About a year ago I launched a new podcast and YouTube show called Author Update. It is primarily a news show, but recently we covered a story I wanted to share here on the Christian Publishing Show.

Pope Leo XIV recently published an encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas. It is the best theological breakdown I’ve seen on AI, and that means a lot coming from me because I’m not Catholic. I’m not aware of any authoritative stances on AI from either the Orthodox or Protestant churches, which means that if and when those do come out, they will be responding to and echoing the Pope’s encyclical.

If you have ever been curious about how, when, and why Christians can use AI, I think you will find this breakdown helpful.

But I want to share one other news story first that will help give some context. This story is about the anti-AI Butlerian Jihad (a term from Dune) that my cohost Jonathan Surger and I break down.

The Butlerian Jihad Comes for Hollywood Producer Jorge R. Gutierrez

According to Deadline, Jorge R. Gutierrez dropped out of Amazon’s GenAI program on May 29, 2026. The creator of The Book of Life, El Tigre, and Maya and the Three announced he will not make the AI-assisted series Punky Duck.

The Spark

Amazon MGM Studios and AWS unveiled the GenAI Creators’ Fund on May 27, 2026, at the AI on the Lot conference, and the fund greenlit three animated series powered by Project Nara, Amazon’s purpose-built AI production platform.

Punky Duck followed a punk duck and Smiley Cat through chaotic Los Angeles adventures with aliens and monsters. Gutierrez called the fast greenlight, which went from pitch to approval in two months, a miracle in an industry that usually drags projects out for years, and at the event he described AI animation in startlingly intimate terms, comparing it to being handed a baby right after conception.

The Backlash

The animation community erupted. Fans and peers dug up Gutierrez’s earlier posts, including an October 2025 message where he wrote that AI would flood the market with slop while making skilled artists more valuable, and critics labeled the move hypocrisy and a sell-out.

Social media filled with accusations, and some of them crossed into death threats against him and his family. Gutierrez responded on May 28 with a statement to Cartoon Brew, calling the project a big experiment and pledging to stay as cautious as possible with artists driving the technology rather than the other way around, and he left his X comments open for feedback.

The Reversal

Gutierrez then posted on X that he had decided to drop out of the AI program at Amazon and would not be making a Punky Duck series, writing that actions speak louder than words. He explained that his intent had been to showcase artists, both new and seasoned and both inside and outside the studios, driving this new technology, and he offered his sincerest apology to those he upset, promising to do better and to try harder. Peers, including some voice actors, praised the decision.

Why This Matters for Authors

The incident shows how quickly community sentiment can kill a project even when a major studio and an established creator back it. Authors who experiment with AI for covers, marketing assets, or drafting tools now see the personal and professional cost of perceived inconsistency.

Indie writers who once defended AI as a tool face the same pressure that traditional houses apply to illustrators and cover artists. The Butlerian Jihad reference from Dune, which names humanity’s war against thinking machines, captures the current mood, because many creators treat any AI involvement as a betrayal of the craft. Cash-flow realities still push creators toward faster tools, yet public backlash can erase opportunities in days.

This story signals that the AI debate has moved beyond theory, since studios test the waters, creators test the limits, and audiences enforce the rules. Authors who plan to use AI in any visible way should prepare for similar scrutiny or build transparent processes that keep human artists in the driver’s seat.

Sources

• Deadline: Jorge Gutierrez Drops Out of Amazon AI Program
• IndieWire: Jorge R. Gutierrez Won’t Make AI-Generated Punky Duck Series
• Hollywood Reporter: Director Jorge Gutierrez Drops Generative AI Series for Amazon
• Jorge R. Gutierrez X Statement (May 29, 2026)
• Bleeding Cool: Gutierrez Responds to AI Backlash

Commentary

Thomas: This was a mistake on his part, and the lesson is to never feed the trolls, because doing so killed his shot at being a showrunner. I do have real empathy for him, since the threats reached his family, and that’s indefensible.

