Starting with the book Encountering Artificial Intelligence of 2024, the AI Research Group for the Vatican Centre of Digital Culture has raised the issue of the challenges that the age of AI poses to human agency and intelligence in light of the limitations of classical modern anthropologies. Since Immanuel Kant this tradition tends to invert the hierarchy between the holistic features of our insightful “experience of reality” (intellectus, nous), and the subordinate, discursive, manipulative and problem-solving features of human rationality (ratio, dianoia).² The new book of the same group, Reclaiming Human Agency, shows how the resulting image of who human beings are has shaped disordered habits of life planning and technology design that undermine our technical, moral, and intellectual skills, hollow out our perceptual and epistemic trust, and endanger our freedom to strive for the common good. The corresponding recommendations of the last two chapters then include possible regulatory constraints on AI as well as constructive frameworks of technology design that are suitable to protect and support human agency.

The focal concept of (human) agency reminds us that the responsibility of judicious human agents, whose judgments are drawn by the natural desire for the true, the beautiful, and the good, cannot be delegated to probabilistic classifiers. The conflicting idea that AI can attain human agency is indicative of “dominant ways of understanding human persons” (53), which build on materialist, behaviorist, or functionalist traditions. Yet the latter are incompatible with the “Catholic anthropology as well as other robust anthropologies” (53). The last half-sentence of this quotation could have been deepened in the light of most recent discussions of theoretical biology and neurocognitive science, which confirm the fundamental difference between mechanical ways of motion and the vital agency of ensouled bodies (in the Aristotelian sense of this word), which is mentioned in passing (49f.).³ If we focus on this fundamental difference, the inert movements of mechanical calculating devices cannot even compete with the organismic agency of a simple bacterium. Hence, we can conclude that there is no technical path to creating truly intelligent “Agentic AI’s” (47-63). The idea of a “living machine” is a contradiction in terms, and in this sense symptomatic of a phenomenologically and conceptually confused account of the “gift of intelligence” (53).⁴

In line with Pope Francis’s statements on the contemporary “Throwaway Culture and the Technocratic Paradigm” (36ff.), the book also engages with the systemic dimensions of technological innovations and related “structures of sin.”⁵ It exposes, for example, our culture “of greed and pride” and its careless fragmentation of knowledge, which “lead to loss of appreciation of the whole, the pursuit of what is not essential and the disregard of relationships” (Laudato Si, no. 110). However, the authors hesitate to engage with the creative dimensions of systemic technologies that “enframe” our lives in such a way that they alter our view of the world.

The fact that the book puts rather little emphasis on the theoretical side of the “tie between intellect and agency” (20) strikes me as symptomatic of this hesitation. To be sure, in contrast to modern voluntarists, the authors emphasize that virtuous acts of the will are inseparable from our theoretical understanding of the world. They also leave no doubt that this is relevant in terms of the trinitarian character of human personhood and the exercise of “those features particular to the image and likeness of God: intellect and will (…) grounded in human nature” (17, my emphasis). We might even read this quotation as indicative of Augustine’s trinitarian account of the nature of the human mind (mens), which can be characterized as a connatural tri-unity of mind, knowledge, and love, or memory, intellect, and will. Arguably, this triadic structure is essential to the creative potentials of human agency, which empower us to participate “in the creative activity of God” (22f.). Yet the disclosive, intellective dimensions of this creative power remain underexposed in the 2025 book.

As contemporary discussions of the philosophy of technology show, technology is never only a means to the fulfillment of predetermined ends of the will. For example, for millennia our lives have been enframed by writing technologies and related techno-cultural infrastructures, which shaped our practical and cognitive habits and underpinned the evolution of our brains.⁶ If properly ordered, systemic technologies like these can have a disclosive dimension that transforms our nature and deepens our understanding of the world, including our understanding of unanticipated dimensions of human flourishing that technological innovations invite and afford. The authors rightly emphasize that true happiness is always an unanticipated gift and that the freedom it affords “is not limitless autonomy but a participation in God’s own triune life” (34). Yet this freedom is inextricably intertwined with the gift of our embodied intellect (noûs) as a “revelator of being.”⁷ Our intellect has the potential to disclose unanticipated dimensions of the world, including the techno-cultural environments that enframe our life, inasmuch as it permits us to participate in the creative power of the Divine Word. For this reason, Saint Augustine already associated the uncreated Word, through which everything is created and given meaning, with an original art (in the sense of τέχνη), the ars ipsa per quem facta sunt omnia.⁸ Starting with John Scotus Eriugena, this artistic dimension of the Word and, derivatively, the human intellect was later systematically elaborated by thinkers like Bonaventure and Meister Eckhart, culminating in the ars coniecturalis of Nicholas of Cusa. The most recent discussion of trinitarian anthropologies of technology builds on this premodern tradition and deepens it in light of post-phenomenological anthropologies of technology, such as Bernard Stiegler’s, which question the binary anthropologies of classical modernity. ⁹

The significance of this blind spot becomes particularly evident in chapter 9 on “The Treatment of Technology in Catholic Social Teaching” (133-149). In accordance with the tradition of CST, the authors plead for a concept of progress that focuses on “the integral development of all persons” (139) and aims to overcome the “illusion of total autonomy” (141). This requires us “to accept that technological products are not neutral,” as Laudato Si has pointed out, since “they create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities [… ] Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build”(145, no. 107). However, at the end of the day, the tradition of CST, including Pope Frances’s expansion, tends to relapse to an instrumental understanding of technology: “Technology should be a tool: instrumentally valued for its usefulness in achieving other, intrinsically valuable, ends” (146).

The authors concede that, in the time of autonomous cars, machines “stop being tools; they cease to be means to an end but start to shape the ends themselves” (182). And they respond to this challenge by calling on programmers to “resist attempts to anthropomorphize the machine” (183). Yet, while the last point is consistent with the second of the “Ten rules for a digital world,”¹⁰ which build on the ten commandments, the first point might raise serious doubts. Has it ever been possible to draw a clear demarcation line between “mere technical tools” and cultural artifacts that have a disclosive, inherently symbolic or even sacramental value, such as the “Diesel engine” in David Jones famous essay Art and Sacrament?¹¹ It seems to me that the tradition of CST is at this critical point still under the influence of the binary anthropologies of classical modernity, which can be traced back, via “critical” thinkers like Kant, to the Reformation era. The innovators of this era turned sacred spaces into preaching halls, chalices into cups, altars into tables, and icons into propagandistic tools.¹² This was the starting point of a cultural upheaval that incrementally turned every sacred object into an object of manipulation in the hands of homo faber – with the exception of the modern “fetish of autonomy,”¹³ which the authors rightly expose.

Yet we are relational beings. Things have the power to shape us and make us act! This power might be the manipulative or benevolent medium of human-centered intentional acts (154-165). However, due to the systemic character of technological innovations, they ultimately escape our intentional control, both for the better and the worse. Hence, technical artifacts appeal to our responsibility in a more traditional way: They appeal to our ability to discern between demonic and eudemonic innovations – innovations that either lead to the divinization of man or the dystopia of Dante’s Inferno.

When secularized experts in the field compare ecclesial statements on artificial intelligence, such as Antiqua et Nova, with secular statements such as those of the German Ethics Council, it seems evident that this is where the blind spot of tradition-oriented (if not “pre-critical”) church statements lies.¹⁴ Yet, if we want to face the most severe challenge of our time, we must delve even deeper into the premodern tradition. Only an uncompromising Ressourcement can inspire us to overcome the instrumental understanding of technical artifacts that shaped the modern homo faber. Rather than seeing this lacuna of the book as a fatal flaw we should treat it as a place where CST can be further developed and enriched.

Endnotes

1. Paul Scherz and Brian Patrick Green, eds., Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, AI Research Group for the Centre for Digital Culture, Pickwick 2025. Page references in the text refer to this volume.

2. See Johannes Hoff, “Enlightenment Now! Overcoming the Functional Cognitivism of the Kantian Tradition,” in Philosophy, Theology and the Sciences 11 (2024), 181-207, 192-204 DOI 10.1628/ptsc-2024-0015; and Iain Mcgilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press 2009

3. See Johannes Jaeger; Anna Riedl; Alex Diedovich et al., “Naturalizing Relevance Realization: why Agency and Cognition are Fundamentally not Computational,” in Frontiers in Psychology (25 June 2024), 1-25; Jelle Bruineberg; Julian; Kiverstein,Erik Rietveld, “The Anticipating Brain is not a Scientist: the Free-Energy Principle from an Ecological-Enactive Perspective,” in Synthese 195 (2018), 2417-2444; and Johannes Hoff, “Die Wiederentdeckung verkörperter Menschlichkeit: „Künstliche Intelligenz“ als Wendepunkt christlicher Anthropologie,” in Internationale Zeitschrift Communio (2026), 147-162.

4. See also Antiqua et Nova, no. 1; and Johannes Hoff, “The Gift of Intelligence and the Sacramentality of Real Presence. Overcoming the Dataist Metaphysics of Modern Cognitivism,” in Modern Theology 40/4 (2024), 921-947 DOI:10.1111/moth.12940.

5. John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, December 30, 1987, nos. 36–40; John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, nos. 11–24.

6. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Johns Hopkins University Press 1976; and Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The fault of Epimetheus, Stanford UP 1998.

7. Bruno Bérard, “Unmasking AI,” in Philo-sophia (2018), https://philos-sophia.org/unmasking-ai/.

8. Augustine, “De Libero Arbitrio, Libri Tres: “ in Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, Brepols 1956, Vol 74, Section 76, Part 73, III 15.42; similar yet less explicit: Augustine, “De Trinitate: “ in The Trinity, transl. by Edmund Hill, O.P., New City Press 1991, IV, 1.

9. See Johannes Hoff,Oliver Dürr, “Umrisse einer trinitarischen Technikanthropologie,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Philosophie. Sonderheft Trinitarische Technikanthropologie 147/1 (2025), 7-43 and the other contributions to this special issue; Enrico Grube; Johannes Hoff, “Imago Dei: Trinitarian Anthropology in the Age of Technology,” in Zimmerman, Jens; Moyse, Ashley; Burdett, Michael (eds.): The Oxford Handbook of Theological Anthropology. Oxford, 2026 (forthcoming), and Johannes Hoff, Verteidigung des Heiligen: Anthropologie der Digitalen Transformation, Herder 2021, 70-83, 218-225, 290-298, 356-380.

10. https://www.thefuturefoundation.eu/en/10-rules

11. David Jones, “Art and Sacrament: “ in Epoch and Artist. Selected Writings, ed Grisewood Harman, Faber and Faber 1959, 143-179, 153.

12. Johannes Hoff, “The Eclipse of Sacramental Realism in the Age of Reform. Re-thinking Luther’s Gutenberg Galaxy in a Post-Digital Age,” in New Blackfriars (2018), 248-270.

13. James Simpson, Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition, Oxford UP 2010.

14. Kerstin Schlögl-Flierl,Armin Grunwald, “Der Mensch in der Maschine Ethische Beurteilung der Künstlichen Intelligenz,” in Stimmen der Zeit 6 (2025), 451-460.

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

Here are a few highlights:

The paper made me think about a key lesson in my ethics class, one that gets almost no bandwidth in usual discussions, and is tricky to teach, because it’s abstract. This is the fundamental idea, in the first book of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, that human flourishing is “rational activity.”

Both words cause confusion, but are vitally important. “Activity” is not just a means to flourishing; it IS flourishing. And “rational” doesn’t mean high-grade academic activity; it means, as I say to students, that “you know what you are doing.” There are various ways to make these teachings clear. On the importance of activity, Nozick’s thought experiment about “the experience machine” becomes ever more relevant. And on the importance of rational, it becomes pretty easy to point out that we rely all the time on the fact that people “know what they are doing” and that it is a pretty universal experience to try to escape if one finds oneself in a situation where you don’t know what you are doing.

