Magnifica Humanitas seen deepening Church-tech ties, former Silicon Valley exec says

Relationships between tech companies and the Church will prompt “real dialogue as to how AI is going to affect humanity,” Father Brendan McGuire said.

Magnifica Humanitas has opened the doors for deeper conversations between the Church and the tech industry regarding “how AI is going to affect humanity,” priest and former Silicon Valley executive Father Brendan McGuire said.

McGuire, pastor of St. Simon Parish in Los Altos, California, told “EWTN News Nightly” that tech companies are searching for “wisdom” right now, and Pope Leo’s encyclical can offer it.

The Church has “been working with the different tech companies for a number of years … directly from Rome, in the Vatican, and also here locally,” he said.

In 2024 Anthropic, an AI safety company and creator of the Claude AI system that filed to go public June 1, reached out to the Vatican for ethical guidance. McGuire helped shape Claudeʼs Constitution, the 23,000-word document governing how Claude reasons through complex moral questions.

McGuire also co-founded the Institute for Technology, Ethics, and Culture — a formal partnership between Santa Clara Universityʼs Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and the Vaticanʼs Dicastery for Culture and Education.

Earlier he had worked for the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA), an industry consortium of computer hardware manufacturers.

The Irish priest holds degrees in engineering and computer science from Trinity College Dublin and has a theology degree from St. Patrickʼs Seminary and University.

‘Engaged in deeper conversations’

“More intensely over this last year, weʼve been more deliberately, and more intentionally, engaged in deeper conversations monthly … mostly with Anthropic, and we believe this document now will be able to deepen these relationships even more,” he said.

These relationships will prompt “real dialogue as to how AI is going to affect humanity,” he said.

“I love the reframing that the pope has done” by asking “How do we have all of humanity … flourish inside of AI? Instead of the other way around,” McGuire said. “Itʼs a reframing of the whole issue.”

While some wonder if tech companies will listen to the pope’s call, McGuire said he believes they will, as people in the industry “are looking for wisdom.”

Those in the tech industry “are men and women of goodwill, and they want this AI to go well,” he said. “And if itʼs going to go well, then theyʼre going to have to have people outside of the programmers, and the mathematicians, and the technology people, and engineers.”

“They need wisdom from outside. Itʼs not just the Catholic Church. Every religious tradition needs to lean into this moment,” he said.

Reading the pope’s encyclical is ‘the most important thing’

The encyclical comes years after AI really took off, but “itʼs not true” when people say the pope’s call is too late, McGuire said.

“The technology people themselves say that itʼs not true. But I do believe that the window is closing,” he said.

The “whole intention” of the popeʼs encyclical is “to start asking those more difficult questions,” McGuire said.

The pope has asked: “What [does it] mean for a human being to flourish? What is good for all of humanity? And not what is just good for a handful of people, but what is good for all of us?”

“So what weʼve done here is raised questions more than got answers,” McGuire said. Now we must “bring about a dialogue to go for those answers.”

The “first thing I implore everyone to do is to read it,” he said. Reading it is “the most important thing” and “not relying … on soundbites from somebody else.”

The first half of the encyclical “is a survey of the previous documents of the Church and social doctrine” and it is “a great summary of them,” he said.

Then, focus on reading “Chapter 3 on artificial intelligence” and “Chapter 4 [on] the impact of it.”

Pope Leo “uses two biblical metaphors” that “are beautiful and really important”: the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem by Nehemiah, he said.

He is “basically saying we donʼt want to go back to the Tower of Babel, where everyone builds it for their own … purposes,” he said. Instead, it must be like the city Jerusalem where “everyone has a role. Every family, every person, every engineer, every journalist, every philosopher.”

“Everyone needs to play a role, and we need to engage with this because it will, in large part, determine our future as a humanity,” McGuire said.