CNA Staff, Jun 6, 2025 / 10:31 am (CNA).
Catholic bishops from Maryland, Delaware, and Washington, D.C., released a pastoral letter this week addressing the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the Church’s response to the numerous challenges and opportunities the technology presents.
Signed by Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, Wilmington Bishop William Koenig, and Maryland’s four auxiliary bishops, the letter, titled “The Face of Christ in a Digital Age,” urges Christians to discern “how to speak and live the Gospel amid the new language and powers emerging through artificial intelligence.”
Released ahead of the solemnity of Pentecost, the bishops write that Christians should not fear the rapid development of technology, which “is not foreign to the Spirit’s work, for God’s Spirit moves through history, culture, and human creativity.”
However, the bishops write: “Will we allow technology to form us in its image — or will we shape it according to the Gospel?”
The Catholic Church “must be a prophetic voice, calling the world to place the human person, made in the image of God, at the heart of this transformation,” the letter states.
“No matter how advanced machines become, they can never replicate the soul, the conscience, or the eternal destiny that belongs to each human being,” the bishops argue in the letter.
The letter highlights AI’s potential benefits to humanity in the realms of health care, education, evangelization, and humanitarian efforts while warning of its risks, including job displacement and the use of lethal autonomous weapons, as well as the manipulation of truth.
In order to teach discernment in an era where digitally fabricated content blurs the line between truth and falsehood and reality and fantasy, the bishops strongly emphasize a focus on the development of virtue, especially regarding the formation of conscience.
“It is essential that we form consciences capable of discernment — especially among young people — so that they may not be manipulated by algorithms but by truth and grace,” the prelates write. “Digital tools can inform, but they cannot form the heart.”
The bishops call for parishes and families to ground digital engagement and media literacy in Scripture and the sacramental life and admonish the faithful to cultivate real “empathy and authentic relationships.”
Michael Hanby, a professor of religion and philosophy of science at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, told CNA that while the document “identifies some obvious dangers with AI as well as some good uses to which it can be put,” it does not go far enough.
“There are other dangers,” Hanby continued, “especially the reduction of human intelligence ordered to understanding the truth, to a ‘functional intelligence without thinking or understanding,’ that the letter doesn’t really address.”
“It is built into the logic of technology, and especially technologies as powerful as this, that there are dangers that we simply cannot foresee. We have not yet fully comprehended this new kind of power,” Hanby said.
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education addressed the same concerns as Hanby in a note issued in January titled “Antique et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence.”
“The Christian tradition regards the gift of intelligence as an essential aspect of how humans are created ‘in the image of God’ (Gn 1:27),” the note stated, emphasizing that “one of the goals of this technology is to imitate the human intelligence that designed it.”
The dicastery acknowledged fears that AI could achieve a kind of superintelligence that “could one day eclipse the human person,” though some welcome this possibility.
“We do not know yet whether AI is simply a ‘tool’ that can be used or shaped according to the Gospel,” Hanby told CNA. “I wish the letter had emphasized more strongly the need for more philosophical thinking about this, and I wish it had taken a little more care to distinguish the movement of the Spirit, which is a mystery, from the history of technological progress. But then again, the letter presents an open-ended challenge, not the final word.”
Drawing parallels to other historical technological shifts like the invention of the printing press and the advent of the internet, the bishops in their letter encourage Catholics to approach AI with courage and hope, invoking the Holy Spirit to “renew the face of the earth” (Ps 104:30).
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The bishops speak clearly of “empathy and authentic relationships.”
Two supporting and incisive insights, one from the Jewish Edith Stein and the other from the Jesuit Jean Abele (both extracted from my book: “Beyond Secularism and Jihad: A Triangular Inquiry into the Mosque, the Manger & Modernity,” University Press of America, 2012):
“[Still before her conversion] Edith Stein, one of six million souls incinerated into eternity at Auschwitz, shows us the reality of each human person: ‘The most exact statement of all that Frederick the Great did from the day of his birth up to his last breath does not give us a glimmer of the spirit which, transforming, reached into the history of Europe. Yet the understanding glance [!] may seize upon this in a chance remark in a short letter.’ Stein discovers that recognition of the givenness of the other and of the self as an ‘I’ is an act ‘completely attributable to spirit . . . without parallel in physical nature’ (Edith Stein, translated by Waltraut Stein, “On the Problem of Empathy,” Washington D.C.: ICS Publications, 1989, p. 113). Rather than a random data point in the speechless depths of space, each person is more of a divine holiday that the Lord is willing to celebrate for all eternity if man is also willing.”
“[The Catholic] Jean Abele, SJ, a contributor to a series that includes his “Christianity and Science,” explores the fit between the irreducible mystery of the human person and the incontestable productivity of the scientific method. He makes this comparison: ‘It is clear that this (scientific) method rests on a choice [!], namely, that of the relations that can recur in identical conditions. It therefore leaves quite to one side the universe of persons, since the latter is in fact formed on what is not repeatable, for each person brings to the sum total of other persons his own originality and his own irreplaceable contribution [!] . . . [Further] Religion is in fact essentially a relationship of the person of man and the person of God’ (Jean Abele, S.J., “Christianity and Science,” Vol. 14 of the Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Hawthorne Books, 1961, p. 120).”