Listeners have pushed back on the phrase Butlerian Jihad, mostly folks who’ve never read Dune or its Orange Catholic Bible, which contains the commandment against making a machine in the likeness of a human mind. The phrase actually fits, because the anti-AI movement doesn’t have a name yet. They aren’t really Luddites either, since hardly anyone even knows who Ned Ludd was, so I use Butlerian Jihad as a broad-strokes, slightly teasing label.

Here’s the political insight underneath all this. The backlash rests on the Marxist labor theory of value. Think about an apple pie’s value. In one hour, a novice cook can destroy good apple pie ingredients. In the same amount of time, a decent home cook can produce a fine apple pie, but a chef produces a delicious masterpiece of a pie that that people buy for $50. That illustration proves value isn’t based on the amount of labor.

Marxists have no objective standard of beauty, so they end up judging art by the effort behind it, which is why they’ll call something AI slop even when it’s indistinguishable from human work. Show a Marxist a Monet and tell them it was AI, and suddenly it’s slop. Hollywood is essentially Marxists critiquing other Marxists, and Gutierrez has no real answer to them.

Jonathan: I’d add that the labor framing exists to propagandize laborers and activate them politically. It was never really about the means of production.

Thomas: The point is there are different AI factions that object to AI for different reasons.

Pope Leo XIV Gives Catholic Novelists Green Light to Use AI

The Pope’s encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is the most nuanced and intelligent critique of AI I’ve found. At 42,000 words, I listened to the entire thing in preparation for this episode.

What is in the Magnifica Humanitas encyclical?

Jonathan: Let me do a brief overview. I’ll explain what the chapters were about, tell you what the encyclical is about, and then Thomas will detail how it applies.

This document applied Catholic social teaching to artificial intelligence. It urges disarmament, transparency, and human oversight to protect human dignity in an AI-driven world.

• Chapter one traces the tradition from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 through every major social encyclical, grounding the document in the principles of human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity.
• Chapter two examines the present technological moment with deep technical nuance, treating AI as a valuable tool that requires vigilance while rejecting both naive optimism and outright rejection.
• Chapter three applies these principles to concrete realities, including work, surveillance, rare earth ethics, CCP-style data regimes, techno-slavery, and the disarmament of autonomous weapons that remove human moral judgment.
• Chapter four calls for shared international governance, transparency, and accountability so technology serves integral human development rather than domination or profit.
• Chapter five delivers an explicitly anti-Gnostic and incarnational vision, contrasting the flesh made of silicon of transhumanism with Jesus, the Word made flesh, as humanity’s only path to salvation.

An encyclical is a pastoral letter written by the Pope to address major theological, moral, or social issues facing the Catholic Church and humanity. It’s designed to be propagated throughout the world, not hidden or held back. This is Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical since his election.

Why should authors care what the Pope thinks?

Thomas: Pope Leo XIV is a mathematician and an American, and you could argue the reason he was elected pope was to write this encyclical and grapple with this issue. Most of the encyclical wasn’t actually about AI, even though that’s all anyone is talking about. I read the whole thing, and he hits a lot of topics, many of them economic, that AI has affected or influenced.

It’s really well done. A lot of the concerns I’ve had with AI, the Pope has had too, and for the same reasons, so it was very encouraging for me.

Full disclosure, I’m not Catholic. I’m a Christian, not Catholic. We should care about this partly because it’s the first really well-reasoned articulation about AI from a Christian source, really from any religious source. This is the initial draft everyone will be reacting to.

Up to this point, AI has mostly been discussed by journalists who don’t understand it very well, technologists who do but can’t communicate, and politicians. I haven’t heard any pastors give sermons on AI.

There was a church in my town that used AI to prepare the service, but mostly it’s been hush-hush. The people I’ve heard critiquing AI from a religious context don’t know much about it. I listened to one podcast episode, actually for authors and about AI, and it was clear the critiques came from someone who didn’t know what AI was. He couldn’t tell the difference between machine learning and a large language model, and he didn’t know what a neural network was.

