VATICAN CITY – Cardinal Stephen Brislin, the Archbishop of Johannesburg, has cautioned that the unchecked pursuit of technological power risks creating a modern “Babel,” urging the Catholic Church to champion a framework of ethical responsibility and human dignity in the face of rapid artificial intelligence integration.
Addressing the third session of the Extraordinary Consistory, Cardinal Brislin centered his remarks on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas. His intervention signals an intensifying effort by the Holy See to define the moral boundaries of the digital age, framing the development of emerging technologies not as a neutral technical evolution, but as a profound theological and political challenge.
The Consistory, a formal gathering of the College of Cardinals to advise the Pope on matters of universal importance, serves as the primary mechanism for shaping the Church’s global strategic direction. In this session, the focus has shifted toward how the Church can maintain its relevance and moral authority in an era of unprecedented algorithmic influence and automation, alongside emerging legislative frameworks such as the European Union’s AI Act.
The Tension Between Babel and Jerusalem
Cardinal Brislin structured his reflection on a binary comparison drawn in Magnifica humanitas between the biblical cities of Babel and Jerusalem, using them as archetypes for human collective action and, implicitly, for competing models of global governance over technology.
He argued that the “Babel” model represents a project of self-sufficiency where human intelligence is weaponized to exclude the divine, ultimately leading to “fragmentation and disintegration.” In contrast, he presented “Jerusalem” as the model for human intelligence placed at the service of God, which he asserted is the only path capable of promoting the dignity of every person and sustaining institutions that prioritize the common good over technological dominance.
This dichotomy was applied directly to the current global trajectory of technological expansion, from automated decision-making in public services to data-driven border management. Cardinal Brislin questioned what happens to human endeavor when it is granted access to “ever more powerful tools” without a corresponding increase in moral stewardship or clear, enforceable safeguards.
“The question concerns artificial intelligence and new technologies, but also the broader issue of whether technical progress is accompanied by responsibility or whether it exposes people to new forms of exclusion,” Cardinal Brislin said.
The Political Economy of Technical Tools
Moving beyond theology, the Cardinal emphasized that technical tools are never neutral. He argued that they are deeply embedded in political, economic, social, and educational processes that dictate the quality of shared human life and shape how power is distributed between governments, corporations, and citizens.
This perspective aligns with a broader institutional concern within the Vatican regarding the “digital divide.” For leaders from the Global South, such as the Archbishop of Johannesburg, the risk is that AI and automation may exacerbate existing geopolitical inequalities, concentrating power in a few corporate or state entities while further marginalizing underdeveloped economies and communities already excluded from digital infrastructure.
Against that backdrop, Cardinal Brislin’s remarks were interpreted in Rome as an implicit call for dialogue with policymakers, regulators, and industry leaders. By situating AI within questions of justice and participation, he placed the Church alongside existing multilateral efforts to shape global standards for emerging technologies, rather than speaking only to internal ecclesial audiences.
To counter the risks he outlined, Cardinal Brislin proposed that the Church adopt a “grammar of building,” a four-part framework designed to guide the integration of technology into society and to inform how bishops’ conferences, Catholic universities, and social ministries engage with lawmakers and technologists:
- Desire: Ensuring the human quest for happiness is grounded in truth rather than consumerist illusion, so that product design, platform incentives, and digital communication respect users as persons, not merely as data points.
- Limitation: Recognizing that life is a gift to be protected, resisting the urge to “optimize” the human experience beyond its natural boundaries, particularly in areas such as biometric surveillance, predictive policing, and experimental biomedical applications.
- Shared Responsibility: Applying the principle of subsidiarity, ensuring that no single entity possesses the entire project and that no one is forced to build alone, encouraging multi-stakeholder oversight that includes affected communities in decisions about how AI is deployed.
- Discernment: Utilizing the Church’s social doctrine to separate tools that serve the person from those that create dependence or social exclusion, and to offer structured ethical guidance to Catholic institutions that procure or develop digital systems.
Synodality as a Global Strategy
The Cardinal framed “synodality”-the process of listening, consultation, and collective discernment-as the practical application of these principles within the Church’s own governance. By adopting a synodal approach, he argued, the Church can engage with the “building site of history” without fear, acting as a critical voice in the governance of global technology while examining how its own dioceses, schools, and charities use data and automation.
In this vision, synodality becomes not only a spiritual method but also an institutional strategy: local churches collect experiences from the ground, episcopal conferences consolidate them, and the Holy See translates those concerns into moral criteria that can be brought into dialogue with governments, international bodies, and standard-setting organizations. That iterative process, Brislin suggested, enables the Church to accompany rapid technological change rather than merely react to it.
In the closing of his address, Cardinal Brislin linked these efforts to the theological virtues of faith, charity, and hope. He stated that faith recognizes God’s mercy in history, even in moments of disruption; charity finds its source in the Eucharist and must inform how technologies treat the most vulnerable; and hope sustains the “building of the civilization of love,” including in digital spaces where polarization and manipulation often dominate.
He concluded that Magnifica humanitas assigns the Church a specific mandate: to confront the struggles of contemporary history through a synodal approach rooted in these virtues and focused exclusively on serving the human person, while remaining attentive to emerging norms such as the UN Secretary-General’s proposed Global Digital Compact, which seeks to orient digital cooperation toward human rights and shared prosperity.
The Extraordinary Consistory continues its deliberations on the implementation of the encyclical’s directives across various dioceses worldwide, with Vatican officials indicating that subsequent sessions will explore concrete guidelines for Catholic institutions that design, deploy, or rely on artificial intelligence systems.
