“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,” Pope Leo XIV wrote in his May 25 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas.
This encyclical, the Chicago native’s first, addresses Catholics around the globe and outlines a stance that calls for caution, restraint and intentionality in further developments of AI technology.
Since his appointment just over a year ago in May 2025, Pope Leo XIV has been in the public eye for his positions on a number of controversial issues. He has stood behind established Catholic doctrine on abortion, women deacons and the LGBTQ+ community. He’s also urged Catholics to support climate change action and protect immigrants. He tends to wear more formal papal vestments than his predecessor, Pope Francis, a move that signals Leo’s preference for tradition.
In some ways, Pope Leo has pushed the Church forward: he has shown an openness to Church reform and encouraged interreligious dialogue during visits to countries around the world. Those moves, however, are expected. They align with actions other popes have taken in the Church’s two-thousand-year history.
Encyclicals like Magnifica Humanitas are some of the most important documents a pope can create, but they differ from other forms of official papal communication, such as papal bulls, because they are not decrees or orders. Instead, they’re invitations to dialogue.
“It’s not a commandment in the sense of the Church telling us we must do this,” Brian Taberski, associate director of university ministry and assistant clinical professor of theology and religious studies, said. “It’s an opportunity for us as a community of scholars and practitioners to take this communication from the Pope, from the Holy Father, and begin to discern what it’s asking of us as a community.”
For the most part, Pope Leo appears to primarily be speaking about generative AI, which encompasses large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The simplest explanation of LLMs is that they are advanced text predictors: they make educated guesses about the tokens (numerical values assigned to words and phrases) that will come before or after another token.
Because LLMs are trained on billions of documents, they are skilled at synthesizing text that sounds like what a human might write. For that same reason, LLMs are also good at perpetuating implicit biases and stereotypes just as humans do; biased training data (that is, anything written by a human) teaches LLMs to be biased regardless of our intent in creating them.
“Entrusting an algorithm in practice with the power to select who is worthy or not, without anyone bearing responsibility for that judgment, is to hand over the task of redefining the boundaries of human possibilities,” Pope Leo wrote. “The exclusion of the vulnerable becomes cloaked in a veneer of neutrality and objectivity, against which it becomes difficult to raise objections. […] From this follows a simple but compelling consequence: we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral.”
Seattle University stands in a position uniquely suited to address Leo’s words. As a university, it is well-equipped to explore AI as it continues to evolve and even contribute to its growth. As a Jesuit Catholic institution, it can engage in faith- and ethics-based conversations surrounding the moral neutrality (or lack thereof) of AI. According to Provost and Chief Academic Officer Shane Martin, students at Seattle U should keep these ideas in mind when deciding for themselves how and when (or if) to use AI.
“These issues of judgment, wisdom, leadership and moral values are where Seattle University has great strength. Our faculty need to ask ourselves how we think about our own teaching differently in the age of AI and our graduates need to have a full, clear-eyed view of the advantages and challenges with AI. They need to be grounded in leadership, in formation and in our social justice values,” Martin said. “Our Jesuit values are our North Star.”
AI policies, at the moment, are for the most part left to faculty discretion. Instructors are permitted to allow or ban AI in their classrooms so long as their policies are clearly communicated; in addition, they are advised to require students to cite AI when used.
According to Martin, a more comprehensive policy is coming in the fall of 2026. The policy is in development by the Technology and Ethics Initiative, a group created by the provost to situate Seattle U to stimulate productive discussion around technology and create resources to help leaders harness its power for social good. Its director, Professor of Political Science Onur Bakiner, says that he and other initiative members were encouraged by the content of Magnifica Humanitas.
“I believe [the encyclical] is a vindication of our approach,” Bakiner said. “It demands human-centered AI development and use that cares for the vulnerable. I believe this vision aligns with our mission to educate the whole person without reducing humans to productivity or profitability.”
