There is, to my mind, something deeply theological in the mathematical concept of a limit. In calculus, a limit is concerned not simply with where something is, but with the value towards which it tends: a function may draw ever closer without quite arriving. What matters, therefore, is not only position but direction, the horizon that gives movement its intelligibility. Perhaps this is simply the mathematician in me refusing to leave the theology alone, but the metaphor is remarkably persistent.
Reading Magnifica Humanitas, I found myself returning unexpectedly to this language. Much contemporary discussion of artificial intelligence is preoccupied with capability: what technology can do, how rapidly it can do it, and what it may eventually become capable of doing. Magnifica Humanitas presses beneath those questions to a more fundamental one: towards what are we moving? For Christian anthropology, the horizon cannot be technological capability as an end in itself, but the flourishing of the human person in dignity, relationship, communion, responsibility, freedom, care for creation and, ultimately, a life oriented towards God. Progress, in other words, cannot simply be assumed to be synonymous with flourishing; history has given us rather too much evidence to permit that confidence.
Pope Leo’s biblical image of Babel sharpens this distinction. Babel is, in one sense, an extraordinary technological achievement: its builders possess knowledge, organisation, materials and ambition, and they are able to build beyond what earlier generations imagined possible. Yet possibility becomes detached from the common good as the project turns inward towards self-exaltation – ‘with its top in the heavens’ (Gen 11:4; MH 7)- and building ceases to express communion, becoming instead an assertion of human self-sufficiency.
Nehemiah offers a markedly different image of construction. Jerusalem is rebuilt not primarily as a monument to achievement, but so that a people may again become a community; the walls matter because of the life they are intended to protect and sustain. Building is therefore ordered towards restoration, belonging and hope. I am reminded, in a contemporary register, of the rebuilding of Christchurch following the 2011 earthquake, where the work of recovery became inseparable from communal participation and the contribution of thousands of volunteers. The question Magnifica Humanitas places before the Church in the digital age is therefore not whether we will build – human beings always have – but whether what we build becomes another Babel or contributes, however modestly, to the rebuilding of Jerusalem.
A living tradition in dialogue
Catholic Social Teaching offers an especially important framework for this discernment because it is not an attempt to preserve the social categories of another age under theological glass. The Gospel does not change; faithfulness to it, however, requires the Church continually to discern what its claims mean within altered historical and human circumstances. This is particularly significant in relation to artificial intelligence, since genuinely new questions are emerging around power, work, agency, attention, responsibility, relationship, knowledge and even the meaning we attach to intelligence itself. Catholic social doctrine is therefore best understood not as a static archive of settled answers, but as a living tradition formed through sustained dialogue between the Gospel and human experience.
Its foundational principles – human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good, the dignity of work, care for creation, participation and the proper exercise of authority – remain indispensable. Their permanence does not remove the work of interpretation; rather, it gives each generation the responsibility of asking what those principles require within the world it actually inhabits. If social justice is genuinely foundational, it must shape technologies, systems and institutions from the outset rather than being added retrospectively once architectures, economic models and power relationships are already entrenched. The pressing question is therefore not simply what a new technology enables, but what it reveals about our understanding of humanity and what it demands if human beings are genuinely to flourish.
The problem of power
Technology is never only about technology; it is also about power – who designs systems, who controls them, whose interests they serve, who benefits from them, who is excluded and who is required to adapt. The misuse of power causes harm when authority becomes a means of control instead of a responsibility to others. The digital world creates new possibilities for connection, liberation and participation, while simultaneously generating new forms of dependence and new capacities for manipulation, exclusion and inequality. It is precisely here that the Catholic principle of subsidiarity becomes especially significant.
Subsidiarity is sometimes reduced to an organisational formula in which decisions should be made at the lowest appropriate level. Its deeper concern, however, is human agency. It resists concentrations of power that diminish the capacity of people and communities to participate meaningfully in decisions that shape their lives, ultimately reducing the potential for power to be corruptly centralised. Applied to technological contexts, this raises a cluster of difficult questions: what becomes of human judgement when it is increasingly outsourced to systems that most people neither understand nor control; how meaningful is choice when available options have already been filtered, ranked or shaped algorithmically; and what happens when efficiency becomes the dominant criterion by which decisions are evaluated? These concerns become more acute in environments deliberately designed to influence behaviour while preserving the appearance of autonomous choice.
