In ”The Magician’s Nephew,” C. S. Lewis tells the story of Uncle Andrew, a pompous, self-important magician who finds himself present at the creation of Narnia as it is sung into being by the great lion, Aslan.
Initially repelled, Uncle Andrew’s perspective changes when a piece of iron brought from London drops to the earth and springs up as a large lamppost in this miraculously fecund world:
The commercial possibilities of this country are unbounded. Bring a few old bits of scrap iron here, bury ’em, and up they come as brand-new railway engines, battleships, …. They’ll cost nothing, and I can sell ’em at full prices in England. I shall be a millionaire.…The first thing is to get that brute [Aslan] shot.
Uncle Andrew is the embodiment of the technocratic paradigm, which Pope Leo XIV recognizes as a central threat to our age. This paradigm defines our relationship to the natural world and to other humans exclusively through efficiency, profit, and power, fostering a throwaway culture that produces rampant consumerism and a deep disregard for humanity. Like Uncle Andrew, the technocratic paradigm looks on the wonders of creation and sees only a tool for profit.
The challenge of artificial intelligence, Leo argues in his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, is not the technology itself, but its enmeshment in the technocratic paradigm. To confront the challenges of the digital revolution, we must disentangle the tech from that paradigm. And Leo’s consistent message for the last year has been that Catholic education is an essential force in this work.
In January, Leo said that just as the Church relied upon education in its response to the industrial revolution, she now turns to education in response to the digital revolution, calling upon institutions to offer a humanistic and cultural formation for their students. The principles that define human excellence and lead to human flourishing will provide these young people with the formation necessary to resist the paradigm seeking to control and commodify them.
Leo notes that “fidelity to the truth requires integrating the possibilities offered by technology within a framework marked by wisdom, which is capable of safeguarding both the dignity of each person and the future of our common home.” In his teachings, first canonizations, and declarations, Leo proposes a four-part educational approach to promote human dignity and to liberate technology from technocracy: fast with St. Carlo Actuis, immerse with St. Pier Giorgio Frassati, integrate with St. John Henry Newman, and incarnate in community.
Fast with Acutis
More than a quarter of the world’s population is struggling with some form of digital addiction; we are immersed in a “dopamine culture,” drowning in 30-second hits of repetitive, compulsive, gamified activity.
Such a culture, Leo warns will reduce humans to “passive consumers of unthought thoughts and anonymous products without ownership or love.” In losing authentic culture, we lose the prophetic witness that provides insight into the human experience. Education must begin by providing spaces free from the disorienting effects of digital addiction.
Leo notes that the newly-canonized St. Carlo Acutis offered the world an example of just such disciplined use, reminding us that we can rightly use technology only by first training ourselves in digital sobriety. Before we can use such pervasive technologies appropriately, we must teach ourselves when not to use them.
Immerse with Frassati
“Do not remain fixated on your smartphones and their fleeting bursts of images” says Leo. “Instead, look to the sky, to the heights”—a clear reference to “Verso L’Alto,” the motto of St. Pier Giorgio Frassati, canonized by Pope Leo in the early days of his pontificate. It is not enough to turn away from the phone; we must turn toward reality and be immersed in the beauty of nature and in the power of poetry and of song.
As Leo noted in his apostolic exhortation, “Drawing New Maps of Hope,” contemplating God in creation and art cultivates a disposition to divine inspiration in young people and reminds them of their human calling. “No algorithm can replace that which makes education truly human: poetry, art, imagination, and the joy of discovery,” wrote Leo, for “each of us possesses an irreplaceable and inimitable vocation that originates from our own lived experience.”
The fabrications and hallucinations of AI make it difficult to distinguish the authentic from the insincere, tempting us to prioritize the fake and easy over the reality that is so vital to human flourishing. It is essential that education give students time “for engagement with reality beyond appearances.” This engagement will imbue them with a deep longing for the real, reminding them that “we are a desire, not an algorithm!” It is only by recognizing rich, human realities through a deep immersion in their truths that we can rightly judge the algorithms.
Integrate with Newman
Artificial intelligence treats human knowledge as fragmented data points, and is incapable of judging its ultimate meaning. If AI becomes the source and measure of our understanding, we will lack the necessary wisdom to properly orient ourselves to reality. In Magnifica humanitas, Leo notes that “as knowledge becomes increasingly fragmented, it becomes difficult to grasp reality as a whole, to ask profound questions about meaning, or to develop authentic, critical and creative thought.”
In this world of fragmentation, an “integral education” like that proposed by St. John Henry Newman is of paramount importance. Such an education provides a unifying vision of the whole of existence—both what is known by faith and what is known through reason—and rejects the mercantilist’s inclination to measure value in terms of functionality and practical utility. It depends on silence and conversation, and careful reflection on one’s own experiences and sufferings and on those experienced vicariously. And it requires great effort, placing it in direct conflict with the modern method where, as Leo noted, “passive adaptation to dominant paradigms will be mistaken for competence.”
Such an integral education is at fundamental odds with the technocratic paradigm. Without it, we risk confusing the rhythms and value of human knowing with the empty work of artificial intelligence. If AI-assisted learning becomes the standard for our education, we will lose the ability to rightly judge its role within the whole of human life, for while AI imitates (and even surpasses) our capacity for data computation, it lacks the “affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.”
Incarnate in Community
The AI of the technocratic paradigm makes us lonely. It perpetuates “the pervasive lie of a distorted system, which reduces people to numbers, exacerbating competitiveness and leaving us caught in spirals of anxiety.” To free ourselves from these distortions and lies, we need an education incarnated in a rich, authentic community life, for, as Leo wrote, “Truth is sought in community.”
In Magnifica humanitas, Leo reminds us that “in an era that favors speed and fragmentation, the human person still yearns to receive care and recognition from attentive minds, kind words and hands capable of tenderness. The digital culture multiplies connections and offers new opportunities for interaction; yet, the human heart retains an irrevocable need for genuine closeness.” Humans yearn for a community that is unified through a shared pursuit and embrace of the Truth, entrusted to it by God.
Education is the work of a community, Leo argues, for “the deepest and most important things are learned only after much time and effort, by engaging in discussion with others, ‘striking upon’ ideas and experiences together like flint until the spark of understanding is kindled within us.” This unhurried, communal pursuit is truly the instrument of the education; it cannot be outsourced or downloaded.
“Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world,” Leo continues, “but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.” By rooting education in the rich soil of real community, we push back against the isolation and distortion that AI brings into the world of academia.
I opened with C.S. Lewis’s description of the technocratic paradigm; I close by appropriating the quote from J.R.R. Tolkien that Leo used in Magnifica Humanitas.
In the fight with the technocratic paradigm, “it is not our part to master all the tides of the world,” but in the field of education, we must “do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set.”
The teaching of our young people has been given into our care, and we must uproot the evils present in this paradigm so that future generations “may have clean earth to till.” We must protect them from the “pervasiveness of digital media [that] fosters a culture of immediacy and hyper-stimulation, which gives rise to fatigue, boredom and apathy concerning the effort required for seeking the truth,” immersing them in the richness of reality, and offering them an integrating education within a place of authentic community.
Whether this humanizing education will free them from the prison of the technocratic age is more than we can know, but for those of us entrusted with Catholic education, let us at least give those in our care the freedom to fight another day.
Fr. Deacon Kyle Washut is president of Wyoming Catholic College