Magnifica Humanitas: Part 1 of Pope Leo XIV's Insights on AI
Part 1: What is the frame of Catholic Social Teaching, what lenses matter, and how do we start to think about them relating to technology in 2026.
When I started college at the University of Notre Dame, I thought I did not want to go into medicine. I had loved English, History, and Theology classes the most and felt most proud of my work in writing. Medicine—and science courses—felt like they weren’t going to fit for me—outside of, possibly, psychiatry. Coming from a medical family, though, and recognizing that at the time careers in the sciences had a more guaranteed path (this was 2013-2017), I took a smattering of classes across many fields my first two years of college, with enough classes in the premed track to not rule it out.
I ended up working in ministry with high schoolers at Notre Dame, which led to two things: seeing that being with people, talking in depth about how they think about their lives, and solving logistical problems was an incredible combination for my way of moving in the world. I also wanted to still be able to use the science and social sciences at points in ministry to assist people beyond only religion. When I left college for medical school, I finished with a double major in pre-medicine and theological studies.
Now, almost a decade (!) later, I am a psychiatrist and a practicing (though often pushing back and protesting) Catholic. I work with kids and teens and adults who are all asking the same question right now: What are screens doing to us? What do we do?
Then, Pope Leo XIV releases Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding The Human Person In The Time of Artificial Intelligence, and all my interests are overlapping at once. I’ve seen people mention this encyclical, make memes about it, and give some overviews across the internet. Given my background, my current work in child psychiatry, and my own personal and content-creating interest in asking how we live well alongside a digital world, I wanted to read the entire encyclical and walk you through points that really hit me as a psychiatrist.
Girl, Are you trying to evangelize me?
No. As stated above, I am Catholic but also have many complaints, concerns, doubts etc as a woman who stands in the Church, especially as in the last decade or so the level of association between conservative political beliefs and religious beliefs have tied themselves so strongly together.
I also think the idea of evangelization as whole tends to have a consent problem. Am I respecting the dignity of another person and their particular intelligence and experience if I, by semantic force, try to elicit emotions from them and change their mind? Right.
Point here is this: the Catholic Church is an institution, a human community, and a cultural vehicle that has had contemplative, intelligent, and kind people thinking deeply for hundreds of years. In the modern world where we increasingly seem to be only able to hear things if we invent a new term and acronym for them, study them, and never see the history we come from even in ideas, being able to sharpen our thinking with something long-lasting can be useful.
The Encyclical begins with a brief history of Catholic Social Justice Teaching
This encyclical begins with a review of the emergence of the social doctrine in the Catholic Church, or what some refer to as Catholic Social Teaching (CST). This encyclical starts by citing this emergence in reference to one of Pope Leo’s predecessors and namesake Pope Leo XIII. In 1891, he put out the timely encyclical Rerum Novarum (“of new things”) that put into the world the Church’s new engagement and response to the labor and human practices of the Industrial Revolution. As quoted in this encyclical,
“When some objected that the Church should not waste energy on worldly matters, but instead focus on communicating the message of eternal life, Leo XIII responded with realism and wisdom, saying that the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of people.”