Humanity has always struggled with authority and trust. Rather than recognizing God as the author of all creation and choosing to avoid evil and do good in freedom, even we believers try to tell God how the world should be.
In the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius identifies these tendencies and categorizes them into three types of people. The first desires to follow God’s will but fails to act. The second desires to follow God’s will, but acts only as convenient to his or her own desire and attachments, in a sense, wanting to direct God. However, Ignatius exhorts us to become the third type of person, surrendering all and fully acting in accordance with God’s will.
Which type of man or woman, whose labors build and affect societies, are we?
Our desire for self-preservation
Humanity’s natural desire for self-preservation, which required the physical and mental labor of our forebears, serves as the touchstone for ongoing scientific development and technological innovation. This desire extends to human flourishing, and now, with Artificial Intelligence (AI), we have another giant stepping stone in humanity’s progress.
Socio-historical advances have occurred since the beginning of human history, including tools from the Stone and Metal Ages and the advent of agricultural innovations in the Neolithic period, which allowed our nomadic ancestors to settle in one place. Today, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is upon us; following the steam, electrical, and computer/information revolutions, we are in the midst of the AI revolution.1
Two basic industrial and labor relations concerns are: 1) management’s use of AI could lead to Orwellian surveillance of workers, and 2) job losses. The mainstream press has not reported rampant employee privacy breaches, and U.S. workers have not faced massive layoffs. Some work can now be performed exclusively by AI, while other jobs use AI to assist. Work life will change dramatically, but as with the advent of the telephone and the automobile, AI will be a boon to the world.
Telephone operators, elevator operators, and shape-up dock workers were members of labor unions until technological innovations (automatic switchboards, automated elevators, and containerization) took hold. Although fewer longshoremen remain, the International Longshoremen’s Association negotiated arbitration procedures for automated technology in 2025.2 Nevertheless, robotic crane operations are inevitable.
Workers and their families faced similar challenges during the well-studied English Luddite uprisings, from 1811 to 1816. Even before the Luddites, French “machine-breaking” workers participated in the French Revolution.3 Despite fears of industrialization, England and France have more employed workers today than at any other time in their history.
While each earlier industrial revolution displaced some workers and required responses to job losses, over time, as technological advancements occurred, the number of jobs has always increased. During the automation revolution, the advent of washers, dryers, and other home appliances enabled women to work outside the home.
The AI influence and U.S. workers
After re-election, President Trump rescinded Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14110, which called for a “…Safe, Secure and Trustworthy Use of Artificial Intelligence.” Trump’s Executive Order 14409 promotes U.S. leadership in AI. Biden’s order explicitly protected workers, especially organized labor, from AI harassment and required greater government oversight of AI development. President Trump’s order focuses on strengthening the nation through AI by collaborating with the private sector to advance technology, enhance security, and prevent crime.
Trump’s subsequent America’s AI Action Plan likens the AI industrial revolution to the space race and underscores the importance of the American workforce:
First, American workers are central to the Trump Administration’s AI policy. The Administration will ensure that our Nation’s workers and their families gain from the opportunities created in the technological revolution. The AI infrastructure buildout will create high-paying jobs for American workers. And the breakthroughs in medicine, manufacturing, and many other fields that AI will enable will raise the standard of living for all Americans. AI will improve the lives of Americans by complementing their work—not replacing it.4
Trump’s Executive Orders 14277, “Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth,” and 14278, “Preparing Americans for High-Paying Skilled Trade Jobs of the Future,” confirm the rapid development of AI and its monumental impact on work. One stated goal is to help workers in labor sectors experiencing job loss by providing “Rapid Response funds…to proactively upskill workers at risk of future displacement” and “Train a Skilled Workforce for AI Infrastructure,” in other words, career and technical education.5
A case of human reasoning and will without God
Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas addresses this latest Industrial Revolution from the perspective of faith and reason. He calls our time a “change of era” and encourages all people of goodwill to build a city where they dwell with God in communion, rather than a confusing Tower of Babel in a misguided attempt to become godlike.
