The Tower or the City: What Leo XIV Is Really Asking of Scientists
The first encyclical of the AI age opens with an image of Babel. For working scientists and engineers, the question it poses is not whether to build — but what, for whom, and under whose judgment.
When the Holy Father chose to open his first encyclical with the Tower of Babel, more than a few technologists winced. The image seemed, at first hearing, like a familiar rebuke: ambition punished, builders scattered. But read the opening paragraphs carefully and something more interesting emerges. The encyclical does not condemn building. It presents humanity with two construction projects and asks which one we have joined.
This distinction matters enormously for members of our Society, many of whom write code, train models, or manage systems that the encyclical addresses directly. The document is not addressed only to bishops or ethicists; it is addressed to us, in our laboratories and offices, where the actual decisions get made.
"The encyclical does not condemn building. It presents humanity with two construction projects and asks which one we have joined."
The heart of the argument arrives in the treatment of human limitation. Where the surrounding culture treats illness, aging, and vulnerability as engineering problems awaiting solutions, the encyclical insists that human beings often flourish precisely through their limits — that limitation is where wisdom is learned, where the closeness of others is experienced, where the Lord is encountered.
Human limits are not simply defects to be corrected; the human person often flourishes through limitation, discovering wisdom, the nearness of others, and the encounter with God.
Magnifica Humanitas, ¶118–119 (paraphrase — read the full text at vatican.va)For a scientist, this lands differently than it does for a philosopher. We are trained — rightly — to treat limitation as provisional, as the boundary of current knowledge rather than a fixed wall. The encyclical does not ask us to abandon that instinct. It asks us to notice when the instinct crosses from healing into a quiet contempt for the human condition as such: when the pitch deck stops promising to cure disease and starts promising to cure finitude.
What, concretely, does this ask of us? Three things, I would argue. First, honesty in language: refusing to let marketing claims about machine "understanding" or "reasoning" pass unexamined in our own workplaces. Second, attention to power: the encyclical is blunt that how AI is designed, and by whom, is itself a moral question, not merely how it is used. Third, a recovered confidence that our faith gives us something to say here — that a Catholic scientist is not a contradiction to be managed but precisely the witness this moment requires.
The city in which God and humanity dwell together is still under construction. The encyclical's wager is that scientists belong on that crew.