It was moralistic and emotional, all reacting to the marketing around AI rather than the actual function of AI. It wasn’t a helpful critique because he didn’t know what he was talking about. Which is fine. Not everyone knows what they’re talking about.

I’m going to pull out some things from this encyclical that I thought were valuable for authors. I also have a Q&A I’ll do with Jonathan, specific moral questions for Catholic authors, what they can and can’t do, because the Pope was very clear about what Catholics can and cannot do. It’ll be interesting doing this as non-Catholics.

The Pope demonstrated really deep technical understanding and a surprising amount of nuance. He treats AI the same way I do, as a valuable tool, and he didn’t call for a Butlerian crusade against the machines, despite the memes on X.

Did the Pope use AI to write it?

Thomas: It’s also very likely the Pope used AI to help write this encyclical. Certain sections started sounding very AI to me as I listened. A bunch of people have run tests using various AI detection tools, and certain chapters tested positive for AI use. Specifically, it had a lot of Claudisms.

Jonathan: He’s American, though, not Italian. The Italian version, the original, tested higher for AI use. It was probably translated.

Thomas: The Pope authors the encyclical, but he doesn’t write it. He’s got a whole team of priests and bishops writing these encyclicals with him.

It’s not a papal bull, which is more like a bill that says, “This is what the law is.” This is more like a sermon. It’s not that he himself wrote every word with a quill pen. Italian isn’t his native language, but he’s worked in the Vatican a long time, so he’s probably pretty good with it.

The Italian version tested higher for AI than the English translation. That tells me it’s possible that while he used AI to help draft the Italian version, it was translated into English by humans. The one thing the Vatican is not hurting for is translators, particularly from Italian into English. They’ve got good translators, and they’re not going to use a machine for that.

Is the Catholic Church anti-science?

Thomas: The villain of this encyclical was not the technology. There’s a popular meme online that the Catholic Church is anti-science or anti-technology, and this is very ignorant.

Before the Catholic Church, we had alchemy, which was Gnostic and secret. It’s the Christian value of revelation, as opposed to hiding information, that’s the foundation of science.

Most people, when they get a science education in school, are really getting propagandized. I can prove this with your own knowledge. The goal of the science education you got in high school was not to teach you useful information. It was to propagandize you.

You probably spent an entire semester on evolution. You’re probably very articulate on evolution, which is not a scientific theory you’ve used at all in your life. There’s not a single question that understanding evolution has helped you solve.

Yet you don’t know the difference between a watt, an amp, and a volt, which is scientific knowledge that would save your life if you understood it. It wasn’t taught to you because it’s not helpful in propagandizing you against the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church invented science, has been doing science, and is pro-science. As a Protestant, as a conservative Evangelical, I see the Catholic Church as too pro-science. They’re too accepting of science for my preference. To be fair to them, though, they’ve always been pro-science from the very beginning.

Even the Galileo situation, people can’t really articulate what happened. That entire situation was entirely misinterpreted for you. It was not Catholics crushing Galileo because he challenged their view on how the world works. That’s an entirely wrong take on the historical facts.

So who are the “villains” in the encyclical?

Thomas: The villains of this encyclical are not the science and not the AI. They’re technocrats, transhumanists, and post-humanists. That’s who the Pope sees as the threat.

Jonathan: Thomas, what is a transhumanist and a post-humanist?

Thomas: First, a technocrat is somebody who sees people as cogs in a machine, as data points, as something to be optimized. The value of a human comes from their economic output. That’s a technocrat.

A transhumanist believes humanity can be augmented with technology, so we can transcend our human limitations. The Borg in Star Trek are a presentation of transhumanism, where they’ve bonded flesh and machines.

Another version of transhumanism is the idea that you can transcend your physical body by uploading your consciousness into a computer. GLaDOS in Portal 2 is a post-humanist or transhumanist character. She was human, but her consciousness was put into the machine.

