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Keith Dow reflects on Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas and its challenge to modern visions of AI, transhumanism, and “superhuman” possibility. Drawing from disability theology, Scripture, and the Christian understanding of embodied life, he argues that human fullness is not found in escaping weakness, limitation, or dependence, but in Christ-shaped communion, mutual care, and communities where vulnerability and gift are held together.
Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash
Talk of AI becoming “superhuman” now shows up everywhere: in technology forecasts, product launches, philosophical debates, and, increasingly, in public fears about what these systems may become capable of. Pope Leo XIV’s brand-new encyclical approaches this question from a very different direction. Rather than asking how far human capability can be expanded through technology, Magnifica Humanitas asks what human fullness actually is and what kind of future we are trying to build together.
Magnifica Humanitas, released this week, is a serious theological engagement with technology and artificial intelligence. It is worth reading, and not only for its warnings about AI. The encyclical offers a richer vision of Christ, creaturely dependence, vulnerability, and the common good than most technology discourse, and perhaps than much other theological writing. For those of us who have spent years considering or living with disability, the limits of the body, and what it means to belong, it is a refreshing and timely read.
Babel or Jerusalem?
Leo XIV does not simply attack or embrace artificial intelligence.
“[T]he primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.”
The question is what kind of future is being built, and for whom.
This approach avoids two temptations that often appear in conversations about technology. The first is uncritical enthusiasm: the assumption that because something is new and powerful, it must be progress. The second is fearful withdrawal: the assumption that the right response to digital culture is simply to opt out of it. Leo rejects both.
The issue is not the tools themselves but the purposes they serve and the people who shape and control them.
Technology critic Tristan Harris has repeatedly argued that technologies are shaped by the incentives and design choices behind them, and that digital systems do not simply reflect human behaviour but actively condition it. Recently, on the Modern Wisdom podcast, he observed, “Right now the AI company leaders are building bunkers. A lot of people who are wealthy are building bunkers. They are all over the place.” He urges people to seek better safeguards and laws with respect to AI and to be people who are invested in the future, not trying to escape a future they are racing toward.
What does it mean to be people who are here for people? What does it mean to live into the ancient proverb, “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in”? Unfortunately, those who are shaping the future are not planting trees. They are building bunkers.
Leo writes that
“technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”
These are human choices, and human choices can be revisited. There are powerful forces moving technology forward, but they are still, for now, human forces.
For all of us, and particularly for Christians who care about loving their neighbours, faithful response means understanding what these tools make possible, what they put at risk, and where they need to be challenged.
Human Limitation Is Not a Bug
One of the striking lines in Magnifica Humanitas, of which there are many, is this: “building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected.” Leo is speaking directly against the transhumanist vision of AI, the idea that technology should ultimately free humanity from illness, weakness, mortality, and dependence. He sees this as a profound theological mistake: “the human desire for fullness can be deceived by fantasies of a technology that will ‘free us from all weakness.’”
Photo from Vatican Media
Communities shaped by disability theology have been making a version of this argument for a long time. Limits are not malfunctions. Vulnerability is not a design flaw waiting for an engineering solution. Disability is not crying out for a cure.
The presence of people whose bodies, minds, and ways of communicating differ from the assumed norm teaches a truer account of human community.
In Formed Together, I put it this way:
“Whereas pride seeks to meet the needs of everyone on its own, humility accepts the limits of embodiment. The experience of human limitation makes the gifts we give that much more significant.” (p. 141)
Limits are not merely aspects we accommodate or tolerate about one another, although some limits are. Many of our limits make particular gifts matter. What I can offer you is significant precisely because it is what I have, and not everything.
The limits are part of the gift.
When I spend an hour with you, it is with the shared recognition that time is not an infinite resource. I will never get that hour back. It is precious and beautiful to “spend” that time together precisely because it is so much more valuable than money.
Leo reinforces this by saying,
“No one can single-handedly bear the weight of the challenges the world is facing, just as no one is so weak that they cannot play their part, for ‘power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Cor 12:9).”
Two lies are refused at once: the fantasy of heroic self-sufficiency and the assumption that weakness means uselessness. We find ourselves in the in-between, each having something to offer but none of us able to do everything alone. This is precisely why we need each other.
The True “Super Human”
The heart of Leo’s theological argument comes when he turns from warning to vision. People, he writes,
“are called to self-transcendence, not through an escape from reality or a contempt for their limitations, but through their fulfillment in love.” And then: “what saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms.”
