In a week when tech leaders said the artificial intelligence industry needs to slow its race to an uncertain future that some warn may be apocalyptic, Georgetown University hosted a Sept. 9 discussion on “AI, Catholic Social Teaching, and Pope Leo’s Invitation to Dialogue with the World.”
The dialogue, sponsored by Georgetown’s Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, drew upon Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s May 2026 encyclical letter that was subtitled “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.”
Speakers emphasized that the pope’s letter offered a clarion call for moral guidance and reflection among all stakeholders, including community members, on the best way to move forward with AI.
“Artificial intelligence is something completely new in the horizon of the history of our civilization,” said Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the apostolic nuncio of the Holy See to the United States.
The nuncio said Pope Leo didn’t pretend to have answers, but he put forward questions about AI “that we have to tackle together,” with stakeholders around the table reflecting on technological, economic and political factors posed by advances in artificial intelligence.
The encyclical offers “an invitation for everyone to be part of the future that we have to build,” Archbishop Caccia said.
He noted that the pope said his encyclical was born from listening to scientists, engineers, public officials and parents and teachers. He said Pope Leo heard concerns about “increasingly autonomous weapons systems practically beyond any human reach to govern them effectively… troubling accounts of algorithms that can block access to health care, employment and security on the basis of data tainted by prejudice and injustice,” and the pontiff also heard “the silence of those who have no voice when decisions are made.”
Archbishop Caccia also noted how Pope Leo in the encyclical said that “artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed.”
In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo wrote, “Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of ‘armed’ competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance… To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.” (MH, #110)
Eduardo Peñalver, the new president of Georgetown University, welcomed people to the dialogue, noting that in the previous week, Georgetown had launched a university-wide initiative focused on developing principles and practices guiding that community’s engagement with artificial intelligence.
The pope’s encyclical and its reflection on the moral and human dimensions of AI and the perspective of Catholic social thought will shape that initiative as the university uses its tools of research and teaching “to ensure that AI advances and respects human dignity and freedom both on our campus and in the wider society,” Peñalver said.
In addition to Archbishop Caccia, the participants in the dialogue included:
- Anna Rowlands, the St. Hilda Chair in Catholic Social Thought and Practice at the University of Durham in England. She is a member of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development and spoke at the Vatican’s launch of Magnifica Humanitas in May.
- Vilas Dhar, who has served on the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence. He is president of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, one of the world’s foremost philanthropies advancing AI for public purposes.
- Jasmine Sun, who covers the culture and politics of AI as a contributor at the Atlantic and on her Substack, and has written for other outlets including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. She previously led the core product team at Substack and has worked in AI policy.
- Molly Kinder, a leading expert on AI and its impact on work. She is currently the founding CEO of the Breakwater Initiative, a new organization building policy responses to AI's disruption of work. Previously, she was a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution studying AI's economic impacts.
Kim Daniels, the director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life, moderated the conversation. She noted that it was taking place two days before the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
“Those days reminded us that human dignity is not an abstraction. That conviction is what brings us here tonight as it is tested by a technology developing faster than our understanding of it,” Daniels said.
She said Magnifica Humanitas “begins a new chapter in the Church’s ongoing dialogue with the world on what technological development means for work, for families, for public life and for human dignity. It asks us to consider who this technology is for, and who is being left behind.”
Daniels added that the encyclical offers a Christian vision of hope in a fearful time, “and it also calls for a concrete response from us.”
Anna Rowlands emphasized that Pope Leo’s encyclical “promotes a rational conversation about the technologies,” at a time when there is “magical thinking” that tech can solve all of its own problems, and when some of the discussion centers on transcending human limits.
“I think one of the most profound aspects of this encyclical is that human beings are made for and within a world of limits, and limits are something not simply to be overcome,” said Rowlands, who underscored that the Catholic Church speaks “from a place of dialogue and accompaniment” when confronting issues like AI.
Noting that he comes at the issue as “a non-Catholic scholar and AI practitioner,” Vilas Dhar said he appreciates that the encyclical is grounded in the perspective that “any conversation about AI or AI governance doesn’t start from the capabilities of the technology. It comes from the worth and the dignity of the person, from the sense that our moral worth is established before we talk about our usefulness or our productivity.”
Dhar also praised Pope Leo’s encyclical for its “moral humility” of recognizing the Church’s own failures on the moral question of slavery. When addressing new forms of slavery that might arise from AI and the world’s digital transformation, Pope Leo wrote, “Neither can we deny or diminish the delay with which both society and the Church came to denounce the scourge of slavery… This constitutes a wound in Christian memory… For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.” (MH #176)
Jasmine Sun noted that her reporting goes beyond Silicon Valley, and she has traveled to Wisconsin and Michigan to get a ground-level view of the data center backlash in communities.
“We are in a moment now where even the AI industry and the AI ecosystem itself is asking itself these very hard questions about whether the work that they are doing is ethical, whether they are making the right decision by continuing to build a technology that they themselves wonder if it will herald the apocalypse,” she said.
That week, two AI researchers had warned that the technology could lead to human extinction, and on Sept. 12, three days after the Georgetown discussion, the Washington Post reported that Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei issued an essay calling for the AI industry to slow its pace, a stance that was supported by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and SpaceXAI founder Elon Musk.
