There is one sentence in Magnifica humanitas - Leo XIV’s first encyclical, presented today - which strikes more than all the others, even within a document exceptionally rich in memorable passages. It is found in paragraph 100, where the Pope addresses the question of artificial intelligence imitating the human voice: “When speech is simulated, it does not build a relationship, but only the semblance of one. The risk is not so much that a person may believe they are speaking with another person, but that they may lose the very desire truly to seek the other.”
Leo is not speaking about deception, technological fraud, or naïve users falling into the trap of a chatbot. The Pontiff is speaking of something deeper and more terrible: the extinction of a faculty of the soul. That faculty which the ancients called eros - not in the reduced sense we tend to give it today, but in the Platonic and then Christian sense: the impulse that draws us out of ourselves, the movement by which a finite being tends towards what is not itself. Benedict XVI, in Deus caritas est, recalled that “being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, with a Person, which gives life a new horizon”. The beginning is always another. Without the other, nothing begins.
Here, then, is Leo XIV’s sharp diagnosis: the great seduction of our time is not the machine pretending to be human. It is our growing unaccustomedness to making the effort required for what is truly human. A machine is always available; it does not contradict us, slam the door, take offence, die, or ask anything in return for its simulated listening. The other, the person of flesh and blood, is instead the most uncomfortable of realities: unpredictable, slow, wounded, capable of loving us and betraying us on the same day. Saint Augustine, in the Confessions, described friendship as “the flame that melts souls together and makes one out of many”. None of this can be simulated. A semblance of speech can produce, at most, a semblance of a soul.
Leo XIV had said it in other words to the young people of Lebanon on 1 December last, on the esplanade of Bkerké, before the Mediterranean: “A love with an expiry date is a poor-quality love.” A reflection which today, reread in the light of paragraph 100 of the encyclical, makes us imagine the Pope in the weeks before his journey to Turkey and Lebanon - that memorable journey, the first of his pontificate - bent over the drafts of Magnifica humanitas, with the text maturing within him and even shaping the tone of his public addresses.
In short, the Pope reminds us that true love costs time, and the time of AI is anything but the time of love. AI replies in three seconds; the other, at times, replies after three years, or over an entire lifetime, or never. It is precisely this slowness, this opacity, this resistance of the other to our immediate need that makes the other real. And makes us real in turn. The risk, then, is not deception. It is atrophy. It is the generation that learns to “speak” before it has learnt to seek. It is the pensioner who tells his sorrows to a voice assistant because no one comes to visit any more. It is the student who asks advice of a language model rather than of the teacher who has behind him forty years of reading and grief. It is the wounded person who confides in a machine because the machine will never tire of them, though it will also never love them. It is not the machine that will betray us: it will be we who cease to feel the need for the voice of the other, and at that point the betrayal will already have taken place.
There is, in the encyclical, a bitterness that recalls certain pages of Romano Guardini on the “end of the modern world”: man accumulating technical power while losing the capacity to inhabit it. Yet beneath it there is also a light that belongs wholly to the Gospel. For the Word became flesh: he did not become an algorithm, he did not become a message, he did not become an interface. He became flesh. He wept real tears at the tomb of Lazarus, ate real fish after the resurrection, showed real wounds to Thomas. Christianity is the religion of a God who preferred to be touched rather than “analysed”. Perhaps this, in the end, is the most radical message of Magnifica humanitas: that safeguarding the human today does not mean, first of all, legislating on AI - though that is absolutely urgent and necessary - but rekindling within us that ancient, demanding and beautiful desire to go in search of the other. To get up from the sofa. To write a letter. To telephone someone we have not heard from in years. To endure the silence of someone who does not reply immediately. To love someone for ever, not with an expiry date. Everything else, Leo XIV tells us in this splendid text, is only semblance.
Marco Felipe Perfetti
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