That’s very Gnostic. It’s the view that you have a spiritual self, a true self, and then a physical body that’s evil and fallen, so you have to change your physical body to better appeal to your true self. Or better yet, upload your true self and ascend into the machine where you can live forever.

Christians reject that. The Pope rejects that. How do Christians transcend their physical bodies? They do it through Christ, and only through Christ. That’s our only salvation.

Thomas: The encyclical warns against technocratic thinking that turns humans into cogs and devalues the human.

One of the words the Pope used a lot was dignity. As a Protestant, this Catholic doctrine of dignity was very new to me. He talks about dignity being innate, where we just have dignity. I assumed we have dignity because we’re made in God’s image, but he didn’t make that case. He said we have dignity because God loves us, which was interesting.

As a Protestant, I haven’t dived deep into the Catholic doctrine of dignity, but he used that word dozens of times.

What is the Pope’s view on disarmament?

Thomas: Another word he used a lot was disarmament. One concern the Pope has, and I share, is that of AI killing people, and we’re already seeing this.

In Ukraine, initially we had drones that were controlled wirelessly. A human would remotely fly the drone and blow up the other guy. Both Ukrainians and Russians are doing this.

The problem with a wirelessly controlled drone is that wireless is just another word for radio, and radio signals can be jammed. It’s the equivalent of shouting really loud. When my wife and I are trying to talk in the kitchen, my children will signal-jam us by shouting so loud we can’t hear each other.

That’s effectively what you can do on the battlefield. One solution is to simply give the drone instructions to kill guys wearing the enemy’s uniform and let the drone decide who to kill.

Currently they have helium balloons they lift into the air. The drone detaches, glides down, pilots itself, and basically picks a human to kill.

The Pope is not a fan of this.

He articulated that civilians could be killed, but there’s also a moral question. Machines are not capable of mercy, and mercy is a high value among Catholics.

Autonomous weapons remove human moral judgment, and by removing it, they remove human moral responsibility, or at least the appearance of it. Someone might claim, “It wasn’t me killing that person. It was this drone I made. The drone decided to kill them. I didn’t commit murder. This drone committed murder.”

By offsetting our moral responsibility, we can kill people without feeling bad about it. That’s very concerning for the Pope, and I think rightly so. Humans should take responsibility for their actions. We can’t blame the machines when we stand before God and give an answer for every deed done in the body, whether good or evil, as the Bible tells us. It’s a very scary passage, that we’ll be accountable to our Creator for our actions.

Jonathan: On a shallow level, I don’t mind the strategy of killing people with autonomous weapons, but I do agree with the concern. I have an issue with losing mercy, because when you separate men from warfare, it becomes a numbers game. Stalin told us it’s way easier to kill a million people than 100. One hundred is a massacre; one million is a statistic.

When war becomes about numbers of bodies instead of tactical precision and strategic brilliance to break an enemy’s will or logistical capability to keep fighting, something is lost.

I have this problem with Grant in the Civil War. Grant was not a strategist. He just threw hundreds of thousands of men into meat grinder and ran Lee out of ammunition. He had the will to win, but he had no problem with the price it took.

Lee, by contrast, optimized every position and the limited resources he had to fight numerically superior forces battle after battle. That’s warfare pursued correctly. When you treat it as a numbers game, where you win because you killed more people, I see less value in that.

Thomas: We covered a story several weeks ago about an event in 2025 where the Ukrainians overtook a Russian position using nothing but drones. One of the drones was basically a bomb on wheels that rolled into a bunker and blew it up.

One of those bombs on wheels didn’t blow up its bunker because the guys inside surrendered to the drone. The drone was controlled by a human at Ukrainian headquarters, who saw the surrender through the drone’s camera and accepted it. I think the Catholic Church would say that needs to be preserved.

Letting the drone go in, see the white flag, and blow up the bunker anyway because its programming said “blow up the bunker,” is what the Pope is concerned about. That’s what he means by disarming AI.

