Top photo caption: Pope Leo XIV speaks during a visit to Sapienza University of Rome May 14, 2026. OSV News photo/Guglielmo Mangiapane, Reuters
By Paulina Guzik, OSV News
OSV News – Amid the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence and digital media, Pope Leo XIV is calling on families, schools and policymakers to forge an “educational alliance for the digital age” to protect the dignity and intellectual development of young people.
“In an era when truth is often distorted in order to serve particular interests and communication strategies, the field of education assumes decisive importance,” Pope Leo wrote.
In the newly released encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo is urging teachers, caregivers and university lecturers to not give up on a generation that could otherwise be lost to technology. And he’s starting with a quite blunt fact clearly derived from his pastoral, on the ground approach of a missionary: “Rapid technological transformations reveal just how unprepared we are on the educational level.”
“The pervasiveness of digital media” fosters “a culture of immediacy and hyper-stimulation,” Pope Leo said, giving “rise to fatigue, boredom and apathy concerning the effort required for seeking the truth.” But education stands on the other side of the barricade, the pontiff stressed, and is “a long journey requiring patience” and needing “time for development and for engagement with reality beyond appearances.”
Luke Rowe, lecturer and researcher at the Australian Catholic University, was not only happy when he read those passages – he was deeply “moved,” he said.
“I think I didn’t realize how much I was longing to hear this guidance,” he told OSV News of the encyclical. “And I think the world needs it right now.”
“There was almost a hunger for this guidance,” he said, pointing out that what struck him most reading the encyclical was that the Holy Father underlined the “the frailty of humanity and our imperfections provide the necessary backdrop for us to appreciate and call out for God’s love,” Rowe said.
– Fragility of humanity in the face of AI –
The pope wrote in his encyclical that in offering reflections on the digital continent, he hoped to “help the lay faithful and people of goodwill rediscover their duty of implementing” the principles of Catholic social doctrine principles “in their daily lives, family relationships, work and involvement in society. Thus, they will let themselves be inspired by the aim of embodying God’s love in the concrete events of life.”
The pope emphasized the danger of relying too heavily on automated systems for learning, noting that “the speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions.” Consequently, he urged society to “protect our young people from the promise of the perfect machine, from that subtle temptation which renders human thought seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.”
“With an increasingly synthetic AI driven world, we’re expected to have the answers straight away,” said Rowe, whose main areas of teaching focus on the science of learning, evidence-based teaching and health education at ACU’s Melbourne campus.
“Everything’s now neat and polished. We all have perfect grammar because we’re writing with AI on our emails,” he said. “We have perfect structured documents and perfect images.” This “synthetic world is starting to erase human imperfections, at least on the surface. And I think for me, a thriving education ecosystem requires us to see our imperfections. And hearing this – that resonated with my heart deeply,” he said after reading the encyclical.
“I felt like that was being spoken to directly,” Rowe stressed. “And I wanted to share that with my students. I want to share that with our trained educators … and I want them to know that it’s OK to be flawed, vulnerable, imperfect human beings and that there is a lot of hope for us.”
“For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change,” the pope said in his encyclical, among a number of pointed reflections on stark difference between technology and humanism.
– A major task: teaching the young how to use AI –
Addressing the specific challenges posed by the rise of artificial intelligence, the encyclical cautions that “every technology shapes those who use it.” Rather than simply adapting to new tools, the encyclical outlines that “educating people about the use of AI … involves teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used.”
Education “is to amplify and celebrate the diversity of everyone’s uniqueness and to give everyone a voice. And that’s a challenge in a world where AI is homogenizing people and giving them a script, taking away their voice … blending it into some kind of, I suppose, homogenized sludge,” Rowe told OSV News.
He said that a clear call to action in educational terms from the encyclical “is to be more careful about how we use this technology to build upon and augment the individuality of people. And what makes them unique and special is something that should be celebrated, not homogenized,” Rowe said.
The Australian professor underlined that the risk in academia is a frantic search for answers in technology, while the pope provides a genuinely human answer to big concerns.
“I have seen this technology swallow itself up every three to six months with something new. And so for me, it points to the fact that we need to have a set of first principles as guideposts to pivot from. And that, to me, is what I believe was missing,” he said of the encyclical’s takeaways, which he said are “very powerful call to action.”
– A harmful early digital exposure –
The encyclical also outlines the severe psychological and social harms of early and unsupervised digital exposure, which can negatively impact sleep, attention spans and emotional control, while opening the door to online exploitation, cyberbullying and manipulation by AI tools.
Acknowledging the immense pressure on the modern family, the pope conceded that “it is difficult for parents by themselves to resist the influence of business models that monetize attention and time.”
