(RNS) — Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” is an extraordinary document. Its integration of artificial intelligence within the church’s prior commitments to human dignity, its prophetic call for collective structural responses to systematic problems, and its use of Catholic social teaching to draw attention to labor are essential and timely contributions to one of the most consequential debates of our time. I am so grateful for it and have been writing about it with something close to (for the Seinfeld fans out there) unbridled enthusiasm.
But this is Purple Catholicism. Which means forthright engagement across political and ideological differences. And, in this context, it includes naming what remains to be done.
But before naming some unfinished business, it is worth recalling how central integration of a fully Catholic moral vision across ideologies is to the church’s social tradition. In #51 of “Caritas in Veritate,” Pope Benedict XVI taught us that “the overall moral tenor of society” cannot be compartmentalized. When a society loses respect for human life at its most vulnerable (through things like artificial conception, the sacrifice of embryos, the denial of natural death), it simultaneously loses what Benedict called “human ecology.” He wrote, “The book of nature is one and indivisible.” It encompasses not only the environment but “life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development.” To uphold one set of duties while trampling the other, said Pope Benedict plainly, is “a grave contradiction.”
Pope Francis used exactly this integrative model. Even in “Laudato Si’,” his ecological encyclical, he found room to address abortion. And when it came to gender ideology, Francis was even more clear and direct: On multiple occasions, he called it “the ugliest danger of our time” and an example of “ideological colonization.” This was not Francis caving to the right or becoming obsessed with “pelvic issues.” It was Francis insisting on the full, nonideological, integrated vision of Catholic teaching.
“Magnifica Humanitas” gives us the tools to do the same. The question is whether theologians, pastors and others will pick them up and use them in the places the encyclical itself did not go. Three areas in particular call out for exactly this kind of constructive extension.
First, the encyclical’s treatment of transhumanism and posthumanism is rich: It critiques the logic of unlimited enhancement, the desire to eliminate human weakness and the reduction of people to the greatest efficiency or convenience. Leo insists that a human being is never “a project to be optimized” and human dignity is unconditional.
Those critiques apply directly to the most concrete transhumanist project currently underway: AI-assisted embryo creation, selection and discarding. Companies like Orchid and Nucleus Genomics are already offering polygenic screening of embryos created through in vitro fertilization. Proof of concept for in vitro gametogenesis (the creation of eggs and sperm from ordinary cells) raises the prospect of a future in which AI analyzes thousands of embryos for preferred traits and discards the rest as medical waste. The encyclical’s anthropology is exactly what is needed to address this. That application now falls to us.
Second, the transhumanism section critiques the desire to transcend the limits of the human body. It strongly critiques thinking of human beings in disembodied ways, as merely projects of self-construction rather than as given and embodied persons called to relationship. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” is the tradition’s richest positive resource here: the body as a genuine sign of the person, as the locus of love and gift, as irreducibly normative.
“Magnifica Humanitas” invites exactly this kind of application when it insists on embodiment and relationality as constitutive of genuine humanity. The connection to gender ideology — through its claim that biological sex can be a limit to be overcome through using technology at the service of a dualistic anthropology which imagines that the real person could be born in a wrong body — is direct and theologically and culturally important. Leo has given us the framework. It is now ours to apply.
Third, the encyclical is deeply attentive to the ways AI can simulate a false human connection and hollow out genuine communion. It warns against mistaking AI intimacy for real relationship. It is concerned with automation and what caving to robots is doing (and may do) to human work and human dignity.
A natural extension of this argument, one the encyclical’s own theology of embodiment and relationality makes readily available, would be to AI-powered sex robots. This rapidly developing technology extends the logic of both pornography’s vicious objectification and the false intimacy of AI chatbots. Here, too, Leo has given us the tools. The application is ours to make.
What these three areas have in common is that they involve the sexual and reproductive dimensions of the AI and transhumanist threats the encyclical addresses so well. The encyclical, it seems, took on the challenges that were most likely to resonate with a broad secular audience — labor, governance, objective truth, global cooperation — and I am so glad it did. The challenges that push more directly against progressive assumptions about sex and reproduction were left for another day, another document, or perhaps another set of voices.
This, actually, is the kind of integrated ethical work that this Purple Catholicism column is all about doing. And Leo XIV has given us better tools for it than we had before. Time to get cracking.