[OPINION] Beyond AI: Leo probes modern humanism

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, did not disappoint. 

The document has been a year in the making; the Pope hinted at it just two days after his election. The drafting has involved not only theologians but also tech experts, and now the secular press treats the outcome as one of the most significant institutional interventions in the global debate on artificial intelligence (AI) to date. 

Yet the encyclical is not merely a moral treatise on advanced technologies. It is a Catholic attempt to take humanism itself from the Enlightenment movement and back to its Christian roots. For the Philippines, whose political tradition reflects an encounter between these two traditions, this intervention carries particular significance.

The Enlightenment was of course deeply critical of Catholicism’s claims to intellectual and moral authority, but both converge on a profound conviction: that human dignity is inviolable, and that the conscience and the will must remain free.

This humanism anchors the predominantly liberal grammar through which contemporary secular institutions speak. The modern world order, for instance, is underpinned by humanist instruments like the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 

The same humanism also lies at the heart of modern Catholic social teaching, a tapestry of moral reflections on political and economic issues that can be traced back to the writings of the current Pope’s namesake, Leo XIII. 

In 1891, in the midst of social upheavals arising from the shift from farms to factories, the last Leo rejected radical ideologies and articulated a distinctly Christian response to the Industrial Revolution. His encyclical Rerum Novarum laid the groundwork for a series of papal pronouncements defending workers’ rights, warning against the excesses of both state and capital, and promoting social justice. 

Throughout the last century, the Catholic Church articulated principles that resonate with social-democratic traditions, including “solidarity” and “subsidiarity.” The former emphasizes that each individual has a responsibility for a greater good beyond themselves, while the latter insists that communities, rather than detached authorities, must make decisions regarding their immediate needs. The right to property was upheld only to the extent that it does not prevent the arrival of all products and resources at their “universal destination,” which is the common good. 

These became embedded in Christian democratic platforms that helped shape such policies as universal health care, the right to form unions, and Europe’s Mitbestimmung system, which grants labor a voice in corporate governance. In the Philippines, they influenced constitutional provisions protecting labor and empowering the family, as well as more recent efforts to expand access to health care and social welfare.

Today, the current Leo calls for the specific application of these Catholic social principles to the current technological context. Solidarity, for instance, now means bridging the digital divide, preventing new forms of technocratic inequality, and protecting the vulnerable from the adverse impacts of automation. Subsidiarity still means empowering communities – this time not necessarily against the state but against big tech. The concept of “universal destination of goods” is invoked in favor of distributing the benefits of technology fairly. 

All of these resonate with current secular initiatives concerning emerging technologies, including the global push for strengthened AI governance, prohibitions and regulations on autonomous weapons, and guardrails against disinformation and the erosion of shared factual realities. They validate current Filipino advocacies ranging from President Marcos’ call for “legal rules to prevent the weaponization of artificial intelligence” to Nobel laureate Maria Ressa’s campaign for information integrity in the digital age.

Yet Leo goes beyond such reaffirmation and probes the very foundation of humanism itself. 

While human dignity is the common language of both the Enlightenment and Catholicism, the two traditions disagree on its premise. In a dominant strand of Enlightenment thought, this dignity derives primarily from the human capacity for reason and free will. 

Earlier currents in modern philosophy laid the foundations for this view. Rene Descartes’ distinction between the thinking self and the extended body – along with his famous dictum “I think, therefore I am” – helped place cognition at the center of modern reflections on personhood. John Locke would take this further, arguing that personal identity rests primarily in the continuity of consciousness rather than in the body itself.

As modernity became increasingly detached from religious accounts of human nature, the body came to be understood in more mechanical terms – not as an integral aspect of the person, but as something to be mastered, optimized, and perhaps even transcended. Yet once cognition alone becomes the defining feature of personhood, it becomes tempting to measure human value only in cognitive terms as well. Technologies that promise to enhance, replicate, or even surpass human capacities acquire a special appeal. The question gradually shifts from how technology can serve human beings to how human beings themselves might be technologically transformed.

This tendency culminates in what Leo describes as modernity’s “Promethean dreams” – a reference to Prometheus’ attempt to steal fire from the gods in Greek mythology. Vulnerabilities like aging, frailty, and even mortality are treated like bugs to be fixed, giving rise to fantasies of “liberating” cognition from the physical body. The enthusiasm surrounding transhumanist technologies, including proposals to upload human consciousness, reflects this impulse.

Yet the Pope insists that human imperfections are not bugs but part of the program. “Even when limitations are experienced as inner suffering, human wisdom teaches us not to deny or suppress it, but to integrate it,” he writes. “Those who love and desire cannot avoid passing through trial and suffering; and over the years, we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars, the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, dreams and disappointments. It is only thanks to the interplay of these elements that the wonders of the soul occur within us, allowing us to sense the richness of our humanity.”

For Leo, the human condition allows each person to mature in relationships, find meaning in joy or pain, derive wisdom from experience, and know what love or responsibility mean from within – things that no language model or algorithm, no matter how advanced, could truly replicate. Our imperfections are thus not glitches that need optimization or engineering but components of an adventure that must be experienced. Writes the Pope: “To renounce this adventure, both tragic and splendid, in the name of a presumed transcendence of all limits could mean many things, but it would no longer be human.” 

Now this is a retrieval of humanism through a Christian conception of the human person: we are not merely minds inhabiting bodies, nor souls trapped within them; we are both body and soul forming an inseparable whole. Our dignity is derived not from our capacity for reason or will alone, but from our intrinsic worth and our transcendent nature. In the Christian understanding, humans are not self-sufficient; we are called to relate with one another and to commune with the divine. This understanding does not see physical limitations as impediments but conditions that call for love, care, and community, and even sources of meaning. 

This intervention is not foreign to Filipinos. Similar reflections on the premise for human dignity are embedded within our own intellectual history. 

Precisely because our physical and spiritual dimensions are inseparable, human flourishing cannot be measured in terms of power and utility alone. Jose Rizal thus linked national progress not only to material gains but to moral development in terms of liberty, civic virtue, and enlightened citizenship. Emilio Jacinto and Apolinario Mabini insisted that rights could not be separated from civic duties and responsibilities for the common good. These thinkers understood freedom as a moral vocation exercised within relationships and responsibilities. Their writings foreshadow Leo’s rejection of purely technical measures of human advancement.

It is not surprising then that the Philippines’ current advocacies for the “people-centered and responsible use of AI” reflect the same intuition. We have consistently worked to ensure that technology serves the human person rather than redefine what it means to be human. As Marcos told the United Nations in March, “We use AI and seek for it to become a tool for inclusion, respectful of the belief that human dignity must always be the primary consideration.” In a sense, these are not mere policy responses but national contributions to the same broader conversation that Leo seeks to reopen. 

For Magnifica Humanitas does not merely intervene in the evolving AI discourse; it engages a deeper debate on what it means to be human – a debate that we Filipinos have a stake in, and much to contribute to. The Pope reminds us that we must first understand what humanity is before wielding powerful technologies. – Rappler.com

JJ Domingo is a career diplomat currently on sabbatical to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Oxford as a Chevening scholar. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect official government views.