A Reflection on Magnifica Humanitas and the deeper question
There are conversations that take place at altitude. The air is thin, the view is long, and the language moves in ways that most of the world does not recognise. Sr Ilia Delio’s response to Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas is serious, substantial, and worth close attention. Her theological reading opens a generous and imaginative space around artificial intelligence, human becoming, and the evolutionary vision of Teilhard de Chardin.
I read it with interest. I also read it with some unease.
I do not reject AI. I have used these tools for many years, long before they became mainstream and accessible to the general public. I teach others to use them. The unease I feel is because I believe the Church needs a much deeper conversation about technology, power, dignity, and the future of human relationship. The unease comes from the context from which I am reading. Where you are standing when you ask what it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence is not incidental.
I grew up in South Africa and moved to Ireland nine years ago. For eight years I have worked within this missionary congregation whose life and work reaches across West Africa and beyond. I have spent my adult life working inside digital technology, across learning and development, social media, content strategy, and AI tools. Long enough to have watched several waves of technological promise surge with promises of connection, access, empowerment, and human flourishing. I’ve also seen what remains when the promises settle into systems of profit, extraction, and control.
That location does not make me an authority on Teilhard, papal encyclicals, or the full theological architecture of Delio’s response, but it does mean I come to this conversation with things in view that the altitude does not always allow.
Magnifica Humanitas is a serious moral intervention. Pope Leo’s concern for human dignity, his attention to the displacement of labour, and his refusal to treat artificial intelligence as a neutral instrument are important. The encyclical recognises that AI carries a vision of the human person and places that vision under scrutiny of dignity, communion, justice, and the common good.
Delio’s critique rests on the encyclical’s use of the word remain. Remain profoundly human. She argues that this presupposes a fixed human essence to be defended, as though humanity were something already complete, now under threat from technology. Against this, she offers Teilhard’s language of becoming: humanity as unfinished, consciousness as evolving, convergence as the movement toward greater love.
It is a rich and compelling argument. And yet it does not touch on what most concerns me.
There is a prior question underneath both Pope Leo’s encyclical and Delio’s response, and it is not theological. It is structural. While people debate what it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence, the architecture of that age is being built by people who have no interest in the answer. It is being built fast, and it is being built for profit, and the communities with the least power to interrogate it are already living inside it.
We have already run this experiment.
When social media was released into the world, it carried a language that anyone reading this encyclical will recognise. Connection. Community. Voices given reach. People brought together across distance and difference. Those promises were not entirely false. What the technology also did, at scale, without guardrails, in the hands of platforms whose economic model depended on exploiting human attention and emotion, is documented now in ways that were not available when the architecture was being built. Fragmentation. Radicalisation. The commodification of outrage. The erosion of shared reality. The incremental, measurable damage to the interior lives of the young. A crisis of loneliness so profound that governments have begun appointing ministers to address it, as though loneliness were a policy problem that had appeared from nowhere rather than the entirely predictable consequence of systems designed to simulate connection while delivering its opposite.
In communities across Africa, people are not debating the definitions of humanity. They are using technology without guardrails, on platforms built elsewhere, by people with no stake in what happens to them. Algorithmic decisions made in California have shaped electoral realities across the continent. Disinformation has moved faster than truth through infrastructure those communities had no hand in building. The attention and data of populations across the Global South have been extracted for the enrichment of platforms they cannot govern and did not choose.
Delio’s vision of the noosphere, humanity moving toward richer collective consciousness through technological convergence, has real beauty. It offers hope that technology might serve communion rather than domination. It also arises from an educated, connected, largely Western interior world.
Teilhard was clear that convergence without love at its centre would produce not the noosphere but its shadow. We have seen what that shadow looks like. The social media years were the demonstration.
Why do we keep reaching for the ethical conversation after the architecture is already built?
Delio’s response is especially strong where she attends to loneliness. People are turning to AI for companionship, comfort, counsel, and something that feels like presence. Drawing on Jung, she reads this as projection: the divine, exiled from the interior life by a tradition that placed God outside the self, now seeking a vessel in the machine.
That reading is thoughtful, but I want to remain closer to ordinary human need.
Within a missionary congregation, you learn what genuine presence requires. It takes time. It demands attention, patience, and the willingness to be altered by encounter. It happens through repeated acts of care, often in unglamorous places, over long periods of time. It cannot be scaled. It cannot be optimised. It does not always produce evidence that can be measured.
What people seek in AI may sometimes be theological substitute. It may also be something simpler and more painful: the experience of being heard without embarrassment, without judgement, without having to manage another person’s discomfort. A place to bring the unfinished and the unresolved. A place to speak when no one else is available.
That need is real. AI can answer some part of it, functionally and partially. The deeper matter is what it reveals about the societies we have built. So many people now live without the ordinary structures of belonging that allow grief, confusion, longing, fear, and uncertainty to be held by another human being.
That is a mission question. It is also political, economic, and structural. Governance frameworks are needed. Theological imagination is needed. Neither can substitute for the work of rebuilding forms of human presence that have been weakened by speed, individualism, precarity, and the monetisation of attention.
Both Magnifica Humanitas and Delio’s response are invitations to engage with a serious question.
What does it mean to be human in the age of artificial intelligence?
That question will not be answered only in Rome, or in universities, or in technology companies. It will be answered in classrooms, care homes, parishes, homes, workplaces, communities, hospitals, and the private places where people reach for a machine because no human presence feels available.
We need to be aware of what our own location allows us to see, and what it may prevent us from seeing. We need to listen beyond the centres of power, especially to those whose lives are already being altered by systems they did not choose.
I use AI. I believe it can serve learning, communication, creativity, access, and practical support. I also know that every technology is hardwired with the values of those who build it, fund it, regulate it, and profit from it. The conversation about what AI means for human dignity, relationship, and spiritual life is overdue and necessary. What I am unwilling to do is outsource the question of what we are becoming to anyone who has an interest in the answer.
The encyclical opens a conversation, but what is needed is presence. Presence in the conversations around ethics and guardrails, but also in the world where the consequences are already being played out, and people are looking to be witnessed.