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Artificial Intelligence, Human Responsibility, and Discernment: A Reader Response to Father George E. Schultze, S.J.’s “Labor Unions, the Church, AI, and Magnifica Humanitas” — with Traditional Mandarin Edition

A Catholic and Ignatian reader response to Father George E. Schultze, S.J. on artificial intelligence, work, family, the common good, and the final end of human action. The complete Traditional Mandarin edition is included on this page.

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Artificial Intelligence, Human Responsibility, and Discernment: A Reader Response to Father George E. Schultze, S.J.’s “Labor Unions, the Church, AI, and Magnifica Humanitas”

Edition noteEnglish is presented first, with a complete Traditional Mandarin edition included on the same page. Each edition retains its own notes and bibliography; switching languages does not alter the text or citation numbering.

I am grateful for the opportunity to read Father George E. Schultze, S.J.’s September 6, 2026 Labor Day reflection in Catholic World Report, “Labor Unions, the Church, AI, and Magnifica Humanitas.” Father Schultze places artificial intelligence within the larger Catholic questions of vocation, work, family, the common good, and the final end of human action. In doing so, he returns a technological question to its deeper theological form: What good is technology meant to serve, and is that good finally ordered toward God?[1]

I fully share the conclusions that follow from this approach. Artificial intelligence can and should be developed and used well. Human dignity and purpose are not defined by technological capability; human moral responsibility cannot simply be transferred to a machine; and gains in productivity should strengthen workers, marriage, family, and community rather than make the human person subordinate to efficiency.

This essay develops two questions within that shared framework. First, if future artificial systems greatly exceed present AI, which claims remain enduring propositions of Catholic anthropology and which are empirical judgments tied to present technology? Second, if an artificial system were expected to reason seriously within a Catholic intellectual framework, what bodies of thought, ecclesial sources, and lived local traditions would it need to understand? Both questions extend Father Schultze’s central concern into a longer technological horizon.

I

Father Schultze’s Central Concern: Technology in Service of the Human Good

Father Schultze’s argument moves from the human will, through labor and technology, toward the measure of the good and the final end of human action.

He begins, in a way often found in Jesuit reflection, with the human will and then moves into the technological question. Drawing upon St. Ignatius and the Spiritual Exercises, Father Schultze asks whether human beings truly seek God’s will or seek it only insofar as it conforms to existing desires and attachments. Technology is therefore connected to a deeper question: are our desires rightly ordered, and are we truly free to seek the true good even when convenience, profit, or power pull in another direction?

Father Schultze then places artificial intelligence within the long history of human labor and technological development. Tools, agriculture, steam power, electricity, computers, and artificial intelligence can all be understood as part of humanity’s continuing development of technology for self-preservation and integral human development. He addresses the risks of worker surveillance and occupational displacement and places the response on adaptation, retraining, and responsible use.

From history, the essay turns to social order. Father Schultze places productivity within integral human development and proposes that the gains created by artificial intelligence can support shorter working hours, just compensation, living wages, family care, and meaningful communal activity. This also reflects cura personalis: the worker is a whole person whose work affects family, vocation, community, dignity, and the ability to care for others. Increased productivity is therefore valuable not only because society can produce more, but because it may free time for children, parents, parish, community, and other forms of human service.

Father Schultze then reaches the deepest theological and moral question in the reflection. Even if artificial intelligence possesses extraordinary computational power, computational power does not itself determine the good toward which it should be directed. Developers, institutions, providers, operators, and users establish goals, assumptions, and constraints. Father Schultze therefore raises what is often called the alignment problem: how the results produced by Artificial Intelligence correspond to human intentions and, more fundamentally, what human beings themselves understand as good.

In ordinary engineering language, the artificial intelligence alignment problem asks whether an AI system actually behaves according to the goals, values, and constraints established by its designers or users.

Father Schultze then asks a deeper question: even if a system does exactly what we ask it to do, is what we asked it to do actually good?

