“Discerning the Spirits” in Making Decisions about AI

On Powers, Principalities, and Pope Leo’s New Document on Catholic Education

“…Instead of chains, let us dare to think of constellations, their intertwining full of wonder and awakening. In them lies the ability to navigate challenges with hope, but also with courageous revision, without losing fidelity to the Gospel. We are aware of the difficulties: hyper-digitization can fragment attention; the crisis of relationships can wound the psyche; social insecurity and inequalities can extinguish desire. Yet, precisely here, Catholic education can be a beacon: not a nostalgic refuge but a laboratory of discernment, pedagogical innovation and prophetic witness. Drawing new maps of hope: this is the urgency of the mandate.”

—Pope Leo XIV, from the Apostolic Letter, “Drawing New Maps of Hope”

I have found myself consistently encouraged by the words of Pope Leo XIV since his taking office last May. And as a Catholic educator for nearly twenty years, and as a Catholic college and high school student for ten years before that, his call to renew and revitalize the church’s commitment to Catholic education definitely “hits home” in all kinds of ways for me personally.

Let us dare to think of constellations, their intertwining full of wonder and awakening. Ok, Poet Leo! Striking that at the heart of this papal teaching is a metaphor, an image: the intertwining of stars. Striking, too, that Pope Leo, head one of the largest (maybe the largest?) institutions in the world, calls the reader to center the person over the “programmes” institutions (Catholic or otherwise) might have or might be running.

There’s a balance to Pope Leo’s approach to technology and specifically AI, too, which I appreciate. He makes clear that our Catholic institutions must avoid any “technophobia,” but at the same time maintains that any use of technology “requires discernment in didactic planning, evaluation, platforms, data protection, and equitable access.” And Leo continues with specific regard to AI: “Artificial Intelligence and digital environments must be oriented towards the protection of dignity, justice and work; they must be governed according to criteria of public ethics and participation; they must be accompanied by adequate theological and philosophical reflection.”

This is a timely note by the Pope, especially for an American audience. Note that President Trump, in December, issued an executive order that blocks states from regulating AI use. Taken alongside Trump’s push with his April, 2025 executive order, “Advancing Artificial Education for American Youth,” which aims to get educators to “utilize AI in their classrooms to improve outcomes” from kindergarten on up to the twelfth grade, it’s clear that Pope Leo’s mandate for “adequate theological and philosophical reflection” on AI and digital environments is an urgent one indeed.

I trust that other Catholic school leaders will be studying and looking to apply insights from Leo’s writings in the months to come, but I figured why not offer my own two (or three) cents on this platform? These notes are of course, necessarily limited and provisional, but they give you, reader, some sense of how Leo’s reflections land with one “on the ground” laborer in a Catholic (high school) vineyard.

So, without further adieu, here are a few of my takeaways on what Leo-inspired “discernment and reflection” might mean for school communities, specifically regarding decisions on AI.

1. Reflection and Discernment Require Space, Time, and Freedom

As alluded to before, President Trump is working in tandem with the Tech Bros of Silicon Valley. And we can see their philosophy of “move fast and break things” in real time, especially as it concerns AI. People, including and especially for our context young people, are being broken in the process of adapting the latest software or update. Leo writes, “The specificity, depth and breadth of educational action is the work – as mysterious as it is real – of ‘making the being flourish [...] is taking care of the soul’, as we read in Plato’s Apology of Socrates (30a–b). It is a ‘profession of promises’: it promises time, confidence, skill; it promises justice and mercy, it promises the courage of the truth and the balm of consolation.” This “taking care of the soul,” as he beautifully puts it here is necessarily slow going. “Specificity, depth, and breadth” cannot be modeled or practiced without taking your time (as a teacher and student), and it is easier than ever to undermine these values if you are always looking to implement the latest tool or technology.

If we are taking Leo seriously in this document, there is good reason to slow down, learn more about the technologies in play, and make sure whatever use we as teachers or schools make of them in our schools and classrooms will not be harmful to kids, both in the long and short run. Obviously, it is not possible to do real reflection and discernment if you are being pressured to use the technologies, now. For a thoughtful and at times heartbreaking essay on a public school teacher facing exactly this kind of pressure, I highly recommend Marcus Luther’s October essay, “Adults Are the AI Problem in Education.”

