Digital Dignity: Why Thomas Merton and Pope Leo XIV Matter for AI Ethics Today
A Reflection in the See-Judge-Act Tradition
Introduction: A Method for a Moment
The See-Judge-Act method was created by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn and draws on Thomas Aquinas’s description of the intellectual virtue of prudence. Cardijn originally designed it for young industrial workers: to help them see the problem of their temporal and eternal destiny, judge the present situation and its contradictions, and act with a view to transforming it. Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI formally incorporated it into Catholic social teaching, and Pope Francis has continued in that same tradition, insisting that “realities are more important than ideas.”
It is fitting, then, that Pope Leo XIV has framed his papacy in explicitly social terms, invoking Leo XIII and Rerum Novarum in response to artificial intelligence. The See-Judge-Act method offers us a precise and honest way to engage his call.
“I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great Industrial Revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.” — Pope Leo XIV, Address to the College of Cardinals, May 10, 2025
(This address is collected in “Peace Be With You: My Words to the Church and to the World*, published by HarperOne, February 2026.)*
SEE & Observe: What Is Actually Happening?
The first step of seeing entails social analysis — working to get a complete picture of the situation, historically and structurally, by exploring how it has developed over time and what political, economic, social, and cultural forces are shaping it.
We are living through a second great labor disruption. The first, addressed by Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891), was the Industrial Revolution — the replacement of craft and agricultural work by machine production in factories. The human cost was enormous: unsafe conditions, child labor, poverty wages, and the stripping of dignity from work itself. Leo XIII’s response was to insist that workers were persons, not instruments, and that economic systems must be judged by whether they serve human flourishing.
Today’s disruption is subtler but no less far-reaching. AI systems are not merely automating physical labor; they are encroaching on cognitive and creative work — writing, diagnosis, legal analysis, financial advice, and education. Algorithms now screen job applicants, assess creditworthiness, set prices, recommend medical treatments, and curate the information environments in which people form their beliefs and identities. In many cases, the people most affected by these systems have no knowledge of how they work, no access to appeal, and no name attached to the decision.
This is not a distant possibility. It is the present situation.
Thomas Merton was watching an earlier version of this same dynamic in the 1960s. In “The Triple Revolution,” an open memorandum sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964, Merton’s close friend and correspondent W.H. “Ping” Ferry — the document’s chief organizer — argued that automation was already breaking the traditional link between work and income, and that society needed a fundamental re-examination of its values. Though Merton was not among the 35 signatories (as a cloistered monk, he could not formally participate in political declarations), he engaged deeply with the document’s ideas. He predicted the emergence of what he called a “collectivist, cybernated” society in which human beings would be managed rather than known.
What does this look like now? A worker is scored by a productivity algorithm that tracks keystrokes. A student’s essay is evaluated by AI before a teacher reads it. A patient receives a treatment recommendation generated by a model whose reasoning no physician can fully explain. In each case, a human being is present — but their personhood is not quite the point. The data point is the point.
That is what we see.
JUDGE/Discern: What Does Faith and Human Wisdom Say About This?
The second step — judging — asks: what do Scripture and Catholic Social Teaching say about this issue? What key principles apply? Among those principles are human dignity, the common good, human rights, and the option for people with low incomes.
The judgment here is not primarily technical. It is theological and moral.
On Human Dignity
Leo XIV’s invocation of Rerum Novarum is not nostalgic — it is diagnostic. Leo XIII’s central claim was that workers possess an inherent dignity that no economic arrangement can legitimately override. That dignity is not earned by productivity; it is given. It precedes the market. This is the same claim Leo XIV now brings to AI: that the person cannot be reduced to their data profile, their algorithmic score, or their economic utility.
Merton made the same argument from a contemplative angle. In New Seeds of Contemplation, he drew a sharp distinction between the “True Self” — the person as known and loved by God — and the “False Self,” the identity constructed by social performance, consumption, and external validation. His warning was that industrial modernity systematically cultivated the False Self by defining human beings in terms of roles and outputs rather than their irreducible depth. AI intensifies this pressure. When your value to a system is determined by what you produce, click, buy, or say, the True Self is not merely ignored — it is declared irrelevant.