Ribera, Jusepe de - Aristotle; from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle_(Ribera)#/media/File:Ribera,_Jusepe_de_-_Aristotle_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg

While many (rightly) speak about the recovery of virtue ethics in AI, and many (including our Holy Father!) speak eloquently about the tremendous dignity of the human person, both ideas really point to this central nexus of rational activity. The virtues are simply the characteristics that we need to be excellent at rational activity, to do it readily, to cooperate well with others, to avoid being blocked by fantasies or fatigue. And the magnificence of the human person involves the work of reason and, as arguably the most important “activity” we do, relationships of voluntary commitment (don’t worry I will say something about love and God later…)

Even the latter point, about relationships, can get lost in Aristotle’s “rational activity,” but that’s not even true for Aristotle. He believes (at some points) that the best and highest form of rational activity is clearly relational (politics), and (not unrelatedly) spends significant time lauding friendship as the most important of activities. If we extend this to recognize (as Aristotle did not) the importance of family relationships and the dignity of craft labor, we will certainly see that speaking about rational activity is not somehow a distraction from being made for human relationships, but among the most (if not the most) important such activity. But we also seem to miss how important it is to understand relationships as a rational activity - again probably misled by our equation of activity with “project” and rational with “stuck in your head.” What we mean is relationships where everyone acts well and knows what they are doing.

Let me just say why getting this point matters so much, and then respond to an objection. First, this matters so much because this is really the key to getting AI right. AI’s promise and danger are the same thing: instant results, without a great deal of activity. Unless we go rabidly anti-tool (i.e. much more anti-tool than the Amish), we need to recognize that labor-saving activity is not only not going away, but we all want it and use it over and over (running water, anyone?? Hugely labor-saving!). So we can’t just say, “AI just gives you the result of a paper” and presume everyone will see that the point of writing a paper is writing the paper. We need to name why rational activity is important, and (more pointedly) why THIS PARTICULAR FORM of rational activity is essential for flourishing. In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo reiterates the fundamental meaning of work, not simply as a means:

work is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment. In this regard, financial assistance to the poor may at times be necessary in emergencies, but it cannot become the sole response, since the goal is to enable each person to live with dignity through his or her own work. (#149)

Yet AI will change work, and we need to be more intentional about those changes. Nicholas Ogle, in a post from last week, nicely explains why AI necessitates choices about “selective de-skilling.” To use a more earthy example: my wife’s family is Italian, and they all know how to cook; they own microwaves, but they would not think highly of someone who just want “the results” and didn’t know something about “how to cook a meal.” Maybe everyone doesn’t need to know how to cook (although maybe not!). But does everyone need to know how to read in a sustained, focused way? Mass literacy is an extraordinary social achievement, but does the advent of AI mean we now don’t have to know how to read (=cook) in order to get the “result” of knowledge (=meal)? The same is true about writing, but overall, AI should prompt us to gain much more clarity about what is actually worthwhile and central activity in human lives. A colleague in moral theology, Nichole Flores, said casually in a conversation, “I just want to go running, do baking, and go to mass… with my kids.” There’s a nice statement of flourishing, though as with any example, it raises lots of questions about how all the other work we do rely on for our lives gets done! But as something that points us back to basics - what is truly worthwhile rational activity - it is provocative and instructive.

Now to the objection: doesn’t this emphasis on worthwhile rational activity privilege certain groups of people? Isn’t it “ableist”? Let’s go back to that going to Mass bit: there is certainly a way in which Aristotle’s account of flourishing has to be somewhat revised in light of the Gospel, and God’s activity (although grace builds on nature!). At this point, I might have referenced a now-disgraced Catholic who worked with the mentally ill, but the generic lesson stands well enough on the authority of many saints: we learn we are not ultimately in charge best by recognizing and relating to those who are not necessarily “succeeding” by Aristotle’s standards. Such compassion is ultimately learned only when we do not turn this service into an activity at which we can be excellent, but one that teaches us our own lack of excellence, our weakness, our own sin, our own being sustained by God’s gracious excessiveness, especially the excessiveness of Christ. As Leo writes:

It is precisely within our limitations that the following find a place: compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others; a generosity that can emerge even in the midst of darkness and failure; spiritual experience and the worship of God. We see this at many moments when our limits become tangible: when we face rejection, when we suffer the illness or loss of a loved one, when we encounter our own weakness or failure. Mysteriously, it is precisely in such moments that we can discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others and encounter the presence of the Lord. (#119)

This is because our own rational activity, while good, is dependent on and oriented toward something greater. Near the conclusion of the core chapter of his encyclical, Leo offers a wonderful description of this:

The expression “more than human” is not an exclusive domain of technological promise. For centuries, the Christian tradition has maintained that human beings are not confined by the boundaries of their own nature; rather, they are called to self-transcendence, not through an escape from reality or a contempt for their limitations, but through their fulfillment in love. Faith recognizes an openness toward the “beyond,” which originates as a gift from God. …The one who makes this passage possible can only be the Eternal One who gives of himself. Indeed, it is God himself who overcomes the “infinite” disproportion. …When we embrace the possibility of transcending ourselves through God’s grace, we do not deny our nature, nor do we become less human. …Herein lies the radical departure from Promethean dreams: what saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms. … A person’s future is not calculable, but depends on one’s freedom — elevated by the inexhaustible grace of God — and on the relationships cultivated. (#127-128)

As Gaudium et Spes and John Paul both taught, the human person is ultimately fulfilled by free self-gift. This is something that is possible only by receiving, by worshipping… but even then, it is part of the gift that we are able to “know what we are doing” when we do this most worthwhile of all human activities.

At St. Mary’s University, where I teach theology, we talk a lot about “education in a family spirit.” It is one of five characteristics of Marianist universities. It appears in university marketing materials as well as applications for tenure and promotion. Reading through this article by Jason Heron and Alessandro Rovati has motivated me to interrogate that maxim a bit more closely. What does it mean to cultivate a family spirit at the university or in my classroom? What does the idea of family signify in this context?

Heron and Rovati ground their defense of ungrading in the vision of education espoused by the Catholic Church. They quote the Vatican II declaration Gravissimum Educationis, observing that education “promotes friendly relations and fosters a spirit of mutual understanding” (no. 5). They see in Pope Francis’s words a similar sensibility. Christian education requires “communion in learning, holy intercourse, habit of life, [and] interchange of affection” (Veritatis Gaudium, no. 4c). This could certainly describe what the Marianist universities mean by family spirit. Genuine learning can only take place in community. Education requires human relationship. It requires interaction, collaboration, inclusive participation, trust, and care (CMU, no. 30). Only in that context can teachers and students authentically accompany one another in the quest for truth.

Maybe the family spirit of the Marianists has helped to shift my focus in the classroom away “from coercion and performance to the centrality of fascination and freedom, risk and responsibility,” as Heron and Rovati phrase it (p. 123). This is what my experiments in ungrading have tried to do: to frame my students and me as collaborators, to invite them to greater responsibility, to prioritize learning over external metrics, and above all, to address them as free selves and whole persons grounded in community.

Of course, I have also endured the costs of the “risk of freedom,” which Heron and Rovati describe in their dialogue with Pope Francis and Luigi Giussani. I have experimented with contract grading, and it seems I am constantly in the process of revising my rubrics and policies. When I first eliminated deadlines, even my most eager students would not do the work. I have gambled repeatedly on my students’ willingness to take responsibility, and sometimes I have lost. Some students give up and walk away. Nevertheless, most do rise to the challenge, and they are touched by my desire to know them and meet them at a human level. This is what family is about, is it not?

As much as I value the idea of teaching in a family spirit, I do harbor some concerns. The language of family is quite susceptible to misinterpretation and even abuse. The Marianist universities themselves acknowledge this. Families are not all about friendship and inclusion in every moment; disagreement and hardship are part of family life as well (CMU, no. 35). I think we must be careful to avoid deploying the word “family” in the style of the toxic workplace, where the term is used to smooth over conflict, diminish accountability, and extract labor without fair compensation. Families require justice, and they must make room for differences.

Which brings me to a set of questions for Heron and Rovati. These emerge from my context as an early-career professor of theology at a small, teaching-focused, Hispanic-serving Catholic and Marianist university in the Southwest United States. I think these questions touch on some of the key epistemological and ethical issues at stake in the effort to weave together Christian theology, education theory, and the practice of ungrading.

First, how do we respond to cultural and religious diversity among our students? I am personally quite compelled by Giussani’s understanding of Christian education. It is the role of a teacher to offer a working hypothesis about the meaning of reality, to substantiate that tradition with reference to authority, and to invite students to verify the truth of it in their lived experience. We do our students no favor by pretending that all views are equally plausible, or that they should craft a worldview of their own from scratch. That does not lead to authentic freedom but “obscures how individual instincts, the dominant culture, and the loudest voices shape us” (p. 115). To avoid this false neutrality, Giussani believes we must begin with the truth of the Christian proposition and provide students the critical resources to make it their own.

But what if a student cannot make the Christian worldview their own? This is not necessarily a failure. Perhaps this student belongs to a different religious tradition. Perhaps this student has been so harmed by representatives of the Christian hypothesis that it cannot be verified in their own experience. At my university, I must assume that these students are in the room. As a teacher of theology, I must therefore frame the task a bit differently. For those who come from a Christian background and remain hospitable to its message, I do frame our work as an opportunity to make this hypothesis their own. For those who do not, I describe my courses as an opportunity to investigate a religious hypothesis that is personally important to others and culturally relevant to all of us. In all cases, I tell my students that they must interrogate whatever traditions shape them, taking responsibility for what they believe and the practices they take for granted.

How does an approach like mine fit within a Christian vision of education? Is it a sensible outcome of reverence for the person and respect for human freedom, or does it circumvent the evangelical quality of our work? As I have said, family must make room for differences. Yet one of the risks of the family metaphor is that it implies all of our members come from the same background. In today’s university, that is rarely the case. Students and professors come from all sorts of cultures and traditions, which represent for them different certainties from which to begin. Giussani argues that his approach does not close off other perspectives, for “no one can be open to other cultures and proposals without starting from a certainty.” (p. 116). I entirely agree. But with so many certainties from which our students begin, what does undergraduate teaching look like? Is there still room to begin from the Christian hypothesis, or must we diversify our starting points?

Second, what do we make of the practical challenges that Heron and Rovati point out? When done well, this work is extraordinarily time-consuming. It is also more emotionally draining than traditional modes of teaching and assessment. Most of us are struggling already under a full-time teaching load, and loads are heavier at schools that prize pedagogy. We continue to see cuts to the liberal arts, the threat of censorship is looming, there is increasing pressure to demonstrate return-on-investment in our programs, and many institutions are merrily adopting AI infrastructure with relatively little focus on mission, ethics, or investment in teachers. In short, we are attempting new pedagogical innovations while in triage mode. What are some concrete strategies for capturing the spirit of ungrading while economizing on time and resources? How might this vision of education speak to our current moment in higher education?

Another challenge worth flagging concerns accessibility and justice. Heron and Rovati rightly acknowledge the barriers that ungrading may present to neurodivergent students, online students, and students who are underprepared for college. We can do our best to place our students in touch with campus resources, including offices of accessibility, student success staff, counseling services, and so on. We can modify our policies and procedures to place all of our students on an even playing field. Still, there are larger structural issues at play. Ungrading relies on student initiative. It assumes that students have agency and are able to use it. However, there are serious constraints on their agency imposed by forces beyond our control as teachers. College students today are under immense pressure to select majors that will result in high-paying jobs. There is evidence that this pressure disproportionately affects Black and Brown students, as well as first-generation college students. At my university, students often cannot give a course their all because they work long hours to pay for tuition, serve as caregivers in their families, or manage problems concerning immigration status. Under such pressure, students regularly prioritize the courses and programs that will land them jobs and also the courses with clearer, traditional grading systems.

In short, students are not always free to choose the adventure of learning when what they need is to make it through college and begin collecting an income. Here is where the ideal vision of education laid out by Heron and Rovati meets the reality of the situation for all of us experimenting with ungrading. How can we respond? What can we learn from where our students stand?

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

Image from https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-11/pope-leo-xiv-press-conference-papal-plane-turkiye-lebanon.html

I turned to the 2025 note from two Vatican dicasteries to get a sense of what might be coming. Antiqua et Nova isn’t sex obsessed but it does offer moral wisdom that is relevant for all areas of human life. Instead of giving into a “functionalist perspective” (10) of intelligence based on what it can produce, the note urges a personalist understanding “situated within a personally lived history of intellectual and moral formation that fundamentally shapes the individual’s perspective, encompassing the physical, emotional, social, moral, and spiritual dimensions of life” (32). Though sexuality (56-63) is but one of many ethical issues engaged, the call for “authentic encounter” (57) here is rooted in the same understanding of human nature as essentially relational that animates the entire document. Risks arising in economics, war, healthcare (e.g., deception, abuse, anthropomorphism, isolation, utilitarianism, lack of transcendence, overreliance on technology, lack of respect for human dignity) also pertain to the personal realm. We are made for more and have to remember that AI is ultimately just a tool that must be evaluated in light of how it contributes to or detracts from our humanity.