Subsidiarity, then, cannot simply be inserted into an AI policy as recognisably Catholic vocabulary, a kind of theological garnish that signals the right tradition without changing very much. It demands a more searching test of whether a technology enlarges people’s capacity to act, participate and flourish, or whether, beneath the language of convenience and optimisation, it quietly diminishes that capacity.
The importance of limits
One of the most countercultural insights in Magnifica Humanitas is its refusal to treat human limitation merely as a defect waiting to be overcome. Pope Leo writes: ‘It is precisely within our limitations that the following find a place: compassion, as well as a sincere concern for the needs of others;’. Contemporary culture is increasingly captivated by optimisation: faster, smarter, more efficient, more productive and more capable. Even the ordinary signs of ageing are often treated as imperfections to be arrested or erased; people in their twenties and thirties may already seek to freeze emerging wrinkles into non-existence, sometimes before the wrinkles have really had a fair chance to emerge. The example is slightly comic, but only on the surface, because it reveals a deeper cultural instinct: if imperfection can be corrected, why should it be tolerated? Once that logic is extended, the human being can itself become another problem to be perfected.
Illness, ageing, incapacity, vulnerability and dependence undeniably involve suffering, but limitation also creates the conditions in which compassion, patience, generosity, care and mutual dependence become possible. It reminds us that human flourishing is not achieved through autonomy alone, because human beings need one another. At this point the mathematical metaphor earns its keep and becomes more than an indulgence, in mathematics, a limit need not function as a barrier; it may instead operate as a horizon that gives direction to movement.
A curve may continually approach what lies beyond its present position, and in a comparable sense the human person is finite while remaining oriented beyond the self. We seek truth, goodness, beauty, love and, ultimately, God. Our limitations are real, but they do not constitute the final horizon of the person. ‘Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others.’ (MH 122) Christian anthropology is therefore at once finite and transcendent: we are bounded and embodied creatures who are nevertheless open beyond ourselves, capable of reaching towards the horizon of God’s infinite presence.
The danger arises when technological culture encourages us to confuse the overcoming of a particular limitation with the overcoming of humanity itself. If the human person is principally imagined as something to be improved, corrected or surpassed, it becomes easier to regard some lives as less useful, less desirable or less worthy than others. Christian anthropology begins from an entirely different premise: human dignity is not earned through capability, and the Christian life is not a project of making ourselves progressively valuable enough. It is, rather, an increasingly faithful living-out of what is already true of us in God.
Continuity
Calculus offers another useful concept: continuity – because, apparently, one mathematical metaphor was not enough. Mathematically, continuity asks whether what happens at a particular point corresponds with the behaviour of the surrounding function, without an unexplained rupture between trajectory and point. This provides an unexpectedly fruitful way of thinking about Catholic institutions, whose claims about the human person must be tested against the realities people actually experience within them.
An institution may proclaim the inherent dignity of every person, speak of the common good, affirm subsidiarity, prize relationship and communion, and defend the dignity of work. The more demanding question is whether those commitments are recognisable in policy, structure and ordinary interaction: whether adopted technologies strengthen the common good; whether systems distribute appropriate agency rather than quietly removing it; whether organisational structures deepen human encounter; and whether artificial intelligence strengthens meaningful human contribution rather than treating the person primarily as a cost to be reduced.
The danger is discontinuity: a rupture between stated theology and lived reality, even though Pope Leo writes that ‘every real transition involves discontinuities.’ (MH 153) A Catholic institution cannot be satisfied with possessing a Christian anthropology in strategic documents if that anthropology remains invisible in the everyday experience of its community. Over time, trajectory and lived point must correspond. This may be among the most demanding challenges posed by Magnifica Humanitas, because Catholic identity cannot finally be secured by assertion; it must become embodied.
