Catholic universities in the United States are facing multiple challenges, from the country’s demographic cliff to worldviews increasingly governed by questions of return on investment, to the advent of artificial intelligence (AI from here on).
Those challenges are shaping institutional discernment and decision-making inside and outside our classrooms around fundamental questions, including: who are the students whom we will be teaching in the near future (perhaps not the 18- to 22-year-old full time student and, for the time being, perhaps not coming from abroad); whether U.S. society will value learning as a constitutive dimension of what it means to become persons and communities that are more fully human (a fundamental commitment of the liberal arts and the Catholic intellectual tradition); and how our students’ learning will be impacted by the use and misuse of AI (will serve or short-circuit the creation and sharing of knowledge, particularly in the humanities). Those questions and related ones have profound socio-political, pedagogical, and curricular dimensions. Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas offers a unique perspective on them to clarify what is at stake for our institutions.
Previous CTEWC Forum posts have engaged Magnifica Humanitas. And while the encyclical’s insights on the common good were secondary to their analysis, both posts caught my attention because they hint at the unique perspective that Leo XIV brings to the discernment that is taking place inside and outside our classrooms. Megan Heeder’s post explores the encyclical’s framing of the fundamental choice before humanity in the time of AI as a “Tale of Two Cities.”[1] The pope’s call to rebuild Jerusalem reaffirms Catholic social teaching’s aim to build a civilization of love. As she concludes, that pursuit calls for “standards for discernment” that nurture our creativity’s capacity to remain “directed at alleviating suffering and opening up new possibilities for the common good.”[2] Anne Celestine Achieng Oyier Ondigo’s post traces the encyclical’s capacity to offer a counterpoint to “a broader shift in the knowledge of personhood under data capitalism” to its theological-ethical framework.[3] As she shows, the encyclical reaffirms “the irreducible dignity of the human person as a moral reality that cannot be reduced to power dynamics, productivity, utility, or informational traceability.”[4]The broader shift in knowledge that is underway “complicates,” she observes, “conventional notions of […] the common good.”[5]
The encyclical offers a third insight on the common good that is important to ongoing discernment inside and outside the classroom: that truth is a common good. Magnifica Humanitas describes the common good “as the social expression of the dignity recognized in every person.”[6] That recognition “requires us to shape the way we live together” and thus our social relationships, politics, economics and ultimately, our institutions, including colleges and universities.[7] Truth, the encyclical reminds us, is an essential component and condition of those relationships. And while it calls for a discernment that neither demonizes nor idolizes technological tools, including AI, our task is to “utilize them on the basis of a fundamental principle: that truth is a common good and should not be the property of those with power or influence.”[8]An ecology of communication is thus necessary across our structures and institutions, including universities, where “the principal challenge lies in the integration of knowledge.”[9]
The integration of knowledge in an era “when truth is often distorted in order to serve particular interests and communications strategies” places us at the crossroads of the encyclical’s two cities because technologies shape those who use them.[10] On the one side, we have a “culture of immediacy and hyper-stimulation, which gives rise to fatigue, boredom and apathy concerning the effort required for seeking the truth.”[11] On the other, we have education, which Leo XIV describes as a “long journey requiring patience, and therefore needs time for development and for engagement with reality beyond appearances.”[12] Love and the pursuit of truth, more so as a common good, require personal and communal effort.
The world of education, to borrow the encyclical’s term, faces three challenges to forming students and nurturing communities that have the wherewithal to love and pursue truth in the age of AI. The challenges (identified above) that Catholic universities face in the U.S. echo each of them:
First is the socio-political challenge the world of education faces when access to classrooms becomes “overly dependent on families’ financial means, especially in the absence of adequate public support.”[13] Recent policy changes in the U.S. have made access to loans from the federal government more limited, particularly in the case of graduate programs. That is a greater issue still for most Catholic colleges and universities in the country because they are tuition dependent.
Second is the pedagogical challenge. The encyclical acknowledges that information technologies and AI will necessarily require a change in pedagogies and even curricula that were conceived to meet the needs of a previous era. Even so, the encyclical observes, they “must be rethought in order to promote an authentically integral education that addresses every dimension of the person.”[14] From that perspective, the risk for institutional discernment in Catholic higher education is to so focus on the need to prepare students to work in industries that are being reshaped by AI that it overshadows other dimensions of their lives that it must also nurture. The real or perceived needs brought on by AI may thus make it easier for faculty, staff, and administrators to allocate limited resources to AI-related programming—including for pedagogical purposes—more so because the data may support those developments. And yet, while data-driven decision-making has its place, its capacity to fully account for learning outcomes that cannot be directly turned into metrics, especially those nurtured by the liberal arts and the Catholic intellectual tradition, is limited.
The third challenge relates to knowledge itself. AI’s ability to offer students immediate information clashes with the patience that knowledge demands if it is to help them “grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical, and creative thought.”[15] Catholic colleges and universities must protect and promote their core curricula’s commitment to the humanities because they are foundational, more so if they are to remain mission driven institutions that are committed to the theological anthropology of the human person as inherently relational because we are created in the image and likeness of the Triune God.[16] From that perspective then, the encyclical offers a powerful rejoinder to the pressures that schools and other institutions in the world of education are facing: “Schools 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.”[17] Those relationships, especially between and among professors and students sharing their time in classrooms, offices, and hallways, are at the heart of truth known and experienced as a common good.
As Catholic colleges and universities in the U.S. grapple with the challenges this post identifies, including those brought on or exacerbated by AI, the encyclical’s invitation to rediscover that truth is a common good supports their institutional discernment by bringing attention to the uniqueness of their calling. That invitation is grounded, to borrow an insight from Gustavo Gutiérrez’s work on the future of liberation theology, on the encyclical’s ability “to ask about the relevance and consequences of the great themes of Christian revelation which [a] theology has been able to revitalize and fix in the consciousness of believers.”[18] While Gutiérrez would point out that the encyclical is a work of social doctrine rather than theology and needs to be interpreted accordingly, its focus on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence” is deeply rooted on the relevance and consequence of the Triune’s love in our time.[19] In so doing, it speaks powerfully to what is at stake for our humanity from a position that is attentive to reason and reality—of which AI is but a part—in a manner that is informed not by fear but by faith.
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[1] Megan Heeder, “Magnifica Humanitas’ Tale of Two Cities,” CTEWC – The Forum, October 2026, https://catholicethics.com/forum/magnifica-humanitas-tale-of-two-cities/.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Anne Celestine Achieng Oyier Ondigo, “Beyond Extraction: Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of IoT, Data Commodification, and the Moral Challenge of Magnifica Humanitas in Kenya,” CTEWC – The Forum, July 2026, https://catholicethics.com/forum/beyond-extraction-reclaiming-human-agency-in-the-age-of-iot-data-commodification-and-the-moral-challenge-of-magnifica-humanitas-in-kenya/.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 59.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 137.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 139.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 140.
[13] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 144.
[14] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 145.
[15] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 146.
[16] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 50.
[17] Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 146.
[18] Gustavo Gutiérrez, “The Situation and Task of Liberation Theology Today,” in Opting for the Margins: Postmodernity and Liberation in Christian Theology, edited by Joerg Rieger (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 90, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/019516119X.001.0001.
[19] For Gutiérrez’s distinction between theology and social doctrine, see Gustavo Gutiérrez, La Verdad Los Hará Libres: Confrontaciones (Lima, Perú: Instituto Bartolomé de las Casas and Centro de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1986), 217-221; the quote from the encyclical is its subtitle, Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas.