Reflections from Georgetown's “Magnifica Humanitas” Panel, by Julia Johanna von Rüden.
On September 9, I attended "AI, Catholic Social Teaching, and Pope Leo's Invitation to Dialogue with the World" at Georgetown University, a conversation that impacted my own ethical perspective on AI more than I had expected. The event, convened by Georgetown's new president, Eduardo Peñalver, was moderated by Kim Daniels, director of the university's Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life. The panel brought together Archbishop Gabriele Caccia (Apostolic Nuncio to the United States), Vilas Dhar (Patrick J. McGovern Foundation), Molly Kinder (Breakwater Initiative), Anna Rowlands (Durham University), and Jasmine Sun (The Atlantic).
The anchor for the discussion was Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), which calls on institutions, especially universities, to help ensure that AI serves the common good rather than a narrow set of interests.
Building bridges, not walls
Kim Daniels opened by framing her own role, and the event itself, as an attempt to build bridges between politics and the church, two worlds that don't often share a stage. That framing mattered, because the pace of AI's rollout into workplaces and schools is fast, and she pushed the room to ask a simple but sharp question, one Pope Leo raises directly in the encyclical: who is this technology actually for, and who gets left behind by it?
Why the Pope wanted to be in the room
Archbishop Caccia's remarks stuck with me the most. He explained that Magnifica Humanitas itself was born out of listening, to scientists, to engineers, to parents, to leaders, to the people actually building and living with this technology. But he was also candid about fear: fear of automatic weapons systems making life-and-death decisions, and fear that AI entrenches exclusion, that the suffering it can cause falls hardest on people who have no voice in the rooms where it gets discussed and designed. That's where the panel's central line landed for me: a moral voice says not everything that is possible should be done. There's a real difference between what's possible and what's just. AI, as it stands, has no knowledge of sensory ability or relational knowledge, it doesn't feel the weight of a decision the way a person does. That's exactly why those moral decisions can't be handed to it.
Work, worth, and who decides
At some point the conversation turned to labor. So far, AI's actual impact on the labor market has been more modest than the alarm suggests, but that's precisely the problem: our leaders don't have a plan or a strategy for what happens next, and we haven't figured out how to retrain professionals for what's coming. That raised a harder question underneath it: what is worth, when the work itself changes, as work is essential to humanity itself? Would AI bring a new Garden of Eden, or would it actually entail the opposite? It isn't only a fight about AI, it's a fight about decentralization: who gets political agency over these systems, and who gets to decide, when access is so unevenly distributed. It's a question about the future of democracy itself, who builds power, and who it's built for.
What kind of world are we leaving behind
The panel kept circling back to one plain question: are you doing this for our benefit, or for yours? And a second one, harder to shake: what kind of world do we want to leave to our children? It was pointed out that we spend so much time worrying about death that we forget to ask the harder questions about life, and that those questions need space to be asked safely, inside our institutions, not around them.
One thing Archbishop Gabriele Caccia said has especially stuck with me: everyone is created in the image of God, and living by calculation alone misses the point of life itself. Each of us is unique, with a purpose of our own. As the title states, humanity is magnificent, we have to protect its beauty and each person's individuality. That's what sets us apart from uniform machines chasing growth while forgetting morality. We should work together, listen to each other, and be loud for the people who have no voice.
What I took away wasn't a neat conclusion, the panel wasn't offering one. It was closer to an invitation: everyone should be willing to involve themselves and work through this together, because whatever world AI ends up building, we have a long way to go, and we have to go there together. As the Archbishop stated, “to go far, we have to go together”. In the end, it comes down to two questions worth carrying forward: who is AI really benefiting? And who gets a say in the world it's building?