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Pope Leo XIV has just released his first encyclical, focused on artificial intelligence and the future of human society. The timing could not be more urgent for theological institutions. Prior to the encyclical, Pope Leo already has stressed that emerging technologies place a particular mandate on Catholic educators: “Catholic education can be a beacon: not a nostalgic refuge, but a laboratory of discernment, pedagogical innovation and prophetic witness. Drawing new maps of hope: this is the urgency of the mandate.”Pope Leo’s call to “draw new maps of hope,” echoes his predecessor, Pope Francis, who urged Catholic universities to “Be present as great laboratories of hope at this crossroads of history.” There is just one glaring problem with this captivating vision: hope is in short supply right now in higher education.Long before ChatGPT answered its first query, changes in demographics, pandemic-era disruptions in student preparation, and a political climate that seeks to undermine the value of critical reasoning had already dramatically decreased the level of hope in these intellectual “laboratories.” Reading student reflections that have been quite obviously written by robots is depressing; even more depressing are the despondent attitudes of students struggling to find value in classroom learning itself.Like most educators and administrators, I have wrestled with how to prepare our community for inevitable technological transformation. Last summer, I co-led a group of faculty at our private Catholic R1 university to discuss how we might prepare for inevitable technological transformation. These conversations renewed our confidence in a liberal arts education as the critical tool we will need to face the future.This era requires thought leaders who are trained to ask better questions, who know the value of human reason and creativity, and who can critically and ethically evaluate rapidly changing technologies and their applications. Liberal arts colleges and universities are designed to prepare precisely this kind of leader, and that should be the reason for our hope.Our curriculum does not teach students to find answers to arbitrary questions; it enlivens their creative capacity to refine their questions in order to build a more just world. At a moment when large language models promise instant answers at unprecedented speed, universities have a different responsibility. We must prepare students who know how to evaluate knowledge critically, recognize the limits of technological systems, and ask difficult moral and intellectual questions about the societies those systems are shaping. ‘Education in the round’Many institutions of higher education are grounded in an educational tradition that is vitally important for this historical moment. The Greco-Roman tradition of encyclios paideia, or “education in the round,” was a technology of the empire that worked by ensuring a common language and training, but also by educating the whole person. This circular, or complete, education was thought to advance society by forming the human soul through a set of shared educational habits, habits that shaped the ways humans would think, behave, and dialogue with each other to produce knowledge.The Catholic intellectual tradition is full to the brim with thinkers who leaned into inquiry in the face of dramatic change. Pope Leo underscores that “dynamic history” tracing it from the Desert Fathers to women educational reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries who led the way in educating the marginalized.Catholic higher education is part of a living tradition, and there are a few key features that I have observed as a historian working at a Catholic university that strike me as particularly valuable for this historical moment. First and foremost is that we continue to prioritize the dignity of the human person in the process of advancing knowledge. This means that the utility and profitability of discovery is not the sole telos of our research — the human metacognitive and dialogic processes by which we arrive at those discoveries in community are just as important. The human researcher is essential for the successful evaluation, interpretation, and integration of knowledge. New discoveries are not possible without human reason and verification in a community of researchers who are held accountable for their work. LLMs do not possess these essential human faculties, and when they are wrong, they bear no accountability.The ethical questions we face in this technological age are more complex than the citation or fabrication of sources; they strike at the foundations of human interdependence and its centrality for the advancement of human knowledge. LLMs promise to provide answers to human questions at an unprecedented rate, but they attempt to do so by indiscriminately pulling from available sources in ways that obscure the contexts and relationships between those sources, limit the perspectives considered, and reinforce inequalities. University education prepares students not just to examine the sources and evidence they can readily see, but to ask critical questions about the evidence itself. This is the intellectual scaffolding that meets the changing needs of our students and our world.Pope Leo reminds us, “education does not measure its value only on the axis of efficiency: it measures it according to dignity, justice, the capacity to serve the common good. This integral anthropological vision must remain the cornerstone of Catholic pedagogy." This does not mean we educate students on every injustice in our current world, but that we teach them discernment so they can “recognize and name both justice and oppression” in an ever-changing world.  In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo places particular emphasis on community and human relationships for achieving this learning: “Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere  by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.” As AI threatens the biodiversity of human knowledge, university education “in the round” will be vitally important for protecting human innovation and its roots in the human community. We know as educators that we cannot possibly provide our students with all of the knowledge they will need ten or twenty years from now. Our hope is grounded in knowing that a student who graduates with the humility to recognize the limits of their knowledge, the curiosity to ask a different question, and the moral courage to ask a difficult question will be prepared for the uncertainty of a changing world. In the era of AI, the ability to stay curious and center human flourishing will distinguish the leaders from the users. 