2. Reflection and Discernment Must Be Done Communally

Throughout “Drawing New Maps,” Pope Leo lays an emphasis on how decisions are made in schools. “We must continue to promote,” the Pope states, “participatory educational communities, in which lay people, religious, families and students share responsibility for the educational mission.” Earlier on, specifically addressing colleges and universities, Leo called participants to “sit around together, without unnecessary hierarchies, to touch the wounds of history and seek, in the spirit, the wisdom that springs from the lives of people.” With regard to a set of technologies that prioritizes efficiency above all things—it is one of the gods of these technologies for sure—it is vital to prioritize each party and person affected by our decisions about the technologies. And accept that it may be the wisest thing we can do in our school communities to inaugurate messy and human conversations about our use (and non-use) of them.

3. Reflection and Discernment Must Be Oriented Towards Educating the Whole Person

Against a view of education that centers almost entirely on the productivity of students and their preparedness for the workforce (again, see Trump’s April “Advancing AI for American Youth” executive order as a particularly damaging illustration of this view), Pope Leo reiterates the wisdom gleaned from the 1965 Vatican II document, “Gravissimum educationis,” warning not to “subordinate education to the labor market” but rather to “put the person at the centre.” For Leo, this means that “Education is not only the transmission of content, but also learning of virtues.” And notably, Leo names as new “co-patron” of Catholic Education alongside Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal John Henry Newman, who famously fought for and embodied the ideal of a liberal arts education pursued for its own sake, for growth in wisdom, not growth in economic gain. Memorably adapting the sixty-year-old wisdom of “Gravissimum educationis” to a new era, Leo writes that “a person is not a ’skills profile,’ cannot be reduced to a predictable algorithm, but is a face, a story, a vocation.” This line of thinking stands squarely in opposition to the FOMO idea of AI use in schools (thanks Emily Bender and Alex Hanna for that phrasing), that is, “you must use this AI technology now or you will be helplessly out of touch when you enter the workforce.” If the technology is reducing the person, or the subject under study, then the technology and its value must be re-examined, not the subject, and certainly not the person.

A Scriptural Lens

The careful reader will note my use of “principalities and powers” in the subtitle, a nod to New Testament biblical language. Some readers of this stack might not want to “go there” in terms of decision-making regarding AI, but as I am a Catholic school teacher taking seriously the idea of “discerning the spirit of our age and moment,” along with Pope Leo, I think it worth my time to do this in line with these sacred texts. An immense aid as I’ve done some of this thinking and discernment is the theologian and scholar, Walter Wink. (Thanks, David Dark, for introducing me to Wink’s work. What a gift it has been.)

In Wink’s work examining New Testament writers’ use of the different textual variants of power, he helps the readers see the totality of the way these words functioned in the Greek texts—archon, exousia, dynamis, among other key words for power(s). I say totality because Wink noted that the New Testament writers were always talking interchangeably about “spiritual” (good angelic as well as bad satanic) aspects of these powers as well as the “human” (institutional, governmental, military, etc.) ones, and very often at the same time. This was not an either/or kind of thing.

Wink offers a contemporary example to make his point, and one that illuminates my own thinking regarding discernment of technologies:

“Before us we have the chairperson of a political committee. Which is really the power here—the person, or the role? Not the person—she can be replaced with another, and the job will go on being done. Not the role either—for some use it to great benefit and others irresponsibly. Is it then the person-in-the-role? But then what authorizes her to act? Is it then the authority invested in her by the constituting charter of the group? But what gives the charter its binding character? Where is power finally to be located, unless we see it as the total interaction of all these aspects, visible and invisible? And how is power to be brought to heel, unless it is addressed on its own terrain—unless that is we address not only the physical manifestations of the group but also its ‘spirit’ or ‘angel’?”

I mentioned earlier in this essay that a god of the new technologies being lumped under the general heading of “AI,” is the god of Efficiency. To use Wink’s language, it seems important to name this god, and its “spirit.” On a practical level, when you automate something, you can do it much faster, and at greater scale. It’s clear how and why these technologies would be very attractive to companies, and now governments, in our surveillance-capitalist age. And I very much agree with writers like Emily Bender and Alex Hanna and Karen Hao (among many other prophetic and skeptical voices) that we should see through the hype and misuse of language around AI and call companies and governments to account for regulating the technology. But there is also a spiritual element in play.

