An Epiphany Pastoral Letter in Response to Pope Leo XIV Encyclical
MAGNIFICA HUMANITAS
Something happened yesterday that I have been waiting for, in one form or another, for a long time.
Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence – and in doing so, the Catholic Church placed its full theological weight behind a question we have been sitting with at Epiphany for years now: what does it mean to be human?
The timing carries its own eloquence. Leo XIV signed the document on May 15th, the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, the encyclical that addressed the dehumanizing conditions of industrial capitalism and became the cornerstone of modern Catholic social teaching. The parallel is intentional and precise. Just as Leo XIII looked out at factory workers stripped of dignity by the machinery of industrialization, Leo XIV looks out at us, at all of us, and sees a civilization at a crossroads with artificial intelligence. The stakes, he suggests, are at least as high. Perhaps higher.
I want to walk you through the heart of this document, because I think it speaks directly into what we say and teach and practice here. In fact, back in 2019, I stood before you on Christmas Eve and said this: “I want future generations to look back on this time, here in Seattle, at the beginning of the 21st century, and say there was a church that had the wisdom to wonder what it means to be human in a world of machine learning, big data, and artificial intelligence.” Pope Leo XIV is now saying the same thing to a billion people. We are not ahead of the curve. But we are on it, and that matters.
Two Cities, Two Loves
The encyclical organizes itself around a powerful theological image drawn from St. Augustine: two cities, built by two loves. “The earthly city, the love of self even to the contempt of God; the heavenly city, the love of God even to the contempt of self.” Leo XIV maps this ancient tension onto our present moment as a choice between the Tower of Babel and the New Jerusalem.
Babel, in his reading, is not just a biblical story. It is a living paradigm, what he calls the “technocratic paradigm,” a way of organizing human life around domination, optimization, and control. In this vision, the fullness of life means having more, eliminating weakness, reducing uncertainty. Efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, and human beings come to see themselves as projects to be optimized rather than persons called to love and communion. When AI is built and governed from within this paradigm, it colonizes the most important domains of our shared life: it undermines truth and democracy through algorithmic manipulation and deepfakes; it erodes the meaning of work through displacement and devaluation; it short-circuits the formative education through which we develop the capacity to reason, empathize, and seek truth; and at its darkest, it accelerates human trafficking and enables new forms of exploitation.
The New Jerusalem is the alternative, not a rejection of technology, but a different love directing it. Leo is careful here. Technology, he writes, “is never neutral; it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it, and use it.” The question is not whether to use AI. The question is what kind of love builds the city in which AI lives.
Something Genuinely New
I want to flag one thing in this encyclical that I believe is historically significant and worth sitting with carefully. Leo XIV argues that the traditional ‘just war theory,’ articulated by St. Augustine in the 4th century and developed through the centuries as the Church’s framework for evaluating the moral limits of armed conflict, has been rendered functionally obsolete. This is not a rejection of Augustine. It is a development, a recognition that the tools of war have so outpaced the frameworks designed to restrain them that the framework itself can no longer do its job. AI-driven autonomous weapons, he argues, represent a threshold beyond which the old calculus simply breaks down. His alternative: dialogue, diplomacy, forgiveness, and the witness of figures like Martin Luther King Jr., who demonstrated that nonviolent resistance is not weakness but a reflection of a far greater power.
That is a strong claim. It is worth your honest engagement.
What This Means for Epiphany
So where does this land for us? I want to suggest it lands exactly where we have always stood – which is to say, it calls us to stand there more deliberately.
At Epiphany we have long taught that the arc of a fully human life bends through five dimensions: physical, intellectual, moral, spiritual, and relational. These are not five separate compartments. They are five ways of engaging the same journey, the journey toward what Leo XIV calls “self-transcendence through love.” Each dimension, lived with intention and community, becomes a form of resistance to the Babel paradigm and a practice of the New Jerusalem.
The Eucharist is where this comes together. Every Sunday, when we gather around that table, we enact the very thing the technocratic paradigm cannot produce: a community of people who did not choose one another, who do not agree on everything, who come from different generations and backgrounds and struggles, sharing a meal that declares every person at the table to be a beloved soul. The Eucharist is not a metaphor for the New Jerusalem. It is its practice.
Here is my ask: don’t be tepid about this. Don’t let someone else’s algorithmic logic write the story of your life. This is the moment, not for hunkering down into comfortable familiarity, but for stepping out into the real, sometimes uncomfortable, irreplaceable gift of actual human community.
Concretely: come to church every single Sunday you are at home. Commit to community and to gratitude. Then, when here, introduce yourself to someone you don’t know. Stay for coffee hour. Take a risk on a group activity or a class or even a conversation that pulls you somewhere slightly outside your usual orbit. The New Jerusalem is not built by people who remain strangers to one another.
We are not spectators of this cultural moment. We are, together, its answer… which is why the neighborhood church is the hope of the world.
Peace upon your souls.
Doyt+