American media has only just begun to speculate about the political leanings of Pope Leo XIV as they comb through his social media posts. Just as they tried to fit Pope Francis into the binary categories of conservative/liberal and traditional/progressive, so too will they with Leo. Such analysis so often fails because it rarely takes seriously what animates their lives: proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ. Gospel means good news, and the four Gospels are these men’s principal source of guidance. To understand Francis’s words and deeds, we have to take seriously that he prayed with these Gospels for his entire adult life. We can say the same about Leo XIV. Neither prioritizes whether their positions align with liberal or conservative positions; rather both worry whether they are being Jesus’s faithful disciples. Here are just a few examples of what challenges them when they pray with the Gospels. In Luke, Jesus announces his ministry quoting from the prophet Isaiah. The Spirit has sent him to proclaim the following: good news to the poor, the release of prisoners, the blind seeing, and the oppressed being liberated (Luke 4: 14-22). Francis’s relentless insistence that we remember and care for the poor comes from his obedience to gospel passages like these. Before his election, Robert Prevost lived out this ministry of Jesus among the Peruvian people whom he greeted in his first address as Pope Leo XIV. In the current political landscape, liberals and conservatives fall short when measured by the Gospel’s standard. Francis and Leo have meditated on and preached from Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount many times since their ordination. The Sermon opens with the Beatitudes where Jesus identifies those blessed in his kingdom. He names the poor, the mourner, the meek, the merciful, the pure of heart, the peacemaker, the one hungry and thirsty for righteousness, and the one persecuted for the sake of righteousness.  In his exhortation on holiness, Rejoice and Be Glad, Pope Francis describes the Beatitudes as ”the Christian’s identity card” (63), even as “the world pushes us towards another way of living” (65). He encourages Christians to be open to the Holy Spirit and to “allow [Jesus’s] words to unsettle us, to challenge us and to demand a real change in the way we live” (66).[i] In light of the Beatitudes, the liberal-conservative binary dissolves and the traditional melds with the so-called “progressive.” The American media notes every time that Pope Francis and Pope Leo speak on behalf of migrants and refugees. This defense should come as no surprise when one turns to Matthew 25 and reads Jesus’s parable about the final judgment. A king, aka Jesus, welcomes into his kingdom those who, unbeknownst to them, tended to him when they tended to the hungry and thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, cared for the ill, visited prisoners. Those who failed to show mercy end up in the kingdom where demonic suffering reigns eternally. Reflecting on this passage in 2016 during the extraordinary jubilee year of mercy, Pope Francis warned: “The lesson of Jesus that we have heard does not allow escape routes.”[ii] And Leo XIV, in his first message told the world, “we want to be a Church of the Synod, a Church that walks, a Church that always seeks peace, that always seeks charity, that always seeks to be close, especially to those who suffer.”[iii] Like Francis, Leo recognizes there is no escape route from tending to the suffering. Jesus demands even more from his disciples than these works of mercy. In the Sermon on the Mount, he calls them to be light and salt for the world and challenges them in all manner of living from turning the other cheek and  loving their enemies to avoiding even lustful thoughts. These demands culminate in the Torah’s commandment: love God with one’s entire being, to which Jesus joins love the neighbor as the self. In his parables, Jesus identifies the neighbor as the one who shows compassion exemplified in the Good Samaritan and the father to his prodigal son as well as his resentful elder son. Like the first disciples, most Christians in every age fall short of these demands.  Pope Francis meant it when he declared himself a sinner in need of God’s mercy. Clearly, contemporary Christians face challenges that require creative fidelity from attending to the climate crisis to understanding the complexities of sexual and gender identity. An often cited example of Francis’s “liberal agenda” is “who am I to judge?”  Rarely is Francis’s entire comment quoted. He said, “If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” In this response, Francis gives witness to  two dimensions of the Church’s life. The first is to embrace every person because no one is excluded from seeking and receiving the love and mercy of God. Echoing Francis, Leo XIV calls for “a Church that builds bridges, dialogue, always open to receive like this square with its open arms, all, all who need our charity, our presence, dialogue and love.”[iv] Yet, implicit in Francis’s response is the challenge to live in the demanding way of discipleship: loving God with one’s whole being and loving the neighbor as one’s self. To borrow from Paul, in Christ, there is neither conservative nor liberal, traditional nor progressive. Or as Leo XIV declares in the motto of his papacy: In illo uno unum”: “In the one Christ, we are one”.     Notes & Bibliography [i] https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20180319_gaudete-et-exsultate.html [ii] https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/audiences/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160630_udienza-giubilare.html [iii] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5392318/transcript-pope-leo-xiv-speech [iv] https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5392318/transcript-pope-leo-xiv-speech