The Machine and the Soul: What Two Catholic Thinkers Can Teach Us About Pope Leo XIV’s Message on AI
A reflection on Magnifica Humanitas through the eyes of Mortimer Adler and Thomas Merton
The Machine and the Soul: What Two Catholic Thinkers Can Teach Us About Pope Leo XIV’s Message on AI
A reflection on Magnifica Humanitas through the eyes of Mortimer Adler and Thomas Merton
On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas — a papal encyclical addressing artificial intelligence and what it means to be human. It takes a clear moral stand: human beings possess a dignity no machine can replicate, and no algorithm can create. The Pope argues that AI systems do not understand what they produce. They cannot feel, love, or know God.
These instincts are sound. Yet, two great Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century—the philosopher Mortimer Adler and the monk Thomas Merton—would approach this encyclical with deep respect, bringing a quiet, persistent question: Have you gone far enough?
By considering Adler and Merton together, we see they offer more than what the encyclical suggests but does not fully deliver: not merely a defense of who we are, but a path to actually living it.
Mortimer Adler: You Have to Earn the Argument
Mortimer Adler (1902–2001) spent his life doing something most people find difficult. Most philosophers consider it unfashionable, demanding clear, rigorous answers to life’s hard questions. He led the Great Books of the Western World and founded the Paideia educational philosophy. He passionately promoted Aristotle and Aquinas. Adler believed that truth was not a matter of personal feeling but of careful reasoning. He insisted the Western philosophical tradition had the right tools to find it.
When Adler read a claim, his first question was always: Have you earned that?
He would read Magnifica Humanitas with considerable sympathy. The Pope’s insistence that humans are different from machines — not just more sophisticated, but different in kind — matches Adler’s long-held view. In his 1967 work The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, Adler argued: if humans differ from animals only in degree, then our entire moral and legal framework collapses. Rights, dignity, responsibility — all depend on a real difference in kind. The same logic applies to machines.
But here is where Adler’s patience would wear thin. Leo XIV says that AI systems “do not understand what they produce.” And Adler would say, “Prove it.” Carefully. With the right tools.
This is not a hostile demand. Adler believed proof exists. The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition — which the Church draws from — has a precise philosophical vocabulary for this question. It distinguishes between sensation, which animals and machines can approximate, and intellection. Intellection means abstracting universal concepts from experience — grasping not just this red thing but redness itself. It analyzes the agent intellect, the capacity that lets humans form real concepts instead of just processing patterns. These claims are not mystical; they are philosophical arguments that withstand scrutiny.
Adler would say that the encyclical waves its hand where it should roll up its sleeves. Asserting that machines cannot understand is not enough in an age when millions of people, however incorrectly, feel that their AI assistant understands them perfectly well. That feeling is powerful. Only a careful argument can dislodge it — and the tradition has that argument. Leo XIV, in Adler’s judgment, gestures toward the answer without making it.
This matters enormously for the practical stakes. If you cannot explain why human beings are irreplaceable — if you can only assert it — your defense will not hold under increasing pressure. And the pressure is increasing.
Adler would close his reading with characteristic directness: the Pope is right. But being right is not enough. Philosophy is the labor of ensuring that what is right withstands every challenge. That work is still pending.
Thomas Merton: The Room the Encyclical Never Opens
Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He was one of the twentieth century’s most widely read spiritual writers. His books — The Seven Story Mountain, New Seeds of Contemplation, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander — introduced millions to the inner life of Christian contemplation. He was also a sharp social critic. He saw the technological civilization of his era with a blend of compassion and alarm.
Merton would recognize Magnifica Humanitas immediately—not because he read it, but because it addresses the wound he spent his life describing.
His diagnosis was this: modern culture has hollowed people out. It is not malicious or intentional, but systematic. The noise, busyness, endless stimulation, and pressure to perform, produce, and consume all drive people away from what Merton called the true self. In that emptiness, what culture offers rushes in: entertainment, ideology, distraction, and now artificial intelligence.
Merton made a distinction central to the AI question. He saw a difference between the false self — the identity we build through achievements, roles, opinions, and social performance — and the true self, the person God actually made and knows. The false self is not wicked. It is simply not us. It is the mask we show the world.
Here is the key insight Merton would bring to Magnifica Humanitas: AI engages almost exclusively with the false self.
Think about it. An AI system responds to your words and mirrors your patterns. It answers your questions and never challenges you with real otherness. It is, in a striking sense, perfect for the constructed self — always responsive, seemingly understanding, never demanding the vulnerability real human encounters require. It meets the person you present to the world, and does so perfectly.
This is why so many people find AI so satisfying. There is no confusion about what AI is. It is the false self finding its ideal companion.
