Building the Kingdom of God – Pope Leo and the New Technology

Some of you probably know what it’s like to have a child who is really sick in body, mind or spirit. Parents, understandably, feel that they should be able to keep their children safe; to protect them from anything that would harm them.  The Canaanite woman in our Gospel today was driven to distraction because her daughter was “tormented by a devil”.  In her anxiety, she turns to Jesus.  Nothing would deflect her; she was not going to take “no” for an answer.  She understood that she needed to look for salvation in a power outside herself.  It was out of her experience of smallness and vulnerability that she came to faith.

The interesting thing about this woman was that she was not “one of us”.  She was “one of them”.  The disciples of Jesus, in spite of all they had seen and heard, could not understand why he would bother with her.  Jesus provokes the woman, so that his disciples can see that her faith is real, and possibly more mature than theirs.  The mission of Jesus was never about “us” and “them”.  It included saints and sinners; the healthy and the sick.  Women and men were counted among his disciples, and he even praised the faith of a Roman centurion.

The other two readings, like the Gospel, tell us very clearly that the love of God and his salvation are open to all who live with integrity and justice, and who come to him in humility.

I want to connect all of this with what Pope Leo has been saying about artificial intelligence.

When I was a child, we were still going out to the phone box and “pressing button A”.  Now we carry computers in our pockets and our handbags that are more powerful than the one that put the first person on the moon in 1969 – “one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind”.

Advances in technology have certainly brought about many giant leaps for humanity, especially in the past ten years, but I suppose it is no harm to ask ourselves, “into what are we leaping?”

Towards the end the nineteenth century Pope Leo XIII wrote an encyclical letter, called Rerum Novarum on capital and labour, about the challenges facing humanity and human relationships as a result of the Industrial Revolution.  Machinery had the potential to make work easier, but there was also risk that workers would become slaves to the machine, or be replaced altogether.  One of the worst effects of the industrial revolution was the development of a new kind of class struggle between employers and workers, who were divided implacably into “us” and “them”.

In his encyclical letter published just on 15 May Magnifica Humanitas on safeguarding the human person in the era of Artificial Intelligience, Pope Leo XIV speaks about Artificial Intelligence as another kind of “revolution”.  He invites us to reflect on how our humanity and our human relationships may be changed for better or worse by the arrival of artificial intelligence.

“Technology”, Pope Leo says, “has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice (MH 9).”

One of the first principles of Catholic Social Teaching is that society must be ordered in such a way that it serves the common good, not just the good of individuals or of the few or even of the State.  Every human person has inherent dignity.  Nobody is disposable.  Pope Leo explains that AI systems are geared to seeking perfection.  They tend to reject the frailty and weakness which is part of our humanity.  AI is mathematical, there is no room in it for human warmth, understanding, or forgiveness.  You will have noticed this when you go on the telephone and you are answered by a chat-bot.  Either you get the question right, or you get nowhere.  There is no room for “explanation”.

Alongside this, Pope Leo, points out: “In the past, it was largely up to the State to guide and direct technological power.  Today, however, the main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many governments” (MH 5).  These corporations are usually motivated by profit and power.  Because they are able to control information, they are also able to control and manipulate financial systems, manufacturing and communications.  To take just one simple example, most of us have had some experience of the way algorithms are designed to manage what we see and don’t see on social media.  That is only the tip of the iceberg.

One of the particular challenges of Artifical Intelligence is the way in which, once it is set in motion, it tends to operate independently of human intervention.  One example of this is the way in which Autonomous Weapon Systems are designed to identify targets and launch attacks while, somewhere in the background there is a human “controller” who seems not to be really responsible for the consequences.  No machine should ever “choose” to take the life of a human being.

Pope Leo suggests that AI needs to be “disarmed”.  It needs to be freed from the mentality of “armed” competition.  He is not using the word “disarmed” just in the military sense, but in the sense that AI can contribute in so many different contexts to dividing society into “us” and “them”.

In the end, Pope Leo says, this is not about accepting or rejecting artificial intelligence.  It is already part of our reality.  It is a matter of how we design it and how we manage it to serve the good of humanity.  We have to choose one of two possibilities:
– One possibility is that we simply build bigger and bigger monuments to ourselves, like the people who built the Tower of Babel.  That scenario, built on pride, ends in conflict.
– The other possibility is that we “Build the City of God”.  This involves working together in a way which respects the dignity of every person and the gifts that he or she has to offer, and which sees God as the ultimate source of meaning in our world.

I want to finish by briefly going back to the overall them of the Novena: ‘Sheltered in God’s Love’.

You may be familiar with a story once told by Fr Anthony de Mello.  A man walking through the forest saw a fox that had lost its legs and wondered how it lived.  Then he saw a tiger come with wild game in its mouth.  The tiger ate its fill and left the rest of the meat for the fox.  The next day the same thing happened again.  The man was amazed at God’s greatness and his providence and he said to himself, “I too shall just rest in a corner with full trust in the Lord and he will provide me with all I need.”  He did this for many days but nothing happened, and he was almost at death’s door when he heard a voice say: “O you who are in the path of error, open your eyes to the truth!  Follow the example of the tiger and stop imitating the disabled fox” (The Disabled Fox from Anthony de Mello: The Song of the Bird).

It is good, and even necessary, to sit in the stillness and to ponder the mystery of God’s love.  But it is essential, especially for those of us who gather around the table of the Eucharist, to remember and to celebrate that fact that God welcomes all the guests at his feast, and we can only truly be sheltered in God’s love, when we allow his love for us to send us out to others.

Sunday 16 August 2026