At the end of the encyclical promoted more peace-and-love ideology and he quoted other popes who were against war. Popes have been against war for a long time. I remember reading about the Hundred Years’ War, with the French on one side and the English on the other, and they’d have to pause at the beginning of the battle while these bishops forced the monarchs to talk and tried to make the war not happen.

Give the Catholic Church some credit. They’ve been doing UN-style, give-peace-a-chance stuff for a long time. It didn’t work, and all the French people died at the Battle of Agincourt. Nobody listened to the bishops.

Credit where it’s due, the Catholic Church made an effort, and the Catholic monarchs on both sides let the effort happen. They got their tent in the middle, white flags, and they talked. Then they said, “No, we’re going to kill you,” told the priest to stand aside, and let the battle happen.

The Catholic Church is pushing for total peace, but it’s especially pushing for disarmament.

What about Chinese-style surveillance?

Thomas: Another element it pushed back on was AI-powered, Chinese Communist Party-style surveillance.

This encyclical took a lot of sideswipes at the CCP and the way it treats its people like cogs. That technocratic leadership is very CCP-coded. The Chinese Communist Party surveils everything you do and scores you as a citizen. The Catholic Church is pushing really hard against that.

Thomas: The Pope also quoted Tolkien via a Gandalf quote: “It’s not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we sow so that those who live after us may have clean earth to till.”

I thought that was a really great quote.

The Pope was pushing back against this doom idea, that there’s nothing we can do, that there are conspiratorial forces and technology’s so powerful we’re helpless. He essentially says, “No, listen to Gandalf.”

Some people are more powerful than others, and the Pope acknowledged that, but our job is to deal with the field in front of us so those who come after have a cleaner field. I love that attitude. He’s rejecting this Gnostic, conspiratorial view and saying, “Do what you can with what you have.”

Can Catholic authors use AI to edit and draft?

Thomas: Yes, as an aid for grammar, style, or suggestions. The key is that the final edit and the moral judgment stay with the author. Catholic authors can’t surrender that judgment to the AI.

As the Pope said, “AI can be a valuable tool, yet this power remains entirely tied to data processing.” He also said, “Human intelligence, with its conscience and freedom, guides the technological innovations.”

You can use it as a tool, but you can’t surrender your judgment to it.

Jonathan: Can Catholic authors use AI for drafting a book?

Thomas: Yes. Nothing in this encyclical banned that. The key is that you take responsibility and provide oversight as the Catholic author. As the Pope said, “These systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence, offering tangible benefits across many fields.” He went on to say, “Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation.” It’s the same theme. You can use it as a tool, but you can’t let the tool exercise judgment. You, as a human, must maintain it.

Can Catholic literary agents and publishers use AI to read the slush pile?

Thomas: No. If AI makes autonomous accept-and-reject decisions without human review, the Pope criticized that pretty explicitly. He warned that sensitive decisions risk being fully delegated to automated systems that lack compassion, mercy, or forgiveness. He said, “Entrusting an algorithm in practice with power to select who is worthy or not, without anyone bearing responsibility for that judgment, is to hand over the task of redefining the boundaries of human possibilities.” The context was specifically about resumes and judging human value.

The application to a human literary agent delegating the slush pile to an AI is a pretty clear correlation.

This caused me to ask if a Catholic can even use a spam filter.

A pure spam filter, maybe not. But the way spam filters are implemented, there’s a spam folder, and there’s a chance of mercy. If someone was incorrectly damned by the AI into spam filter purgatory, you, as the human, can go into your spam folder, offer mercy to the author of that email, and bring them back into your inbox.

It’s a pardon from the spam box. You were inappropriately damned to the spam box. So having that spam filter and reviewing it from time to time might be important for Catholics, according to the Pope.

Jonathan: Can Catholic publishers use AI to read the slush pile?

Thomas: No, not for final rejections and acceptances without meaningful human oversight or accountability. I think you could make an argument that you could use AI to expedite the slush pile by summarizing it, but you, as the human, have to be the one judging and rejecting a manuscript. It can’t be the machine doing that for you.