The economy of attention
If human flourishing is the horizon, then one of the most significant moral questions raised by the digital environment is deceptively simple: what happens to our attention? Attention is finite, and precisely for that reason it carries moral weight. Vast industries now compete not simply for money but for sustained attention, designing devices, platforms and systems to draw us back, hold us there and make disengagement difficult. Anyone who has opened a phone to check one message and resurfaced twenty minutes later in a completely unrelated corner of the internet has already conducted a small, accidental experiment in the ‘digital attention economy’. (MH 170)
The transaction was once imagined rather simply: we supplied information and received a service. It is now considerably more entangled. We surrender data, habits, preferences and patterns of behaviour, while receiving content selected, ordered and personalised according to predictions about what will keep us engaged. The individual remains a chooser, but increasingly chooses within an environment designed around previous choices and optimised to influence future ones. Human agency is not thereby erased, although it is substantially complicated. Attention can no longer be treated as a purely private matter when entire commercial systems are built around its capture.
The concern is deeper than screen time because attention is formative. What repeatedly receives our attention gradually shapes imagination, desire, priority and assumption; the moral question becomes not merely what we are looking at, but who we are becoming. This is particularly significant for schools. If young people inhabit environments engineered to fragment attention, intensify emotional response and maximise engagement, education cannot simply exhort them to ‘pay attention’ as though attention were an unlimited personal resource and distraction a minor failure of will. Schools must also examine the structures of attention they create: what they make prominent, what they repeatedly place before young people, and what their timetables, technologies, classrooms and routines quietly teach is worthy of sustained regard.
The challenge is especially acute for those dimensions of human life that cannot compete successfully within an attention economy precisely because they are slow, quiet or demanding. Prayer and contemplation require time; so too do deep reading, friendship, discernment and care. None is especially efficient, which may be part of the point. One of the tasks of Catholic education in the digital age may therefore be to create spaces in which attention is not merely captured or managed, but recovered as something intentional, relational and ultimately formative.
Artificial moral agents
Artificial intelligence also raises difficult questions about moral agency. It is tempting to assume that increasingly sophisticated computation will eventually approximate human judgement so closely that the distinction between the two becomes insignificant. Yet computation, however powerful, is not identical with moral thought. Human judgement is not simply the calculation of outcomes; it takes place from within relationships, histories, emotions, commitments, responsibilities, bodies and communities. Moral knowledge involves more than processing information correctly, because it concerns not only what is the case but what ought to be brought about.
A reason for action therefore contains both judgement and orientation. Artificial systems may become increasingly adept at simulating moral reasoning, identifying ethical patterns, predicting responses and supporting decisions, but simulation should not be confused with moral subjectivity. A functional moral agent can operate according to rules; a human moral agent can be answerable. Responsibility is not exhausted by producing the correct outcome, because it also involves recognising another person as someone whose good makes a claim upon me. That recognition is relational rather than merely computational.
For this reason, increasing competence in moral calculation should not become an excuse for surrendering human moral agency. There will remain questions in which efficiency is not the highest good, prediction is not equivalent to wisdom, and responsibility cannot simply be delegated to the system that generated the recommendation.
Human dignity in an age of artificial agency
The rise of increasingly autonomous systems also forces a reconsideration of what is meant by human distinctiveness. If machines can write, reason, create, diagnose, analyse and make decisions, then any account of dignity grounded principally in intellectual superiority becomes increasingly fragile. Christian anthropology, fortunately, does not depend upon the claim that human beings possess value because they outperform everything else. Its foundation is relational rather than competitive.
The human person is created, loved, called and capable of communion. That theological claim provides a more secure basis from which to think about artificial intelligence, because preserving human dignity requires neither diminishing AI nor elevating it to human status merely because it demonstrates capacities once assumed to be uniquely ours. The central question is not whether machines can become more like us, but whether, in learning to live alongside increasingly capable machines, we remain fully human.
Physical presence
This leads back to another theme running through Magnifica Humanitas: physical presence. Digital communication is real communication, and online relationships can be meaningful, sustaining and even life-changing; it would be simplistic to dismiss the digital world as somehow unreal. Yet embodiment remains theologically significant because Christianity is stubbornly physical. The Word becomes flesh, and the ministry of Jesus is enacted through eating, touching, walking, washing feet and breaking bread. Sacramentality itself depends upon material reality – bread and wine, water and oil, and bodies gathered in a particular place.