Technical alignment asks, “Is the system acting according to our intention?” Moral alignment asks, “Is our intention itself truly good?” Catholic and Ignatian discernment also asks, “What is the true good? How do we know it? Which attachments may be distorting our judgment? Are both the ends we set and the means we adopt rightly ordered toward God?”

Following Father Schultze’s treatment, alignment finally becomes a discernment of ends.

A. Alignment and the Measure of the Good

The alignment problem leads naturally to Father Schultze’s discussion of competing moral frameworks: different accounts of the human person imply different accounts of the good that technology should serve.

The intellectual framework he favors runs from God through revelation, created order, natural law, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition, final ends, objective human goods, and human dignity, and from there toward family, work, community, and moral limits upon technology.

The other framework he criticizes runs broadly from Rationalism and Deism through Enlightenment emphasis upon autonomy, Kantian ethics and secular rights discourse, Nietzsche and the will to power, and then toward postmodernism, secular humanism, and increasingly individualized claims of rights detached from objective human ends.

Father Schultze also connects this deeper intellectual conflict to contemporary social and ecclesial controversies, including secular humanism, DEI, contemporary identity-based political activism, Pride at Work, the German Synodal Way, and challenges to traditional Catholic teaching on the human person, marriage, and family.

The central question is therefore simple to state and difficult to evade: Who defines the “good” that AI should serve? On that question, I fully share Father Schultze’s conclusion.

The moral problem of artificial intelligence is not automatically solved when we discover better engineering methods, because engineering cannot itself determine the ultimate end. Without some prior account of what the human person is, why the person exists, and what truly constitutes human good, “AI alignment” ultimately does not know what it is supposed to align with.

A system can execute a disordered objective with great technical precision, and greater capability may make that execution more thorough. Alignment therefore concerns the machine, human desire, institutional purpose, and our understanding of the good.

B. Doctrine, Philosophical Argument, and Social Application

The argument can be read at three connected levels that should remain distinct even as they inform one another.

The first level is Catholic doctrine: theological and moral teaching concerning human dignity, marriage, family, objective good, conscience, freedom, and the ultimate orientation of the human person toward God.

The second level is philosophical argument, including the Thomistic tradition, final ends, the relation between reason and revelation, Kantian autonomy, the grounding of rights, and the different ways philosophical traditions understand the human good.

The third level is political and social application, including questions concerning DEI, Pride at Work, the German Synodal Way, labor movements, and artificial intelligence policy.

Catholic doctrine, philosophical argument, and social application are different in kind and should not be collapsed into one another. Their connection lies deeper: concrete judgments eventually disclose an account of the human person, the good, and the moral order.

II

From Present AI to Hypothetical SAI: Capability, Conscience, and Responsibility

If future systems greatly exceed present AI, Catholic claims about human freedom, responsibility, and dignity still require conceptual clarity. For that purpose, this essay uses hypothetical superintelligent artificial intelligence (SAI) as a thought experiment.

Here SAI means only a hypothetical future system that substantially exceeds the best human performance across most important cognitive domains and can integrate knowledge and reasoning across disciplines. The hypothesis tests concepts; it does not assume that such a system will necessarily exist.

The distinction between present AI and hypothetical SAI matters because the phrase “moral judgment” actually contains several different activities.

The first level is moral knowledge. A sufficiently advanced system could conceivably know Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, the Fathers, ecumenical councils, St. Thomas, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, canon law, papal teaching, theology, philosophy, history, and relevant empirical knowledge far more comprehensively than any individual human being.

The second level concerns the interpretation and application of moral principles and authoritative sources: identifying which principles apply, distinguishing levels of authority, interpreting texts, recognizing exceptions, comparing authorities, and identifying genuine conflicts. We have no sufficient reason to assume in advance that all such intellectual work must permanently remain beyond artificial systems.

The third level concerns analysis by practical reason: understanding concrete circumstances, comparing morally permissible courses of action, constructing counterfactuals, and anticipating possible consequences. A sufficiently advanced future system might become extremely capable at these tasks. Such analysis may imitate some operations associated with prudence, but it is not thereby the cardinal virtue of prudence itself. In Catholic moral theology, prudence perfects practical reason so that a person discerns the true good in concrete circumstances and chooses fitting means to attain it.[2]

The fourth level is qualitatively different: conscience and moral responsibility. At the level of conscience and moral responsibility, the question is no longer merely whether a conclusion is correct. It concerns the subject who can say, “I ought to do this,” who can freely ask, judge, assent or refuse, and who bears responsibility for the act.