Can a Catholic author use AI for research?

Thomas: Yes, as a research assistant. You’re still exercising judgment but using it as a tool. The Pope said, “Technology has the power to heal, connect, educate, and protect our common home, yet human intelligence, with its conscience and freedom, is what guides it.” It comes back to the same answer. You have to use your conscience for the final decision-making, but you can absolutely use it as a tool.

I think the Pope would approve of the way I implemented the Patron Toolbox, because one of the things he kept talking about is human judgment. The Patron Toolbox aids human judgment, but it’s not a replacement for it.

With a tool like Grammarly, it’s very easy to “accept all changes,” and by doing so to delegate your human judgment to the machine.

The Pope would say that’s not good from a theological perspective. I would say it’s not good from a protecting-your-voice perspective, so I can make a secular case for why you shouldn’t use Grammarly.

The Patron Toolbox is less convenient than Grammarly because you have to accept every single change and implement them manually, which forces you to use human judgment for each one and decide whether it’s for the better. That friction is a feature, not a bug, from a Catholic social teaching perspective.

One reason I read the encyclical was to find out if I could market the Patron Toolbox in good conscience to Catholics. I don’t want to cause a Catholic to violate their conscience.

Can a Catholic author use the Patron Toolbox for various tasks?

Plotting and story development?

Thomas: Yes, as long as Catholics are the ones making the moral judgment at the end.

Book blurbs and marketing copy?

Thomas: Yes, again, as long as it’s your final judgment, using the tool is fine.

Study guides, discussion questions, or companion materials?

Thomas: That’s fine. He talked about how AI is a tool that can foster dialogue and participation. The key is that it serves the common good without replacing personal conscience.

Developmental or copy editing?

Thomas: Yes, for the reasons I already outlined. The key is that it’s a tool to help you make decisions, not to replace you making them.

Book cover concepts and design ideas?

Thomas: Yes, for visual concepts, as long as the final design decisions stay with the human creator.

He didn’t put many prohibitions on individuals using AI for creative work. His concern was more about corporations and governments using AI against the people, and technocratic leadership using AI against the people. That’s my concern too. The scariest AI is not you using AI to make a better book cover; it’s Meta using AI to control your imagination. That’s really scary.

Language translation?

Thomas: Yes, although it’s interesting. While he used AI to help write the encyclical, I don’t think he used it to translate the encyclical. Most authors would typically write the book themselves, but use AI to translate it.

Social media?

Thomas: The Pope had a lot to say about social media, and a lot of it was negative. We share the same concerns. Using AI to create content on social media isn’t a problem as long as you’re guiding it.

One of the things he talked about was the danger of social media and social networks using AI to direct human imagination. So much of your knowledge of the world is directed by these social media algorithms, which are very dangerous. They control you and control your imagination in dangerous ways.

Thomas’s Additional Notes and Observations on the Encyclical

On GDP

Thomas: I jotted down a few more comments while listening. He critiqued GDP, which I loved. His critique was that gross domestic product is a dehumanizing force. I agree with all of his critiques, and I’d go further.

As a metric, GDP has been harmful to Western civilization, and it’s a core reason the birth rate has collapsed, because we don’t capture the value that mothers produce in gross domestic product.

Any decision guided by GDP will diminish what a mother does and emphasize what that woman could have done if she weren’t a mother. It’s a huge anti-mother force in society, and it has killed the birth rate. If you tried to put a number on what a mother produces, most estimates of replacing her run between $120,000 and $180,000 a year.

When you articulate it that way, most women create more economic value as a mother than they do working for a corporation.

That’s not a comfortable conclusion. So instead of allowing that data to exist, they ignore it and say, “The only valuable thing a woman can do is work for a corporation. If she’s working as a mother, it’s not valuable, because we can’t measure it in GDP.”

Once a country starts using GDP to guide its decision-making, its birth rate falls off a cliff. It’s dehumanizing, and it’s very undermining for the community.