Presence is therefore not an incidental detail of Christian life but part of its grammar. This does not require withdrawal from the digital world, nor can the Church respond adequately to technological change through defensiveness or nostalgia. The task is to inhabit digital environments in ways that remain genuinely human, discerning when technology enables relationship and when it begins to substitute for it; when digital connection deepens communion and when it diminishes it; and when convenience or efficiency begins to remove the apparently inefficient moments in which relationships are actually formed.
For Catholic institutions, that discernment may require resisting the assumption that faster, smoother and more efficient is invariably better. Sometimes the most human choice will be deliberately inefficient: walking across the room rather than sending a message, speaking directly to a person, learning someone’s name, listening beyond what is strictly necessary, or allowing time for a conversation whose outcome cannot be predicted. These are hardly revolutionary acts, and perhaps that is precisely why they matter. Physical presence may become increasingly countercultural because it cannot be scaled, automated or neatly reduced to a productivity gain.
Theological hope
There is another mathematical resonance within the idea of a limit: it gives direction. Christian hope performs something analogous, although hope is not optimism and should not be confused with confidence that technological progress will inevitably produce a better world. Neither is it nostalgia for a world before artificial intelligence. Hope is theological because it situates history within a horizon larger than technological possibility and thereby gives movement meaning.
Seen from that horizon, the insufficiency of purely technical solutions becomes clear. A world marked by perpetual conflict requires more than better prediction; it requires reconciliation. Digital hostility cannot be answered by moderation systems alone, because it also requires people capable of dialogue. Inequality demands more than access to technology; it demands justice. An environment saturated with information requires discernment, while a world increasingly populated by artificial systems needs human beings who understand what human life is for.
This may be where Magnifica Humanitas is most important. Its response to the future is neither fear nor naïve celebration, but faithfulness: the Church is called to enter emerging technological realities with a ‘Eucharistic spirituality’ (MH 234) without allowing the horizon of the human person to be reduced to what technology makes possible. That is a less dramatic posture than either panic or enthusiasm, but it may also be the more demanding one.
Rebuilding Jerusalem
The most hopeful image, then, may be not the destruction of Babel but the rebuilding of Jerusalem. Nehemiah does not build alone; responsibility is shared, different groups repair different sections, and the community becomes responsible for the whole precisely because individuals accept responsibility for the part entrusted to them. The image is particularly apt for the digital age, in which the future of artificial intelligence will not be determined by a single institution, government or technology company, but through countless decisions concerning design, regulation, education, work, relationships and everyday use.
The work of shaping a humane technological culture therefore belongs to all of us. Catholic institutions carry a particular responsibility, not because the Church possesses every technical answer, but because its intellectual and social traditions hold sustained resources for reflection on the human person, community, work, power, justice, creation and the common good. Those traditions do not relieve us of contemporary discernment; they equip us to ask better questions.
Among them are questions of purpose, benefit, exclusion, dignity, participation, communion and flourishing: who is this for, whose good does it serve, who may be excluded, and what kind of human being does this technology encourage us to become? Taken together, these questions converge on a more fundamental one: what are we building together? The answer cannot be Babel, because the Christian task is more hopeful than the construction of increasingly impressive systems ordered towards self-sufficiency.
Magnifica Humanitas calls us instead towards the work of becoming wise architects of a genuinely human future: neither fearful guardians of a disappearing past nor naïve celebrants of technological progress, but, perhaps, weavers of hope. I confess to liking that image more than I expected. It suggests neither control nor passivity, but the patient work of bringing threads together into something capable of holding. Such a vocation requires engagement with the digital world without surrendering the human person to it, fidelity to truth rather than power alone, and a willingness to protect physical presence, cultivate attention, defend dignity, distribute power responsibly, honour human limits and create structures in which communion remains possible.
The final question, therefore, is not simply what artificial intelligence will become. It is what we will become alongside it, and whether, in all that we build, the horizon towards which we move remains recognisably human. For all our fascination with intelligent machines, that may still be the more interesting question.
The Female Theologian 