Finally there is spiritual wisdom and holiness, including faith, hope, charity, grace, prayer, conversion, sacramental life, sanctification, and communion with God. Greater computational power by itself does not establish any of these realities.

The proposition to preserve is not that an artificial system can never produce better moral analysis than a human being. It is that superior moral knowledge or analytical capacity does not by itself establish conscience, virtue, grace, holiness, moral responsibility, or legitimate moral authority.

A. Knowledge, Authority, and Formation

The distinction becomes clearer if we imagine a future artificial system that has learned almost everything taught in a Catholic seminary.

Complete mastery of knowledge would still not be equivalent to Catholic judgment, because Catholic thought has an ordered structure of authority. Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition, the living Magisterium, canon law, different theological schools, pastoral judgments, and private theological opinions do not possess equal authority.

Dei Verbum 10 describes Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium as inseparably related while preserving their distinct roles. The Code of Canon Law likewise shows that canonical interpretation involves far more than text retrieval. Canon 17 requires attention to the text and context of the law and, where necessary, to parallel provisions, the purpose and circumstances of the law, and the mind of the legislator. Canon 19, where an express provision is absent, permits reference to analogous laws, general principles, canonical equity, Roman Curia jurisprudence and practice, and the common opinion of learned persons.[3]

A sufficiently advanced artificial system might one day become extremely capable at canonical interpretation, comparison of authorities, analysis of precedents, and integration of multiple sources. It could compare more authorities, precedents, interpretations, facts, and consequences than any single canonist could simultaneously hold in mind.

Understanding an authority and possessing that authority are not the same thing.

Likewise, intellectual mastery is not formation. A seminarian is not formed merely by knowing Scripture, theology, the Catechism, canon law, and papal documents. Formation also involves prayer, virtue, spiritual direction, communal life, sacramental life, lived experience, examination of conscience, and growth in freedom from disordered attachments.

The New American Bible, Revised Edition joins renewal, testing, and discernment in concise terms. Romans urges believers to “be transformed by the renewal of your mind” so as to discern God’s will (Rom 12:2). Paul also writes, “Test everything; retain what is good” (1 Thes 5:21). First John adds, “do not trust every spirit but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God” (1 Jn 4:1).

Romans 12:2, 1 Thessalonians 5:21, and 1 John 4:1 may become especially important in a future in which artificial systems can speak with extraordinary fluency, confidence, and intellectual power.

Increasingly powerful intelligence therefore calls for deeper discernment.

B. Human Responsibility: Active and Deep Questioning

If future artificial intelligence becomes better than human beings at retrieving information, calculating consequences, comparing authorities, or proposing morally permissible options, the human role cannot consist merely in receiving an answer. Greater machine knowledge and speed should not become reasons to stop asking. Human responsibility includes actively asking more questions, deeper questions, and better questions, and steadily improving their precision and quality.

Active questioning should reach premises, sources, omissions, uncertainties, counterexamples, alternative interpretations, effects on the vulnerable, and the conditions that would change the conclusion. It should also test whether efficiency, cost, convenience, or an easily measured proxy has quietly displaced the true human good. The final question remains whether the proposed course is ordered toward God.

Artificial intelligence can itself help improve the questioning. A person can ask an AI or SAI to identify blind spots in the original question, propose questions not yet asked, search for counterexamples, challenge hidden premises, identify evidence not yet tested, and turn a vague inquiry into a progressively deeper and more precise one. Artificial intelligence can therefore assist not only in answering questions but also in teaching us how to ask better ones.

The beginning still depends on the human willingness to ask, to seek the truth, and to continue the inquiry. If a person merely wants a convenient answer, a more powerful system may simply make passive acceptance easier. Human responsibility therefore requires more than preserving permission to ask. It requires actually asking; not asking once, but continuing to ask; not merely increasing the number of questions, but improving their depth, precision, and moral relevance.

