Joseph Tomás McKellar: What Pope Leo XIV really asks us to do with AI

By JOSEPH TOMÁS MCKELLAR | Special to the Tribune
PUBLISHED: August 4, 2026 at 5:00 AM CDT

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” has been widely characterized by the media as the Catholic Church’s landmark alarm bell about the perils of artificial intelligence. But it would be a mistake to reduce the encyclical to a warning about AI and its impact on humanity alone. More broadly, the pope frames the AI revolution as full of peril and some promise, with core questions at the center from the perspective of those on the peripheries of our society:

• Will AI be placed in service to humanity or in service to further concentrate wealth and power?

• Will AI cause further loss to our sense of humanity? Will it bring us further from the flesh (ourselves and our fellow human beings) or closer to the flesh?

For the pope, there are three basic pathways to dignity that are exacerbated and threatened by what’s now being referred to as the “fourth industrial revolution.”