Published June 15, 2026
Several topics will be discussed at the consistory of cardinals called by Pope Leo XIV for June 26-29: the international situation and its effects on local Churches; key themes in the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas; the next steps in the Synod on Synodality.
At first blush, these three agenda items may seem a bit disconnected. In fact, they are closely linked by what the Pope rightly identified in his encyclical as the civilizational crisis of the moment: the deep confusions over the very nature and destiny of the human person.
Despite its now being pigeon-holed as “the AI encyclical,” Magnifica Humanitas pointedly asks us to reflect deeply on the question posed in the Bronze Age by Psalm 8: “What is man…?” (Ps 8:4). For that is the ultimate question posed by the development of artificial intelligence: Who are we? Are we simply walking algorithms, about to be outdone in computional, then cognitive, then decision-making capacity by other algorithms? Are our capacities for love, regret, shame, altruism, wickedness, compassion, speculative thought, and learning from our mistakes merely a function of neural connections in our brains that for millennia we mistakenly thought of as “consciousness”–connections that can be replicated, even improved upon, by the development of what is known as General Artificial Intelligence?
The answer biblical religion gives to that question is the answer implied by the key paragraph, #99, in Magnifica Humanitas: algorithms, no matter how refined, do not and cannot have souls, and the immortal soul, created by God, is what differentiates the human person from everything else in creation. It is that “ensouledness” that is the ultimate reason why we can discern right from wrong, distinguish the noble from the base, feel shame when we choose what degrades others and ourselves, repent, and rise from the dust to try to do better in the future with the help of grace.
The defense and promotion of that biblical idea of Who We Are is thus the connection between the three consistorial topics.
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George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Catholic Studies Program. A Catholic theologian and New York Times bestselling author, he is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading authorities on the Catholic Church and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He served as president of EPPC from 1989-1996.
