THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – A NEW ‘RERUM NOVARUM’ OR EXPANSION OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING:  WHAT IS IT TO BE?

14th May 2025 – by Andrew Dolan

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

A NEW ‘RERUM NOVARUM’ OR EXPANSION OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING:  WHAT IS IT TO BE?

At the very outset of this new pontificate, Pope Leo XIV referenced the importance of the encyclical ‘Rerum Novarum’: it set the seal on the church’s then response to the industrial revolution and signposts the direction of engagement with another industrial revolution, namely artificial intelligence.  In terms of this new form of industrial revolution, the Church will need to defend ‘human dignity, justice and labor’.

How best to do this is perhaps an open question.  The terms above have acquired some elasticity and nuanced emphasis since 1891, when Rerum Novarum was first published. Indeed, there is some validity to the argument that what the church requires is a new encyclical solely relating to AI or that the fundamental of Catholic Social Teaching itself needs to be updated, given that the AI challenges to human dignity, justice and labor are far from fully understood.

Early consideration might, therefore, be placed on seeking to discern just how AI will impact people’s lives, not only in terms of the advent of new technologies in society but rather the inevitable unevenness of access – the future haves and haves not of artificial intelligence. There are no shortages of dystopian futures hypothesised or predicted under an AI world but perhaps the most obvious place to start is amongst the inevitable, future marginalised.  This is territory today that the church knows only too well.

Furthermore, the future might bring AI to the masses but one in which societies’ future engagement with the new technology is one where most, if not all, aspects of life and human engagement is governed by machines.  Access to ‘people’ could become a luxury.  One might argue that we are already on the path to an ‘automated’ environment.

Possibly another vexed issue that the church will need to navigate is its response between climate activists and those who advocate technology and AI as the solution.  The global community seems incapable of developing a coherent climate strategy, which recognises the need to ‘save the planet’.  It is not impossible that science and technology might develop the ‘silver bullet’ panacea and that ever more forms of ‘artificial super intelligence’ will be the platform.  Yet societies are waking up – belatedly – to a recognition that the energy requirement associated with ever more powerful AI is debilitating and dangerous.  Is the quest to develop new medicines to support mankind for example, only possible if we continue to threaten mankind with environmental catastrophe?  

There are also issues to be addressed in relation to the wider considerations of what constitutes human dignity and the church, I would suggest, is well-placed to do so.  Yet dignity today and tomorrow might depend on being able to establish the truth and this can only be illuminated by the light of knowledge and here again, what will be the church’s response to AI’s influence.  Considerations will have to be given to a future whereby all human knowledge is deposited in machines, truths and untruths and of course bias.  Humans are slowly becoming familiar with the machine telling us what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is false.  How does the church retain access to the operation of reason and intelligence and communicate its repository of faith and tradition?

It is possible that the Catholic Church will need to widen its concept of engagement with AI beyond traditional views of human dignity, justice and labor.  Maybe it needs to evolve a new doctrine of societal security or societal safety for the artificial intelligence age.  Traditionally, the church has offered sanctuary for those under immediate threat or suffering displacement and perhaps the time has come to revisit this concept considering the threats and challenges that an AI world can throw up.  This new sanctuary might be in viewing the Church as a refuge from constant shifts and changes in social through its consistent message of revelation, tradition and liturgy.

For some time now, the Catholic Church has exhorted states to abandon the introduction of ‘frontier’ AI-enabled weapons, whereby machines can decide to use violence against the individual at the time or place of its choosing and with no human agency involved in decision-making.  Yet other forms of debilitating challenges to societal safety are equally threatening, including the targeting of societies’ critical network infrastructure by cyber weapons, the weaponization of biology and AI to create sophisticated bioweapons that threatens to destroy small- or large-scale communities or indeed humanity. Perhaps equally as dangerous to freedom and human dignity, could be the imposition of privacy-robbing surveillance systems and regimes, which could facilitate more authoritarian forms of governance.

What kind of advocacy or response might be crafted to help society from the consequences of such malignancy? 

Grappling with the enormity of these societal dilemmas could arguably extend into new avenues of Catholic Social Teaching beyond the existing foundations.  In a world, which frequently calls into question the relevancy of religion and where a cacophony of competing noises creates instability and drowns out structured dialogue, how will the Church be heard?

This is where I feel the church is today and I would not be surprised if urgent efforts were made to better understand the range and complexity of the challenges from this unfolding ‘industrial revolution’ to populate a new AI encyclical and an updating of Catholic Social Teaching.