Mothers used to make a meal for a sick friend and take it to their home with a note and an offer for prayer. Today, women often can’t do that because they’re pressured into this corporate concubinage. Instead, they send a gift card so you can get DoorDash. What’s lost with the DoorDash gift card is that community, that reciprocal exchange of goods.

The Pope didn’t go that far. In fact, he seemed to have a high view of women in the workplace, and he used a lot of leftist language like diversity, inclusion, equality, and communities. Instead of talking about families, he often talked about communities. But while his language was very leftist, his arguments were not particularly leftist.

On Gnosticism

Thomas: Theologically, I didn’t have a lot of critique. There were things I didn’t understand, and I’m still very thankful I’m not Catholic. This didn’t convert me to Catholicism.

I was really listening for elements of Gnosticism, because I see Gnosticism, which is the Antichrist spirit, as the existential threat. There’s a lot of Gnosticism tied up in this technocratic, transhumanist ideology. It’s very Gnostic, and the Pope was clearly against it.

I wrote a sentence that summarized the final section: “Technology, the silicon-made word, will not save humanity. Jesus, the Word made flesh, is our only path to salvation.” He didn’t say it in those words, but that’s basically the argument at the end. He referred to Jesus as the Word made flesh several times, which is a finger in the eye of Gnostics.

The test for the Antichrist spirit that St. John gives us in the Book of First John is that you ask the spirit one question: “Did Jesus Christ come in the flesh?” That’s the test.

The Word Made Flesh redeems our flesh. Our physical bodies will be resurrected, according to Christian teaching.

On Globalism

Thomas: The other interesting thing was how globalist this was. I don’t think I appreciated just how globalist the Vatican is, and maybe the whole Catholic Church is, in its orientation. This helped me understand one big difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy is very nationalist in its orientation. It’s the Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, whereas it’s the global Catholic Church. Rome was over everybody. The Pope had a very high view of globalist institutions like the UN.

Gnosticism has a nationalistic incarnation, too. I’d say Nazism is Gnosticism incarnated in a nationalist form, and communism is Gnosticism incarnated in a globalist form. Both are forms of Gnosticism, as is Islam. Speaking of Islam, he had only nice things to say about it. While he took all kinds of swipes at the Catholics, he didn’t take any swipes at the Muslims.

Bottom Line

Thomas: To sum up, technology, the silicon-made word, will not save humanity. Jesus, the Word made flesh, is our only path to salvation.

As Christians, we can use technology to aid our work, and that is good and right. We aren’t prohibited from using tools, and using a tool does not make your work any less valuable.

Your work is good, true, and beautiful to the degree that it honors God and blesses your neighbor. The tool neither redeems nor pollutes the work. The work is redeemed to the degree that it honors God, and polluted to the degree that it dishonors God. That’s my understanding of the Catholic teaching on AI.

The encyclical was extremely in-depth. Chapter one was a summary, because Catholic social teaching only goes back to the 1800s. The Catholic Church, or at least the papacy, was silent on social issues before that. This Pope Leo named himself after the pope who wrote the first encyclical on Catholic social doctrine, Rerum Novarum, which was the Catholic Church’s position on communism and the Industrial Revolution.

It was published in the 1890s, when the Industrial Revolution was turning humans into cogs and communism was doing crazy stuff. The Catholic Church critiqued both. It was saying that capitalism and communism, when taken too far, both devalue the human. It was trying to articulate a via media, a middle way.

He re-articulates that the Catholic Church supports private property. Private property is a core Catholic value, according to this Pope Leo and the last Pope Leo. In short, Catholics are not communists as some people claim.

Can Catholic’s use the Patron Toolbox?

Thomas: The Pope has not endorsed the Patron Toolbox, nor has he endorsed Anthropic, even though Anthropic was there at the presentation. But from my reading of the encyclical, and as a Christian who has studied Catholic history but isn’t Catholic, if you’re Catholic, I think you can use every tool in the Patron Toolbox in good conscience without violating this particular encyclical.