Leo XIV’s papal name suggests that Leo XIII will serve as a guide for his papacy. In 1879, Leo XIII underscored the Church’s debt to the scholastic philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas in Aeterni Patris. He also wrote the 1891 Encyclical Rerum Novarum, which is the foundation of modern Catholic social teaching. Among his roughly 80 Encyclicals, he wrote Humanum Genus and Arcanum Divinae, which remain useful today for Catholic discernment and for labor’s responses to family, work, and AI.
According to Pope Leo XIII’s 1884 Encyclical Humanum Genus, Rationalism and Deism were errors found in Freemasonry, representing secular attempts to deny Divine revelation in Scripture and the true presence in the sacraments. It was a rejection of the faith and Church teaching and a threat to the Christian moral order. Rationalism elevates human reason above our religious faith. Freemasonry mistakenly set aside the revelatory understanding of Christianity. Neither the “Great Architect” of Freemasonry nor the developing presence and power of today’s AI is a member of the Holy Trinity.
In Catholicism, scripture and the sacraments are foundational to a believer’s understanding of God’s continual, real presence in our lives. Pope Leo XIII, exercising his authority, denounced a non-transcendent, non-God-centered, rationalistic worldview of his era. Christians follow God’s will through faith and reason, even when this entails suffering and rejection, regardless of the historical era.
Recognizing the great wonder and potential benefits of AI, Catholics must acknowledge that misguided AI algorithms, despite their immense computational power, can produce harmful responses and outcomes. Reports of people taking their own lives after receiving AI advice are not unheard of.
How many other biased or questionable search responses lead to mistaken decisions and immoral choices, especially when AI caters to users’ mistaken desires?
AI does not have a moral conscience; human beings do. In Soulless Intelligence: How AI Proves We Need God, brothers Greg and Bryan Trilli ask how to align AI’s responses with our intentions and, more fundamentally, what a person intends as the good for himself and others. This “alignment problem,” the link between AI’s results and our good intentions, is essential for AI developers and users.
As an extreme and dreadful example, AI, with its power untempered by moral reflection, could conceivably suggest eliminating human beings to stop environmental degradation. Such a course would obviously disregard the good intentions of thoughtful people.
Catholics and this changing era
In the face of powerful secular forces, Catholics believe they come from God, and protecting their existence requires an AI that upholds the sanctity of human life across all possible algorithms. Pew Research reports that 75.8% of the world’s population belongs to some form of religion, indicating a dominant belief in a spiritual and/or moral life.
Although individual philosophers have rejected the existence of the human soul since ancient times, it is only in the past two centuries that Westerners have begun to deny its existence as a matter of cultural belief.
Friedrich Nietzsche argued that Western philosophy had killed God, meaning God was dead to people. In his writings, he attributed the “death of God,” in part, to Immanuel Kant’s Enlightenment philosophy.
Pope Leo XIII did not explicitly address Nietzsche’s outright rejection of God, but aware of the cultural drift, he reminded Catholics and others that humanity relies on the Creator. Today, Leo XIV has counseled us not to build the proverbial Tower of Babel with AI, affirming what Leo XIII observed in religious and cultural terms more than a century earlier.
AI and St. Thomas Aquinas
AI will never even approach what Thomists call a non-rational animal soul, which entails “[an animal’s] desires to respond to stimuli in [its] environment, or to seek growth, nutrition, reproduction, or self-preservation.”6 Therefore, AI will never possess human autonomy or a rational human soul. AI is a useful tool that can and will do much good, but it can also cause great harm if used by immoral people.
As an analogy, consider the ongoing struggle to halt the development and use of nuclear arms, born of human discovery and technological know-how. In the worst case, AI without fail-safe measures is equivalent to an unchecked nuclear arms race; science and technology alone cannot prevent immoral use. In the end, only moral human beings can.
Catholics, made in the image of God, have the Scripture, the sacraments, and the Church’s moral and social teaching. While others may not accept our belief in God, they, too, are better off when they protect their own lives, the lives of those they love, or even the lives of strangers.
AI already solves challenging problems and reaches intellectual capacities we will never possess; we will need to continue to see, judge, and act with faith and reason when using this tool. We are autonomous; AI is not.