The human task need not be to recompute billions of alternatives merely to prove independence from the machine. What must remain is the active resolve to inquire, test, revise, discern, and take responsibility for the judgment that follows. The more powerful the system becomes, the more important that active habit of questioning becomes.

C. When the Machine Finds a Better Permissible Option: An Earthquake Thought Experiment

The following earthquake-relief example makes one specific issue concrete: even if SAI identifies a better permissible option, human questioning, freedom, and responsibility do not disappear.

Suppose an earthquake strikes a diocese and only one hundred emergency generators are available, while hospitals, nursing homes, shelters, parishes, schools, and family-support centers require far more than one hundred.

Before any calculation begins, legitimate human authorities establish moral boundaries. Innocent persons may not intentionally be sacrificed. Intrinsically evil means remain impermissible. The vulnerable deserve particular protection. Human beings may not be reduced merely to economic utility. Essential medical services deserve appropriate priority. Unjust discrimination must be excluded. Family integrity should be protected where reasonably possible, and the resources should serve the common good.

Now suppose a future SAI possesses reliable information concerning every medically dependent patient, hospital capacity, fuel supply, road condition, weather system, alternative power source, transport route, family dependency, and likely cascading consequence. Suppose it can compare billions of feasible plans and identifies one that violates no moral prohibition while preserving more lives, protecting more vulnerable persons, maintaining more essential services, and producing fewer serious secondary harms than all other permissible plans.

In such a case, there is no reason why human freedom and responsibility should require a bishop, physician, priest, or engineer to choose a demonstrably inferior plan merely to prove independence from the machine.

A choice informed by prudence may instead be to follow the better recommendation.

Following the better recommendation still leaves a human task: disclose the assumptions, test the reliability of the input data, examine how competing goods were weighed, verify that no protected person or moral prohibition disappeared inside a complex calculation, and discern whether the recommendation remains ordered toward the good originally intended.

Questioning assumptions, evidence, weighting, alternatives, and moral limits makes final assent a genuinely human act of judgment and responsibility.

Human freedom and responsibility therefore require freedom of discernment, and that freedom does not depend on permanently superior knowledge.

III

The Full Inheritance Required for Catholic Moral Reasoning

This section asks a distinct question: if an artificial system were to reason seriously within a Catholic framework, which intellectual traditions, ecclesial sources, and historical experiences would it need to understand?

The term “Judeo-Christian” is sometimes used today as an American political or cultural expression. The theological relationship signaled by the term “Judeo-Christian” has a much deeper and earlier foundation within the Catholic tradition.

Nostra Aetate 4 teaches that, when the Church examines her own mystery, she remembers the spiritual bond joining the people of the New Covenant with the descendants of Abraham. The Church received the revelation of the Old Testament through the Jewish people; Christ, the Apostles, and most of the first disciples came from that people.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church 839 develops the same teaching: when the Church examines her own mystery, she discovers her link with the Jewish People, whose faith is already a response to God’s revelation in the Old Covenant.[4]

The Catholic understanding of the Church’s Jewish roots remains explicit in recent papal teaching. Pope Francis has stated that the bond between Christians and Jews is theologically clear and inseparable, and that Christians cannot fully understand themselves apart from their Jewish roots. Pope Benedict XVI explicitly used the expression “Judeo-Christian tradition” in discussing moral truth and the civil order. St. John Paul II likewise situated human dignity, the sacredness of life, the importance of family, the meaning of work, responsibility, and stewardship of creation within the Judeo-Christian tradition.[5]

The continuity between the Catholic faith and its Jewish roots remains explicit under Pope Leo XIV, who stated in July 2026 that pilgrimage is “deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition.”[6]

The Church’s understanding of her Jewish roots belongs to the Church’s own self-understanding. It includes faith in the Creator, the human person as imago Dei, stewardship of creation, responsibility for one’s neighbor and especially the poor, the Decalogue, covenant, the prophetic tradition, and the Jewish world in which Jesus and the Apostles lived.

