A Franciscan View: Remaining human in the face of AI

“A Franciscan View” is a series from the Province of Our Lady of Guadalupe’s Office of Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation to help you reflect on the news through a Franciscan lens. Our hope is that you will not only watch the news — you will be transformed by it to become a witness of God’s peace and justice in our world today." 

On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” This historic document has received a great deal of secular and religious press coverage. 

Much of the coverage positions AI as a challenge to our world while highlighting the pope’s call for guardrails to protect humanity. This is correct and admirable.  

However, the coverage ignores that AI builds on and exacerbates the larger systemic problems of our world, namely power and wealth concentrations, the loss of human autonomy and value, and the continual spread of hyper-individualism. It is reported as a singular problem to solve rather than addressing the larger set of disordered relationships affecting society. 

Our Franciscan witness

There is much for Franciscans to embrace and laud in Magnifica Humanitas. It focuses on care for the poor, immigration, peacemaking, creation and so much more that is central to our charism.  

But there is another facet that we should not overlook: the risk of losing the specialness (haeciettas) that each being brings as a reflection of God. 

One friar expressed it this way: 

“Large Language Models (LLMs) that operate AI are built from the writing of "the herd,” - everything available on the internet and beyond. They merely parrot how we string words together. One of the more pernicious effects of AI on our culture so far is the recursive feedback loop where we all start sounding like AI — the same formulations, the same sentence structures, the same buzzwords, etc., that have accumulated over a generation of the internet and now constitute the pool LLMs draw from.”— Br. Ed Tverdek, OFM 

To preserve our humanity, we must nourish what makes us unique and honor that uniqueness in others. In doing so, we accept the pope’s invitation to work toward the common good not as bots, but as brothers and sisters in Christ. 

Br. Kevin Mullen, OFM, of Siena University explains how the encyclical reflects St. Francis' belief that we encounter God in our relationships with each other..

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