Pope Leo XIV opened his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), with a stark choice: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” The Holy See
What AI can’t do is feel anything. It can’t grieve. It can’t love. It can’t make a sacrifice. And in May 2026, the most powerful moral voice on the planet said so — loudly, in 42,300 words — in a document that every person building with technology should read.
That sentence stopped me. Because it’s the same question we ask ourselves every time we build something for a client. Are we building something that serves people — or something that eventually swallows them?
The Encyclical That’s Shaking Silicon Valley
Magnifica Humanitas is the first encyclical concerned with “preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.” Published on 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV chose to present it personally — an uncustomary gesture — to an audience of AI experts, academics, diplomats, and members of the Roman Curia. Wikipedia
Among the speakers was Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, one of the world’s leading AI companies, who praised the Vatican’s role as “informed critics” and called the event the beginning of “a long collaboration between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot.” EWTN Vatican
Think about that for a moment. One of the people actually building frontier AI sat in the Vatican and said: we need people outside the industry to tell us when we’re failing.
That’s not a PR move. That’s a confession.
The document was deliberately timed to mark the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical on the rights of workers during the Industrial Revolution. The message connecting both documents is the same: no economic system, no technological revolution, should ever place itself above the dignity of the human person, created in the image of God. Rome Reports
What AI Can’t Do — And Why That’s the Whole Point
Understanding what AI can’t do is not a criticism of the technology. It’s the foundation of using it wisely.
The encyclical puts it plainly: “In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replicate.” Catholic World Report
What AI can’t do is bear witness to suffering. It can process a description of grief and generate a statistically appropriate response — but it has never lost someone it loved. It can mimic warmth without ever having chosen to stay when leaving would have been easier. It can simulate conscience without ever having wrestled with one.
The Pope was equally direct in stating that AI is not morally neutral. It must be “disarmed” — not by rejecting technology, but by ensuring it does not dominate humanity. The Federal
That word — disarmed — is remarkable coming from a papal document. It implies that AI, as currently being developed and deployed, is armed. That it carries power that can be used against people just as easily as it can be used for them.
We’ve seen this at Tim’s Web Worx. AI is genuinely useful — it speeds up development, removes repetitive work, gives smaller teams the kind of capability that used to require much larger ones. But the moment it becomes the point rather than the tool, something shifts. Clients stop getting what they actually need and start getting what an algorithm decided was close enough.
The New Tower of Babel — and Who’s Building It
The Babel metaphor in Magnifica Humanitas isn’t decorative. The encyclical frames the entire debate as a binary: Babel or Jerusalem — centralised, dehumanising power concentrated in the hands of a few, versus a shared future built around dignity, accountability, and the common good. Explainx
Pope Leo XIV warned specifically against “a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets,” driven by “the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance.” Al Jazeera
Look at the AI industry right now and tell me that description doesn’t fit. Companies racing each other to AGI. Governments racing rivals. Everyone moving faster than any regulatory body can track, let alone govern. The concerns aren’t hypothetical — the Pope also warned that AI is normalising war, noting that the US military confirmed using AI tools as concerns grew about mounting civilian casualties, and pointing to AI systems that had helped generate thousands of military targets. Al Jazeera
This is what happens when speed is treated as the same thing as progress. Intelligence without direction isn’t advancement — it’s momentum in search of a destination nobody agreed on.
New Forms of Slavery — Closer Than You Think
One of the most confronting parts of Magnifica Humanitas is its treatment of what the Pope calls the digital economy’s hidden servitude.
Leo XIV argues that the digital economy is riddled with more or less invisible forms of servitude — poorly paid moderators sifting through hours of disturbing content, and workers extracting rare earth materials for a pittance to power the devices running the very AI being celebrated in boardrooms. The Pillar
The Pope stresses that “the Church renews her firm condemnation of every form of slavery, trafficking, and commodification of persons” and underscores that to not react or to tolerate grave violations of human dignity means becoming complicit in them. Vatican News
This is where the conversation stops being abstract and starts being personal. Every time we choose a cheaper AI tool, we might be choosing not to ask who built it, under what conditions, paid how much. The supply chain of AI is not clean. And what AI can’t do is hold itself accountable for that.
