Magnifica Humanitas: A Three Part Series of Expert Conversations

On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical: Magnifica Humanitas. It is His first encyclical on artificial intelligence and the human person. Most of the internet reached for a hot take. We did something else. We got the people building Catholic AI tools, studying how technology re-forms us, and serving parishes through all of it into a room and asked what they learned from this document.

Nine guests, each panel anchored to one major chapter. And we also have a same-day reaction bonus episode with Katie McGrady. Watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts. Links below.

Matthew Sanders
Dr. Brett Robinson
Fr. Jean Gove
Taylor Black
Julianne Stanz
Fr. Philip Larrey
Andrew DeBerry
John Johnson
Letty Garcia

The day the encyclical dropped, Katie (SiriusXM's The Catholic Channel, CNN Vatican analyst) and I discussed it. Her verdict: "This is not old man yells at cloud." Why this is a recovery document and not a regulation document, why Leo opens with the Tower of Babel — and why an encyclical came with a trailer.

Leo says AI is "not simply a tool" — it's a logic that can quietly turn people into "mere cogs in a system." Are we building Babel, or rebuilding Jerusalem? This is the panel that wrestles with the metaphor the whole encyclical hangs on.

What happens when a man who builds Catholic AI tools (deployed in 190+ countries) sits with the encyclical's warning about "the promise of the perfect machine"? Put him next to a scholar of communication ecology and a priest who wrote his archdiocese's actual AI policy, and you get the most practical hour of the week. We discuss truth as a common good, the quiet de-skilling of work, and what any of it means on a Tuesday morning in a parish.

The highest-stakes chapter. Leo calls just-war theory "outdated" in the age of AI, and points past it to what he names a culture of negotiation. Three people who've spent their careers where power, faith, and technology meet take that claim apart.

One thing to carry into all four: the Pope didn't write 245 paragraphs to tell you whether to use a chatbot. He wrote them to ask a harder question — what are we building? That's the question these nine guests kept circling. Come sit with it.

Cheers,
Edmund Mitchel
The Faith & AI Project Team

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