The frame
The real frame is not “Pope versus sister.” Instead, it is two thoughtful responses to the question at the heart of all my teaching, writing, and work, Merton’s question: what is happening to the human person? Leo XIV says remain. Ilia Delio says become. The post’s real value comes from the practitioner’s judgment between these answers, which is more compelling than simply taking Delio’s side or the pope’s.
A note for the summary. Delio is sharper than just “an opportunity for deeper imagination.” Her main point is what Leo missed. She concludes his answer is “too small for the tradition it invokes” and for the moment it addresses. She praises him generously, affirming his defense of finitude as the medium of love and the wisdom of the cross. Yet in the end, she critiques him rather than simply adding to his ideas. Read and understand her argument clearly and strongly.
Opening story
Teilhard himself represents the argument in a small way. He died in New York on Easter Sunday, 10 April 1955. For thirty years, his superiors kept his theological work from being published. In 1925, they removed him from his teaching post in Paris, and after a visit to Rome in October 1948, he realized he would never be allowed to publish The Phenomenon of Man. In a hastily written note, he named his secretary, Jeanne Mortier, a laywoman, as his literary heir, and she ensured the manuscripts were published.
On 30 June 1962, the Holy Office responded with a monitum urging seminary rectors and university presidents to protect young minds from his works. (I am grateful that did not happen where I went to college & theology) The Vatican reaffirmed it in 1981. Then the tone changed. Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI each spoke of him with respect. In 2015, Francis cited him approvingly in footnote 53 of Laudato Si’, and in Mongolia in 2023 he called Teilhard often misunderstood. In 2017, the Pontifical Council for Culture asked Francis to lift the monitum. He never formally did. Now, in 2026, Teilhard’s thought is being used to answer a pope.
Here is remain versus become, shown by the Church itself: a vision once strongly resisted, then slowly accepted.
A note on accuracy. The monitum has never been formally lifted. Under Francis, only the tone changed, not the law. Those who know the history will notice, and this gap actually strengthens the argument. On paper, the Church remains; in practice, it has become something else.
The movements
1. A social encyclical, not a tech memo. I want to present Leo’s argument in its strongest form first. He signed Magnifica Humanitas on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, intentionally placing AI where Leo XIII placed industrialization. His point is clearer than what the press reported. He argued that the real issue is anthropology, not just ethical limits, because big platforms can work around any ethical code. After thirty-five years in the emerging technology industry, I can confirm that.
2. One verb. This is Delio’s main point. She sees remain as a symptom: it treats the image of God as something to protect rather than a process to experience. She also says that if people are naturally relational, then new networks of machine relationships become the next stage of personhood, not its end. Here Teilhard’s distinction matters. Transhumanism uses technology to escape the body. Ultrahumanism uses it to help humanity grow into deeper consciousness.
3. Where God is. This is the deepest layer, and most readers will miss it unless it is made clear. Delio says that in the encyclical, the divine always acts on humans from outside, following Thomistic tradition. She argues this pushes God out of the inner life. She says this explains something Leo sees but cannot explain: people turning to AI for advice, companionship, even love, and projecting a sense of the sacred onto the machine.
4. The practitioner’s objection. This is where my perspective adds value. “Next medium” is the same language I used in my strategy work. A become approach to anthropology can be controlled or captured by whoever owns the medium, and inevitability is a common sales pitch in the industry. Leo’s instinct for governance is important. It is the same instinct as a CISO’s. Delio admits that Teilhard worried convergence could lead to totalitarianism, and that Leo and Teilhard agree on the risk but have different solutions: governance and protection versus deepening the inner life. Both are needed.
5. Merton as the hinge. This is the post’s unique idea. Merton’s true self isn’t made up, which supports Leo: it’s given and worth protecting. But it is found only through an inner journey, which supports Delio. My earlier point that a recommendation engine feeds the false self matches Delio’s idea about projection. Leo points out the threat. Delio points out the hunger. Merton explains what the hunger is really for.
6. Where Merton and Delio meet. The hinge holds because Merton and Delio are not strangers. They share four touch points, and one honest disagreement.
She found him first. Delio, who earned a doctorate in pharmacology before turning to theology, has written that she discovered Merton while working in a laboratory. New Seeds of Contemplation (New Directions, 1961) shaped her. (On a side note here, I highly recommend everyone read that book. It changed my life.) Her reading: God does not want us to become anything other than the true self God has loved from eternity. That sentence carries both verbs. The self is given from eternity, which is Leo’s remain. It still has to be discovered, which is Delio’s become. Merton’s own phrase is “to discover myself in discovering God.”
Merton read Teilhard, and was censored too. Merton’s early essay on The Divine Milieu, “The Universe as Epiphany,” raised his order’s censors’ suspicions. It appeared only after his death, in Love and Living. The monk and the paleontologist shared the same drawer. Let that settle in for the moment.