What AI Can’t Do With Truth
The encyclical warns: “Living amid incessant flows of information, opinions and images, we know how easy it can be to influence decisions and preferences through increasingly sophisticated algorithms. In this context, it is imperative to cultivate hearts that love the truth, prefer what is right despite the most appealing content and pursue wisdom rather than immediate results.” National Catholic Register
What AI can’t do is care about truth. It can produce content that sounds true, that reads as authoritative, that passes every grammar and tone check — and be entirely wrong. Or more dangerously, be subtly, directionally wrong in ways that serve whoever trained it.
We’re building systems that shape what billions of people read, believe, and act on. And most of those people have no idea how those systems make their decisions.
That’s not a technology problem. That’s a conscience problem.
What Responsible Actually Looks Like in 2026
Magnifica Humanitas is not anti-technology. Rather than rejecting technological progress, the Pope wrote that “technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” but instead must be guided by responsible and ethical use. Time
Experts in the tech industry, academia, and Catholic morality have said the document will likely become a benchmark in the debate over AI — a point of reference for policymakers, researchers, and ordinary people alike. PBS
For us, responsible looks like this:
Use AI hard where it genuinely serves people — removes friction, expands access, gives smaller businesses real capability. That’s good work and we’re proud of it.
But refuse to use it in ways that exploit loneliness, erase accountability, replace human connection with a convincing simulation of it, or quietly concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands.
And hold onto something modern tech culture keeps trying to optimise away:
Intelligence isn’t humanity’s most important quality. Wisdom is. Conscience is. Knowing why you’re building what you’re building — and who it’s actually for.
A Personal Note
I should be honest about where some of this thinking comes from.
My wife is a theologian. She was the one who brought Magnifica Humanitas to my attention — not as a religious document, but as a moral framework for one of the most consequential shifts in human history. She reminded me that the oldest questions are often the most important ones, and that the Church has been thinking about human dignity, power, and what it means to remain human for a very long time.
The people currently building AI have been thinking about it for considerably less.
I’m grateful she pointed me toward it. I think more people in tech should read it — not because they need to be Catholic, but because they need to be accountable.
The Future Is Still Being Written
Magnifica Humanitas identifies a deeper danger beyond the familiar concerns about job losses and privacy violations: that human beings may begin to see themselves and others as primarily productive or computational units — valuable only for what they can generate or process, rather than for who they simply are. Ascension
That’s the real Babel. Not a tower made of stone. A civilisation that forgot what it was building toward — and mistook capability for purpose.
The future is absolutely going to be shaped by AI. That part’s settled.
What isn’t settled is whether the people building it stay grounded enough to remember what all of it was supposed to be for.
Because if this era becomes another Babel, it won’t be because we built something too powerful.
It’ll be because we forgot to ask who it was supposed to serve.
Understanding what AI can’t do is not an abstract exercise — it is the most practical question any business building with artificial intelligence needs to answer right now. What AI can’t do is replace the judgment, conscience, and genuine human care that sit at the heart of meaningful work. It cannot take responsibility when things go wrong. It cannot build real trust with a client who is going through something difficult. It cannot look someone in the eye and mean it.
As AI and human dignity become the defining conversation of our era — in boardrooms, in government, and now formally from the Vatican — the businesses that will earn lasting loyalty are the ones that use AI tools to enhance human capability, not erase it. Responsible use of AI in business means staying relentlessly clear on what the technology is for, who it serves, and where the human being must remain in the room. That is not a limitation on growth. That is the foundation of it. What AI can’t do is care. That job still belongs to us.
Tim’s Web Worx builds digital systems for businesses that want to grow — without losing the human element that makes growth worth anything. With thanks to my wife, a theologian, who brought Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas to my attention and reminded me that wisdom has always preceded technology’s ability to wield it responsibly.