This vulnerable communion, to draw from Thomas Reynolds, is a direct answer to transhumanism, but it is not a smaller ambition for humanity. It is saying that the version of “more than human” imagined by the transhumanist project is not only wrong, it is inadequate. Going beyond our own human limitations requires reaching out to one another in love. This is the direction that does not involve escaping embodiment, weakness, or one another.
Jesus is the key here. The encyclical opens with the claim that “it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.”
Christ is not less human, or inadequate as a human exemplar, because he came in dependence, locality, weakness, and vulnerability. He is humanity in its fullness.
The Incarnate Son receives life from the Father, is born from Mary, grows in wisdom, becomes tired, needs friendship, and loves in particular rather than in the abstract. His embodied, limited life is not a failure to transcend. It is the form that divine love takes in the world.
In John 14:12, the disciples are promised that they will do “greater works” than Jesus did because he is going to the Father. It is easy to read this as a promise of surpassing individual power or miraculous cures and healing. Read alongside the encyclical’s conclusion about the church as one body in Christ, it makes better sense as an ecclesial promise: the body of Christ, empowered by the Spirit across time and place, participates together in the expansive reach of his love. The “greater works” are not performed by stronger individuals. They are only possible together.
Learning to Love the People We See
A practical theology of AI cannot stay abstract. If the answer to the transhumanist vision is communion rather than enhanced self-sufficiency, then communities need habits that make communion possible, even attractive. These practices must resist the narrowing of sympathy, the minimization of presence, and the myth that human collaboration is primarily an opportunity for productivity.
That means intentionally spending time with people whose limits, gifts, needs, rhythms, and ways of communicating differ from our own. Family camp, disability ministry, nursery service, visiting the sick, local nonprofit work, and shared meals with people who cannot be reduced to productivity metrics are all schools in the kind of life Leo is trying to protect. Communion is not built by sameness, speed, or control, but by patient presence and mutual interdependence.
Formed Together describes what that practice can look like in caregiving relationships:
“Responding to others in love is seldom found in grandiose, self-fulfilling acts of valor. Neither is it realized in the self-deprecating sacrifice of one’s own passions and interests. Instead, responsive love is profoundly human, remarkably simple, and surprisingly difficult. It calls us to rest humbly with another, becoming attentive to his needs, hopes, and fears before taking action.” (p. 144)
AI can aggregate and deliver. It cannot rest humbly with another.
The church can do something AI cannot. Not because Christians are smarter or more powerful, but because human beings are the kind of creatures for whom presence, limitation, and particularity are features rather than bugs.
What the Church Has to Offer
Leo repeatedly calls for “shared discernment,” not panic, and he is specific about what Christians can contribute: help identifying the “spiritual and cultural roots” of the technological changes underway, and practical criteria for evaluating them, including the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, and “the inclusion of the most vulnerable.”
That last phrase deserves to be taken as a litmus test for our communities and their adoption of technology.
If a technology excludes the most vulnerable, that is not a minor accessibility oversight.
It is a sign that the technology is working against the common good. If a community’s adoption of digital tools makes participation harder for people with certain disabilities, that is not a neutral design choice. Instead, it is an amplification of the ableism that already underlies many of our societal practices.
None of this requires fear of AI or rejection of the tools it offers. Many of those tools, including assistive technologies designed for people who have been excluded by inaccessible environments, are genuinely good. The question is always who is designing, who is funding, and who is being left behind.
Not a Smaller Ambition
The best Christian response to the transhumanist vision of AI is anything but a smaller ambition for humanity. It is a truer one, though perhaps not as exciting as the latest LLM. We are indeed called beyond ourselves, but not by escaping embodiment, weakness, or one another. We are called beyond ourselves in Christ, through love, into communion.
That means the communities best positioned to offer a compelling alternative to the AI-accelerated culture of self-sufficiency are not the ones with the most sophisticated counterarguments.
They are the ones where people with very different bodies, minds, and capacities have learned, slowly and imperfectly, to love the people we actually see.
Learning to love ourselves, even, with our own limits in the ways that God loves us and in the ways others have loved and cared for us. These are communities where limitation is understood as the condition of particular love rather than an obstacle to universal efficiency. Where weakness and gift are held together, because they always were.
Magnifica Humanitas rewards careful reading. It offers not just a warning about artificial intelligence but an invitation into a richer account of what it means to be human, and what it means to belong to Christ and to one another.
About the Author:
Keith Dow:
Keith Dow lives near Ottawa, serving as Manager of Organizational and Spiritual Life with Karis Disability Services. He holds his PhD in caregiving ethics from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is the author of Formed Together: Mystery, Narrative, and Virtue in Christian Caregiving (Baylor, 2021). Keith Dow is a credentialed Pastor with BIC Canada for his role with Karis Disability Services, where he supports the spiritual health of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and equips churches to be more accessible and hospitable.
