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A clear call to action in
education
He said that a clear call to action in
educational terms from the encyclical “is to
be more careful about how we use this
technology to build upon and augment the
individuality of people. And what makes them
unique and special is something that should
be celebrated, not homogenized,” Rowe said.
The Australian professor underlined that the
risk in academia is a frantic search for
answers in technology, while the pope
provides a genuinely human answer to big
concerns.
“I have seen this technology swallow itself
up every three to six months with something
new. And so for me, it points to the fact
that we need to have a set of first
principles as guideposts to pivot from. And
that, to me, is what I believe was missing,”
he said of the encyclical’s takeaways, which
he said are “very powerful call to action.”
Using AI as a tool requires
vigilance
Kathy Ann Mills, a professor at Australian
Catholic University who researches — among
other fields — digital and media practices,
said that the education world can play “a
role in teaching children and young people
how to use technology in responsible ways,
and as Pope Leo XIV reminds us, “to use AI
as a valuable tool, but in a way that
requires vigilance,” MIlls underlined.
“Importantly, he points to some of the
dangers of AI that can be misleading, such
as creating illusions of friendship with a
personal subject, which research shows is a
danger when humans develop emotional bonds
with machines,” she said in a written
message to OSV News.
“Children also have developing
understandings of AI, with different or
immature ways of thinking about human-like
machines than older children and adults,”
she wrote. “For example, the tendency to
anthropomorphize artificial agents,
particularly when AI has a human-like
persona, face, backstory or physical form,
like robots, changes over time. So this is
an example of how teachers and parents play
a vital role in guiding children’s
developing understandings of AI,” she
emphasized.
Pope Leo also talks in his encyclical about
legislators intervening to set appropriate
age limits, holding service providers
accountable “rather than shifting the whole
burden of control onto families,” and
providing specific protections “against all
forms of online sexual exploitation and
violence.”
Pope Leo's Eucharistic answer to
the age of AI
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Eucharistic Spirituality:
Pope Leo XIV emphasizes a
spirituality where we unite
with Christ’s body to
complete God’s creation,
promoting justice, peace,
and compassion over power
and dominance.
-
Technology and
Responsibility: He calls
for wise integration of AI,
education, and relationships
to safeguard human dignity
and foster inner freedom,
rather than succumbing to
exclusion or isolation.
-
Active Christian Life:
Christians are urged to
engage in society, serve the
marginalized, and follow
Mary’s example of seeing
history through the eyes of
the humble and suffering,
building a world of common
good.
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A harmful early digital exposure
The encyclical also outlines the severe
psychological and social harms of early and
unsupervised digital exposure, which can negatively
impact sleep, attention spans and emotional control,
while opening the door to online exploitation,
cyberbullying and manipulation by AI tools.
Acknowledging the immense pressure on the modern
family, the pope conceded that “it is difficult for
parents by themselves to resist the influence of
business models that monetize attention and time.”
Because of that, he called for an “alliance among
policy-makers, educational institutions and families
that is capable of concretely supporting adults in
this task.”
What he said is needed are “far-sighted public
policies … to oppose the immediate interests of
platforms — concentrated in a few hands — when they
conflict with the wellbeing of minors.”
‘Precious treasure’ in need of
protection
He calls children and adolescents “a precious
treasure” in need of such protection, but also urges
that they are taught “how to recognize manipulation,
defend their dignity and respect that of others in
digital environments.”
“Research shows that AI systems contain biases that
need to be challenged,” Mills said, pointing to Pope
Leo’s words: “Ethical discernment cannot be limited
to asking whether we are using a system for good or
bad purposes; it must also examine how that system
is designed and what vision of the human person and
society is embedded in the data and models that
guide it.”
School, Pope Leo said, “is the place where new
generations can learn to seek and love the truth, to
reflect on the meaning of life and to recognize the
dignity of every person” — but that same school,
faced with the digital age, seems weak.
“Even young children can begin to develop a sense of
social justice, learning to identify when the output
undermines social justice and the common good,”
Mills pointed out. “They can see which voices are
missing, whose views and values dominate, and whose
views are silenced. They can also learn to think
about ‘who’ benefits from the technologies,” she
said.
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Need for new educational
awareness, formation
For families and schools, the pope said,
“there is a growing need for new educational
awareness and for formation concerning the
proper and critical use of digital tools, AI
and online commercial and financial
platforms.” In universities, on the other
hand, “the principal challenge lies in the
integration of knowledge, so as to cultivate
the capacity to connect and synthesize
knowledge in order to grasp complexity,
while also forming the skills necessary for
verifying facts.”
Pope Leo said technology “has the power to
heal, connect, educate and protect our
common home; but it can also divide, exclude
and generate new forms of injustice.”
