By Robert Royal

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Now for today's column...

It's been a week since the publication of Magnifica humanitas, and I've been re-reading certain sections, trying to probe into it more deeply (after my own quick reactions on a recent Prayerful Posse, the very day Pope Leo's first encyclical appeared). Serious questions about the text remain, to be sure: the functional pacifism and an over-optimistic belief in multilateral statism and "dialogue" as the go-to mechanism to rein in not only the AI juggernaut, but virtually all human conflict. (Odd stances for an Augustinian). But I confess that my initial suspicions may have been exacerbated by the many ways that, for over a dozen years, Pope Francis repeatedly left many of us on a hair-trigger because of heterodox notions smuggled into papal documents. Leo's effort to defend what's human is carefully positioned within the Church's modern social teaching, sincere, open, and – from its first words – focused on Christ.

So I'd like to acknowledge a culpa – mea, but not maxima. Because we still need something much stronger and quite different to meet the challenges of our "new era." The pope speaks often about "disarming" language and AI, when what we also, desperately, need is a call to arms – of a different kind, to defend the faith and human civilization.

If you think about it, we've already had plenty of warnings, in many quarters, about the potential threats from AI – from job losses to environmental threats to rogue military uses – even from Silicon Valley itself. And the disastrous narrowness of the "technocratic paradigm," the slow slide into believing that the machines we create will provide all the truth and everything else we need, has been on our cultural radar for at least a century.

The real defense of humanity must begin with humanity defending itself from itself. Which at times calls for physical means, but always means patrolling the cultural peripheries, not just to "accompany" but – can one use a Christian term here? – to convert.

That's precisely the Christian challenge, which needs a more explicitly Christian solution: A more robust confrontation with what Christianity sees as the real situation of the creature made in the image and likeness, now in a fallen state, marked by sin and death, and in our time in particular often closed off to the saving message of the Gospel.

Leo himself acknowledged that a few days ago in an address to evangelists gathered in Rome:

The prevailing cultural climate in media-saturated and consumerist societies diminishes the capacity to learn with patience and to undertake, with effort, a personal quest for truth, with perseverance and a critical sense. Every message risks being perceived as just one opinion among many.

That's a just description of the times. And he put his finger on the crucial point: "It is certainly not by watering down the content or softening the demands that Christianity can be made attractive, but by bearing witness with humility and courage to 'the way, the truth and the life' that has converted and sanctified so many people." (Emphasis added.)

I've been saying for years that it would be not only inspiring, but taking the true me...