David Dark, a far deeper student of Wink than I, in a different context, talks about a “robot soft exorcism” that students of the Gospel can make, drawing fellow humans out of their “robot” role (whether that be an institutional, technological, or ideological robot) and into a non-hierarchical human-to-human one by naming the evil happening, in the moment. This seems very much to the point with regard to school leaders—specifically Catholic school leaders—and the way they are approaching their use or non-use of AI technologies. “Exorcism,” of course, will conjure up for many readers rolled-back eyes, and heads flipping to other sides of heads, but Dark’s point (and I think Wink’s before him) is that the bad spiritual energy is not going to manifest in that obvious way. But if we are going to talk about integrating ChatGPT into our Learning Management Systems, let’s not forget to mention that Kenyan workers had to first filter out, for two bucks an hour, thousands of racist, hateful and toxic images to make this LLM as “safe” as possible. Or that a young person took their life at the behest of one of those chatbots. We are on spiritual terrain here.

To use Pope Leo’s language from “Drawing New Maps of Hope”: it is painfully clear in these cases, that the “person” was not “at the centre.” In fact, these are people that are seen by companies (and perhaps governments now too) as a kind of collateral damage. That view—which is capturing many minds and hearts and at high levels across institutions—is one which may demand a kind of “exorcism,” though as Walter Wink and David Dark show, you don’t need to be a priest or Catholic or Christian to perform it.

A Big Catholic (AI) Tent

As I was in the midst of wrapping this essay up, I received in my inbox, courtesy of Commonweal Magazine a piece titled, “Pope Leo vs. Palantir,” written by Father Antonio Spadaro, SJ, a writer whose work I admire. The essay is a terrific distillation of key priorities of “Drawing New Maps of Hope,” which Spadaro sees as “interior life, technology, and peace.” “The student is not a cog,” Spadaro writes. “Education, Leo insists, is a constellation that binds heart, mind, and hands. Education, for him, is another name for peace—because it teaches us to appreciate differences and to grow in dialogue.”

This view of education binding “heart, mind, and hands” Spadaro contrasts vividly with the “Meritocracy Fellowship” launched by Palantir Technologies:

“The fellowship, open only to exceptional students who pledge not to enroll in an accredited college the following fall, pays roughly $5,400 a month. The message could hardly be clearer—or colder: higher education is obsolete, learning is a waste of time, what matters is knowing how to perform. It’s not only a provocation; it’s a political act. Palantir, whose empire runs on data and artificial intelligence, isn’t just recruiting talent; it’s shaping the future of education as a battlefield between freedom and economic power.”

As Spadaro notes, this narrowing of education couldn’t be further from the vision of Pope Leo’s new co-patron, St. Cardinal John Henry Newman, who “warned that to reduce education to the mere acquisition of skills was to betray its soul.”

That writing like this is coming from, as Father Spadaro’s byline indicates, “the undersecretary of the Dicastery for Culture and Education of the Holy See,” is encouraging news indeed. I also note that, there is no single, uniform “Catholic response” to the rise of AI. “The Catholic Church,” as my old boss Bob Zyskowski, longtime publisher for The Catholic Spirit diocesan newspaper in Saint Paul & Minneapolis, used to say, “is a big tent.”

So, at the same time that folks like Father Spadaro are noting the contrasts between Palantir and Pope Leo, the recent November 6-7 “Builders Artificial Intelligence Forum” hosted by the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome included Palantir (Canada), as well as Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Kurzweil Technologies as participants. This gathering, which Pope Leo addressed with a one-page exhortation, had the purpose of “[bringing] together companies leading in Catholic AI, venture capital and angel investors, as well as prominent AI thought leaders and researchers.”