You can also use it without violating the Author’s Guild guidelines on AI. While I’m hesitant to violate Catholic conscience, I’m all for conflict with the Author’s Guild. I’m here for that battle. But at this point, I’m not in conflict with either one.

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Citations for Reference

1. Can Catholic authors use AI for editing? Yes, as an aid for grammar, style, or suggestions, while the final edit and moral judgment remain with the author. The encyclical describes AI as a valuable tool whose power stays tied to data processing (¶99), and it stresses that human intelligence, with its conscience and freedom, guides technical innovation (¶97).

2. Can Catholic authors use AI for drafting a book? Yes, for initial drafts or idea generation, provided the author retains creative vision and spiritual oversight. The encyclical notes that these systems merely imitate certain functions of human intelligence while offering tangible benefits (¶99), yet it insists that moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation (¶198) and that the human person must guide the work.

3. Can Catholic agents use AI to read the slush pile? No, not if the AI makes autonomous accept or reject decisions without human review. The encyclical warns that important and sensitive decisions risk being fully delegated to automated systems that cannot show compassion, mercy, or forgiveness (¶102), and that handing an algorithm the power to select who is worthy, with no one accountable for the judgment, surrenders the task of defining the boundaries of human possibility (¶103).

4. Can Catholic publishers use AI to read the slush pile? No, not for final rejections or acceptances without meaningful human oversight and accountability. The encyclical argues that a system designed or used to treat some lives as less worthy, or to exclude them with no possibility of appeal, is no longer merely a tool to be used well (¶104), and it insists that responsibility be clearly defined at every stage so that someone can account for each decision (¶105).

5. Can Catholic authors use AI for research? Yes, as a research assistant, while the author still exercises personal discernment and spiritual reflection. The encyclical celebrates technology’s power to heal, connect, educate, and protect our common home (¶9), yet it again roots that power in human intelligence guided by conscience and freedom (¶97).

6. Can Catholic authors use AI for plotting and story development? Yes, for generating plot suggestions, while the author supplies the unifying vision and moral framework. AI can be a valuable tool (¶100), but moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation (¶198) and must remain under human conscience.

7. Can Catholic authors use AI to generate book blurbs and marketing copy? Yes, as a drafting aid for communication, with final approval resting on the author to ensure truth and dignity.

8. Can Catholic authors use AI to create study guides, discussion questions, or companion materials? Yes, for generating supporting materials, while the author ensures they deepen genuine human and spiritual engagement. The encyclical favors tools that foster dialogue and participation (¶192), provided they serve the common good without replacing personal catechesis or conscience.

9. Can Catholic publishers use AI for developmental or copy editing? Yes, as an efficiency tool, while human editors retain final responsibility and accountability, since the encyclical requires that responsibility be clearly defined at every stage so someone can account for each decision (¶105).

10. Can Catholic authors use AI for initial book-cover concepts and design ideas? Yes, for visual concepts, while the final design decision belongs to the human creator or designer. The encyclical calls on developers to embed values in their projects with transparency and responsibility (¶111).

11. Can Catholic authors use AI to translate their books into other languages? Yes, for translation assistance, while the author reviews for doctrinal accuracy, cultural sensitivity, and human voice, since the encyclical’s treatment of responsibility, transparency, and governance in Chapter Three requires human oversight.

12. Can Catholic authors use AI to create social media posts and author branding content? Yes, as an aid for content, while the author ensures authenticity and avoids deception. The encyclical notes that those who control digital platforms hold a considerable ability to affect the collective imagination (¶136), so human conscience must direct the work.

Sources

• Vatican: Full Text of Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)
• The Verge: “Did the Pope use AI to write about the dangers of AI?” (27 May 2026)
• Linch Zhang / Substack: “Claude, Author of the Humanitas” (detailed Pangram analysis)
• Cybernews: “The Pope’s AI encyclical is triggering AI detectors” (GPTZero results, 27 May 2026)
• National Catholic Register: Full Text and Expert Reactions (27 May 2026)