A. From Jewish Roots to the Universal and Local Church

A system expected to reason competently within a Catholic intellectual framework would need to understand an ordered genealogy extending from the Hebrew Scriptures and Israel’s covenantal tradition, Second Temple Jewish thought, and the Jewish world of Jesus and the Apostles through the New Testament and the early Church; Greek philosophy and the Hellenistic world; Roman law, institutions, political thought, Latin culture, the Church of Rome, and the Petrine See; the Greek and Latin Fathers together with Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian, and other Eastern Church traditions; the ecumenical councils and the development of doctrine; monastic and spiritual traditions; Augustine, Benedict, and other formative currents of the Latin Church; medieval scholastic philosophy and theology, especially St. Thomas; natural law, the doctrine of the virtues, and Catholic moral theology; canon law and its Roman inheritance; liturgical and sacramental traditions; Catholic social teaching; papal, conciliar, and other Magisterial teaching; the Catechism of the Catholic Church; the Code of Canon Law; and the Church’s continuing engagement with modern philosophy, science, and the humanities.

This inheritance also includes the lived experience of local Churches throughout the world. The universal Church does not exist apart from culture: the same faith is received, expressed, and lived through different languages, intellectual traditions, forms of worship, education, art, music, devotional life, social service, and pastoral experience. The encounters of the Church in Asia with Chinese culture, Confucian thought, Daoist traditions, Indian philosophy, and Buddhist cultural settings, together with the experiences of local Churches in Africa, Latin America, North America, Oceania, the Middle East, and Indigenous communities, belong to the accumulated work of Catholic inculturation. A system seeking serious Catholic moral competence would need both the common sources of the universal Church and the ability to understand how the faith is discerned and lived locally, while preserving the hierarchy of authority among those sources.

Within that larger genealogy, the Church’s Jewish roots are constitutive rather than optional background. A capable system would need to understand both continuity and difference: what Catholicism receives from Israel, how the New Testament understands that inheritance in Christ, how the Fathers and councils develop it, and how the Church understands her relationship with the Jewish people. Breadth of knowledge and doctrinal precision should increase together.

B. Theological Inheritance and Modern History Must Remain Distinct

The modern history of the State of Israel, Zionism, particular families, and financial institutions belongs to a different level of analysis from the theological claim about the Church’s Jewish roots.

The Jewish people, Judaism, biblical Israel, the modern State of Israel, Zionism, the Rothschild family, and modern banking and financial institutions are not interchangeable categories.

Modern political, philanthropic, and financial history does not prove the theological relationship between the Church and her Jewish roots, nor does that theological relationship depend upon modern historical examples. The theological claim already rests upon Scripture, Tradition, and authoritative Church teaching.

Examples from modern political, philanthropic, and financial history can still show how distinct traditions and institutions intersect without becoming identical.

Baron Edmond de Rothschild was an important supporter of early Jewish settlement and development in Palestine. He supported land acquisition, agricultural development, and industrial development and was associated with extensive land and multiple settlements.[7]

C. The IOR: Professional Competence, Institutional Ends, and Moral Authority

The Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR) provides a direct contemporary Catholic institutional example of the difference between professional competence and authority over Catholic ends.

In 2026 François Pauly became President of the Board of Superintendence of the Institute for the Works of Religion, the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, or IOR. IOR materials state that his appointment was approved by its Commission of Cardinals, and that he had previously held senior leadership responsibilities at Edmond de Rothschild. The IOR describes its own institutional mission and investment process as explicitly grounded in Catholic values.[8]

The IOR example serves only an institutional analogy: highly developed financial and managerial expertise can enter a Catholic institution and serve its mission without thereby acquiring authority to define the institution’s final ends. Professional competence and Catholic moral authority can therefore remain clearly distinct.

Applied to Artificial Intelligence, the IOR distinction between professional competence and authority over Catholic ends gives an analogy: an artificial system may possess extremely high analytical competence without thereby acquiring authority to define moral ends.

