The Pope Saw It Coming
His first encyclical is about AI. Almost nobody will read it. That’s part of the problem.
In May, Pope Leo XIV gave his first encyclical, the founding document of a papacy, entirely to one question: what artificial intelligence is doing to the human person. Magnifica Humanitas runs about 40,000 words.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Most people will not read it.
Not because people don’t care. Because the capacity it asks for is the capacity we have already spent. A long, patient, demanding document about the fragmentation of human attention has arrived in a world too fragmented to read it. The diagnosis is the obstacle. The encyclical’s first proof is its own unread pages.
I am a psychologist. I did not need the Pope to tell me something is wrong. I see it every day in my practice: adults who cannot finish a page, teenagers whose baseline state is interruption by the feed, the low hum so many of us carry now, the sense that something else is running the show and we never remember agreeing to it. What the encyclical gave me was not the diagnosis. It was the nerve to call the stakes by their real name.
Remaining human has become a goal that we could fail at.
The imitation runs both ways
Early in the document, Leo says something that sounds technical and is actually terrifying: the technology is never neutral (¶9). It arrives already shaped, already pointed, already wanting something from you. And later he notes, almost quietly, that the machine imitates our speech and our reasoning while having “no joy or pain” of its own (¶99). It performs the outside of a person without the inside.
We have spent years asking whether the machines will become like us. That was never the sharpest question. The sharpest question is whether we are becoming like them.
Two building projects
The encyclical reaches for two ancient images, and they carry the whole document. The first is Babel (¶7): a single tower, a single language, a uniformity that eliminated diversity, humanity flattened into one voice that reached for heaven and produced confusion. The second is Nehemiah (¶8): the wall of Jerusalem rebuilt by ordinary families, each one working with one hand and holding a weapon in the other. Scripture remembers it plainly: they built with one hand, and with the other held a spear.
Two building projects. The difference was never the tools.
Leo is not against the technology, and neither am I. The difference is whether what we build concentrates power and flattens the people who use it, or serves something shared and leaves you irreducibly yourself. One project builds the tower. The other builds the wall, armed and awake. You are taking part in one of them every day, mostly without choosing.
The whole work of this moment is to start choosing.
A companion
So I wrote a book I kept wishing I could hand to people. It is called Remaining Human, and it is a plain-language companion to the encyclical. It moves section by section, in ordinary words, and it does the thing the document leaves to us: it names the actual machines and markets Leo only points at, and it brings every section home to where you live. Your attention, your work, your children, and your prayer.
Each section ends with what it means for you and a practice you can start the same day. There are questions for reflection, an eight-session guide for groups, and an examen for the digital age. It was written for thoughtful readers, Catholic or not.
I wrote this book because I feel the seriousness of the wave cresting on the horizon, and because I have stopped believing we can sleepwalk through it. The goal was never to outrun what is coming. Waves are not outrun.
The wave is coming either way. The question is who it finds when it arrives.
Remaining Human: A Plain-Language Companion to Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical on Artificial Intelligence is available now on Amazon, in paperback and Kindle.
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Dr. Tobin,
The chapter your wall image comes from has a secret hiding in its most boring stretch. Nehemiah 3 is a list, thirty-two verses of names and gates, the part most of us skim. Which fits your point about the encyclical almost too well: the thing we most need keeps sitting in the pages nobody reads.
Here is what is buried in that list. Over and over, the record says the same thing about the builders: each man built the wall opposite his own house. The Hebrew phrase is ish l'neged beito (אִישׁ לְנֶגֶד בֵּיתוֹ). The city was not rebuilt by experts or by an army. Every family repaired the stretch of wall in front of its own door.
And that is exactly the gap your book stands in. Pope Leo wrote to the whole city, forty thousand words the families will never read. Remaining Human walks the document to each family's front door and hands them their own stretch of wall: your attention, your work, your children, your prayer, with a practice they can start the same day. The encyclical diagnoses the age. Your companion gives a household its ten feet.
One more detail from that chapter. The builders were spread so thin they could not see each other, so Nehemiah kept a man with a trumpet beside him and gave the city one instruction: when you hear the sound, come gather. A scattered people, held together by a sound. That is the other thing a book like this does. The wall is long, we are far apart on it, and someone has to carry the horn.
May the book find the builders, Sean.
Ty
A Christian leader can inspire because he points beyond himself. He is less likely to turn office into a mirror, which is good, because society already has enough rulers admiring their own jawlines in policy glass.