Decisions about right and wrong rely on our sound moral judgment because AI will never possess a human soul. AI providers also determine AI’s “morality and ethics,” so their employees and end users must exercise a high degree of social responsibility and personal vigilance.
The Church teaches that intrinsic evil, such as racism, exists. AI needs a moral understanding of intrinsic evil; otherwise, it could also conceivably justify killing innocent, helpless human beings, another intrinsic evil. At a minimum, AI system developers need to implement fail-safe measures that prioritize respect for human life and promote flourishing families and communities.
AI determines what is good through its search engine algorithm. The Trilli brothers make a telling point:
If human rights come from a human-based organization, that same human-based organization can take them away. If they come from God, they are guaranteed to all humans, even if a government tries to deny them.7
Immanuel Kant’s outsized influence on humanity’s social concerns
Immanuel Kant advocated structuring one’s life around the categorical imperative to act in accord with moral duties. For instance, promising to fulfill an obligation to another person and then reneging on it defeats the purpose of a “promise.” Following Kant, reasonable people do not want to make breaking promises, i.e., lying, the standard for their communities, or chaos would ensue.
Today’s human rights activism, in part, stems from Kant’s deontological thinking. Kant’s reasoning is logical, but it has weaknesses regarding Christian faith, as any person or group can create their own list of rights and demand them. This easily distorted path led to Nietzsche’s view that “God is dead” and, consequently, to his teaching others to live by their “will to power.” As a result, some men now demand their right to play women’s sports and use women’s bathrooms, attempting to create new norms. Kant and the Enlightenment thinkers had “killed God”—that is, faith in God.
The Thomistic teleological view of creation emphasizes our movement toward an end rather than living by Kant’s too easily dismissed categorical imperative, which has diminished faith in God in the West.
As Aquinas understood it, we are rational animals with a soul and an end, capable of living as God’s sons and daughters through faith and reason.
Today, human rights discourse and language often focus on a person’s emotions (though not what Kant intended), without acknowledging the teleological reality of human existence, which requires faith, reason, and sacrifice to fulfill God’s call. This view obviously includes family and work life.
The Church Recognizes Marriage and Family—Procreation—as God-given; does AI?
Catholic social doctrine concerning Christian ends, as articulated by Leo XIII in 1891, has been followed by every subsequent Pope to this day. Unfortunately, postmodernists will reduce rights language to “This—act or speech—is my right,” a pride-filled view that has permeated the lie of “secular humanism” over the last century and has entered the workplace, education, and some Catholic institutions. Will AI promote questionable rights?
Pope Francis condemned the German Bishops’ Synodal Way, which catered to secular humanist demands, as an “ideological” and “elitist” mistake.8 Catholic teleological thinking, as articulated in Leo XIII’s documents and in later papal encyclicals, requires both study and action. Attempts to dismiss the Church’s teaching on human sexuality, marriage, and the family are as important as any concern about AI.
The importance of the family and the role of marriage between a man and a woman are clearly affirmed in Magnifica Humanitas.
“The family is a primary social good. Founded on the enduring union between a man and a woman, it is the first environment where all persons develop their potential, become aware of their dignity, and learn the earliest forms of truth and goodness, internalizing the habits that prepare them for life in society” (Magnifica Humanitas Para. 165).
Magnifica Humanitas does not address the contemporary radical challenges to the truth that marriage is between a man and a woman. But Section Two reminds readers that marriage between a man and a woman and the family they create is fundamental to Catholic social teaching.
Good work is essential to family life. However, individuals and groups, both inside and outside the Church, use human rights language, rooted in Kantian philosophy—then twisted by Nietzsche’s atheistic will to power—to challenge the Church’s teaching on marriage, the family, and human sexuality.
Opponents of Church teaching have organized and lobbied under the postmodern banner of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, a banner that is easily distorted and manipulated. At times, they seek to override God-given human nature. The media and social networks promote this effort, and some in the house of labor mistakenly preach it.
In 1997, AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, lobbied for the creation of Pride at Work, but he faced opposition because Executive Council members did not view LGBTQ issues as collective bargaining issues (union contracts did not discriminate against homosexuals) and because advocates could raise their issues within their affiliated unions.