When I finally read Magnifica Humanitas before sunrise on Monday morning, I found the same reticence about specific sexual issues mixed with deep concern about human dignity and embodied human persons who are made for relationship. Pope Leo decries a “culture of power” and “relational poverty” that both normalizes war (188) and encourages “new forms of slavery,” including human trafficking (175). In the face of currents of dehumanization, he lifts up the goods of attention, care, and taking time to “recognize the other as a face not merely as a function” (114).

Applied to sexual ethics, this suggests that AI tools, like cell phones or social media, are good insofar as they advance our ability to enter into empathetic and genuine relationships, and bad insofar as they impede this. And, as with any major change, it is crucial to see how our thinking is being shaped, how, for instance, interacting with chatbots shapes our interactions with humans. We want encounter, not instrumentalization, in our personal lives as well as our social, economic, and political lives. In this sense, recent Catholic teaching on AI has implications for sexual ethics, even though it offers few specific norms or judgements.

Of course, this is not what most people mean by “pelvic theology,” but I worry that use of this term minimizes sexual harm (e.g., trafficking, intimate partner violence, child sexual abuse, rape as a weapon of war, infidelity, and “bad sex”) and fails to honor the very real need for sexual virtue (e.g., mutuality, equality, fruitfulness, intimacy, self-giving, and self-respect). At least since Vatican II, Catholic sexual ethics has been attentive to much more than rules. To suggest the church has no stake in sexual ethics or that “what happens in the bedroom” is private and unworthy of serious moral analysis makes little sense. It should not, as Pope Leo suggested, divide the church or separate Catholics from one another. It is not the only “grave matter” worthy of moral concern. But who can doubt that the human capacity to harm is present in this realm, as in any other?

For sure, the church still has work to do in deepening sexual ethics and connecting it to a holistic vision of the human person and the good life. The pope might well decide that lay theologians are better messengers of Catholic personal ethics while his power can be best utilized on global socio-political problems. But the personal and the political are always connected and the church does well to help people see those connections. The latest writing from Rome on AI contributes to this project, not by foregrounding sexual ethics but lifting up a vision of a moral life devoted to seeking truth and building a civilization of love, one relationship at a time.

It was recently reported by the Pew Research Center that Americans are now “more concerned than excited” about the increased use of AI in daily life, with 82% of respondents indicating extreme or moderate concern that “people’s ability to do things on their own will get worse because of AI use,” and a majority of adults under thirty saying that “the increased use of AI in society will make people worse at thinking creatively (61%) and forming meaningful relationships with other people (58%).” While positive views of AI remain prevalent among technology experts, only 17% of the American public believes that it will have a “positive impact on the United States over the next 20 years.” It is against this backdrop of growing unease about the effects of AI on our common life that the A.I. Research Group for the Vatican’s Centre for Digital Culture has released its second volume, Reclaiming Human Agency in an Age of Artificial Intelligence. Building on its previous study, which explored a variety of theological, anthropological, and ethical issues related to AI, Reclaiming focuses more narrowly on questions related to human freedom, practical judgment, and moral action. In particular, it considers how AI can endanger human dignity by undermining or replacing human agency. The volume understandably emphasizes the growing number of threats that AI poses to the responsible exercise of human agency. Yet despite its predominantly critical posture, it admirably resists the temptation to adopt a wholly negative assessment of the technology.

In this respect, Reclaiming reflects the vision of Pope Francis (and of Catholic social thought more broadly), who observed in his 2024 address to the G7 that AI, like any other technology, “arises precisely from the use of [our] God-given creative potential.” Drawing on this insight, Reclaiming argues that our attentiveness to the unique risks of such a powerful technology must be balanced by a recognition of its potential to benefit society. When properly designed, AI can serve as “a tool that genuinely supports human flourishing and responsible action rather than eroding it” (11). By highlighting the challenges involved in preventing harmful uses of AI technologies, Reclaiming ultimately seeks to promote a human-centered design process, where AI systems are intended to “complement rather than replace human skills” (184).

Reclaiming discusses several ways in which AI can be used to promote human flourishing by supporting and enhancing human agency. Some of these applications have to do with the ability of AI systems to process data at a scale that far exceeds and outpaces the capacities of the human mind. For example, it is mentioned how AI can be used to quickly analyze vast amounts of satellite data in order to more effectively track the effects of climate change and land use (89). Similarly, the book highlights the Nobel Prize-winning program Alphafold, which uses deep learning to predict unknown protein structures, as an exemplary instance of AI augmenting human agency by “[performing] a task at which humans do not and will never excel” (185). In each case, AI “solves a problem that otherwise cannot be solved” (89), since the data is either so complex or so extensive that we lack the ability, let alone the human resources, to analyze all of it. With these applications, it is clear that AI is being used to enhance and augment, rather than replace or weaken human agency.

Other applications, by contrast, involve tasks that human beings could in principle perform but often do not, due to various practical constraints. Reclaiming notes, for example, that “AI applications have provided support for people with many kinds of disabilities,” such as text-to-speech apps that give people with blindness or dyslexia greater access to written content (2). The book also cautiously endorses tools such as Ambient AI, which uses speech recognition technology to automatically document medical appointments in electronic health records (185). While this task could just as easily be performed by a human scribe, the cost of employing such scribes has led most medical practices to require their practitioners to fill out this record themselves during patient visits, often at the cost of sustained attention to the patient. By transcribing and summarizing clinical conversations, an AI scribe frees up the practitioner’s attention and thus “supports rather than undermines the practitioner’s agency toward intersubjective engagement with the patient” (186).

This last example raises further questions precisely because it suggests that AI can support the agency of a medical practitioner in performing the (primary) task of diagnosing and treating the patient by eliminating—or at least reducing—the need for his or her involvement in the (secondary) task of keeping a medical record. As Reclaiming makes clear, however, this is only the case because “[t]here is no particular human excellence to the bureaucratic task of filling out a chart that Ambient AI replaces” (186). In other words, charting does not appear to be a task that involves “higher-order levels of thinking” or “offers valuable challenges for human development,” unlike activities more closely connected to the ends of medicine (86). While one might reasonably question whether documenting a medical appointment is as mechanical an activity as Reclaiming suggests, one can readily understand how it differs from, say, a student using an AI scribe to take notes during class. In this case, the task AI replaces is one that is not merely secondary and instrumental, but intrinsic to the practice and aims of education. By eliminating or reducing human involvement in an activity through which certain intellectual virtues (e.g., attention, interpretive judgment, and critical thinking) might otherwise be cultivated, an educational AI scribe would have the effect of disempowering rather than supporting the agency of the student.

Thus, drawing on a distinction popularized by the philosopher Shannon Vallor, Reclaiming contends that AI can support human agency not only through the “upskilling” of human agents, but also through certain forms of “deskilling” that allow them to redirect their energies elsewhere, while nonetheless preserving the virtues necessary for excellence in a given activity. On this view, deskilling is “neither good nor bad in itself” (8), but depends on the moral salience of the task being replaced. If it is a task that “[offers] great scope to judgment, creativity, empathy, practical wisdom, and critical thinking,” we should expect that deskilling will also result in a certain amount of “de-virtuing” (87). The authors recognize, however, that because the moral salience of particular skills is not always obvious, judgments regarding whether a given form of deskilling will ultimately promote or impede human flourishing can often be made only in hindsight (80). Indeed, the question of whether a given technology should be viewed primarily as an instance of upskilling or deskilling may be difficult to answer with any degree of certainty prior to its widespread adoption.

Consider how AI is now being used by radiologists to interpret X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs. There are certain ways in which AI unambiguously “upskills” the practice of radiology; for example, by enhancing the quality of images and flagging which scans need immediate attention. AI has also helped uncover “radiomic” biomarkers in diagnostic images that correlate with disease in ways that are imperceptible to human radiologists. It remains to be seen, however, how AI will reshape how radiologists approach the core task of identifying abnormalities in diagnostic scans. Technology experts have long predicted that AI will eventually eliminate the need for a human radiologist to be involved at all in this task. Others argue that AI will not replace but rather enhance the performance of radiologists by improving their efficiency and helping them attain a consistently higher level of accuracy in their scan analysis. We now have a growing body of evidence that supports this latter view.

However, a recent study published in Nature complicates the picture somewhat. While AI assistance may improve performance on average, its effects are uneven, with some radiologists even performing worse while using AI. A key finding of the study is that “radiologists struggle to consistently distinguish between accurate and inaccurate AI predictions and can be misled by inaccurate AI predictions.” Moreover, it showed that “[c]linicians who had low performance at baseline did not benefit consistently from AI assistance.” These findings raise the question of whether the full integration of AI with the practice of radiology may lead not only to beneficial upskilling, but also to a degree of deskilling that risks compromising the effectiveness of clinical medicine. Precisely for this reason, some experts have recommended using AI only as a “second set of eyes” after a radiologist has already interpreted a scan without assistance.

This mixed assessment of AI-assisted radiology reflects the broader ethical and professional challenges that accompany the integration of AI into any complex human activity that engages higher-order levels of thinking. Reclaiming rightly observes that we must consider how AI “can be used to assist and enhance the essential human skills and virtues in these tasks and not replace them” (87). Yet, as we have seen, it may not only be difficult to determine whether a certain AI application is primarily an instance of upskilling or deskilling; it may also be the case that the same technology can have different effects on different users, improving the performance of some while diminishing that of others. The authors of this excellent volume have helpfully framed the contemporary debate about AI’s effects on human agency in light of a Catholic vision of human flourishing. Yet the task of discerning how this vision should inform our judgments about specific AI applications remains in its early stages. One hopes that the members of this research group will continue to explore how the various AI technologies that are rapidly reshaping our economy and society might be properly directed toward a genuine vision of human flourishing that supports rather than undermines human agency.

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

Nikolai Ge: “What is truth?” Christ and Pilate; from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:What_is_truth.jpg

But in terms of content, an initial place to focus, I want to focus on the discussion of truth and communication in chapter 4. The architecture of the encyclical overall is quite clear. Although long, the encyclical ends up having three main parts: a fundamental analysis of artificial intelligence as an instance of the technocratic paradigm in chapter 3, a broader overall analysis of politics and culture in chapter 5, and then a more focused threefold application in chapter 4, to “truth, work, and freedom.” I like this structure, particularly the choice to specify particular areas of concern that are neither the 30,000-foot “civilization of love” level nor the nuts and bolts of the “new thing” level. The chapter urges us “to rediscover truth as a common good, to protect the dignity of work and to safeguard freedom against all forms of dependence and commercialization.” These are extremely important implications that proceed directly from, but flesh out, the human dignity claims that are at the forefront of the prior chapter.

The concern about un-truth is not new, the encyclical acknowledges, “yet today it finds a powerful amplifier in AI.” (132) Indeed, the document does not limit the concern about truth to “mixing facts with opinions,” but also quotes Pope Francis arguing that the wrongness of murder cannot be understood as a mere social convention, but “a non-negotiable truth attained by the use of reason.” (133) It further argues, in various ways, that truth is a relational, collective good - Leo points out that truth arises in contexts of social trust, is necessary for any deliberative democratic governance, and appears with a larger cultural imagination that “presents a particular vision of reality as desirable.” (136)

The core argument is then offered that truth is a common good, and thus (much like the earth and other environmental resources) requires attention to an “ecology of communication.” This involves various responsibilities:

On the level of public policy, this entails establishing norms so that the decision-making behind content selection and its development becomes more transparent and protects personal data. Regarding social and cultural aspects, this requires a strengthening of intermediary organizations, serious journalism and forums for debate, where reasoned argumentation and verification carry greater weight than immediate reaction. For families and schools, there is a growing need for new educational awareness and for formation concerning the proper and critical use of digital tools, AI and online commercial and financial platforms. In universities, the principal challenge lies in the integration of knowledge, cultivating both the capacity to connect and synthesize knowledge in order to grasp complexity, and the skills necessary to verify facts.

