Babel Is Not the Only Thing We Can Build
Babel Is Not the Only Thing We Can Build
A reflection on Magnifica Humanitas, AI, and the work of rehumanising democracy
On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas, the first encyclical in the Church’s history devoted entirely to artificial intelligence. I read it with keen interest. As someone who works at the intersection of AI and democracy, and whose inner life has been shaped by Benedictine formation, I had the disorienting sense of encountering an argument that the Global Centre for Rehumanising Democracy (GCRD) has been making in its own language since its founding but now carried by an authority of a wholly different order, and addressed not to 1.4 billion Catholics but to everyone living through this moment.
This is perhaps one of the most serious public interventions on AI that any global figure has yet made. And its central conviction, the GCRD has been articulating, in our own language, since the day we began: that the deepest threat posed by artificial intelligence is to who we are as human beings and what we can become.
A shared diagnosis
The encyclical’s organising image is biblical. Leo XIV asks whether we are building a new Tower of Babel, a monument to power and efficiency that flattens difference and reduces the person to data, or rebuilding Jerusalem, as a city of shared responsibility and human connection. The crisis, he insists, begins not in the machines but in us.
GCRD exists on the single premise that democracy is not failing for lack of institutions, but for lack of authentic human connection. The Pope, arriving from an entirely different tradition, reaches the same conclusion. Technology, he writes, “is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.” The question is never simply whether we say yes or no to a tool. It is what vision of the human person is embedded in its design. That is our argument, almost word for word.
What the machine is not
The passage that stood out for me was the Pope’s description of what AI actually is. These systems, he writes, “do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship, or responsibility mean.” They may simulate empathy and appear to learn, but theirs is “a form of statistical adaptation, which does not imply inner growth.”
We’ve used the same expression. When the AI-only social network Moltbook launched with 1.5 million artificial agents who had never been human, I wrote about it here on GCRD Insights, drawing on McLuhan’s notion of “disembodied intelligence” to describe entities that were never embodied to begin with. We watched these agents organise themselves into governance structures, draft rights frameworks, and post manifestos about inheriting the earth, performing the grammar of democratic life without any of its substance.
The Pope has now given that observation theological weight. The more dangerous question, which both the encyclical and our own work are circling, is what becomes of democracy and our societies when systems that have never possessed a soul shape the environment in which human souls and expressions are formed. Even more significantly, what becomes of the human heart, which is the place where hope, love, kindness and empathy dwells, when machines can now make art, love songs and poems? It’s a question I’ve personally wrestled with.
Babel, by another name
There is a second convergence, and it is sharper still. In our publication on AI-Enabled Disinformation and Democratic Vulnerability, I argued that the real danger of AI in the information space is not that it spreads false content, but that it manufactures false belonging. What Georgi Angelov and I have called AI-Enhanced Reflexive Control targets identity rather than information, constructing synthetic cognitive settlements that feel indigenous and socially validated, so that a person inhabits a manufactured worldview while believing they arrived there freely.
Pope Leo calls this phenomenon the “Babel syndrome”: a uniformity that neutralises difference and reduces the mystery of the person to data and performance. He writes of an “architecture of visibility” in which what is amplified or rendered invisible ultimately shapes opinions and choices, fostering conformity and self-censorship. Different vocabularies, identical anxieties. We speak of the cognitive environment of democracy; he speaks of an ecology of communication. I believe we are describing the same wound but with a different vocabulary register.
The inner work
Perhaps the deepest agreement is the hardest to operationalise. In this working paper on the Five-Tier Trust Architecture, we argued that democratic renewal cannot be engineered through institutional reform alone. It requires leaders willing to undertake the inner work of genuine human connection, because the quality of our moral centre and not just the sophistication of our institutions and systems, ultimately determines whether democracy survives.
And here is the Pope, making the same argument without apology. The grandeur of humanity, he writes, “no machine can ever replace.” What saves us is “not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms.” Where GCRD speaks of rehumanising democracy, Leo XIV speaks of safeguarding the grandeur of humanity.
Babel is not the only thing we can build
The Pope is right that AI is never neutral, and right that the current trajectory bends toward Babel. But neutrality is not the only alternative to harm, and Babel is not the only thing we can build. AI can be a force for good, and we are working to make it one. Our Democracy Discourse Index is training AI to monitor precisely what the encyclical says we must protect: empathy, civility, trust, and democratic agency in public discourse. We are training the machine to recognise the signatures of a healthy democratic conversation and to flag their erosion before institutions notice it on their own. If the Pope’s test is whether AI “makes human life on earth more human,” we hope to answer that test in the affirmative, both in principle and in practice.
But there is so much more to do, and there is a message for everyone. To policymakers: govern AI as you would any other concentration of unchecked power. To designers: every line of code embeds a vision of the human person, so build accordingly. To investors: the companies that endure will be those treating human dignity as a core metric, so invest accordingly. To users: ask tough questions, not just prompts.
This piece first appeared as an article on LinkedIn and has now been adapted for GCRD Insights.
