Magnifica Humanitas: Real Worship Limits Artificial Intelligence

By Matthew Sherman, November 4, 2026

Pope Leo’s Encyclical,Magnifica Humanitas, proclaims that artificial intelligence is subordinate to the dignity of the human person, who is made for communion.  Artificial intelligence, used uncritically, enhances finite human knowledge at the expense of our transcendent unity and creativity.  Pope Leo therefore offers the Body of Christ as a countersign to the consumptive dangers of AI: “The Church — nourished by the Eucharist—is called to make visible a different paradigm, one that preserves human connections, gives a voice to the invisible and ensures that processes are aimed at respecting peopleʼs dignity” (no. 235). 

Magnifica Humanitas insists that Eucharistic belonging can resist the communal fracturing of artificial technology; in so doing, it builds upon the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Dignitas Infinita and Antiqua et Nova.  The DDF’s recent documents are remarkable in their use of God’s gifts of dignity and community as norms that reject all forms of domination: These include the unlimited control of sexuality, reproduction, and the beginning and end of life; the refusal of asylum and the perdurance of human trafficking, and the technological manipulation of economies and populations.[1] 

Magnifica Humanitas likewise explains that the promise of artificial intelligence too often allows persons and governments to “spend heavily on superfluous interventions or dreams of individual enhancement accessible only to a select few” while “other parts of the world lack the essential equipment needed to save millions of human lives” (no. 161). 

The technocratic and colonial impulses behind AI increase the human knowledge bank at the expense of international cooperation, social intercommunion, and bodily integrity.  Technological advancement thus runs the risk of seducing us into “having more” without “being more” (no. 94).  Undue reliance on artificial intelligence can result in our submission to “a power that claims to dominate the heavens” (no. 9).  This vast increase in factual information can, moreover, nullify the human gifts of “reflection and discernment” (no. 146) and grant far too much control to “those who devise, finance, regulate and use it” (no. 9).

How, then, can we be more of what God envisions—a community of transcendent dignity—without being distracted by the panacea of artificial intelligence and its promise of transhumanism?  Pope Leo’s answer is simple: We must worship God.  True worship resists turning AI into a false God or losing a sense of the irreplaceable value of humanity as made by God.  Liturgical worship gives rise to the communion which is only possible between human beings, who are infinitely dignified, and with God, who is infinite.  The liturgy demands that we enter God’s time, leaving the competition, acquisition, and information-obsession that dominates our world and to enter into a space of community, growth, and wisdom.   As Magnifica Humanitas offers, this liturgical paradigm shift happens specifically “in the Eucharist, in which the Lord gives himself and gathers the Church together, so that his offering becomes the principle of unity and source of new life” (no. 234).

Drawing upon Pope’s Leo’s 2025 Christmas Address to the Curia, Magnifica Humanitas affirms that, in the Eucharistic liturgy, we no longer “inhabit a reality constructed to fit [our] own convictions” (no. 218) and instead encounter “the reality that we ‘are the Church of Christ, his members, his body’” (no. 235).  “Solidarity” in “the mystery of Christ” and being “nourished by the Eucharist” are the sacramental and liturgical antidotes to technological apotheosis and social distortion (no. 88). 

Magnifica Humanitas thus calls for “a Eucharistic spirituality, that is, a spirituality of ecclesial unity in love” (no. 234).  As St. Paul tells the Corinthians, the Lord’s Supper cannot be eaten divisively without risking our own condemnation (1 Cor. 11:29).  St. Paul would likewise oppose the exploitative lure of AI, whose advancement risks technological addiction and the maldistribution of wealth and health access (nos. 161, 169-170).  The Eucharist offers us spiritual food that is not available to chatbots and hubs; it “opens us to justice and sharing, with a preferential concern for those who are burdened by poverty or marginalization” (no. 235).  Eucharistic solidarity can accept only the careful and conscientious use of AI and can never permit our submission to it. 

Indeed, submission to our own inventions—of state, biotechnology, or artificial intelligence—often feeds our personal desire for rapid success by overlooking the basic measures that would ameliorate the health of Christ’s Body on earth.  As Pope Leo and St. Augustine remind us, our liturgical “Amen” can be true only when we submit to the Incarnation and the Paschal Mystery, which “reveal God entering into our human condition and transforming it through the gift of himself” (no. 234).  A world marked by the Great Amen, then, can only be one where “progress is measured by the dignity of each person and the good of all peoples” (no. 12).  Christ is Emmanuel and the Incarnation; He is with us precisely by being one of us.  We know him fully only when we encounter him in the least among us.  Knowledge of Christ—which arises from Eucharistic communion and service—is always greater than human-made intelligence, no matter how powerful the latter may seem.

[1] Cf. Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dignitas Infinita nos. 40-62; Antiqua et Nova nos. 87-9.

Matthew Sherman, Ph.D., is a moral theologian who teaches and writes on the intersections among health, human flourishing, the family, and the liturgy. He serves as faculty in moral theology and as Director of Lifelong Learning and Educational Effectiveness at Saint John’s School of Theology and Seminary in Collegeville, MN. He and his family reside in St. Joseph, Minnesota, where they are members of St. Joseph Parish.