The Pope in the Chapel of Stained Glass

לקריאה בעברית

Pope Leo’s new encyclical warns repeatedly about the concentration of power in AI: a few institutions may set the rules, shape what people see, and make consequential decisions through systems outsiders cannot inspect.

It is an unusual criticism coming from the head of the Catholic Church.

The Church is highly centralized, and its supreme authority is selected through one of the most deliberately opaque elections in public life. Cardinals enter a closed conclave, deliberate in secrecy, cast secret ballots, and disclose almost nothing beyond the result.

There can be good reasons for this. Secrecy can protect the electors from external pressure. Central authority can preserve institutional coherence. AI companies also have reasons for keeping parts of their systems secret and for imposing rules centrally. The same criteria have to decide when those reasons are sufficient.

Subsidiarity changes how centralized authority operates rather than removing it. Rome establishes a framework and local authorities apply it with varying degrees of discretion. AI governance can take much the same form.

Nor does Catholic authority stop at the church door. The Church claims the right to teach about politics, economics, war, education, and technology. Magnifica Humanitas is itself an attempt to shape decisions in all of those areas.

The comparison becomes sharper when the Church worries that people may trust artificial systems too readily. Every major AI system warns its users that it may be wrong. Catholicism retains a doctrine under which the Pope can, under defined conditions, teach infallibly.

Much of Leo’s practical AI program also resembles what secular institutions have already produced: human oversight, transparency, restrictions on autonomous weapons, and suspicion of concentrated technological power.

Christianity becomes distinctive when it changes the answer—when the imago Dei, incarnation, conscience, or the special status of human beings gives a reason to reject something that ordinary secular AI ethics might otherwise accept.

Until then, the obvious question remains whether the Church is willing to apply its principles about concentrated and opaque authority to itself.

He who preaches in a chapel of stained glass shouldn’t be casting stones.