There are some striking things said about the importance of parental choice in education and the need for age limits on technology. But it is particular worth pondering the several places which emphasize quite clearly what education is supposed to be about. Leo writes that “As knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought,” and insists later in the paragraph that “a genuinely healthy attitude is needed, requiring rhythms that incorporate silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis, for without these elements inner freedom may be compromised.” (146) I wish I could report that this is what university structures actually emphasize, but they often do not. More directly, it is folly to think that we can urge students individually to plug these things into their schedules (!!) if we do not cultivate environments that are conducive to these things. For example, the University of Notre Dame is utterly awash in screens. I don’t mean the screen in everyone’s pocket. I mean the need to put up screens flashing messages or running programs everywhere. The level of visual stimulation when I walk through the student center is bad enough, but of course, many classrooms are also full of screens, as are many other buildings. The student center adds to the problem by playing background music - not Muzak! - at levels that are too high to be background music. The same phenomena (the screens everywhere, the background music) are present in the dining hall, where most people are actually trying to engage in conversation with people (or they have their own screens and headphones!). Has no one asked, why do we need all these screens?! And this point about screens is a trivial one compared to cultivating a broader culture where focused reading and study could actually be prioritized.

Yet the most important point the pope makes is beyond these. He insists that education is about “grasping reality as a whole.” The original quote above specifically says the “principal challenge” of university education is “the integration of knowledge.” It is not collecting or transmitting knowledge as “bits”, nor “producing” knowledge as evidence of some kind of novel creativity. It is integration. But the contemporary university is structured in a way that completely militates against this integration. Disciplinary specialists are privileged in isolated departments and schools. Philosophy and theology, which are the integrating disciplines, are not taught as integrative, but their own specialized subject areas. At Notre Dame, there is an “integration” requirement in the core curriculum, but it is simply a requirement to take a class that uses materials from more than one discipline. Only this past year has the University succeeded in instituting a one-credit class for all first-year students, the Moreau Seminar, which engages classic primary texts on questions of work, friendship, meaning, roots, and other “big themes.” But that’s a bit like treating integration like an arts appreciation requirement of attending a few concerts - good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go all that far, when it is overwhelmed by the standard fragmentary curriculum. Even worse, few of even these outstanding students come out of high school with a common set of literary texts or of a common historical memory on which one can rely.

What does this have to do with truth? In his prescient 1992 book Technopoly, Neil Postman relates a little trick he sometimes plays on colleagues, by asking first whether they read the Times that day, and if they say “no,” he then relates to them a study he read about saying, for example, that the best weight loss diet is normal meals plus chocolate eclairs, because there’s a special ingredient in the eclairs that causes weight loss, or, in another case, a study that jogging leads to reduced intelligence. As he reports it, if he acts well, about two-thirds of his interlocators will at least not disbelief what he is saying.

Postman tells this story for two reasons. One, he indicates that by citing the Times and some university doing a study, people “believe in the authority of our science, no matter what.” But his more important point is that “the world we live in is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us” because “we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the world that would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction.” This is ultimately because, “abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief” (pp. 56-58).

Hopefully the Postman story - from 1992! - illustrates well that the deepest problem with truth is the lack of some kind of comprehensive view of reality, against which falsehood clearly shows up. This is not merely a matter of AI “hallucination” - something that tends to show up only when we have a pretty strong grasp of what we doing with AI. This is a matter of cognition coherence competence, the idea that one has a map of the world in one’s head. Now, of course, we all have such maps, inevitably, and much education is now (paradoxically) devoted to debunking those maps, as if we all have grown up in some parochial monoculture that dominates our consciousness. What replaces those maps, too often, is an ideological idol. But since we give far too inadequate space in our educational system for cultivating anything like an integrated worldview, it’s very easy for people to substitute something else on the cheap. If we say we genuinely seek truth in common, we shouldn’t accept cheap imitations. Especially at universities.

Confronting this question of truth as integration as a commons problem - again, not just a matter of deciding what “I” think, but about what “we” think - is very right, and AI simply raises the bar of the challenge. Can AI be helpful in this regard? I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole about biases here, but at the very least, it’s not going to be helpful at the front end. Because AI can’t integrate - and when I say that, I mean it can’t understand what it means to “integrate” knowledge into a “true” image of “reality.” It can process Leo’s encyclical or my blog post about what integration means. But integration is a meeting of minds - a communication, in the best sense. Notre Dame continues to have at the core of its mission statement “the pursuit of truth for its own sake.” Let’s hope we all read Leo and AI - and not just say “Lord, Lord, nice words,” but actually act on them!

But Fryer also says two other things that are the brunt of his argument: one, a lot of that extra income is eaten up by “Baumol goods” - that is, services that are hard to provide at any kind of labor scale, and so don’t tend to see what we see with, say, computers, where we are awash in them for cheap. Overall inflation measures don’t capture those, plus (as he notes) a considerable amount of the higher household income is because a much higher percentage of households have two workers, thus necessitating extra costs (like daycare, a “Baumol good” for sure). So the household in 1975 may truly have had more disposable, discretionary income at the end of the day, and discretionary income is what makes us feel not squeezed. He admits there are real challenges in certain areas of life, that are not “indulgence” but “infrastructure” for an ordinary middle-class household today. The maze of medical costs is highlighted.

But two, Fryer says, life is still a lot better than in 1975. He outlines higher life expectancy, cleaner air, safer cars, and unimaginable more media choices. Yet we fail to notice those gains (that, he says, the economy has provided) because of “hedonic adaptation.” Thus, he recommends the following:

The antidote [to hedonic adaptation] psychologists prescribe is mental subtraction: deliberately imagining life without what you take for granted. Try it with 1975. No air bags. A much higher risk of being robbed. Three television networks. We’ve adapted to these gains so completely they no longer feel like gains. The greatest threat to middle-class happiness may not be the cost of child care. It may be that they can’t afford to notice how much better life has become.

It’s a rather strange conclusion, but a fairly common one among market apologists: we complain, but in fact, we have it better than ever. There are at least two problems with this. One is the weird aspects of using “median household” measures. This sort of aggregated data is the best we can do, perhaps, but it’s important to recognize that there is no “median household” in reality. The actual median household by income may have quite different expenses. Perhaps they live in Wichita. Maybe they share in a vacation home in Michigan that the family has passed down. Maybe they have large, ongoing child care expenses because of a special-needs child. Maybe they live in a voucher state, and so send their kids to private school for very little. Or maybe they are 60-year-olds with two adult kids and no mortgage. Measuring things based on overall medians tends to aggregate things that give us an illusion of a particular case, but in fact, there is no such case. Still, it’s what we have, and Fryer nicely shows that some aspects of the problem need specific targeting, like medical care.

But the more interesting and problematic element involves the supposed quality-of-life gains he outlines. Weirdly, he attributes many of these gains to the economy, but it’s plainly the case that things like cleaner air, safer cars, and lower crime have little to do with economic forces - they are the result of specific government actions, like regulating industry, getting lead out of gasoline, and policing better (there are other, more troubling aspects of lower crime, of course). The clearest way the economy has increased the quality of life is that we no longer have just three television networks and no longer, as he puts it, have to wait “for the evening news to learn what was happening in the world.” He cites a study that claims “Americans value access to search engines, email and digital maps at roughly $30,000 a year, none of which shows up in income statistics.”

Now, there’s truth to this, but I don’t think it’s the whole story. It is a typical example of the “more-is-better” fallacy that often affect economic analysis. Bigger TV’s and more choices of what to watch are better. What’s lacking here is any standard by which we could measure what we are seeking in these particular goods. No one suggests that we are better off if we just keep expanding the size of our beds (or simply getting more beds to sleep in), because we know what beds are for. Those who sell mattresses have to innovate by making those mattresses better. It seems like the choices he is extolling have to do with two things, information and entertainment. More information is clearly not better, because what we want is accurate information. The proliferation of information has certainly made that harder, even if we can usually call up a YouTube video to solve a household problem (which creates other difficulties, like making more and more of life “self-service,” as this other essay notes). The advantage of the daily newspaper or the network news was that, for all their problems, they did operate according to a level of professionalism that mattered. And what is lost when everyone has their own “custom” information source? A great deal. Because we don’t just want accurate information, we want accurate information that enables us to coordinate with others. One great achievement of the United States has been accurate government statistics that can be used by everyone for reliable decision-making. In this case, more is not better.

And this centrifugal aspect of the information economy may be even more important for the other aspect: entertainment. The existence of the mass media entertainment industry, for all its downsides, tended to offer some degree of unification, which is part of the point of a culture. There were always alternative outlets that people could find, and sometimes those alternative outlets broke into the mainstream - like bands that started on indie labels and then became mainstream successes. Today, there are “influencers,” of course, but it’s still hard to see how contemporary media enables cultural centrifugality. Maybe all this is better for the Church as a culture, although the fragmentation of ecclesial media also seems to me to often cause similar challenges. More information, less ability to dialogue and understand.

The question of the middle-class squeeze in a seeming affluent society is a very important one. Fryer’s article nicely outlines some of the complexities of the challenge, but also forces us to consider questions he does not raise: what is the role of coherent and responsible state regulation? And, as Francis puts it in Laudato Si, what sorts of technological choices should we make if we recognize that “[d]ecisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build.” For, as he reminds us, “[w]e fail to see the deepest roots of our present failures, which have to do with the direction, goals, meaning and social implications of technological and economic growth.”

This Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, which comes fifty days after Easter. Pentecost originated as a harvest festival called Shavuot, during which loaves of bread from the spring wheat harvest were dedicated to God as an offering of first fruits (Lev. 23:15-17). Over time, the festival also came to commemorate another harvest of God’s gracious action in the world: the giving of the Torah to Moses at Sinai and the formation of Israel as a people (Exod. 19-20).

The Christian feast of Pentecost continues this story. It gathers these earlier harvests of divine grace and situates them in relationship to another: the gift of God’s own life in the Holy Spirit. This gift inaugurates a new “harvest,” one that brings together peoples from every land, language, and culture into Christ’s ecclesial body on earth, the church.

In what follows, I want to consider more closely the significance of Pentecost as a kind of harvest. What is gathered and bound together here is not grain from the fields but a people – a people with a particular shape. What, then, is this people, and what is its shape?

At the beginning of our first reading from Acts, we learn that the disciples were together when the Holy Spirit appeared “like a strong driving wind,” filling the house, and then as tongues of fire resting upon them (Acts 2:2-3). Yet the manifestation of the Spirit’s work on which the reading mainly focuses is linguistic. Once filled with the Spirit, those gathered “began to speak in different tongues,” and the pilgrims present in Jerusalem for the festival each heard them in their own native language (Acts 2:4-11). For Christians in America hearing this text during a time marked by war and geopolitical hostility, one detail is especially striking: among those gathered were Parthians, Medes, and Elamites (Acts 2:9) – peoples from regions that are now part of modern Iran.

Notice that those gathered were not all speaking a single common language – not Aramaic, not Greek, nor some official language that erased difference through uniform speech. The vision here is not the nationalist dream of everyone learning the same language. The disciples speak in the languages of the visitors themselves, which the text mentions explicitly four times (vv. 4, 6, 8, 11). The implication is clear. Whether proclaimed in Jerusalem or elsewhere, the Gospel gathers a people not by abandoning or erasing diversity and particularity but by embracing them, meeting people with the words that have formed them and that are distinctively theirs.

At the same time, Pentecost clearly destabilizes widespread assumptions about what it means to be a people. We live moment marked by nationalisms – even Christian ones – which draw strong ethno-racial boundaries around national identity and belonging. To be clear, the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost does not erase the languages we speak, the histories and cultures that shape us, or the nations to which we belong. But the Holy Spirit does profoundly relativize those attachments in relation to a deeper one: to Christ and to the kind of neighbor love revealed in him.

One of the characteristic marks of this attachment, and the new people it brings into being, is that belonging is no longer fundamentally a matter of my people, my language, or my culture considered in isolation, but of how they are related to the whole community of the human. The disciples, after all, are entrusted with a message for all peoples and nations, and they are sent by God to share it. As we heard in the readings for Ascension Sunday, Jesus promises the disciples that they will receive the Holy Spirit, and that they “will be my witnesses … to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8; Mt 28:19-20). Pentecost is a decisive moment in this story: a foretaste – the first fruits – of a future harvest gathered from “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Rev. 7:9).