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Keith Dow reflects on Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas and its challenge to modern visions of AI, transhumanism, and “superhuman” possibility. Drawing from disability theology, Scripture, and the Christian understanding of embodied life, he argues that human fullness is not found in escaping weakness, limitation, or dependence, but in Christ-shaped communion, mutual care, and communities where vulnerability and gift are held together.
Photo by Grant Whitty on Unsplash
Talk of AI becoming “superhuman” now shows up everywhere: in technology forecasts, product launches, philosophical debates, and, increasingly, in public fears about what these systems may become capable of. Pope Leo XIV’s brand-new encyclical approaches this question from a very different direction. Rather than asking how far human capability can be expanded through technology, Magnifica Humanitas asks what human fullness actually is and what kind of future we are trying to build together.
Magnifica Humanitas, released this week, is a serious theological engagement with technology and artificial intelligence. It is worth reading, and not only for its warnings about AI. The encyclical offers a richer vision of Christ, creaturely dependence, vulnerability, and the common good than most technology discourse, and perhaps than much other theological writing. For those of us who have spent years considering or living with disability, the limits of the body, and what it means to belong, it is a refreshing and timely read.
Babel or Jerusalem?
Leo XIV does not simply attack or embrace artificial intelligence.
“[T]he primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.”
The question is what kind of future is being built, and for whom.
This approach avoids two temptations that often appear in conversations about technology. The first is uncritical enthusiasm: the assumption that because something is new and powerful, it must be progress. The second is fearful withdrawal: the assumption that the right response to digital culture is simply to opt out of it. Leo rejects both.
The issue is not the tools themselves but the purposes they serve and the people who shape and control them.
Technology critic Tristan Harris has repeatedly argued that technologies are shaped by the incentives and design choices behind them, and that digital systems do not simply reflect human behaviour but actively condition it. Recently, on the Modern Wisdom podcast, he observed, “Right now the AI company leaders are building bunkers. A lot of people who are wealthy are building bunkers. They are all over the place.” He urges people to seek better safeguards and laws with respect to AI and to be people who are invested in the future, not trying to escape a future they are racing toward.
What does it mean to be people who are here for people? What does it mean to live into the ancient proverb, “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in”? Unfortunately, those who are shaping the future are not planting trees. They are building bunkers.
Leo writes that
“technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”
These are human choices, and human choices can be revisited. There are powerful forces moving technology forward, but they are still, for now, human forces.
For all of us, and particularly for Christians who care about loving their neighbours, faithful response means understanding what these tools make possible, what they put at risk, and where they need to be challenged.
Human Limitation Is Not a Bug
One of the striking lines in Magnifica Humanitas, of which there are many, is this: “building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected.” Leo is speaking directly against the transhumanist vision of AI, the idea that technology should ultimately free humanity from illness, weakness, mortality, and dependence. He sees this as a profound theological mistake: “the human desire for fullness can be deceived by fantasies of a technology that will ‘free us from all weakness.’”
Photo from Vatican Media
Communities shaped by disability theology have been making a version of this argument for a long time. Limits are not malfunctions. Vulnerability is not a design flaw waiting for an engineering solution. Disability is not crying out for a cure.
The presence of people whose bodies, minds, and ways of communicating differ from the assumed norm teaches a truer account of human community.
In Formed Together, I put it this way:
“Whereas pride seeks to meet the needs of everyone on its own, humility accepts the limits of embodiment. The experience of human limitation makes the gifts we give that much more significant.” (p. 141)
Limits are not merely aspects we accommodate or tolerate about one another, although some limits are. Many of our limits make particular gifts matter. What I can offer you is significant precisely because it is what I have, and not everything.
The limits are part of the gift.
When I spend an hour with you, it is with the shared recognition that time is not an infinite resource. I will never get that hour back. It is precious and beautiful to “spend” that time together precisely because it is so much more valuable than money.
Leo reinforces this by saying,
“No one can single-handedly bear the weight of the challenges the world is facing, just as no one is so weak that they cannot play their part, for ‘power is made perfect in weakness’ (2 Cor 12:9).”
Two lies are refused at once: the fantasy of heroic self-sufficiency and the assumption that weakness means uselessness. We find ourselves in the in-between, each having something to offer but none of us able to do everything alone. This is precisely why we need each other.
