Key Takeaways
- The University of Notre Dame Australia’s Centre for Technology and Human Futures convened a multidisciplinary roundtable to explore AI’s impact through Catholic social teaching, inspired by Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas.
- Participants warned that focusing solely on AI’s efficiency risks losing sight of purpose, mission, and the irreducible dignity of the human person.
- Human presence in care settings is not merely a conduit for information; it can itself be an expression of care, a point underscored by the roundtable’s discussion of healthcare.
- Ethical judgments about AI presuppose underlying metaphysical convictions about what it means to be human; theology and philosophy are therefore essential, not optional, in shaping AI policy.
- The church’s contribution to the AI age should be a vision of the human person that resists the pressure to optimise every aspect of life, offering discernment, formation, and governance that safeguard what cannot be reduced to efficiency.
The Roundtable and Its Context
I was privileged to participate in a roundtable convened by the University of Notre Dame Australia’s Centre for Technology and Human Futures, launched in March this year. Led by its inaugural director, Associate Professor Victoria Lorrimar, the centre gathered leaders and practitioners from Catholic healthcare, religious life, diocesan life, and mission. The discussion centred on the human questions raised by artificial intelligence, a topic made urgent by Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which offers Catholic organisations a rich stimulus for thinking through AI’s uses and implications through the lens of Catholic social teaching.
Why Purpose Trumps Adoption
What struck me about the roundtable was the importance of bringing different parts of the church together to wrestle with a technology that evolves faster than our institutional responses. AI is already shaping our mission, while continuing to raise questions for the wider church and society for which there are no settled answers. I was grateful for the chance to think with others about those questions, because the conversation about artificial intelligence can too easily become a conversation about adoption, capability, and efficiency, when the more fundamental question is one of purpose and mission. As one participant put it, “An organisation can become extraordinarily busy implementing AI without ever asking what its use is ultimately for.”
The Tower of Babel Analogy
This concern is where Pope Leo’s image of the Tower of Babel in Magnifica Humanitas seems apt: there can be enormous ingenuity and activity, yet no common horizon capable of giving that activity meaning. An organisation’s board may reasonably ask how it should use AI, but a more searching question is what kind of organisation it wishes to become, and whether the technology is actually serving that end. The roundtable acknowledged that the dominant cultural narrative increasingly presents AI as a general solution to almost every problem, known and unknown, bolstered by obvious commercial interests in sustaining that confidence. Yet technological possibility is not the same thing as human necessity, and an AI system can solve a problem in one part of an organisation while creating a larger one elsewhere.
Unintended Systemic Consequences
The increasing use of AI in recruitment provides a simple illustration. If applicants can generate highly tailored applications and apply for many more positions than was previously possible, the efficiency gained by the individual can become an overwhelming volume of work for those receiving and assessing applications. What appears as efficiency when viewed locally can become dysfunction when viewed across a whole system, reminding us that the consequences of technology are often delayed and distributed rather than immediately visible. This systemic blind spot underscores the need for holistic evaluation before deploying AI tools.
Trust, Participation, and Human Dignity
There is a related question of trust, particularly when those most affected by technological decisions have little influence over them. Workers who use technology in their daily practice are often well placed to understand what might genuinely assist their work, yet organisational decisions about systems and vendors can be made at a considerable distance from that practical knowledge. For Catholic institutions, this takes us inevitably towards the question of human dignity, understood within a distinctly Christian vision of the human person. Our institutions and ministries cannot simply ask whether AI makes a process faster or cheaper; they must ask what its use communicates about the person who encounters it.
Human Presence as Care
In healthcare, for example, there may be circumstances in which a person should have the genuine choice to speak with another human being rather than an AI system, because “human presence is not merely an inefficient delivery mechanism for information but can itself be an expression of care.” This insight helps explain why purely technical solutions can fail when they are removed from the history, culture, and relationships of the people they are intended to serve. As our lives become more technologically mediated, the temptation grows to treat human beings as disembodied collections of data, preferences, and predicted behaviours—or even “obstacles” to productivity. We may therefore need to recover an instinct for the moments when something feels wrong even though it is technically possible, developing what the roundtable described as the “ick” that tells us there are forms of automation we should resist before we can yet formulate the argument for why.
Ethics Grounded in Metaphysics
We sometimes speak as though ethics is something that can be added to technology at the end of the development process, as though we first build the machine and then ask whether its use is permissible and fitting. Yet every ethical judgement rests upon prior convictions about reality, knowledge, and the human person; in other words, every ethics has an underlying metaphysics, whether acknowledged or not. “What we believe a human being is will inevitably shape what we believe can legitimately be done to, for or with a human being.” This is why the philosophical question of whether intelligence is reducible to computation matters, just as the theological claim that the human person is created, embodied, relational, and endowed with an irreducible dignity in Christ matters. These are not merely academic questions; they become practical when we ask whether an algorithm should determine someone’s employment, whether automated decision‑making diminishes human agency, whether simulated empathy can substitute for presence or the community of the parish, whether generated information changes our relationship with truth, or where responsibility ultimately lies when a machine participates in a decision whose consequences are borne by a person.
AI as Invitation and Confrontation
The deeper question is what an AI‑shaped world might gradually teach us to believe about ourselves. All of this makes AI both an invitation and a confrontation for the church. There is an intellectual response that needs to be developed now, and Pope Leo has already given us beginnings for that work. However, there will also be responses prompted by crisis as technology alters centres of authority, expertise, and influence within our institutions and in the wider community. The church will need more than policies to navigate this complex terrain; it will need formation capable of cultivating discernment, governance capable of holding principles together with lived experience, and experimentation that allows new technologies to be explored without surrendering what cannot be compromised. Ultimately, the church’s credibility may depend less upon whether it becomes an exemplary adopter of AI than upon whether it can lead both intellectually and practically: offering a compelling account of those dimensions of human life that cannot be measured, optimised, or reduced to efficiency, while embodying that vision in the way our institutions use technology.
Shaping, Not Just Responding
My hope from the roundtable discussions is that they might help build a shared Catholic vision that does not simply respond to the AI revolution, but helps to shape it—bringing together our intellectual tradition, our institutional practice, and our defence of the irreducible dignity of the human person. That same question of what we are willing to optimise, and what we must refuse to reduce to efficiency, reaches well beyond AI. Consider euthanasia: it may be presented as an efficient response to suffering, but efficiency alone cannot tell us what a genuinely human or grace‑filled response to suffering requires. Beauty is inefficient, love is inefficient, worship is inefficient, and yet these are not peripheral features of human existence; they disclose something about what human existence is for.
The Core Question for the Church
Perhaps, then, the most important question AI places before the church is not simply what this technology permits us to do, but what, in fidelity to our understanding of the human person, we are unwilling to do with it. “Perhaps, then, the most important question AI places before the church is not simply what this technology permits us to do, but what, in fidelity to our understanding of the human person, we are unwilling to do with it.” In answering that question, we may discover that the church’s contribution to the AI age is not principally to offer another technology policy, but to recover and proclaim a vision of the human person profound enough to withstand the pressure to optimise everything. This vision, rooted in Catholic teaching, can guide the church to lead—not merely follow—in the age of artificial intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence, human dignity, and the Catholic Church