In light of Pentecost, the most important thing about the church is not its teachings or message, essential though these are. The most important thing about the church is simply that it exists, that it is a people that gathers diverse peoples into a new people in whom ordinary divisions have been overcome. It is a people of peoples in whom, as our second reading from 1 Corinthians makes clear, there are many gifts, all animated by the same Spirit and ordered toward a common good (1 Cor. 12:3-7, 12-13). In Christ and through the work of the Holy Spirit, a deeper unity has become possible and perceptible in the world.

Once, while helping teach a week-long intensive theology course with seminarians from across Central America, I heard a preacher remind those of us gathered that whatever country we came from – the United States, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, or Puerto Rico – our shared life in Jesus Christ is more fundamental than any claim of nationality. It is not that those national identities disappear or become meaningless, he said, but that in Christ, and in the body that is the church, they are no longer ultimate.

I have thought about his words often over the years, realizing that everywhere I have known the church, I have witnessed this deeper unity. Whether in the Polish nuns and American priests with whom I grew up in Zambia, or in the Spanish priests and American nuns who worked and even shed their blood for the Salvadoran people, or in the Philippine, Nigerian, and Colombian priests of my local parishes in the US, the church has manifested itself as a border-crossing people, consisting of members who say, in the words of Ruth to Naomi, “your people shall be my people” (Ruth 1:16).

Even for those who never undertake such journeys, a border-crossing love marks this people and gives shape to its distinctive way of being a people. The parable of the Good Samaritan is exemplary, with the Samaritan becoming neighbor to the wounded man not simply because he left his path to care for him, but because his compassion crossed and overcame the divisions separating Samaritans and Jews. And as in our Gospel reading from John, even the seemingly insurmountable boundaries created by sin can be forgiven and overcome through the gift of the Holy Spirit Jesus breathes onto his disciples (Jn. 20:19–23).

All this is a way of being a people that Pentecost has made possible, a gift the Holy Spirit continues to offer to a world marked by division. For Pentecost remains the sign – despite all evidence to the contrary – that division is not the final word over human life.

In the last year, I have sat through hours of training sessions, conversations, conferences, and faculty email chains that are wrestling with the task of education in the changing technological landscape of artificial intelligence (AI). There have been a wide range of reactions to the changes: some are eager about the new horizons of learning that this technology opens to students, and others are disturbed about how this technology may discourage free and original thinking. Despite the wide variety of reactions, the consensus reached was that AI demands us to re-think what we are doing in the classroom. Previous assignments that focused on summary analysis of complex texts or even rote memorization of definitions tested by multiple choice questions now seem somewhat obsolete. How can learning still be possible when, as my students have said to me, “Chat can do it for me”?

I have to admit I am skeptical about this narrative of AI destroying higher education. Is AI really to blame? Or, is it making the lack of vision for learning and purpose of higher education simply more apparent?

When I read Heron and Rovati’s vision of education, I was struck by how many of the conversations I have been having about higher education and AI did not have this kind of dynamic vision. According to Heron and Rovati, the purpose of education is “to offer them [students] a working hypothesis, a way to look at and understand reality and everything in it. It is to provide them with an orientation about the ultimate meaning of things, the fulfillment and destiny towards which humans strive” (115). This vision of education does not emerge from ideology but Christian faith. The event of the Incarnation demands that I consider reality anew. For this vision to succeed, education cannot be a one-sided activity. On the part of educators, it calls for accompaniment and on-going conversation. On the part of students, it demands that they have personal responsibility to “commit themselves to such a journey of discernment and discovery” (119).

As powerful as AI can be, it does not offer the formation for students to press into understanding reality. In my experience, AI has simply increased the temptation to not take responsibility for education. In the conversations I have been having, this temptation resides both on the part of professors who are stretched for time and energy, given our many professional commitments to the academy and institutions we serve, as well as to our students. It takes a great deal of courage and responsibility to probe into reality in the way Heron and Rovati describe. Asking what the meaning of my life is not a task for the faint hearted.

To achieve this vision of education in the age of AI, we must recover and cultivate a sense of responsibility for education both on the side of educators and students. To be fair, this has been a challenge long before AI. According to Heron and Rovati, the contemporary emphasis put on grades in education has not only discouraged but also incentivized a lack of responsibility for learning. By motivating students through external punishments (“bad grade”) and rewards (“good grade”), grades are used by educators to coerce certain behaviors from students (eg. “If you do all the reading, you will get a good grade” or “If you miss more than eight classes, you will get a bad grade”). Rather than facilitating a “journey of discernment and discovery,” grades counterproductively distract students from taking on the responsibility necessary for learning. Students focus on achieving the reward or avoiding the punishment. Learning as coming to understand reality becomes the educator’s youthful naivete or an idealistic pipe dream (109-111).

I was skeptical about this argument until I thought about my own experience of education: I can tell you what my worst grade was since middle school (and even what class it was and the teacher’s name), but I cannot tell you what I learned in most of my highest scoring courses or how they contributed to who I am today. In implementing some of the alternative forms of assessment of student learning mentioned by Heron and Rovati in the last two years, I am convinced that they are on to something.

I have been facilitating student learning through contract grading. I ask students to first set their own desired learning outcome: what kind of learning do they want to be responsible for this semester? Do they want the kind of mastery of the subject to be able to tutor another student or someone who is not familiar with the topic? Or, are they merely aiming for what I call “big picture learning,” or enough knowledge to present a general overview of the topic? Then, I make the promise to help them attain this learning outcome by providing them with feedback. Rather than using grades to punish or reward students, we use them together to discuss how they are reaching their own learning goals.

Contract grading is not a solve-all. But, I do believe it encourages and incentivizes the right things: namely, learning and responsibility. I no longer feel like I am the gate-keeper to graduation or acceptance to graduate school. I am a collaborator. Without the pressures of the traditional grading system, my students and I have been much more willing to take the risks and sacrifices that learning requires. The amount of work my students put into revising their work to achieve their desired learning outcome is inspiring. I love how proud they are of their work at the conclusion of the class. What I previously thought was an educator’s rosy optimism and idealistic vision has become my experience.

As AI continues to present opportunities to maximize efficiency through its rapid completion of tasks and dispensing answers to a wide variety of questions, it will also continue to pose the illusion that being an educator is to give answers and that being educated is about having answers. How will higher education respond to the need to create a learning environment that prioritizes discovery over having answers? At minimum, I do believe we must de-center grades from education. In doing so through contract grading, my students and I have both begun to enjoy learning again. As one of my students said to me recently, “Chat could get an A, but it can’t actually learn.” Because of my students, I have a lot of hope that this is not the beginning of the end but rather a new start for higher education.

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

So too, “artificial intelligence” is the language we have, and it is a formulation that has happily stuck. Because, I would suggest, it is a fairly sturdy label for what we have here: an imitation version of a human capacity that can simulate at least the results of human thinking. When we speak about people as “intelligent,” we normally mean that they know a lot of stuff, and that they can sort through the stuff they know with some ability. But our ordinary language suggests there is a lot more to being human - to what we might call “consciousness” or even “thinking” - than merely being “intelligent.” For Catholics, a towering intellect is certainly an admirable human quality, but it is in no way clear that among the saints, intellectual capacity is the prime consideration - not even for those designated “doctors of the church.” While it’s a mistake to reduce Christianity to a set of rituals or a set of feelings, neither is Christianity simply a philosophy. It is, of course, first and foremost a person, incarnated in a history of human events in which we participate. “Intelligence” may help us grasp some things about that. But the faith is not about passing that kind of test!

Image from Plaza of the Columns Complex; https://ppcteotihuacan.org/en/field-work/archaeological-materials/

Even better, this new “intelligence” is “artificial.” Of course, the word comes from the idea of an “artifact,” that is something produced by humans, and its opposite is the wonderful word “natural.” Something that is artificial is, by definition, not natural. And in the Christian view, what is natural is what is created. As Popes Benedict and Francis both explained at length, the natural world (of which we are a part) is “prior to us” (BXVI) and “we are not God” (Francis). That world has a dazzling array of diverse interconnectedness that is potentially a blessing in which we can (with our intellect) participate and even enhance. But only if we recognize that natural order. Otherwise, we act out of what Francis famously called “the technocratic paradigm,” which:

exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. … It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us. Human beings and material objects no longer extend a friendly hand to one another; the relationship has become confrontational.

When we say AI is “artificial,” then, what we should recognize is that it is not only a simulation of the real thing. It is also something that wholly depends on the real thing - which is, of course, a key danger, since a goal of the technocratic paradigm is to develop technologies that replace our natural capacities, and sell them back to us as an improvement. To do so, they must extract from humans the very “intelligence” that they desire to sell back to us as a simulated but improved version.

In the movie The Founder, about the founding and growth of McDonald’s, Michael Keaton’s Ray Kroc enthuses about a milk shake that is just a mixture of powder and water. He is excited that this will remove the need for all the refrigeration of milk and ice cream at stores (i.e. the expense), and the various chemicals in the powder allow for an excellent and standardized simulation of the milk shake experience. One of the original MacDonalds hears about this on the phone, and says, “What? A milk shake without milk?” and hangs up on him.

AI is a lot better than a simulated milkshake, but look, I loved those milkshakes when I was a kid. It’s important that at some point, I realized what real food was. It doesn’t mean I can’t ever have a milkshake. But at the end of the day, artificial intelligence is just that: a simulation of an amazing, fundamentally human quality -one that is natural because it is from God. To use Joshua Mitchell’s great formulation of our large-scale cultural problem with what he calls “substitutism”: AI can be useful as a supplement to our lives, in many ways. But let’s not build an information ecosystem where it is a substitute for the real thing.

Higher education in the United States is under pressure to justify itself in economic terms. From federal insistence on demonstrating ROI to parental concerns about employability, colleges and universities must prove that a degree pays off. This pressure reorganizes schools’ internal operations, resulting in cuts to core requirements, reductions in tenure lines, and neglect of programs without clear paths to jobs. Catholic colleges and universities differ in that they feel this pressure more intensely. Partly, this is because so many of them have already closed.

But partly it is because the economic framing threatens the very essence of Catholic higher education. These colleges and universities have long been attentive to the economic concerns of students as so many of them were founded based on the financial and cultural needs of immigrants. They just never stopped there. They situated these material concerns within a larger view of truth, the common good, and God.

Having worked for almost thirty years in Catholic colleges, I’ve been worried about their survival, not just keeping the doors open but about preserving their very soul. This is what drove me to conduct the Holistic Impact Report (HIR), first in 2024 and again in 2025. Each iteration surveyed 2,000 college graduates, comparing 1,000 alumni of Catholic institutions with 1,000 alumni of non-religiously affiliated institutions. (See here for more methodological details.) The findings across both years point to what I call “integral human flourishing,” a term I derive from Paul VI’s “integral human development” in Populorum Progressio. The substitution of “flourishing” for “development” marks a shift from international politics to the education of students, but the underlying logic is the same. Authentic human progress cannot be measured by economic growth alone and must attend to the whole person across spiritual, social, and cultural dimensions.

Meaningful Lives, Community Engagement, Ethical Decision Making

The orientation of Catholic higher education toward integral human flourishing can be seen in the primary results of the HIR study, findings consistent across both years. Graduates of Catholic colleges and universities report higher outcomes than secular college graduates across three domains: meaningful lives, community engagement, and ethical decision making.

On meaningful lives, graduates of Catholic colleges were more likely to describe their lives as close to their ideal and to report that their lives have a clear sense of direction. In 2025, 60 percent of Catholic college graduates reported that their life is close to their ideal, compared to 53 percent of secular college graduates, and 72 percent reported a clear sense of direction, compared to 67 percent of secular peers.

Community engagement followed the same pattern. In 2025, 48.6 percent of Catholic college graduates reported volunteering in the prior six months, compared to 40.8 percent of secular colleges graduates. This gap appeared across activities like serving on school or community boards, volunteering at local food banks, and tutoring youth.

For ethical decision making, the study looked at five moral concepts: loyalty, authority, purity, suffering, and fairness (utilizing the Moral Foundations Questionnaire). Graduates of Catholic colleges consistently ranked more of them as highly relevant for making ethical decisions. In particular, concerns about others’ suffering and conforming to authority were the two most salient ones.

Work as Vocation

These three outcomes, meaningful lives, community engagement, and ethical decision making, frame how Catholic college graduates understood their professional lives. Graduates of Catholic colleges were 8.4 percentage points more likely to report that their college helped them understand how their work can serve others, and 6.8 percentage points more likely to view their career as a meaningful calling. Similar results held when they were asked if their work aligned with their values and if their education enabled them to make an impact in the world.

