Magnificent humanity: João Duque calls for leaving the mechanical vision of man

The Portuguese theologian reads the encyclical of Leo XIV as a text of social doctrine: AI is not the enemy, but the mechanical conception of the human, which must be definitively abandoned, is.

The Fact

We had welcomed, with the first African readings of Magnifica humanitas, the doctrinal scope of the first encyclical of Leo XIV dedicated to artificial intelligence. On July 27, 2026, Vatican News Portugal gave the floor to theologian João Duque, who provided a programmatic reading of the text. For him, the encyclical belongs to the corpus of the social doctrine of the Church: it reflects "on humanity in contemporary circumstances" and encounters "in the application of AI a specific problem". The key phrase of his interview: we will have to "definitively abandon a mechanical conception of the human".

Our Reading

João Duque points to the philosophical crux of Magnifica humanitas. Since Descartes and the Discourse on the Method of 1637, modernity has assimilated the human body to a mechanism. Transhumanism has only taken this logic to its extreme: man, a perfectible machine. The encyclical of Leo XIV breaks with this paradigm by returning to Thomistic anthropology. Saint Thomas, in the Summa Theologica (Ia, q. 76, a. 1), reminds us that man is a substantial unity of the soul and the body: the soul is the form of the body. No algorithm can simulate this unity, because the form is spiritual. The Roman line becomes clearer: AI must serve the person, never redefine it. Dignitas infinita (DDF, 2024) had already warned against any artificial redefinition of human dignity; Duque extends this vigilance to the specific field of the digital.

To Ponder

AI is not an enemy; the mechanical conception of man, however, is. Let us meditate on the beautiful intuition that runs through the encyclical: the magnificent humanity of man is not an algorithm, but the image of God inscribed in free flesh.