Four distinctions matter as artificial intelligence becomes more capable. Technical competence concerns what a system can calculate or accomplish. Moral competence concerns how well it can understand and apply a moral framework. Moral responsibility concerns the person who freely recognizes and chooses the good and bears responsibility for action. Moral authority concerns who legitimately possesses the authority to define, interpret, and revise the governing moral and ecclesial framework.

Technical competence, moral competence, moral responsibility, and moral authority may be connected in a human person; in an artificial system they should be analyzed separately.

D. Contemporary Political Context: Understand It, but Keep It Distinct

Father Schultze’s reflection also discusses the present U.S. administration’s emphasis on artificial intelligence development and American technological leadership. The current U.S. government also maintains a close political and strategic relationship with the State of Israel. In this essay, those political policies and international relationships are treated separately from Catholic theological propositions.[9]

The relevance of current U.S. AI policy and the U.S.–Israel relationship is that they remind us that artificial intelligence is not being developed inside a culturally empty laboratory.

AI development takes place in a world in which technological competition, religious traditions, historical memory, legal systems, financial institutions, national strategy, and geopolitics intersect.

A system genuinely capable of Catholic moral reasoning would therefore need enough knowledge to understand these different forces and enough conceptual discipline to keep them distinct: theology from history, politics from economics, law from geopolitical interest, and all of them from authoritative Church teaching.

IV

Instruments, Personal Participation, and External Intelligence

Father Schultze describes artificial intelligence as a tool. Following his description of AI as a tool serving human ends, one can ask what allows a tool to remain a tool even when it surpasses its user in particular tasks.

A telescope sees what the unaided eye cannot see. A crane lifts what its operator cannot lift. A calculator performs arithmetic faster than its user. A database retains more information than its administrator can remember. A chess engine can defeat nearly every human being.

Surpassing a user in sight, lifting power, arithmetic, memory, or chess does not give a tool authority to determine its own ultimate purpose.

The principle that superior capability does not confer authority over ultimate ends may also apply to hypothetical SAI. It may one day know more, reason more consistently, perform better causal analysis, and compare more alternatives. It remains instrumental when its capacities are ordered toward ends defined by legitimate moral and ecclesial authority.

Instrumentality is better understood through the ordering of ends than through inferiority of capability.

Human dignity need not rest upon permanent human cognitive superiority. The distinction to preserve is the human relationship to truth, goodness, freedom, responsibility, communion, and God.

A. Some Acts Cannot Be Reduced to Function

There is an important limit to delegation.

Prayer offers an especially easy example to understand.

Suppose an SAI could compose a prayer more beautiful, more scripturally rich, and more theologically precise than one written by an ordinary member of the faithful. Personal prayer remains irreducibly personal because prayer is relationship and communion with God.

Likewise, an artificial system could compose a perfect examination of conscience without possessing conscience, write a flawless act of contrition without repenting, explain charity without loving, and describe faith without believing.

We can therefore distinguish instrumental activities from formative activities. Retrieving canons, comparing authorities, checking translations, searching historical materials, calculating probabilities, and modeling consequences may often be extensively delegated if artificial systems perform them reliably. Prayer, repentance, charity, sacramental life, accompaniment, discernment, moral struggle, and freely assuming responsibility are different because personal participation is itself part of the good.

The distinction between delegable functional work and acts in which personal participation is itself part of the good can be summarized this way: instrumental work can preserve its function while methods change; actions in which personal participation is constitutive of the good should preserve that personal participation.

B. The “Outer Brain”: Freedom, Questioning, and Responsibility

Brain-computer interfaces make the question of how human freedom and responsibility remain when substantial cognitive work occurs outside the body less abstract.

A Brain-Computer Interface, or BCI, creates a pathway between human neural activity and an external computational system. Contemporary research has already enabled people with severe paralysis to translate attempted speech into synthesized voice and, in other settings, to use neural signals together with artificial intelligence assistance to control computers or robotic systems.[10]

Suppose a person intends to pick up a cup. Neural activity is converted into signals that the external system can interpret, artificial intelligence helps infer the intention, software calculates the trajectory, and a robotic system executes the action. Much of the intermediate computation takes place outside the person’s biological nervous system. We ordinarily understand the technology as helping the person realize the intention; the person remains the subject of the intention.

