Why Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical isn’t an AI rulebook

Picture a busy pastor with his coffee, scrolling the headlines about Magnifica humanitas, hunting for some relief in the form of an AI cheat sheet. Which apps are approved? Which are off-limits? What new policy is coming from the diocese later this year? He expects new rules and regulations are on their way.

But if a serious reader reflects on Magnifica humanitas, it is clear that an easy cheat sheet isn’t in there. Not because the Pope avoided it, but because that was never the kind of document he was writing. So what is it, and what does it change about parish ministry?

Magnifica humanitas doesn’t regulate your software or AI use, and it doesn’t drop a policy document on your week of ministry. It’s a recovery document. It isn’t asking which tools you may run. It’s asking “what sort of things should we never let a tool decide?” and “is this specific application of technology making us more human? Is it making us more Christ-like?”

This is the work a lot of headlines missed. Recovery is neither more rules, nor less work. It’s a parish deciding, on purpose, which decisions will always belong to a human heart, so that everyone it serves is met as a face and not a function. 

Regulation manages machines. Recovery is after something in you.

“For an algorithm,” Leo writes, “an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change” (#128). That is the difference between regulation and recovery in a single sentence. Regulation thinks like an algorithm. Find the flaw, write the rule, correct it. A recovery document starts from the person. The point was never compliance. It’s becoming something you’d otherwise let slip, unless we sit in the tension of what it means to be human and what it means to use a strange new technology called AI. A recovery document is after something in you.

Recovery is remembering, not inventing

This is exactly what the Catholic AI experts on our panels for The Faith & AI Project kept circling. Not “what new rule do we need,” but “what do we already have that we stopped saying out loud?” Fr. Jean Gové, who coordinates AI research for the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, put it the most plainly: “For 2,000 years the Church has been reflecting on what it is to be truly human. We just need to maybe polish it up and get it out in the open again.” 

Polishing it up means remembering what we let go thin. Brett Robinson, who studies technology and culture at Notre Dame, named the thing we forgot: “We’ve fixated on something like social dignity… That’s a very thin and shallow form of dignity. It’s not the ontological dignity given to us by God.”

A parish that reads the encyclical as “which apps are allowed?” is still running on a vague concept of social dignity. It’s an attempt to sort people by category, function, status, or permission. Recovery means putting the deeper kind of questions back at the center of how parish ministry actually operates. This can sound like a word game. But I promise it isn’t. Watch what each reading does to the same ministry decision.

Name your gates, then adopt without anxiety

Imagine your parish is looking at an AI tool that drafts and sends new-visitor follow-ups. Read as regulation, the question is binary. Is it allowed? If yes, then check the box, turn it on for everyone, and move on. Read as recovery, the question changes. You decide first that the first personal contact after someone shares a loss is always a real person. That decision is now protected. Then, with that line drawn, you turn the tool on for everything else and let it run hard. Same software. Completely different parish.

Regulation asks what you’re permitted to use. Recovery asks what you refuse to hand off, so you can use everything else with a clear conscience.

That is the actual job the document hands a parish leader. Not banning tools or chasing efficiency. But drawing a line, on purpose, around the few pastoral decisions that must stay human no matter how good the software gets, and then adopting the software freely everywhere outside that line. Most parishes have never named those decisions, so the tool ends up making them by default. 

The categories that always route to a human are ones a parish staff should make decisions about: sacramental prep conversations, the first contact in grief or crisis, anything that decides how a person is treated rather than just what they’re told. Everything outside that list, your church-management system can carry, and should. Giving, records, scheduling, reminders, the bulk of new-visitor follow-up. The encyclical speaks positively about exactly this. Technology, Leo writes, “can also support this mutual care between people… by providing tools that help us anticipate and organize things, without undermining human freedom and judgment” (#114). This is the difference between something being “automated” and impersonal or “automatic” and still personal and relational.

The take we should be least impressed by is the flex. “Here are all the ways I refuse to use AI, and I’m proud of it.” Or “here are all the ways I do use it, and I’m proud of it.” Both are usually looking for a reason to keep doing what they already do. But this document doesn’t affirm you. It challenges you to change. Getting involved in the tension, and naming your own gates is the change it’s asking for.

Name your own human gates, and you don’t lose the tools. You finally get to use them the way the Church meant. In service of the dignity of the human person, and never in place of them.

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Want to dive deeper into Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica humanitas? Check out our resource hub, created in partnership with The Faith & AI Project, today to learn what Catholic AI experts are saying about the document and what it means for parish leaders.