The True Grandeur of Humanity

“What is the grandeur of humanity?” is not a question that I, as a father, would expect any of my children to ask. Yet today, it is a question for which most people would not have an answer; and, for that very reason, every Catholic parent should not only be prepared to answer it but should teach his or her children to ask it.

Magnifica Humanitas is a great place to start in preparing oneself to answer it, though, at over 42,000 words, most parents may find the document daunting. Its length is a reflection of its breadth: Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical might reasonably be described as three or four encyclicals in one. There is an urgency to each of the topics the Holy Father covers — a revitalized approach to Catholic Social Teaching (particularly with regard to subsidiarity); the resurgence of war and the threat to the international order; and the promises and dangers posed by the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) — but the underlying issue that ties all of these together is the loss of a shared understanding of Christian anthropology, of what constitutes that very “grandeur of humanity.”

As a father of eight, approaching the end of my sixth decade, I have come to see that loss as the greatest threat to the faith of my children, and my own inability for many years to make that Christian anthropology concrete in their lives as my greatest regret. With the rise of AI, that threat has grown exponentially.

The rapid increase in the capabilities of large-language models has led to widespread belief that AI will eventually become conscious; it is (we are told) simply a matter of when. From ancient Greece on, consciousness has been seen as a chief marker of humanity. Yet as Pope Leo points out, there are characteristics of humanity — all of which are inseparable from our experience of consciousness — that AIs, by their very nature, can at best imitate but never possess.

So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.

To discuss whether an AI can become conscious is to beg the question. But mankind has been begging this question not just since the rise of AI but (I would argue) for decades and even centuries: What is the source of our own consciousness?

In the modern world, to the extent that this question is even asked, the answer is nearly always presented in physical terms: Just as life is presumed to have arisen from random chemical processes, consciousness is just a continuation of that development. The understanding shared by all of humanity for millennia — that consciousness precedes matter and (depending on the philosophical or theological tradition) may even be the source of it — has been turned on its head. That scientists have failed for hundreds of years to produce life in a laboratory has not dissuaded certain advocates of AI from asserting that consciousness will undoubtedly arise from the application of enough energy to enough silicon chips.

Speaking in a slightly different context (of posthumanism), the Holy Father notes that “Even when such ideas remain largely speculative, they gain relevance by altering the collective imagination and thereby influence social, economic and political choices.” Since the mid-nineteenth century (at least), certain thinkers have warned of the dangers of viewing man as a machine; but in the popular imagination, that idea has taken such deep root that it is almost unconscious now, and it has paved the way for believing what would have been literally unthinkable (that is, unable to be thought) in previous centuries: that machines may become more human than we are, because they are presumed to be perfectible.

But, Pope Leo asks, “if an authentic ‘more than human’ exists, where is it to be found? The Christian faith answers that question by pointing to a fulfilment that does not arise from a technological divinization, but through God’s grace received in Christ.”

Mankind is fallen, finite, wounded. We are not perfectible in a mechanical sense, because we are not machines. Yet “we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them,” because we are something greater: images of our Creator, capable of being transformed into His likeness by “the Word who became flesh and dwelt among us” — as long as we are willing to acknowledge and accept that we are limited both morally and physically by the sin of our first parents and our own sin.

When I was young, it was common for children to be told that “You can be anything you want to be.” The intervening decades have revealed the hollowness of that secular optimism and contributed to the desire to overcome limits that Pope Leo sees as one of the dangers of an over-reliance on AI. But the better response is to teach our children that recognizing our limitations can be a doorway to grace and that, “In Christ, we are called to cooperate in the work of creation.”

If the next generation gets that right — if we help our children to understand that AI systems are as powerful as they have proved to be not because we are machines but because we, personally and collectively, have created those systems through our participation in the life of our Creator — then they may learn to use such tools to express that creativity for the good of all. The alternative is likely to be an idolatry of AI that “sacrifices human dignity for efficiency” and, ultimately, a form of slavery that elevates those who control the technology of AI over the rest of humanity.

First published in Italian in the July 18, 2026, issue of the daily edition of L’Osservatore Romano and in the August 2026 issue of the English monthly edition.