Despite opposition from members of the AFL-CIO Executive Council, some of whom abstained from the final vote, Pride at Work became an official AFL-CIO organization.9 Sweeney and the AFL-CIO contributed to postmodern rights language and demands that reject any surrender to the will of God.
Leo XIII and Leo XIV, pastors and students of the social condition
Leo XIII set forth the true ends of marriage in his succinct Encyclical Arcanum Divinae on Christian Marriage (February 10, 1880). In his era and ours, marriage has suffered from the cultural acceptance of divorce.
He argued that marriage benefited the state, citing Augustine’s view that marriage served the couple and their family by enabling them to live well and happily (Arcanum Divinae, Para. 5). Citing Ephesians 2:19, Leo XIII calls the couple “fellow citizens with the saints, and the domestics of God” (Arcanum Divinae, Para. 10).
Leo XIII addressed the industrial-era challenges of the late 19th century with a clear-eyed critique of Rationalism and Deism, while underscoring the foundational importance of traditional marriage and the family. Anthony Esolen offers an excellent explanation of Leo XIII’s pastoral understanding in Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching: A Defense of the Church’s True Teachings on Marriage, Family, and the State (Sophia Press, 2014). Some social justice activists have dismissed the fullness of Catholic social teaching, using the Synodal Way to promote incompatible, ideological visions of marriage and the family.
Pope Leo XIV has publicly reminded Catholics and the world, like every pope before him, that marriage is between a man and a woman.
Humanity’s loss of faith
Today’s attempts to diminish traditional marriage and the family are what the Christian theologian Carl Trueman calls the desecration of humanity. This desecration stems from the substitution of God with “nothing” (nihilism). He writes:
In shattering the moral limits, the obligations, and the teleology that originally rested on an understanding of man as made in the divine image, we have paradoxically reduced ourselves.10
The result of humanity’s desecration is a disrespect for life, the decline of marriage and the family, the cultural acceptance of the deadly sins, the loss of community, and, as Trueman writes, a tendency to “revel in an ecstatic destruction of all that was once considered sacred.”11 By insulting and defiling people, places, and things of faith, postmodernists mistakenly seek satisfaction in becoming godlike, following the Nietzschean path.
This reality requires a rededication to our consecration to God, which demands commitment and follow-through, namely the actual practice of the Faith. Trueman advises a return to “creed, cult, and code,” that is, a profession of faith, liturgy, and moral teaching.12
A productive tool when utilized with a holy purpose
Artificial Intelligence, like the computer, Internet, and cell phone (all introduced during the lifetimes of many), will be a boon to humanity when accessed and used for holy purposes. In the case of organized labor, its leaders and members need to recognize nihilism at work within their ranks and society at large. The destruction of the family will not benefit labor.
The AI revolution offers an opportunity to invest more in supporting and developing families. Perhaps a shorter workweek with just compensation will give breadwinners more time with the young, the elderly, and family members facing challenges. Livable wages or a guaranteed income tied to communal efforts in extracurricular activities in the arts, sports, and other reasonable pursuits will provide meaning and sustenance.
Happy Labor Day!
Endnotes:
1 Frey, Carl Benedikt, The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation, Princeton University Press, 2019, Kindle Version, 305.
2 Ibid., 201.
3 Machine Breaking, Encyclopedia.com.
5 Ibid., 7.
6 Ibid., 101.
7 Ibid., 171
8 Allen, Elise Ann, Pope criticizes German reform process as “ideological” and made by “elites”, CRUX, January 26, 2023.
9 Pride at Work, Wikipedia.
10Trueman, Carl, The Desecration of Man: How the Rejection of God Degrades Our Humanity, Sentinel, Penguin Random House, 2026, Kindle Version, 186.
11 Ibid., x.
12 Ibid., 209.
If you value the news and views Catholic World Report provides, please consider donating to support our efforts. Your contribution will help us continue to make CWR available to all readers worldwide for free, without a subscription. Thank you for your generosity!
Click here for more information on donating to CWR. Click here to sign up for our newsletter.
Leave a Reply