On Justice and the Technological Society
Merton’s engagement with the French philosopher Jacques Ellul gave him a framework for understanding why this happens structurally, not just individually. Ellul argued that “technique” — the drive toward maximum efficiency in every domain of life — eventually becomes self-perpetuating. Once efficiency is established as the highest value, moral questions are reframed as inefficiencies. Justice is slow. Compassion is unpredictable. Forgiveness cannot be optimized. Contemplation produces no measurable output.
The judgment here is clear: a society that allows algorithmic efficiency to displace moral reasoning has not merely made a technical error. It has made a spiritual one.
On Labor and Peace
Rerum Novarum argued that economic justice is a precondition of genuine peace. Merton extended this: peace also requires what he called spiritual autonomy — the freedom to be a full person rather than a function of a system. If AI and automation lead to mass displacement of workers, or to the degradation of the labor that remains, the result is not merely unemployment. It is the erosion of the social fabric — what Merton called “a world of strangers” rather than a community of persons. And a world of strangers is not a peaceful world.
One of Merton’s most prophetic observations, developed across his writings and talks on technology in the 1960s, was that technology eventually becomes invisible. We stop noticing how it shapes our choices, our language, our relationships, and our inner life. “Rain and the Rhinoceros” (1965), one of his most accessible essays, makes this case through a meditation on solitude and noise: the fabricated world is so loud and so pervasive that people lose the silence necessary to hear themselves think, let alone to hear God. To defend the human spirit, Merton argued, we must first make technology visible again — so that we can evaluate it honestly through the lens of faith and human agency.
That is the judgment: the AI revolution is not ethically neutral, and efficiency is not a sufficient moral framework for evaluating it.
ACT/Do Something: What Can and Should Be Done?
The third step — acting — follows from seeing and judging. It asks what, in these specific circumstances, can and should be done to put principles into practice and address root causes. Importantly, See-Judge-Act is not a one-time exercise but a continuous cycle: after completing the Act step, participants return to See, observing new realities, making new judgments, and finding new ways to respond.
Leo XIV has not issued a detailed policy program — that is not the primary role of a papal address. But the direction he has set points clearly toward several obligations, which Merton’s thought helps specify.
Make technology visible. The first act is consciousness. Merton’s insight that technology becomes invisible is an invitation — and a challenge — to pay attention. This means reading the terms of service. It means asking what happens to your data. It means noticing when a decision affecting your life was made by a process you cannot see or contest. Communities of faith are particularly well placed to cultivate this kind of reflective attention because they already have practices — prayer, sabbath, silence, community discernment — that create space outside the logic of productivity.
Insist on the person behind the data point. Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum insisted that the dignity of the worker was not negotiable. That same insistence must be applied now to the design and deployment of AI systems — in hiring, in healthcare, in education, in criminal justice. Systems that make consequential decisions about people’s lives must be explainable, contestable, and accountable. This is not a technical wish; it is a moral demand.
Decouple dignity from productivity. The “Triple Revolution” document of 1964 raised a question that is now unavoidable: if machines can do much of what humans do, what becomes of the human beings displaced? The answer cannot simply be “retraining.” It must engage the deeper question of what work means, and what we owe one another when the market no longer needs us. Catholic Social Teaching’s insistence on the common good and the option for the poor provides a framework: the benefits of automation cannot accrue solely to capital. They must be shared.
Cultivate the interior life as resistance. This is Merton’s most distinctive contribution. Contemplation — the practice of attentiveness, silence, and genuine presence to God and to others — is not a retreat from the world. It is, in his view, the only durable form of resistance to a system that wants to reduce human beings to their outputs. A person who knows how to be still, how to listen, how to sit with another person in their full complexity — that person cannot be fully captured by an algorithm. The interior life is not a luxury. It is, in this moment, a form of social action.
Conclusion: The Cycle Continues
The See-Judge-Act method is not a formula that produces a final answer. It is a practice — a cycle continually repeated, in which participants return to observation, form new judgments, and find new ways to act in response to changing realities. Leo XIV has placed the Church firmly within this cycle by naming the AI revolution as a social question of the first order. Thomas Merton, writing sixty years ago from a monastery in Kentucky, gave us tools for the seeing and the judging that the moment demands.
The acting remains, as it always does, with us.
Key sources: Pope Leo XIV, Address to the College of Cardinals (May 10, 2025), collected in Peace Be With You (HarperOne, 2026); Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1962) and “Rain and the Rhinoceros” (1965); W.H. Ferry et al., “The Triple Revolution” (1964); Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891); Pope John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (1961).