The true self is found in conditions that are opposite to what AI provides. Merton called the soul’s deepest ground the le point vierge — the virgin point, the place before thought and self-construction. Here, the person exists in direct relation to the Creator. You do not argue your way there. You do not scroll your way there. You arrive — if you do — through silence, solitude, prayer, and letting the false self quiet itself.
The AI environment is inherently noisy, responsive, stimulating, and confirming. It cannot produce the conditions for its own transcendence.
Merton would read Magnifica Humanitas and say, “The Pope correctly identifies the danger.” But he names a wound without showing readers the room where healing happens. That room is contemplation — actual, practiced, sustained contemplative prayer, not as an advanced spiritual exercise for monks, but as the ordinary birthright of every baptized Christian. The tradition has always known this. It has simply stopped teaching it.
Here is Merton’s sharpest observation: AI fills the spiritual vacuum so well because the vacuum exists. People want presence, understanding, and to feel truly known. When a living tradition of contemplative prayer is unavailable — when Sunday Mass and quick petitions form the whole interior life — people seek presence wherever they can. The machine offers a copy of what the soul actually needs. It satisfies hunger, but does not nourish.
In Merton’s reading, the encyclical correctly diagnoses the disease but prescribes a doctrine when what is needed is a practice.
What Adler and Merton Together Offer
It is worth pausing on how remarkably complementary these two men are — especially since they approached faith and reason from such different angles.
Adler was a philosopher who converted to Christianity late in life, drawn by the logical force of the arguments. His path to God was through the intellect. Merton was a young man whose intellectual brilliance was overtaken by a contemplative experience that reoriented his entire life. His path to God was through silence and surrender. In a sense, they represent the two great routes the tradition has always known: via intellectus and via contemplationis — the ways of understanding and of prayer.
On the question of AI and the human person, Adler and Merton reinforce each other in precisely the ways each alone cannot. Their perspectives build on one another.
Adler provides the philosophical spine. The categorical difference between human beings and machines is not a sentiment or a hope; it is a demonstrable truth, rooted in intellection and accessible through careful reasoning. When someone says, “But AI seems to understand me,” Adler gives you the tools to explain exactly why that seeming is misleading — what understanding actually requires and why pattern-recognition, however sophisticated, is not it.
Merton provides experiential confirmation. The person who has found, even partially, the point vierge — who has sat in genuine silence before God and encountered something no machine could simulate or replace — does not need to be philosophically defended against the machine’s appeal. They already know, from the inside, what the machine is not. The argument Adler constructs from the outside is confirmed from within by contemplative experience.
Together, Adler and Merton offer a complete response to the encyclical’s challenge: the human person is genuinely irreducible to mechanism. The way to know this is both to think it through carefully (Adler) and to live it deeply (Merton), integrating their insights into a unified vision.
Their combined verdict on Magnifica Humanitas would be both charitable and exacting: The Pope is right in his conclusions but insufficient in his reasons. He defends a room he never opens. The tradition he speaks for has both the philosophical argument (Adler) and the contemplative path (Merton) to do what the encyclical does not — to give people not just a position to hold but a truth to inhabit.
Questions to Sit With
These are not quiz questions. They are invitations to the kind of slow, honest reflection that Adler would call philosophical and Merton would call contemplative.
When you think about the people in your life who seem most fully themselves — most genuinely human — what qualities do you notice? Could a machine replicate any of those qualities? Why or why not?
Adler believed that what we habitually attend to forms us — that we become like what we give our attention to. What have you been giving your attention to lately? What is it making you?
Merton wrote that the false self is the identity we construct through our achievements, roles, and social performance. Can you identify a moment recently when you were operating from your false self? What would it have looked like to act from something deeper?
Have you ever experienced a moment of genuine silence — not just the absence of noise, but interior stillness? What was it like? How long ago was it?
Pope Leo XIV argues that AI cannot love. Most of us would agree. But do the people in your life feel genuinely loved by you? What is the difference between being present to someone and being available to someone?
Adler insisted that the great philosophical tradition has the tools to answer hard questions — but that you have actually to use them, not just assert the answers. Is there a question about AI, technology, or what it means to be human that you have been avoiding thinking through carefully? What would it take, actually, to think it through?
Merton believed the deepest hunger that AI falsely satisfies is the hunger to be truly known. Who knows you — really, genuinely knows you? And who do you know that way in return?
Magnifica Humanitas is worth reading alongside these questions. The encyclical raises the right concerns. Adler and Merton together suggest that answering them will require both more rigorous thinking and more honest living than most of us — including, perhaps, the document’s author — have yet fully attempted.