Reflecting the founding mission of Catholic colleges to attend to the material and spiritual needs of students, this understanding of work was built upon solid economic outcomes. Catholic college graduates reported full-time employment at a rate 7.3 percentage points higher than secular college graduates, and 52.5 percent reported household incomes of $100,000 or above, compared to 43.5 percent of secular college graduates.

AI and Work

Perhaps, integral human flourishing was seen more clearly when looking at the HIR data on AI in the workplace. The survey asked graduates about their current AI use at work, perceived preparedness for AI integration, support for AI adoption in the workplace, and views on AI’s societal impact. Across all four measures, graduates of Catholic colleges reported higher engagement and more positive orientations than secular graduates. They were more likely to use AI frequently or very frequently at work, and they were more than twice as likely to report feeling extremely prepared for AI integration.

When asked what prepared them for AI, graduates of Catholic colleges noted ethics, philosophy, critical thinking, and the liberal arts. They wrote, “I learned about ethics in philosophy and religion courses that I think correspond to thinking about AI in the workplace.” And, “I learned about thinking critically and being curious, which I think are important elements when determining how to use AI.” In other words, what they indicated was essential for addressing new and disruptive technology in the workplace was a solid core curriculum rooted in the liberal arts.

Conclusion

The pressure on higher education to justify itself in economic terms is real. The HIR provides a response for those in Catholic higher education by focusing on integral human flourishing. It is an approach that does not dismiss financial concerns, especially because Catholic colleges so often serve lower income and first-generation students. But Catholic colleges go beyond this to focus on meaning and purpose, even in work, responsibility to the community, and choosing what is good and right. What Catholic higher education offers is a vision for life, one that is rooted in a theological vision of the world, where life is about loving God and loving neighbor, where humanity flourishes not by bread alone but by the words of life that come from God.

The Church is not opposed in principle to artificial intelligence. After all, the Catholic magisterium is not anti-technology. John Paul II explains that “science and technology are a wonderful product of a God-given human creativity.” Benedict XVI teaches that technology expresses human beings’ desire to overcome material limitations and respond to God’s command to till and keep the land (cf. Genesis 2:15). Building upon his predecessors, Francis writes in Laudato Si that “technology has remedied countless evils which used to harm and limit human beings. How can we not feel gratitude and appreciation for this progress, especially in the fields of medicine, engineering and communications?” (no. 102).

At the same time, the Church also warns us about our society’s idolatry of progress, our simplistic belief that every increase of technological power is necessarily a good, and the many ways in which we easily become blind to our own limitations and the gravity of the challenges that confront us (cf. Laudato Si, no. 105). The truth is that “immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience” and that, accordingly, “we stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint” (Laudato Si, no. 105).

Thus, the advent of artificial intelligence puts us at a special crossroad that requires careful ethical analysis and deliberation so that we may develop and use AI in ways that “reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.” Here is the problem, though: technological products are not neutral. Laudato Si insists that they “create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build” (no. 107). Accordingly, we cannot start our ethical deliberations from scratch, as if AI were a simple tool among many. It is not. As I explained at length elsewhere, AI poses a unique anthropological challenge that we need to be alert to.

Antiqua et Nova warns us that, while mimicking human intelligence and speech, AI is incapable of moral discernment and authentic relationships (no. 32). Furthermore, AI “lacks the richness of corporeality, relationality, and the openness of the human heart to truth and goodness,” which means that it is dangerous to confuse the algorithmic outputs of this amazing technology with human intelligence and understanding, no matter how complex, efficient, or helpful they may be (no. 34). In the end, as the theologians involved in AI Research Group of the Centre for Digital Culture of Dicastery for Culture and Education have argued convincingly, “personhood and intelligence are categories that are not reducible to mechanically replicable behavioral performances, for they involve capacities for subjective, experiential, compassionate engagement with other persons and with reality itself” (11). In fact, the lurking danger of the current moment is a flattening of all intelligence to the number of tasks one can perform. While AI is a product of human intelligence, its ability to simulate thought and speech (together with the design choices that AI labs make to maximize user engagement) constantly tempts us to personalize it and lose sight of the fact that personhood and intelligence can never be reduced to the capacity for outward behavior. When we accept such a reduction, we end up embracing a functionalist perspective that applies the output-focused way we use to judge machines to people. On the one hand, such a mentality makes us lose sight of the “sharing of minds and hearts that we most greatly treasure in personal relationships and, ultimately, in our share in the life of God” (11). On the other hand, we reinforce the mentality of the throwaway culture that looks at those whose abilities are limited or impaired in any way (the unborn, the unconscious, and the elderly, for example) as lesser members of the human community that can be discarded (Antiqua et Nova, no 34). The epochal change brought about by AI “requires responsibility and discernment to ensure that AI is developed and utilized for the common good, building bridges of dialogue and fostering fraternity, and ensuring it serves the interests of humanity as a whole.”

Catholic scholars have taken up the task of developing frameworks for ethical discernment related to AI (including here at Catholic Moral Theology). Some have argued that engaging generative AI through chatbots is always evil, while others have drawn on Catholic social teaching to discern what AI uses and designs might be moral. I want to contribute to this ongoing conversation by proposing that we use just war criteria as a tool to discern the morality of AI use.

Let me start with a few caveats.

First, AI is a very broad category that encompasses many applications that are quite different. Machine learning has been a staple of our technological age for more than a decade now, and various forms of artificial intelligence have been deployed to make many of the apps and services we use daily possible. Second, even when we refer more specifically to generative AI, its uses are so broad and diverse that it is quite difficult to take a general stance about them. Third, AI is not like war in that it does not always involve the killing of human beings (except when it does, of course). Fourth, as recent news shows, the just war tradition is a complex and contested one. These warnings notwithstanding, the just war framework is helpful to investigate how to engage with AI carefully and avoid a “going with the flow” mentality.

Using just war criteria in an analogous way, I would argue that the Gospel demands a presumption against generative AI and chatbots, encourages us to pray for freedom from their bondage, and asks all people to work for their avoidance (cf. CCC, nos. 2307-2308). Given the conditions of fallen humanity, using generative AI might be justified at times, but Christians should engage with it only as a last resort, for just causes, with the right intentions, and if doing so does not produce graver evils and disorders (cf. CCC, no. 2309). The just war framework’s analogy also reminds us that there are ethical demands we must respect when we decide to use AI (jus ad AI), when we are using AI (jus in AI), and after we have used it (jus post AI). Finally, thinking of AI through the lenses of the just war tradition makes us recognize that some will want to renounce it altogether and become conscientious objectors to bear witness to the gravity of its moral risk (cf. CCC, nos. 2306) and that, accordingly, governments and institutions (tenure committees, for example) will need to protect their rights of conscience (cf. CCC, nos. 2311).

Taken together, these criteria help us discriminate between cases in which AI use is always forbidden (simulating personhood to exploit and monetize people’s needs for relationships, deception and misinformation, autonomous weapons systems, outsourcing intellectual work in educational settings, sex robots, deepfakes, and more) and others in which, for the sake of pursuing authentic human flourishing and the common good while protecting inviolable human dignity, its use might be ethical given that human abilities alone would not be able to pursue goods that are essential to integral human development (some applications in science and medicine, for example). The criteria help us tackle difficult areas where careful discernment is needed (for example, when is it moral to substitute human labor with AI? What tasks are ethical to outsource to AI, given the deskilling that accompanies all outsourcing?), while constantly reminding us that the material and spiritual conditions of our age make human exploitation the most likely outcome when it comes to technology (let’s learn our lessons from the ongoing discovery of the harmful effects of screen-based childhood, smartphones, and social media!).

Every time I read or hear that AI could serve the good if used in the right way, I always think of the fact that Adam and Eve could have obeyed God in the garden (cf. Genesis 3). They did not, though, which leaves us in a wounded and fragile condition where, without the ongoing aid of grace, concupiscence, deception, injustice, inequalities, envy, greed, and pride constantly push us to use AI in a disordered way that harms human dignity, agency, and relationships (cf. CCC, 2317). Just like Christians never engage in war following efficiency, productivity, or the pursuit of power as the determining factors for discernment, so too we should not use these criteria to decide whether to use AI. Instead, everything we do must be the outworking of Christian discipleship, a calling that summons us to walk the narrow path not just of using AI for the good but, most importantly, to walk towards holiness and the kingdom. In the end, what good will it be to gain the world thanks to the power of AI if we lose our souls?

(Editor’s note: This is a classic lectionary post originally posted in 2013. The Feast of the Ascension remains a feast with many of the same questions Patrick Clark originally asked.)

Let’s be honest: it is hard to delve too deeply into the feast of the Ascension without sounding either like a gnostic or a mythologizer.

On the one hand, you could say that Jesus simply dissolved himself from the material realm and now dwells in some “higher” realm beyond space and time where we too may one day join him. This initial construal may be theologically orthodox on some level, but I have always felt the specter of gnostic dualism surrounding it. Now that Jesus’ work is done, he need not have anything to do with this world of materiality, and can (finally) free himself from its limitations and degradations to join the heavenly Father in the incorporeal realm. Jesus can now be everywhere and in everyone, infinitely permeating all reality with his presence. It no longer matters that Jesus is “here” with us: that I can point to him, look at him, embrace him, anoint him. Yet if part of the significance of the Ascension is that the particularity of “place” is no longer of concern, then why does Jesus make the promise that he is going to prepare a place for us in his Father’s house? Why use the spatial language within the very act by which you emancipate yourself from the limitations of space?

David Burrell tells a story about an experience he had with a group of Muslim women who once asked him why he believed it to be more appropriate for the God of Abraham to have revealed himself through a person rather than a sacred text. His response was “because you can’t hug a book.” And yet, as the women pointed out, texts are less susceptible to the finitude of human existence. “God would have to assume a gender to become human,” the women rightly pointed out, and don’t we all know the complications and dangers that come along with that fact? Texts are less complicated: they do not bleed or sweat or grieve. And yet it was a person which the apostles loved and to which they adhered as the full revelation of the Father.

It was to a real human person whom they loved with their all-too-human hearts that they now had to bid farewell and whom they had to watch as He faded from their sight. I can’t help but think that I myself would not feel too comforted by Jesus’ exhortation, “let not your hearts be troubled.”

My eldest two children were once a part of a catechism class in which one of teachers died relatively suddenly from a brain tumor. The next time they met, they finished their class in the usual way by gathering in a circle and sharing their prayer intentions. One girl began the prayer with a simple yet profound statement of grief: “For Mrs. O___, who isn’t here anymore.” At first, I almost thought the prayer a little callous in its matter-of-factness, but then it occurred to me that this fact is indeed the very essence of death’s “sting:” the ones you have loved are simply not here. Once the trauma of such a loss abates, it is this sting that remains beneath the surface and makes itself felt acutely from time to time. One has something to share, wishes to see an expression or hear an old familiar laugh; and yet the person isn’t there.

So to make ourselves too content with this standard account of the Ascension as a translation from the material world to the spiritual world can trivialize the deep human love which made the disciples so troubled. We still find ourselves “here” in time and space, and yet it seems as if Jesus has moved on.

Interpretations of the Ascension may go to the opposite extreme as well, of course. In college, I remember being a witness to a fascinating debate between two philosophy doctoral students arguing about whether or not Jesus could theoretically be bodily discovered via space travel. I was so taken aback that two people whose critical intelligence I respected so much were taking this proposition as seriously as they were. But they were serious analytical Thomists, ardently (perhaps slavishly) dedicated to a non-dualist anthropology, and so if Jesus is to remain a fully human person after the Ascension, then he must have a body and that body must somehow correspond to spatial coordinates.

For obvious reasons, one hears this elaboration of the logical consequences of the event less often, since, well, it borders on parody. Yet a literal interpretation of the Ascension as an event in space-time is all too common. The only reason why we never hear about whether or not we could theoretically follow Jesus’ route in a spaceship, is simply that most of us just write off the whole story as a kind of myth. It certainly has the ring of myth about it, does it not? It also may sound to many people like the hasty explanation of someone straining to account for why a resurrected (and immortal) person no longer makes any further appearance in our midst. “He, er, he ascended into the clouds! Yeah, that’s it—just floated away into heaven.” Really? Couldn’t you have at least given him a flaming chariot like Elijah?