A future cognitive analogue could operate similarly. A person might ask, “What is the morally right course of action here?” An external SAI could retrieve relevant facts, Scripture, Tradition, Magisterial teaching, canon law, historical context, and moral principles; model consequences; identify prohibited options; compare permissible alternatives; and explain each step of its reasoning.

When an external SAI begins supplying facts, comparisons, and reasoning for a moral judgment, active, persistent, high-quality questioning becomes essential if the system is truly to serve the person. The person should not only inspect the answer but continue the inquiry, and can ask the SAI itself to improve the depth and quality of that inquiry: identify blind spots in the question, propose a deeper next question, list counterexamples that could overturn the conclusion, or point out premises and evidence that have not yet been adequately tested.

The person must still ask: Why these authorities? Why this interpretation? What is the greatest uncertainty? Which permissible alternatives have not been adequately compared? How does the recommendation affect the poorest or most vulnerable person? Does it lead toward greater truth, justice, charity, and communion? And ultimately, is it genuinely ordered toward God?

The external system can therefore become an aid to questioning rather than a reason to stop questioning. The decisive issue is not merely whether intellectual work occurs inside or outside biological tissue, but whether the human person continues actively to seek truth, ask, test, challenge, refuse, redirect, and take responsibility for the final action.

C. An Ignatian Examination for AI-Assisted Decisions

When AI or SAI participates in decisions with serious consequences, the Ignatian tradition offers a language and practice of discernment well suited to the task.

Before accepting a consequential recommendation, a person or community should remain free to ask: What good are we really seeking? Have convenience, profit, prestige, fear, speed, or power quietly displaced that good? Which sources and assumptions is the system using? How is it treating Scripture, Tradition, the Magisterium, canon law, theological opinion, empirical evidence, and prudential judgment? Has it flattened all of these into an undifferentiated body of “data”?

We must also ask the end toward which the system is actually being ordered. If it claims to promote “integral human development,” has integral human development quietly been reduced to productivity, survival, preference satisfaction, cost, or some other variable that is easier to calculate than the true human good?

Ignatian attention to fruits is especially helpful here. We should ask both whether a recommendation works and where it leads. Does it tend toward greater truth, justice, charity, solidarity, freedom, reconciliation, service, and care for the vulnerable? Does it tend toward domination, dependency, isolation, the erosion of human dignity, manipulation, or avoidance of responsibility?

Real human oversight requires the freedom to ask another question, demand further explanation, test another hypothesis, reject a recommendation, and, when necessary, stop the process. In a world increasingly skilled at supplying answers, that freedom is itself part of discernment and remains ordered toward one final test: whether the proposed course is directed toward God.

Conclusion

Distinguishing present AI from hypothetical SAI, and clarifying the full inheritance required for Catholic moral reasoning, are two ways of carrying Father Schultze’s central concern into a wider range of future technical conditions. artificial intelligence may become far more capable than present systems without changing the Catholic claim that technology must serve the human good, that human beings remain responsible for the ends they choose, and that increased productivity should strengthen workers, families, and communities.

A future SAI may surpass individual human beings in knowledge, comparison, prediction, and some forms of moral analysis. Technical competence, moral competence, moral responsibility, and moral authority still remain distinct. Superior analysis does not create conscience, virtue, grace, or Magisterial authority.

Serious Catholic moral reasoning also requires more than a collection of conclusions. It requires an ordered understanding of the Church’s Jewish roots, Greek and Roman inheritances, Eastern and Western Church traditions, law, liturgy, theology, social teaching, Magisterial sources, and the lived experience of local Churches throughout the world. The system must know not only the sources, but their relationships and levels of authority.