The interior is the remedy. Delio diagnoses people as seeking God in the machine because tradition emptied the interior. Merton’s false self is the same figure from the other side: a constructed self looking outside for confirmation. Both locate the cure inside: Delio through Teilhard’s “within” of things and Tillich’s ground of being, Merton through contemplation.
Neither is against technology. On 5 June 1966 Merton gave a talk to the Gethsemani novices, “The Christian in a Technological World.” He argued that technology is not opposed to spirituality, but has become a great temptation that can deaden the spirit. Delio says technology must serve the interior life and cannot replace it. That is the same sentence in two vocabularies.
Where they part. In 1967 Merton reviewed Henri de Lubac’s The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin for Commonweal as “Teilhard’s Gamble.” He was far more critical than in his early essay, judging Teilhard’s wager on the human species a bigger gamble than Pascal’s. Here Merton stands nearer to Leo: drawn to the vision, wary of the optimism, insistent on limits. That is also the practitioner’s position. Merton gives the post its synthesis: Delio’s interiority, held inside Leo’s limits.
7. Where Catholic Social Teaching comes in. This is the bridge to the class lecture called “Who Is in Control? Faith, AI, and the Future of Being Human.” For more than 130 years, Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has asked one question in changing forms: what do we owe one another when the world of work moves beneath our feet? Rerum Novarum asked it of the factory in 1891. Magnifica Humanitas asks it of AI. Leo’s insistence that technology is never neutral, because it carries the character of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it, is exactly the point Delio praises. On the diagnosis, the pope and the sister stand together.
Gaudium et Spes already holds both verbs. The Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, promulgated 7 December 1965, states in article 5 that the human race has moved from a static concept of reality to a more dynamic, evolutionary one. That is become, written into a council document a decade after Teilhard’s death. Henri de Lubac later said the constitution expressed precisely what Teilhard had sought to do. The same document’s chapter on the dignity of the human person (articles 12–22) is remain. Catholic Social Teaching never had to choose. Delio is asking Leo to recover what the Church already taught.
Merton helped shape it. Merton wrote to council delegates supporting Schema 13’s provisions against modern war, the draft that became Gaudium et Spes, and published “Schema XIII: An Open Letter to the American Hierarchy” in 1965. The monk in this argument is not borrowed from outside CST. He worked inside its founding modern document.
Work is where Leo is strongest. CST’s labor tradition holds that the person is the subject of work, never its instrument. That is why labor displacement is the encyclical’s firmest ground, and why a become anthropology still has to answer the worker whose job the system just priced out.
The method travels. Joseph Cardijn’s See-Judge-Act, which John XXIII commended in Mater et Magistra (1961), turns all of this into something usable on a Monday. Take one automated decision: a hiring screen, an underwriting model, a surveillance feed. See what it decides and who bears the cost. Judge it against dignity, the common good, and solidarity, and then ask Delio’s question as well: what does this system make us become? Act on both fronts: govern the medium and tend the interior. That is the evaluation tool the class promises, and it is where the pope, the sister, and the monk finally share a table.
Synthesis (get out your index card)
Defend what is given: dignity, labor, finitude.
Ask what we are becoming, and who profits from the becoming.
Govern the medium, because interior life alone will not regulate a platform.
Tend the interior, because governance alone will not answer the hunger.
Test every claim against People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity for everyone.
The return
We end with Mortier and the manuscripts: work once locked away “to protect the minds” of the young now shapes the language used to answer a pope about the minds of machines. Ideas the Church tried to hide have now become part of the conversation.
The tradition is still becoming, too.
Sources
Ilia Delio, “Teilhard de Chardin points to what Pope Leo missed in ‘Magnifica Humanitas’,” Global Sisters Report / NCR, 8 June 2026
ANSA, “Pope Leo’s first encyclical is on AI,” 18 May 2026
Ascension Press, Magnifica Humanitas
American Teilhard Association, Teilhard’s literary legacy
EWTN, text of the 1962 monitum
Angelus News on Laudato Si’ footnote 53
Zygon, Teilhard biography (1925 removal, 1948 Rome visit)
America, “Will Pope Francis remove the Vatican’s ‘warning’?” 21 November 2017
National Catholic Register, Teilhard 70 years after his death
Ilia Delio, “Discovering the true self in God with Merton’s guidance,” NCR
Richard W. Kropf, “Crying with a Live Grief: The Mysticism of Merton and Teilhard Compared,” The Merton Annual 5
Thomas Merton Center, “Teilhard’s Gamble” manuscript record (Commonweal, 1967)
Thomas Merton Center, Merton’s correspondence with Archbishop Flahiff on Schema 13
Thomas Merton Center, “Schema XIII: An Open Letter to the American Hierarchy” (1965)
Gaudium et Spes (7 December 1965), full text
John Haught, “More Being,” Commonweal, on Teilhard and Gaudium et Spes
Lutterworth Press, sample chapter on Merton’s 1966 talk “The Christian in a Technological World”