Within that frame “the organization of
schools, physical spaces, evaluation methods
and the role of teachers themselves must be
rethought in order to promote an
authentically integral education that
addresses every dimension of the person,”
the encyclical outlined.
In a rather unbalanced race between
education and technology, teachers also need
to be supported, the pope said, stressing it
is “necessary to support the ongoing
formation of teachers throughout their
professional lives, so that they can engage
positively with new technologies, helping
students to use them responsibly, critically
Support for teachers
and
creatively, rather than passively succumbing
to their influence.”
Many educators, Pope Leo said, “already
report signs of dehumanization, where people
may ‘know many things’ but struggle to find
direction in their lives, partly due to an
inability to connect information with deeper
knowledge or maintain a sense of purpose.”
As an answer to that, “a genuinely healthy
attitude is needed, requiring rhythms that
incorporate silence, in
depth study, reading and judicious analysis,
for without these elements inner freedom may
be compromised.”
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Critical thinking is key
For Rowe, the pope pointing out critical thinking is
key.
“Students need to be able to think for themselves
before they start to defer to technology to do the
thinking for them,” he told OSV News.
In an AI era, “you can fall asleep on a keyboard and
wake up to a Shakespearean sonnet and impress
yourself, and make yourself think that you’re a
great writer, even though you may not know how to do
anything but put in a little sloppy text prompt,”
Rowe underlined.
The big challenge therefore is to meet that aspect
of human dignity “so that we still value knowledge
and people who bear knowledge,” he said.
“There’s something sacred in that and how teachers
and students interact when they build knowledge
together, and I think there’s a big challenge moving
forward in what that means for education.”
Families, schools, communities,
institutions
The Church’s
social doctrine, Pope Leo said, “invites
families, schools, Christian communities and public
institutions to form a renewed educational
alliance,” which he proposes in his encyclical.
In this alliance students should be taught “a sense
of moderation and limits; the recognition of the
right of others, as well as of future generations,
to enjoy the goods that are either provided for us
or made available by human ingenuity; freedom and
responsibility; and a sense of transcendence and the
common good.”
Schools therefore, Pope Leo wrote, “are not called
to follow the pace of the digital world,” but to
“offer that which the digital sphere by itself
cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning
and developing trustworthy relationships.” |
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The Pope has spoken previously about
regulating AI, imploring industry leaders to
more carefully consider the ethical
implications of AI in their work. Last
May, when explaining why he chose the name
Leo, the pope specifically
cited AI as one of his primary reasons.
"There are different reasons for this, but
mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic
Encyclical Rerum
Novarum addressed the social
question in the context of the first great
industrial revolution. In our own day, the
Church offers to everyone the treasury of
her social teaching in response to another
industrial revolution and to developments in
the field of artificial intelligence that
pose new challenges for the defence of human
dignity, justice and labour."
The encyclical goes further, diving into
AI's impact on jobs, education, and child
safety in a message to leaders around the
world.
"We need moral voices that the incentives
cannot bend," Olah said. "Today is just the
beginning — the start of a long
collaboration between those of us who are
building this and those who can see what we,
from the inside, cannot."
Here are the main takeaways from the Holy
See:
AI is a threat to workers
The Catholic Church is worried about AI
taking over jobs, too. Tying "Magnifica
Humanitas" to other labor-related
encyclicals throughout the Church's history,
Pope Leo calls the automation of jobs a
threat to workers, citing widespread
deskilling and greater labor surveillance
with AI systems in place.
"Today, the convergence of automation,
robotics and AI is rapidly transforming the
very structure of work. It is said that this
will bring great improvements for everyone.
In reality, however, the 'new ways' of
working are not necessarily better."
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Don't believe the AI hype
The leader warned that current AI hype is akin to a
modern Tower of Babel, comparing the pursuit of
advanced technology to the biblical story of a group
of humans trying to reach heaven. He called on
leaders to temper their ambition and recenter
humanity.
He also joined a growing number of child safety
advocates and regulators who want to address screen
time and its effect on children: "Psychological and
psychiatric literature has documented with growing
insistence how early and unsupervised exposure to
digital devices and social media can negatively
impact sleep, attention span, control of emotions
and relationships, especially during the most
vulnerable stages of life, at times with tragic
consequences."
In addition, Leo called out AI's role in
exacerbating misinformation and devaluing critical
thinking, especially in schools, saying the
technology has a dehumanizing force in the
classroom.
Big Tech has created a "new form of
slavery"
While simultaneously issuing the first formal
condemnation of the transatlantic slave trade, Pope
Leo called exploitative tech manufacturing processes
and global AI training a "new form of slavery."
"In some regions of the world, children and
adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing
the materials from which rare earth elements are
extracted...The bodies of these people are scarred,
injured and worn down so that computational flow may
continue uninterruptedly," he said. "This reality
deeply challenges the moral conscience of our
time."
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