Perhaps it makes sense in a forum for “building and scaling” AI technologies that there were no workshops on the environmental and social impacts of building data center after data center all over the known world. Still, a wondering that I have as an outside (but interested) observer of a conference like this one is where is the space for conversation about whether folks should be “building” out this industry at such a large scale at all? And how does that building out square with recent Church teaching on the environment, especially in a document like Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (“On Care for the Common Home”)? For surely “Catholic AI” companies will require the building of massive amounts of data centers as well as companies like OpenAI and Microsoft?

In addition, as I look over the programs from the past two years of this conference (2024 and 2025), I notice that, unless I am mistaken, there were no women presenters in 2025 and only one woman presenter, Alexis Haughey, founder of Catholic Institute of Technology, in 2024. This lack of basic gender representation (a historic problem for the Catholic Church) is notable in conference such as this one. How can we assure full and representative conversation on AI in the Catholic Church if women don’t even have a seat at the table?

I offer these outside critiques (and for folks reading this who were at the conference, please feel free to correct me where I’m wrong) at the same time that I welcome the actual ASKING for permission to “ingest” vast amounts of data from scholars and writers and theologians that companies like Longbeard (another sponsor of the conference) and TrekAI have made part of their policy for building their own LLMs. That is a welcome change from the status quo of intellectual property theft that OpenAI has made their company standard. But I hear a lot of the same language from these companies and their leaders that I have heard and read from leaders of big tech companies. Consider this profile of Matthew Harvey Sanders, founder and CEO of Longbeard, in The Catholic Register:

“Tapping into the ‘two roads diverged at a yellow wood’ motif, the founder and CEO of the Toronto-based Longbeard technology company said civilization has a choice to adopt the ‘golden path’ or the ‘dark path.’

The 43-year-old defines the ‘golden path’ as many choosing to purposefully utilize the extra time freed up by AI and robotics to rededicate themselves to living life more aligned with God’s intention. This could include ‘being closer to nature, living in community, having bigger families and devoting more time to art and asking life’s big questions through philosophical reflection.’”

The “golden path” that Sanders proposes of course assumes that human beings have to take a path that includes a plethora of AI technologies. (We’ve already crossed that rubicon, he has asserted elsewhere.) “If we’re going to be on the AI path, then let’s be on the ‘golden’ one.” This is a remarkable similar line of thinking that someone like Sam Altman has given: we’re competing with China for AGI; if someone’s going to reach AGI capability, it should be us, the “good guys,” not them, the bad ones. The “inevitability” argument for “building and scaling out AI” has actually been around for quite some time.

A report I’ve read on the Builder’s AI Forum noted that there were some “differences of opinion” while “participants broadly agreed that Catholics — with their intellectual and ethical tradition and focus on human dignity — must help shape AI’s future.” It’s hard for me to argue with the last part of that sentence. At the same time, as Catholics—and everyone else—continue to shape this future, it is imperative that the table for that “shaping” include more voices, including ones that are skeptical of the building and scaling that the biggest and wealthiest voices in the room are advocating for. Consider this essay one such skeptical offering.

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Recommendations:

-As noted, Emily Bender and Alex Hanna’s book The AI Con, is a terrific read. And what is even better, the two of them have sustained the close attention they pay to the language of AI hypesters in a thoughtful (and fun) podcast, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. Check it out. It’s great.

-Commonweal Magazine had my number this week! In addition to that great little piece by Antonio Spadaro, the new issue has an excellent essay by Sohrab Ahmari (whose work I don’t usually love), titled “Escaping the ‘Torment Nexus’” all about Christian and social democracy, Popes Leo XIII, XIV, and Francis and AI. Included in the piece is this gem of a penultimate paragraph: “It won’t suffice for the Christian to merely declaim that tech corporations should do this or that. They won’t compromise in the face of moral exhortation or calls to goodwill, no matter how eloquent—not without countervailing pressure exerted by other associative bodies. In the teeth of the Torment Nexus, then, the Catholic task is to repair and reempower such bodies, starting with unions, and to stimulate long-atrophied muscles for Pope Leo’s ‘unified action.’ We should also imagine new tripartite forms, such as AI ethics boards that place organized labor and civil society (including the Church) across the table from technologists.” AI ethics boards that place organized labor and civil society (including the Church) across the table from technologists. Yes to that proposal, a thousand times.

-What about you, dear reader? Any recommendations along these themes?