Because of that, he called for an “alliance among policy-makers, educational institutions and families that is capable of concretely supporting adults in this task.”
What he said is needed are “far-sighted public policies … to oppose the immediate interests of platforms – concentrated in a few hands – when they conflict with the wellbeing of minors.”
Kathy Ann Mills, a professor at Australian Catholic University who researches – among other fields – digital and media practices, said that the education world can play “a role in teaching children and young people how to use technology in responsible ways, and as Pope Leo XIV reminds us, “to use AI as a valuable tool, but in a way that requires vigilance,” MIlls underlined.
“Importantly, he points to some of the dangers of AI that can be misleading, such as creating illusions of friendship with a personal subject, which research shows is a danger when humans develop emotional bonds with machines,” she said in a written message to OSV News.
“Children also have developing understandings of AI, with different or immature ways of thinking about human-like machines than older children and adults,” she wrote. “For example, the tendency to anthropomorphize artificial agents, particularly when AI has a human-like persona, face, backstory or physical form, like robots, changes over time. So this is an example of how teachers and parents play a vital role in guiding children’s developing understandings of AI,” she emphasized.
Pope Leo also talks in his encyclical about legislators intervening to set appropriate age limits, holding service providers accountable “rather than shifting the whole burden of control onto families,” and providing specific protections “against all forms of online sexual exploitation and violence.”
He calls children and adolescents “a precious treasure” in need of such protection, but also urges that they are taught “how to recognize manipulation, defend their dignity and respect that of others in digital environments.”
“Research shows that AI systems contain biases that need to be challenged,” Mills said, pointing to Pope Leo’s words: “Ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.”
School, Pope Leo said, “is the place where new generations can learn to seek and love the truth, to reflect on the meaning of life and to recognize the dignity of every person” – but that same school, faced with the digital age, seems weak.
“Even young children can begin to develop a sense of social justice, learning to identify when the output undermines social justice and the common good,” Mills pointed out. “They can see which voices are missing, whose views and values dominate, and whose views are silenced. They can also learn to think about ‘who’ benefits from the technologies,” she said.
For families and schools, the pope said, “there is a growing need for new educational awareness and for formation concerning the proper and critical use of digital tools, AI and online commercial and financial platforms.” In universities, on the other hand, “the principal challenge lies in the integration of knowledge, so as to cultivate the capacity to connect and synthesize knowledge in order to grasp complexity, while also forming the skills necessary for verifying facts.”
Pope Leo said technology “has the power to heal, connect, educate and protect our common home; but it can also divide, exclude and generate new forms of injustice.”
Within that frame “the organization of schools, physical spaces, evaluation methods and the role of teachers themselves must be rethought in order to promote an authentically integral education that addresses every dimension of the person,” the encyclical outlined.
– Support for teachers –
In a rather unbalanced race between education and technology, teachers also need to be supported, the pope said, stressing it is “necessary to support the ongoing formation of teachers throughout their professional lives, so that they can engage positively with new technologies, helping students to use them responsibly, critically and creatively, rather than passively succumbing to their influence.”
Many educators, Pope Leo said, “already report signs of dehumanization, where people may ‘know many things’ but struggle to find direction in their lives, partly due to an inability to connect information with deeper knowledge or maintain a sense of purpose.”
As an answer to that, “a genuinely healthy attitude is needed, requiring rhythms that incorporate silence, in-depth study, reading and judicious analysis, for without these elements inner freedom may be compromised.”
For Rowe, the pope pointing out critical thinking is key.
“Students need to be able to think for themselves before they start to defer to technology to do the thinking for them,” he told OSV News.
In an AI era, “you can fall asleep on a keyboard and wake up to a Shakespearean sonnet and impress yourself, and make yourself think that you’re a great writer, even though you may not know how to do anything but put in a little sloppy text prompt,” Rowe underlined.
The big challenge therefore is to meet that aspect of human dignity “so that we still value knowledge and people who bear knowledge,” he said.
“There’s something sacred in that and how teachers and students interact when they build knowledge together, and I think there’s a big challenge moving forward in what that means for education.”
The Church’s social doctrine, Pope Leo said, “invites families, schools, Christian communities and public institutions to form a renewed educational alliance,” which he proposes in his encyclical.
In this alliance students should be taught “a sense of moderation and limits; the recognition of the right of others, as well as of future generations, to enjoy the goods that are either provided for us or made available by human ingenuity; freedom and responsibility; and a sense of transcendence and the common good.”
Schools therefore, Pope Leo wrote, “are not called to follow the pace of the digital world,” but to “offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.”
Paulina Guzik is international editor for OSV News. Follow her on X @Guzik_Paulina.
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