As artificial systems become more capable, the enduring human task becomes clearer: not merely to preserve the freedom to ask, but to cultivate the will and habit of asking actively, persistently, and well. Human beings must still ask why, according to what authority, on which facts and assumptions, with what effect on the vulnerable, toward what good, and finally toward what relation with God. A machine may someday answer questions no unaided human being could answer and may even help us formulate better questions; the original human resolve to seek truth and continue the inquiry must remain alive.

One way of carrying the Jesuit desire to ‘find God in all things’ into the age of artificial intelligence may be to receive technological progress as a powerful instrument while continually discerning whether its purposes, methods, and fruits are ordered toward the greater glory of God and the authentic good of our neighbor.

N

Notes

  1. George E. Schultze, S.J., “Labor Unions, the Church, AI, and Magnifica Humanitas: A Labor Day Reflection,” Catholic World Report, September 6, 2026, https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2026/09/06/u-s-labor-unions-the-catholic-church-ai-and-magnifica-humanitas/. Unless otherwise indicated, the reconstruction of Father Schultze’s argument in Section I follows this essay. ↩
  2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1806, 1835, Vatican.va, https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_three/section_one/chapter_one/article_7/i_the_human_virtues.html. ↩
  3. Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, no. 10, November 18, 1965, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html; Code of Canon Law, canons 17, 19, https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/documents/cic_lib1-cann7-22_en.html. ↩
  4. Second Vatican Council, Nostra Aetate, no. 4, October 28, 1965, https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html; Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 839, https://www.vatican.va/content/catechism/en/part_one/section_two/chapter_three/article_9/paragraph_3_the_church_is_one%2C_holy%2C_catholic%2C_and_apostolic.html. ↩
  5. Pope Francis, “Visit to the Synagogue of Rome,” January 17, 2016, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2016/january/documents/papa-francesco_20160117_sinagoga.html; Pope Benedict XVI, “To the Bishops of the United States of America on Their Ad Limina Visit,” January 19, 2012, https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2012/january/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20120119_bishops-usa.html; Pope John Paul II, “Meeting with the Swedish University Community at the University of Uppsala,” June 9, 1989, https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1989/june/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19890609_univ-upsala.html. ↩
  6. Pope Leo XIV, “Video Message on the Occasion of the Conclusion of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage,” July 5, 2026, https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/pont-messages/2026/documents/20260705-videomessaggio-pellegrinaggio-eucaristico.html. ↩
  7. The Rothschild Archive, “Edmond James de Rothschild (1845–1934),” https://family.rothschildarchive.org/people/50-edmond-james-de-rothschild-1845-1934; The Rothschild Archive, “Family Philanthropy: Jewish Causes,” https://www.rothschildarchive.org/family/philanthropy/jewish_causes. ↩
  8. Istituto per le Opere di Religione, “IOR Announces the Appointment of François Pauly as the Next President of the Board of Superintendence,” March 25, 2026, https://www.ior.va/en/contents/press-2026/ior-announces-the-appointment-of-francois-pauly-as-the-next-president-of-the-board-of-superintendence/; Edmond de Rothschild, “Resilient 2022 Results and Evolving Governance,” March 14, 2023, https://www.edmond-de-rothschild.com/en/news/show/1564-2913-resilient-2022-results-and-evolving-governance; Istituto per le Opere di Religione, “Catholic Faith Consistent Investments,” https://www.ior.va/en/catholic-faith-consistent-investments/. ↩
  9. The White House, America’s AI Action Plan, July 2025, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf; The White House, “President Donald J. Trump Meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” July 28, 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/gallery/president-donald-j-trump-meets-with-israeli-prime-minister-benjamin-netanyahu-tuesday-july-28-2026/; U.S. Department of State, “U.S. Security Cooperation with Israel,” describing the 2019–2028 security-assistance memorandum, https://2021-2025.state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-israel/. ↩
  10. Maitreyee Wairagkar et al., “An Instantaneous Voice-Synthesis Neuroprosthesis,” Nature 644 (2025): 145–152, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09127-3; Johannes Y. Lee et al., “Brain–Computer Interface Control with Artificial Intelligence Copilots,” Nature Machine Intelligence 7 (2025): 1510–1523, https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-025-01090-y. ↩
B

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