The True “Super Human”
The heart of Leo’s theological argument comes when he turns from warning to vision. People, he writes,
“are called to self-transcendence, not through an escape from reality or a contempt for their limitations, but through their fulfillment in love.” And then: “what saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms.”
This vulnerable communion, to draw from Thomas Reynolds, is a direct answer to transhumanism, but it is not a smaller ambition for humanity. It is saying that the version of “more than human” imagined by the transhumanist project is not only wrong, it is inadequate. Going beyond our own human limitations requires reaching out to one another in love. This is the direction that does not involve escaping embodiment, weakness, or one another.
Jesus is the key here. The encyclical opens with the claim that “it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.”
Christ is not less human, or inadequate as a human exemplar, because he came in dependence, locality, weakness, and vulnerability. He is humanity in its fullness.
The Incarnate Son receives life from the Father, is born from Mary, grows in wisdom, becomes tired, needs friendship, and loves in particular rather than in the abstract. His embodied, limited life is not a failure to transcend. It is the form that divine love takes in the world.
In John 14:12, the disciples are promised that they will do “greater works” than Jesus did because he is going to the Father. It is easy to read this as a promise of surpassing individual power or miraculous cures and healing. Read alongside the encyclical’s conclusion about the church as one body in Christ, it makes better sense as an ecclesial promise: the body of Christ, empowered by the Spirit across time and place, participates together in the expansive reach of his love. The “greater works” are not performed by stronger individuals. They are only possible together.
Learning to Love the People We See
A practical theology of AI cannot stay abstract. If the answer to the transhumanist vision is communion rather than enhanced self-sufficiency, then communities need habits that make communion possible, even attractive. These practices must resist the narrowing of sympathy, the minimization of presence, and the myth that human collaboration is primarily an opportunity for productivity.
That means intentionally spending time with people whose limits, gifts, needs, rhythms, and ways of communicating differ from our own. Family camp, disability ministry, nursery service, visiting the sick, local nonprofit work, and shared meals with people who cannot be reduced to productivity metrics are all schools in the kind of life Leo is trying to protect. Communion is not built by sameness, speed, or control, but by patient presence and mutual interdependence.
Formed Together describes what that practice can look like in caregiving relationships:
“Responding to others in love is seldom found in grandiose, self-fulfilling acts of valor. Neither is it realized in the self-deprecating sacrifice of one’s own passions and interests. Instead, responsive love is profoundly human, remarkably simple, and surprisingly difficult. It calls us to rest humbly with another, becoming attentive to his needs, hopes, and fears before taking action.” (p. 144)
AI can aggregate and deliver. It cannot rest humbly with another.
The church can do something AI cannot. Not because Christians are smarter or more powerful, but because human beings are the kind of creatures for whom presence, limitation, and particularity are features rather than bugs.
What the Church Has to Offer
Leo repeatedly calls for “shared discernment,” not panic, and he is specific about what Christians can contribute: help identifying the “spiritual and cultural roots” of the technological changes underway, and practical criteria for evaluating them, including the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, and “the inclusion of the most vulnerable.”
That last phrase deserves to be taken as a litmus test for our communities and their adoption of technology.
If a technology excludes the most vulnerable, that is not a minor accessibility oversight.
It is a sign that the technology is working against the common good. If a community’s adoption of digital tools makes participation harder for people with certain disabilities, that is not a neutral design choice. Instead, it is an amplification of the ableism that already underlies many of our societal practices.
None of this requires fear of AI or rejection of the tools it offers. Many of those tools, including assistive technologies designed for people who have been excluded by inaccessible environments, are genuinely good. The question is always who is designing, who is funding, and who is being left behind.
Not a Smaller Ambition
The best Christian response to the transhumanist vision of AI is anything but a smaller ambition for humanity. It is a truer one, though perhaps not as exciting as the latest LLM. We are indeed called beyond ourselves, but not by escaping embodiment, weakness, or one another. We are called beyond ourselves in Christ, through love, into communion.
That means the communities best positioned to offer a compelling alternative to the AI-accelerated culture of self-sufficiency are not the ones with the most sophisticated counterarguments.
They are the ones where people with very different bodies, minds, and capacities have learned, slowly and imperfectly, to love the people we actually see.
Learning to love ourselves, even, with our own limits in the ways that God loves us and in the ways others have loved and cared for us. These are communities where limitation is understood as the condition of particular love rather than an obstacle to universal efficiency. Where weakness and gift are held together, because they always were.
Magnifica Humanitas rewards careful reading. It offers not just a warning about artificial intelligence but an invitation into a richer account of what it means to be human, and what it means to belong to Christ and to one another.