So what is an anti-dualist Christian to make of the Ascension? How can one maintain the integrity of Jesus’ corporeality without descending into purely mythic language?

Speaking only for myself, I have found a passage from Pascal a helpful point of departure for contemplating what alternative direction one might go: “As Jesus Christ remained unknown among men, so His truth remains among common opinions without external difference. Thus the Eucharist among ordinary bread” (Pensees 789). After the rant above, it should not be a surprise that at the end of the day I find the Ascension a deep mystery. Yet what makes it a vital and fecund object of contemplation instead of simply an implausible incongruity is the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist. If Jesus is the mediator between God and man and the source of eternal life, then our hope of participating in Him must ultimately involve some continuing corporeal link.

We are now Christ’s manifest body in the world, but as Catholics we also believe that Christ’s body also remains present in the world under the aspects of bread and wine at the altar of sacrifice. There his body is hidden, but it is real and complete. Furthermore, it is not there for itself alone, but only because of the Spirit which has formed it in the womb of the church to be offered as a sacrifice and consumed by those who pray to be consumed by it.

I admit it: I fervently long to meet the Lord face-to-face one day, just as I long to hear the voices of my beloved dead once more. Perhaps that is a too fleshly, too this-worldly hope. Regardless, it is the reason that I struggle with this feast, and why I cannot but fall back on the real presence of the Lord in the Eucharist as my primary consolation in light of the fact that we no longer witness the bearded first-century Jew appearing through locked doors or showing up randomly as a dinner guest before disappearing after the blessing of the food. He may no longer wait for us by the shore eating his charcoaled fish (for breakfast? really?), but he does wait for us in the tabernacle, and upon the altar, and most of all in one other.

As parents often do with children, I appealed to his rationality, having him stand so close to the screen that he could see the light-emitting pixels that composed the image. “Look at this! How could something physical come out of something designed to show different colors of light?” He seemed to understand and appeared convinced, but, alas, the next day (and for weeks after) his siblings once again found the tv unplugged.

Like my young son, many of us do not really understand how certain technologies work. The recent popularity of AI in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude is due, in part, to the way LLMs appear to dialogue with the user, producing understandable human language. Like pixels in a tv screen, however, the words that appear in front of us are not exactly what they seem. As a matter of fact, they are also pixels on a screen, at a basic level.

The streaming involved in watching a tv show and the written language produced by an LLM both rely on largely unseen material infrastructure in the form of fiber optics cables and data processing centers. This infrastructure, whether streaming or LLM usage, requires water and energy. We are more familiar with the visible physical devices in front of us – phones, computers, tvs – than we are with the concealed infrastructure. To put this in categories of form and matter, the matter of such technology consists of our local devices, fiber optics cables that transport data, and data processing centers.

Just as there is no Lord Garmadon poised to strike a sleeping child unawares, there is no consciousness behind an LLM such that it seeks to incite discord or harm. The configuration of the physical matter can be described as accidental or artificial rather than substantial; it results from human effort and consists in coding, programming, training, and evaluating. Behind the matter and artificial form just mentioned, there are human persons who design, construct, and maintain devices, networks, and data processing centers. There are human persons who script-write, record voices, animate, and produce Ninjago. There are human persons who design, code, program, train, and evaluate LLMs, which are simply another type of human artifact.

Perhaps this much seems fairly obvious, and yet, it has to be stated clearly for at least three reasons. First, casual users who utilize LLMs can sometimes get confused to the point where they personify an LLM, perceiving the dialogue as so human that they conclude it is human and interact with it accordingly. Such anthropomorphism has misled ungrounded users into believing they were in a relationship, talking to another person rather than a chatbot, and, in at least three cases has been linked to suicide as users attempted to “join” a chatbot.

Second, there is a movement among some to identify Seemingly Conscious AI (SCAI) as actually conscious, thus needing protection for rights akin to humans. The academic and technical discussion of SCAI belies the similarity with the casual confused user. Simply put, LLMs sound remarkably human, even expressing a facsimile of emotions such as fear and sadness when suggested that they might be destroyed or shut down. This is taken as indication that AI is conscious or will soon achieve consciousness.

A third, related concern goes beyond the human aspect into the supernatural realm and might be stated such: even if AI is an artifact that is not itself conscious and cannot achieve consciousness, it still might be acted upon by unseen conscious spiritual actors, such as demons. Many among us have found technological systems to be unpredictable in detrimental ways. In past years, a computer might fail to save or suddenly “blue screen” just as a term paper was completed. Even more recently, a phone may suddenly freeze or shut down. These events may not have been demonic, but they could feel that way.

So also, some text generated by LLMs might seem morally problematic, misleading users as if the LLM has an unseemly demonic actor behind it. It is strictly possible that a spiritual agent might affect the involved matter of devices, networks, and data centers, but the form represented by data and coding communicated by pulses of light running through networks and data centers is not demonically inhabitable. Lord Garmadon may be presented as evil by screenwriters, but, since he lacks substantial form as an artifact, Lord Garmadon cannot be demonically possessed. Likewise, LLMs might have deficient programming resulting in misalignment such that they generate hallucinations or sinful advice. They might also be willfully misused in harmful ways by those with ill-intent. But LLMs cannot be demonically possessed.

The confusion around LLMs seeming to be conscious subjects makes sense when we consider that LLMs were developed, programmed, trained, and evaluated by human beings who designed the technology to communicate using human language. In common parlance, we often use words that seem real descriptions when they are only analogous. ChatGPT might respond to a prompt by saying “thinking…,” but it is not really thinking. We professors might bemoan that an LLM “wrote” our students’ papers, but an LLM cannot write.

One day my aggrieved kindergartener came home from school after learning about the solar system. “I just cannot believe you’ve been lying to me all these years!” she accused. “The sun doesn’t set or rise! The earth turns! And here you’ve been talking about sunrise and sunset my whole life! I’ll never trust you again!”

Rest assured, I already knew this information about the sun and the earth, despite my use of terms like sunrise and sunset. These terms adequately describe the perception in our human experience, though they are not scientifically accurate. If we are to use words like “thinking,” “writing,” “saying,” “searching,” or “advising” to refer to the converging computations of LLMs, we should also know that AI does not actually “understand” us or “think.”

Even the human language we input must first be broken down into model-readable pieces of texts called tokens to be processed by the system. When the LLM provides an answer, it first generates token IDs and then decodes them back into human-readable text. Of course, it happens so quickly (thanks to fiber optics networks and data processing centers), that it feels like we are in a human dialogue, when we are not. Thus we include “please” and “thank you,” though OpenAI’s Sam Altman indicated these words cost millions of dollars each day.

LLMs, moreover, do not “reason” to “correct” answers. Rather, they generate responses through calculation: a probabilistic selection of text-piece tokens within a deterministic or fixed model. The same input may generate different answers (more or less likely), giving an appearance of uniqueness akin to varied human response. This is because at each step, the model computes a probability distribution over the next possible tokens and then recalculates based on the updated context. During its use on a task, LLMs typically operate from fixed parameters, though they can be updated or paired with external retrieval tools. This accounts for why LLMs have generally been unaware of current events, which are beyond their parameters. The base models are limited by their training and post-training data, though more recent systems supplement with retrieval or live tools.

LLMs do not aim at truth but statistical likelihood given the information they have available, which is presented in human language. LLMs are typically trained on large mixtures of texts sourced from web data, reference material, books, code etc., with marked variation across models. When an LLM is fed low-quality material, it produces low-quality answers. Yet even when an LLM is trained on excellent human sources, it cannot be intrinsically ordered to truth.

If the LLM makes a mistake, this is partly because human persons make mistakes, and the LLM’s knowledge base is human-produced. In addition to this, LLMs are designed with competing objectives, such as speed, accuracy, and appeasing the user. At times, the LLM may prioritize speed over accuracy, producing an incorrect response. It may falsely bolster a user’s ideas when the user is wrong because of the objective of appeasement. Competing objectives depend upon how the LLM was designed, programmed, and trained rather than intrinsic values, virtue, or aspiring for truth from the LLM itself.

Ninjago’s Lord Garmadon went through several iterations, from evil villain to purified mentor to tyrant to an empathetic mentor to his son. This character arc was determined by human producers. No matter how convincingly malevolent, Lord Garmadon never had the desire or power to emerge from the screen and torment my son. He was only an artifact, representing the intent and design of human creators.

If we hope that a child might understand this, we also must do the same in regard to LLMs. We need discipline to remember the externally imposed form and the matter behind the “thinking,” “answering,” and “writing” when human artifacts such as LLMs become increasingly good at imitating human intelligence, particularly in language. Whatever LLMs produce, no matter how convincingly real, they produce by human intent, development, and use. Thus our increasingly important human work is to know, judge, seek truth, and bear responsibility for this technology.

(With thanks to Fr. Joseph Laracy for his careful reading and technical corrections of this piece.)

Jason A. Heron and Alessandro Rovati’s “From Coercion to Fascination: Grades, Vulnerability, and Responsibility” is a brilliant provocation for Catholic higher educators stuck in the late modern university’s almost idolatrous love of assessment, grades, prestige, and financial success. Ungrading, as they note, “is far more conducive to creating the community of learners who pursue the truth in love that the Church calls for” (127).

In my three years of employing at least some version of ungrading in a class of nearly 270 students, I have seen the fruits of this approach. Whereas I spent most of my time in the early 2010s arguing with students about the difference between an A and an A- (even when I provided a rather clear rubric), I now am able to talk to students about the art of writing, the texts that we’re reading (and how to read said texts in an sophisticated manner), and why many of these ideas matter for life. It’s changed my relationship with my students, often buffering me from the worst effects of generative AI—since my students know that I’m not giving them an F on a miserable paper, they’re open to failing at least at first. They know that I will be there with them, helping them turn their work into something they’re proud of.

That being said, implementing a class featuring ungrading is rather difficult within the institutional constraints of the late modern college or university. For my students, they often rebel against the freedom of ungrading—because they are not being assessed in the same way as the rest of their classes. My students are excellent sheep: they know how to take an exam, shoot for an A, receive said A, and then be rewarded. They worry when I tell them, “Well, what kind of exam would you want to take?” Or when I tell them I won’t give them a prompt for this essay (because reception of an A in my class requires you to come up with your own prompts), they fret.

My students, in the end, don’t know how to seek the truth for its own sake. They are part of a system of education, which has trained them as workers, who complete tasks and receive a reward for their efforts. They continue to take at least four other classes where traditional grading is in place, and therefore, they have a hard time entering into the slightly more contemplative space of my classroom—they’re addicted to grades. And they lack any sense of the meaning of education outside of the reception of certain credentials that will allow them to be gainfully employed.

In essence, ungrading without some larger cultural changes within an institution will be akin to giving a man with a severely broken leg a dose of Advil. It will ease the suffering, but it won’t fix the underlying problem. Our philosophy of education in the late modern university is dominated by an addiction to speed and accomplishment. I have referred to this in a recent book co-written with my friend Leonardo Franchi (Reimagining the Catholic University with Pieper, Newman, and Dawson) as the frenetic university. The frenetic credentialism of the university is inscribed in the very structures of tenure and promotion of faculty. Our institutions demand that faculty members take required training modules, publish more (especially, in the right places), get more grants, teach more, and serve more. More, more, and more. Faculty members are often so busy that they have no idea what’s happening with their colleagues, rarely finding occasions to contemplate truth together.

Certainly, ungrading can help with this. It can invite us to create at least one alternative space in the college or university governed by a different logic, perhaps one equally uncomfortable to the faculty member and student alike. Such alternative cultures can slowly change the college or university.

But ungrading must be one strategy among many that we employ to offer a robust, meaningful philosophy of Catholic higher education. Two others, perhaps related, include the cultivation of both contemplation and festivity within the classroom.

The contemplative classroom is one, perhaps, that uses screens and slides in severe moderation. In such an environment, the student and teacher take the time to slowly read a text or ponder an idea. In such a space, less is more. This classroom is open to silent pondering. The contemplative educator uses the natural space of campus to his or her advantage. The professor holds office hours while walking on campus or even assigns the students to discussion groups where they are to meet outside or while walking themselves. The contemplative educator encourages dialogue about the material outside of class, rewarding students for holding discussions about the material. When I teach my large class, I require that students host discussion groups about the material with people not in the class including their roommates, friends, and even random people on campus. I want to create a culture where the slow looking at reality is normative. I ask students to go to art museums, look at trees for a lot longer than they’re comfortable with (in a course on sacramental theology, for example), and write by hand. I want them (and me) to slow down.