Speaking at the Georgetown dialogue, Sun said, “Even in San Francisco, folks who are not necessarily Catholics, are looking again for true moral leadership, something that is guided not by the pursuit of profit and productivity and efficiency alone, but a deeper sense of values, and I think that’s something that Magnifica Humanitas offers.”
Molly Kinder joked that she personally had anticipated the encyclical “like an 11-year-old at midnight standing in front of a bookstore before the next Harry Potter installment was coming out.”
After having studied the possible impact of AI on work, Kinder said she appreciated how “Pope Leo unequivocally stated that work is fundamental to the human experience.”
And reflecting on the anxiety surrounding the apocalyptic warnings surrounding AI, she noted that she has three small children and had just dropped them off at school when she opened her phone and saw “these terrifying tweets about the likelihood of 10 percent or greater that humanity will become extinct in the next year because of AI.”
Kinder said the Church’s wisdom and moral leadership is needed in the discussion of AI, and she believes a reason that Pope Leo’s encyclical went viral after it was issued was, “I think the entire public, it doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic or not, has been looking for some clear moral human-focused guidance on where this should be going, not where it could go. And I really do think that was the conversation that was started.”
Anna Rowlands pointed out that Pope Leo’s encyclical on AI, rather than offering technical solutions, is encouraging people “to think through and reason through and reflect through these questions together.”
Stressing the importance of dialogue on AI, Rowlands said, “We need brokering spaces where we can have those conversations as parents, as educators, as people in those sectors, and as those who are made most vulnerable who are the victims of these systems, we have to be able to talk together.”
Speaking of the promise of AI in making advances in confronting challenges faced by humanity, Vilas Dhar said, “I believe very deeply that we should explore the very frontiers of what AI allows us to do, but to do it not simply to explore our capabilities, but to design for the kind of tools that help us tangle with really tangible and meaningful problems at scale. There is really no conflict in exploring AI in ways that are grounded in values rather than hubris.”
Dhar said that instead of pursuing those technological advances for greater profit or for global domination or for being first, it would be better to ground that pursuit in values “of love and grace, a question of who we are imbued to be and what we aspire to become, and how we do that when enabled by the incredible promise of innovation.”
When asked who should be at the table discussing AI and its future, Dhar said, “It’s all of us.” Those conversations, he said, “have to be informed by our institutions of faith, our institutions of philosophy, our institutions of humanitarianism.”
He added, “I don’t want the technology companies to design the tools that will destroy us. I want our institutions to build the world that will inspire us.”
While AI may appear to be “the perfect Trojan horse… We can bring people to a conversation about AI, and the conversation is actually about our principles of economic justice, of human dignity and rights, of whether we believe in a universal access to an education or health care,” Dhar said.
Reflecting on the reporting that she has done in communities opposing data centers, Jasmine Sun said people increasingly seem to feel that a “small number of very wealthy and powerful tech people in Silicon Valley are architecting the future digitally (and) physically for everybody else and other folks aren’t really getting a say.”
The question, she said, is whether their future is being built by those tech officials, “or is it us, the people who are living with the actual changed community landscape and material impacts?”
Sun said that moral leadership, and policy actions, are needed.
That point was echoed by Molly Kinder, who said, “It feels like we are sleepwalking into major disruptions to livelihoods to lots of aspects of our lives, and it doesn’t feel our leaders have a plan and a strategy.”
Kinder said that while the impact of AI on the labor market has been modest so far, the technology could have significant impacts on young workers coming out of college and early career workers. Other workers whose jobs in the future may be at risk because of AI include “family sustaining jobs primarily for women without a college degree, in back offices, bookkeepers, clerical workers (and) customer service representatives,” she said.
When asked what will happen to human expertise in an age of AI, Jasmine Sun emphasized that “there’s a lot of human knowledge that AI cannot access,” and as a journalist working in the field and going to places and meeting and talking to people, she can write about “distinctly human qualities, (and) those distinctly human forms of knowledge.”
Answering a question from a member of the audience about young people feeling pressured by the advance of AI, Molly Kinder said two concepts can help them “develop and become themselves” – at times in a cloister experiencing the world and its wonders without the distraction of technology, and at other times as in a starship viewing the universe of knowledge facilitated by AI.
“There’s a place for technology, and there’s a place for young people, in the right way, to learn the skills (they need). I would argue that we should be balancing much more toward the cloister,” Kinder said. She added, “I think there’s lots of ways that young people should have hope that doubling down on who they are, how they relate to people, what are their quirky interests, what could they bring to the world is actually probably what’s going to be most valued. And I would say that’s my hopeful message” to them.
Offering closing words at the Georgetown gathering on artificial intelligence, Archbishop Caccia emphasized the importance of bringing a moral perspective to the issue and remembering the value of human relationships when considering technological advances. “Not everything which is possible to be done, should be done, not everything that technology offers should be taken,” he said.
He noted how the technology of nuclear energy offered great promise, but its first use was as a nuclear bomb.
The Vatican’s representative to the United States said a saying from Africa rings true when contemplating how to proceed with AI: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”
Archbishop Caccia then said, “And I think we have to go very far. And that’s why we have to go together.”
