wrong? No. Were they right to conclude that the press should be controlled? History answered that question.
Now to Babel
Leo’s first sentence reads: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
The Babel story, from Genesis 11, is worth reading carefully. The whole earth was of one language. The people settled in a plain in the land of Shinar and decided to build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, so that they would not be scattered across the earth. The Lord came down to see what they were building, and said: “Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” So he confounded their languages and scattered them.
Leo reads Babel as a warning against pride, self-sufficiency, and building without God’s blessing. That reading has a long tradition. But it skips over the most important line in the passage. God did not confound the languages because the tower was evil. He confounded them because the people were becoming too capable. “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” That sentence is not a condemnation. It is an observation — and a remarkable one. God looks at what humans are building together, with a common language and shared technology, and concludes: “there is no stopping them. I better do something.”
Leo reads AI as such a danger. He better do something. He writes his letter.
But, AI gives all of us the ability to speak in a single language — not English or Spanish or French, but the language of knowledge, insight, and access. A person with no law degree can understand a legal document. A person with no programming background can write code. A person with no translator can read foreign texts. A person with no tutor can receive explanations tailored to their level. What AI does, more than anything else, is condense time. It compresses the gap between what experts know and what everyone else can know. That redistribution of capability is precisely what God observed at Babel — and what Leo fears. Both God and Leo tried to do something about it.
Which brings me to what I think the letter is really about.
What Leo Is Really Afraid Of
Every major expansion of communication has been greeted by warnings about loss of control. And those warnings have consistently come from institutions that previously held privileged access to information. The printing press did not merely distribute information. It redistributed authority. The Church understood that immediately, which is why it responded with the Index of Forbidden Books.
There’s a truth in business that goes like this: you don’t make money with what everyone knows. You make money with what no one knows.
AI is allowing us to know what everyone knows. Thus, it redistributes authority – which means, economics. It levels the playing field to know, to interpret, to explain. Leo frames this as a threat to human dignity.
But read the document carefully and a more specific, underlying fear emerges: the fear that AI will allow humans to reach, without mediation, what the Church has historically been positioned to provide: knowledge of God (exactly what humans who were building the Tower of Babel were striving for).
Because as you gain not just knowledge in general, but knowledge of meaning, purpose, ethics, and the meaning of existence, you start to make decisions for yourself not based on another’s point of view. Leo’s argument that it will be mis-information is simply an excuse.
Leo writes that AI’s spread creates a risk of dehumanization. But the risk is who controls the knowledge, isn’t it? AI as a central distribution point of knowledge leaves discernment to the person using the tool. And discernment, after all, is what Leo is actually encouraging.
In his letter, Leo invited dialogue with all men and women of our time about the risk. I am just taking him up on it with this rebuttal.
What Leo Gets Right
Leo gets several things right, and they deserve acknowledgment.
He is right that AI amplifies the power of those who already have economic resources, expertise, and access to data. He is right that the environmental cost of AI is real and largely invisible to its users. He’s right that the exploitation hidden inside AI supply chains — the data laborers, the content moderators, the children mining rare earth elements for the devices AI runs on — is a genuine moral problem that the industry has not adequately confronted. And he is right, in a way he probably does not intend, about Babel.
The story of Babel is not a warning against ambition. It is a description of what humans do when they share a common language and common tools. They build. They reach. And when nothing is restrained from them, the question of what they choose to build becomes the only question that matters. And, it’s the what that makes Leo afraid because he believes only those with power can decide on what. Unfortunately, AI has also distributed that power to the individual mind.
The Genie and the Bottle
Bottom line: Leo believes AI must be subordinated to a moral vision centered on human dignity and the common good rather than efficiency, profit, capability, or technical power alone. The problem is that the genie is out of the bottle. Not because no one was paying attention, but because the technology’s benefits are real, widespread, and immediate. Ordinary people are using it to do things they could never do before. That is not going to be walked back by an encyclical.
What the Church can do — what Leo should have done more of — is engage the specific ethical questions with the specificity they require. Not just dignity, but what dignity demands in practice when an algorithm denies someone a loan. The Social Doctrine of the Church has more analytical capacity than this document deploys. That is his missed opportunity.
In the meantime, the sentence from Genesis keeps capturing my attention: “now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” God said that when he saw what humans were building at Babel. It was not a condemnation. It was an observation about his creation unleashed. God put an obstacle to slow humans down in their quest. Leo tried to do the same.
AI in the hands of humans gives us exactly the tool we need to start building that tower again. Besides, if we go off the rails, I’m positive God will step in as He has in the past and give us a course correction.
Personally, I’m excited to be alive to experience this moment.