Pope Leo’s latest encyclical Magnifica Humanitas ¹ draws the faithful and other people of good-will the world over, to consider a very important question. How are we as God-fearing stewards of this Earth meant to exercise this depth and breadth of responsible stewardship fully? What is the other Biblical mystery contained in all of this about? Namely, the one that says humans will reign with God over all that He has created, including over the realm of the “pure spirits”? We are not to interpret this to mean that “we give orders” while all else obeys. No, because spiritual freedom is not guaranteed or exercised through humanity becoming as ‘gods’ so to speak.
But here’s the thing, we have on our Earth a very complicated spiritual battle which began from two interrelated sources – that of the Fall of Lucifer and his band of rebel spirits and stemming in part from that, the tragedy of Adam and Eve’s disobedience to God by eating of the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. How these two seemingly disparate events relate is at the crux of why we need to take stock of the full depth and breadth of what our stewardship on this Earth actually means.
The rebel angel Lucifer did not only not want to serve God anymore but at the center of his rebellion was a fallen pride he held onto in a die-hard way that made him refuse to serve, co-operate and collaborate with all the members of God’s sublime Earthly creation. For to him, because these were created “slightly lower” than the angels, having a degree of density hence a permanence of physical form that he did not esteem, he refused to submit to God’s request to participate in a Heavenly mission on Earth which involved the angelic world endorsing fully the divine plan where the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity wantonly becomes Incarnational into human experience, hence Lucifer’s pride adversely embellished his refusal to serve a God Who willingly takes on a form which combines physical nature with divinity. How arrogant and moronic this reprobate Lucifer was, as he convinced one third of all the pure spirits (angels) God had created to follow him in his autocratic rebellion! Following their hard-hearted rebellion, God decidedly punished them, for these knew all the ins and outs, including the consequences – with a full-blown clarity a quadrillion times plus beyond the bounds of human capacity – of every choice and decision they made regarding this before they even went with it fully. St Thomas Aquinas tells us that when God gave the angels this “test”, it was concerning whether they would be willing to follow the Son of God to an Earthly mission. God, in His mysterious design of Providence created our planet Earth for a truly marvellous reason in His divine blueprint out of all the worlds He created. Although we don’t know all the reasons why, we do know that the most important reason God has whenever He creates anything is LOVE and LOVE alone suffices, as St Teresa of Avila meant when she said, “God alone suffices”! For we know that God is Love.
Now you might be wondering what has any of this got to do with one of the most current and hotly debated themes of our time, that of AI (or ‘Artificial Intelligence’ as it’s otherwise sometimes called). Well, alot actually. See, when we humans invented the Internet or the World Wide Web towards the close of the last century, we did not know what we were really getting ourselves into here, what we were really going to be having to deal with. For such a thing contains what I’ll call a bit of a Promethean mystery because we are, in the realm of information technology and telecommunications, dealing with alot more than just human knowledge and creativity – we are dealing also with a fibreoptics that channels creative energy in the form of light and sound waves that travel throughout the Earth and into the vastness of space – the Universe God had created. God had created this energy, these sound and light waves, and because of that they have immense power beyond what we are fully capable at this point of understanding let alone controlling. This is something too, that the likes of St Ignatius of Loyola, St Francis of Assisi and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin were all in absolute awe of! Let’s not become mistaken. We are not kidding ourselves or dabbling in hocus-pocus here when we acknowledge how utterly intricate, delicate, superbly interconnected all these elemental forces in nature are, and all and only because God put them in our midst for a very good and holy reason. We have to be mindful and reverent stewards of an Earth that has been made for the edification and building up in loving relationship of all and between all that God created. When we train our hearts and minds to become aware of and to pulsate in-tune with this sacred rhythm of life, we would not be too quick to treat our quantum and post-quantum technologies as frivolous playgrounds where a Laissez Faire style digital climate has full reign – think hellish designs perpetrated by deep-fake imagery. We already see the negative activity and its associated repercussions of criminal anonymity in cyberspace. Hence we need to harness new digital technological landscapes such as AI with a full gamut of ethical and moral imperatives which essentially shape and direct the purpose and pathways for which such technology will be used and will accordingly traverse.
And in considering this then, it is no wonder that this area, as vital as it is, presents before us not only enormous responsibility but also a myriad of associated spiritual challenges, the most fundamental of which is recognizing that what God created for good has been fought over for aeons in the cosmic battle being waged by God’s adversary and it is he that wants to try and maneuveur the direction of such technology away from that integral purpose for which all life on Earth was created – the glory of God as evidenced through the symbiotic workings, harmonious magnificence, and sublime celebration of His primordial creation.
Because of this, we are being warned ahead of time, and Pope Leo’s encyclical exhorts us to really come to grips with the bare-bones reality of what we are dealing with. Since a spiritual battle undergirds the temporal reality of our existence, we need to be as St Paul said, “on guard” in our hearts, our minds, our intentions, and actions flowing forth from these because we cannot afford to let ourselves be devoured by a rabid monster in disguise as a ‘roaring lion’. Since it was this monster who first took on the cunning disguise as a snake or a serpent (whichever translation you like), in the Garden of Eden. Yes! He disguised himself as one of God’s Earthly creatures. Remember how God saw that everything He made was very good? Well, anything that’s very good can only be that way because it has not set it’s heart upon rebelling or shunning it’s Maker. Everything created in the Garden of Eden was created not only to perfection in purpose, functionality, and aesthetic proportion but it was created above all, to mirror God in love. Therefore, that cunning ‘snake’ who tempted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was not really an animal at all but the “snake thing” was only a mere disguise taken on by a jealous, spiteful, and loathesome monster, which is what Lucifer had become following his decisive and impenitent rebellion. The exhortative warning given by the encyclical instructs us in the way of prudence and of guiding our actions with purity of heart. Let us not be fooled! What makes us so sure when we interact with AI, we are talking to a mere machine, a program crafted and curated solely by human agency? Hence it makes sense here to call upon the assistance of divine intercession.
This is a HUGE lesson in both humility and spiritual discernment and is actually perfect opportunity to put the Ignatian principles of the Discernment of Spirits into practice. In the “internet of things” we come face to face with something essentially invisible, dispite apparent guises of human-looking profiles or whatever. We are dealing with something that could pose a potentially otherworldly identity and we need to pray and seek the face of God first and foremost in all our interactions with the realm of AI. For while there is a sure domain within this realm that has been crafted, curated, maintained, and managed by human agency, there does come a time when things could very well progress beyond the domain we are all-too-humanly familiar with.
In our rich religious and cultural tapestry, Catholicism offers a sheer abundance of grace that when welcomed, co-operated with and steered in unison with our use of good-will and the virtues both (cardinal and spiritual), we have every right and should make use of every opportunity to call on the intercession of our guardian angels and the whole comport of the Heavenly powers who serve the Lord, and the Saints and Holy Souls too, to aide us in our necessities. Such is the apex of our time, the time we are in now, to make our hearts open and prepared to welcome in the dawn of the New Pentecost – that glorious New Era when the reign of Christ’s Peace on Earth will be supremely orchestrated from Heaven and humanity, along with the whole creation, including the hosts and powers of Heaven, will sing with one accord, those bountiful and wondrous praises to Our Heavenly Lord.
All the prophecies of Christmastide are fulfilled in the sublime reign of the Divine Will in all, and through all on Earth who dwell in union with the vast limitlessness of all the beauty throughout the universe God created.
Main Reference:
¹ Magnifica Humanitas – Encyclical by Pope Leo XIV released May 2026. The full text link can be found here:
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