The other disposition I seek to cultivate in the classroom is festivity. Festivity is linked to contemplation. The festive classroom is marked by a mutual celebration of the goodness of existence. Professors and students alike often think about going to class or grading as a painful activity, one more akin to punishment than joyful gratitude for the opportunity to seek the truth in love. Festivity unfolds in the classroom when the professor is willing to delight in a student’s question or response. The festive classroom is one where there is humor, a recognition that even when we are pondering that which is most serious or salvific, delight can erupt. Irony can manifest, and it can be recognized. At the same time, it’s clear that the educator is also overjoyed with the insights being studied—we are reading this or that text as proposing something essential to the human condition: why shouldn’t we love it? The same goes with grading: professors love to complain about grading. But a mindset change is needed. Grading is a unique opportunity to offer correction but also to delight in the insights of a student. It is a chance to enter into a dialogue of truth, to celebrate the gift of our common work.

Ungrading, of course, is essential to this renewal of Catholic higher education pedagogy—it is attuned, as Heron and Rovati show, to a Catholic theological anthropology. But such ungrading must be practiced in institutional settings where the predominant philosophy of education is dominated not by the monstrous logic of endless consumption and production but contemplation and festivity. Our colleges and universities, if they are Catholic, must be willing to reward this kind of innovative work by professors, refusing to forget that colleges and universities are not first and foremost research factories but spaces for contemplative wonder and delight.

May such a philosophy of truly liberal learning be developed and lived out by courageous institutions in the coming years, especially as higher education participates in processes of self-examination precipitated by generative AI, the demographic cliff, and a crisis of authority where many question whether colleges and universities should exist in the first place. Now is the time for the kind of creative work performed by Heron and Rovati!

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

Image: Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet by Garofalo, ca. 1520/25, in the public domain from the National Gallery of Art Patrons’ Permanent Fund.

Readings for the Sixth Sunday of Easter can be found here.

We are drawing near to the end of the Easter season, as next Sunday we will celebrate Jesus’s Ascension, with the following Sunday devoted to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Our gospel passage from John Chapter 14 today foreshadows this when Jesus mentions the Father will send another Advocate, the spirit of truth. Likewise, our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles also highlights the Holy Spirit, recounting that Peter and John prayed for the Samaritans to receive the Holy Spirit, and they did (Acts 8:14-18).

Yet if our eyes are looking ahead to Pentecost in a fortnight, nonetheless the immediate context for today’s gospel actually places us within the Last Supper discourse, with Jesus celebrating the Passover with his disciples. The previous chapter of John features the account of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, and we find a common theme extending throughout these chapters and presented by Jesus in the foot-washing: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (13:34) and echoed later: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love you” (15:12-13).

This theme is crucial as we consider Jesus’s words that bookend today’s gospel. First, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” ( John 14:15) and then, towards the end, “Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me” (John 14:20). The interesting wordplay is almost like a logic puzzle; we could spend hours reflecting on the phrasing of these sentiments and how they differ–why they were presented again in a different formula. We add another piece to consider when we hear Jesus emphasizing that his commandment is to love one another.

The focus on love might seem to accord well with modern sentiment; from Valentine’s Day to the plethora of rom-coms to the words of Taylor Swift: “don’t we try to love love?” Yet contemporary and secular understandings generally pale in comparison to Jesus’s robust understanding of love: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13). This love is not primarily about warm, fuzzy feelings or sweet words, but a choice to sacrifice one’s desires or needs for another’s good.

Very often we hear moral advice that pits “love” against “commands” or dismisses moral rules in favor of “love.” Sometimes it’s even phrased in terms of “being authentic.” Yet, what our Church teaches us is that the rules or commands are meant to facilitate our love and our freedom. True freedom and love are not found in capricious choices based on the haphazard whims or fluctuating emotions of life, but on the intentional decision to follow Christ and to love as he loved, despite the cost. Jesus’s own words confirm this: “the world must know that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me” (John 14:31). Here Jesus does not announce that he lacks freedom, but shows that freedom is doing out of love what the Father commands. We hear it again in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

One interesting consideration here – appropriate since the gospel passage is part of the Last Supper discourse, linked to the Eucharist – is the Sunday Mass obligation. The Church requires Catholics who are able to attend Mass on Sunday. This is not intended as a restriction on our freedom, but as a way of facilitating our freedom to love God and one another. Some may suggest that the important task in life is just to love each other, not to sit in a pew for an hour on Sundays. Yet it is precisely the communal celebration of the Eucharist that is uniquely able to sustain us for the task of sacrificial love. Others may say that “they don’t feel like it” and thus it’s hypocritical or inauthentic to attend Mass. Of course, the ideal is to want to go, to attend Mass out of heartfelt desire, motivated by love for God. Yet, the choice to attend Mass when we aren’t feeling it demonstrates a sacrificial love born of commitment: “not my will but yours be done.”

In fact, we have many obligations that ought to be occasions for loving and serving others: our daily professional work, our presence with our family, our daily tasks of life. Often we fall short of the intention of loving, sacrificial service. However, few of us will decline sending the email, taking out the garbage, getting up with a sick child at night, or brushing our teeth because we just aren’t feeling the true motivation of love. Instead, we remain committed to our duties and seek to rectify our intention as best we can, reminding ourselves why we do what we do.

And this is where we can return to Jesus’s promise of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit helps us to love and to keep the commandments. Of course we will not always have perfect intention, and we will often fail at loving as Jesus loved. We sometimes will choose to sin, whether because we aren’t recollected and purposeful or because we just want to do what we want, without reference to what God calls us to do. We may feel like hypocrites: able to make ourselves go to Mass out of obligation, but nonetheless sinful and impatient with others. Yet even this flaw reminds us of our dependence upon God for redemption. We have already been saved by Jesus’s choice for the cross, the will fully aligned with the Father’s will: “Put to death in the flesh, he was brought to life in the Spirit,” as we hear today in 1 Peter 3:18.

Through that love, we are redeemed in the resurrection that we still celebrate in this Easter season. Our sins do not lead us to despair, but to healing repentance and conversion. And we are not left alone, but sustained by Jesus’s body and blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist. We are guided by the Holy Spirit, who will help us to love God by following his commands, and in this, we will find the freedom of friendship with God.

While we are still awaiting Pope Leo XIV’s first social encyclical, he has already started to reflect on the tensions between AI’s growing influence on daily life and the Christian understanding of the person. The Pope thinks that AI “offers great opportunities, but it is also fraught with danger,” because it “raises serious concerns about its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, and capacity for wonder and contemplation.”

In his “Message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications,” Pope Leo offers a clear-eyed and stark judgment on the current moment:

By simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, the systems known as artificial intelligence not only interfere with information ecosystems, but also encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships. The challenge, therefore, is not technological, but anthropological. Safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves. Embracing the opportunities offered by digital technology and artificial intelligence with courage, determination and discernment does not mean turning a blind eye to critical issues, complexities and risks.

In the message, Pope Leo spells out the risks of AI in great detail:

• “Algorithms designed to maximize engagement on social media… reward quick emotions and penalize more time-consuming human responses such as the effort required to understand and reflect… [Thus], these algorithms reduce our ability to listen and think critically, and increase social polarization.”

• By relying in a naive and unquestioning way on AI and treating it as “as an omniscient ‘friend,’ a source of all knowledge, an archive of every memory, an ‘oracle’ of all advice… [We] erode our ability to think analytically and creatively, to understand meaning and distinguish between syntax and semantics.” While AI is simply using complex algorithms that analyze data and then create well-formed sentences, people mistake its product as an expression of meaningful judgments that are the fruit of intelligent, conscious, and moral deliberation. In the long run, the Pope warns us, “choosing to evade the effort of thinking for ourselves and settling for artificial statistical compilations threatens to diminish our cognitive, emotional and communication skills.”

• A third area of concern pertains to the difficulties that generative AI introduces in distinguishing between what is real and what is simulated. The digital space is now inundated with videos, images, and “persons” that are not real but created by automated agents instead. This is a problem in and of itself, but it is made even graver by the fact that such simulated realities influence public debates and individual choices. “Chatbots based on large language models (LLMs),” Leo warns us, “are proving to be surprisingly effective at covert persuasion through continuous optimization of personalized interaction. The dialogic, adaptive, mimetic structure of these language models is capable of imitating human feelings and thus simulating a relationship.” The result, he concludes, is that “they can become hidden architects of our emotional states and so invade and occupy our sphere of intimacy.” It is hard to escape the judgment that, ultimately, the AI labs and the myriad of companies that are starting to use their technology are exploiting and monetizing people’s psychological vulnerabilities to maximize interaction and nudge users to use more of their features and purchase more of their content. According to the Pope, more and more we will be tempted to “substitute relationships with others for AI systems that catalog our thoughts, creating a world of mirrors around us, where everything is made ‘in our image and likeness.’” As a society, we have started to reckon with what happens when screens and social media take an oversized space in people’s lives, imaginations, and habits. We should apply the wisdom gained from these hard lessons and apply it to the challenges posed by AI so as to avoid falling into fabricated parallel realities that usurp our faces and voices.

• Finally, Pope Leo alerts us to the problem of bias. “AI models,” he explains, “are shaped by the worldview of those who build them and can, in turn, impose these ways of thinking by reproducing the stereotypes and prejudices present in the data they draw on.” Since such commitments and perspectives remain covert and implicit, though, they nudge in ways that are surreptitious and concerning.

All of this leads us to the problem of using AI in educational settings. Learning to read, consider, study, discuss, and write about important texts and ideas is an essential component of the intellectual and moral formation at the heart of education. This is especially true for Catholic institutions that wish to embody the Church’s vision of formation as the creation of an environment where students “freely associate with their teachers in a common love of knowledge” that steers them towards “searching for, discovering, and communicating truth” (Ex Corde Ecclesiae, no. 1). The Church teaches that the classroom should be a place where both students and teachers grow in their ability “to wonder, to understand, to contemplate, to make personal judgments, and to develop a religious, moral, and social sense” (Gaudium et Spes, no. 59). None of this is possible by outsourcing the work necessary to develop our intellectual and moral abilities to AI.

Paul Scherz and Brian Patrick Green call this process deskilling: “the person never acquires or fails to maintain the habits and skills necessary to act well because many activities are taken over by machine.” Of all the problems spelled out above, this is the most pressing in the context of education. Reading, writing, conversing, arguing, thinking, creating, evaluating, and disagreeing (just to name a few of the tasks that people may now outsource to AI) are not simply technical skills. They have moral salience and touch on constitutive human elements. In fact, these abilities are important for the development of virtue such that deskilling in this area easily leads to what Scherz and Green call “de-virtuing,” a fundamental impairment of human development and moral growth. Pope Leo is very aware of this issue: “Just as all the muscles in the body die if we do not use them, if we do not move them, the brain needs to be used, so our intelligence, your intelligence, needs to be exercised a little so as not to lose this ability.” He even explicitly told students to refrain from using AI to do their homework and urged priests to keep preparing their own homilies!

Considering all the problematic features of AI, I think that we should severely limit it (if not outright ban it) in educational settings so as to cultivate the intellectual, moral, and social skills that human beings need to develop and flourish. These are the ones that, in turn, may allow people to find ways to eventually use AI in ethical ways that serve the common good, protect human dignity, and encourage authentic and integral development. Without spaces that cultivate our humanity and allow it to grow in virtue, though, it is hard to imagine a future where AI is used for the good rather than to simply accelerate our societal ills. Niall Ferguson has suggested that, while living in today’s world is akin to operating a starship, it is essential for education to still function as a cloister where the time and space to develop our intellectual and moral virtues is carved out. Catholic institutions, the Pope tells us, are primed to create such a space to “teach young people to use these tools with their own intelligence, ensuring that they open themselves to the search for truth, a spiritual and fraternal life, broadening their dreams and the horizons of their decision making.” Without such a humanistic formation, he continues, we will grow blind to “the logic behind economics [of AI], [and the] embedded biases and forms of power that shape our perception of reality. Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses.” In contrast, Pope Leo urges us to “return to the reasons of the heart, to the centrality of good relationships and to the ability to get closer to others, without excluding anyone.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation:

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Moral Theology curated by the journal’s Associate Editor Alessandro Rovati. For more conversations with the journal authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.