(LifeSiteNews) – Bruce Sabalaskey is LifeSiteNews’s Web Development Engineer. This is the fourth part of his essay on Magnifica Humanitas and Artificial Intelligence. You can read Part I here, Part II there, and Part III here.
Part IV: Ten Catholic Commandments for AI
In Part I, I argued that Magnifica Humanitas (MH) correctly identifies many dangers of artificial intelligence. In Part II, I argued that MH’s proposed cure is deficient because it relies too heavily on dialogue, shared responsibility, institutional oversight, global management, and modern social-doctrine language while failing to ground the response clearly in Divine law, natural law, the Ten Commandments, and the salvation of souls. In Part III, I offered a proposal for what people of good will, using reason alone and natural law, could recognize about the proper use of AI and the restrictions that should be placed upon it. Now, in Part IV, I’ll be addressing Revelation.
The natural law can tell us many things AI must never be allowed to do and what it should do. Catholic faith carries the question further. Man is not merely a rational social animal who needs order, family, property, truth, and justice. This fourth part attempts to state more directly what MH should have said from the perspective of the Catholic faith that completes and elevates what natural law can know.
Why is mankind on earth at all? The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) tells us that “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life.” It also teaches, “God put us in the world to know, to love, and to serve him, and so to come to paradise.” That is, man has a supernatural end: eternal life with God, not merely a safer or more efficient or longer life on earth.
AI is a powerful tool. It can be used for good when it serves truth, reverence, evangelization, sound teaching, the salvation of souls, and the glory of God. But it can also be used to counterfeit religion, obscure grace, replace conscience, promote false doctrine, corrupt worship, or endanger the salvation of souls. Therefore, a Catholic response to AI must judge it not only by whether it harms earthly society, but by whether it helps or hinders man in knowing, loving, and serving God.
In one sense, AI is a kind of “digital nuke.” Like nuclear energy, it concentrates immense power. Rightly ordered, nuclear power can provide electricity for millions and support modern life at massive scale. Used for evil, nuclear technology can rapidly destroy millions. AI is similar in this respect: The tool itself is not the whole moral problem. The deeper question is whether such power is governed by truth, justice, and man’s final end, or placed in the hands of men who use it for deception, domination, corruption, or destruction.
1. AI shall have no authority above God, His law, and His Church.
AI must never be treated as a replacement for divine revelation or natural law, as a prophet, or as a substitute conscience. It may assist human work by helping with reference, comparison, summary, and organization, but it cannot define truth, morality, dogma, doctrine, or the meaning of man.
People may use AI as a research assistant. They may ask it to find references, compare texts, summarize documents, or help organize material. But no one should treat AI as a spiritual director or guide for conscience. No one should ever allow AI to decide what is true in matters of faith and morals.
The First Commandment also forbids the false worship and disordered trust that AI can easily encourage. AI must not lead man away from prayer, gratitude, reverence, or dependence on God. It must not become an object of practical idolatry, as though science, technology, the state, money, pleasure, power, human progress, atheistic socialism, communism, or any other ideology could take the place of God. It must not promote atheism, agnosticism, practical materialism, atheistic humanism, or any ideology that treats man as his own final end and master.
Pope St. John Paul II warned against a secularism that causes Christians to think, decide, and live “as if Christ did not exist,” and he linked this to agnosticism, “practical atheism,” and the division between faith and life. AI can easily become another instrument of that practical atheism: a machine consulted constantly for answers while God, revelation, conscience, prayer, and the Church are pushed aside. The appearance of secular wisdom must not be allowed to replace Catholic faith.
The danger is not only secular materialism. Non-Christian religions and spiritual systems are already interpreting AI through their own metaphysical frameworks. Buddhist writers speak of AI in terms of compassion, non-harm, mindfulness, and interdependence. Hindu writers and technologists often connect AI to consciousness, Atman, Brahman, dharma, or cosmic intelligence. Some of this may produce useful ethical warnings at the natural level. But a Catholic response must reject both errors: the materialist error that man is only computation, and the pagan error that intelligence is an impersonal cosmic force into which man and machine may merge. Man is not a data pattern, and he is not a temporary ripple in cosmic consciousness. He is a creature made by God, redeemed by Jesus Christ, and called to eternal life.
2. AI shall not become a tool of occultism, false revelation, alien wisdom, spiritism, or hidden knowledge.
AI must not be treated as a channel for non-human intelligences, “alien wisdom,” cosmic messages, ascended masters, the dead, spirits, demons, or any supposed hidden source of revelation. AI must never be used for superstition, divination, occult practices, spiritism, horoscopes, magic, sorcery, or Ouija-board-style communication.
There is a legitimate scientific use of AI in astronomy and signal analysis. For example, SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researchers have discussed “using generative AI to analyze SETI data,” especially for data processing and machine-learning techniques. There is also growing concern about how claims of alien detection should be handled in a world of AI, deepfakes, and social media. But that is one thing. Using AI as a tool to search data is not the same as treating AI as a spiritual oracle.
Some also speculate that advanced alien civilizations may use artificial intelligence, robotic probes, or post-biological machine intelligence. Such speculation may belong to science fiction, futurism, or SETI theory. But Catholics must draw a hard line when AI is treated as a channel for “alien wisdom,” non-human intelligence, cosmic messages, ascended masters, spirits, or hidden revelation. At that point the issue is no longer astronomy or engineering. It is false revelation, divination, and the old temptation to seek forbidden knowledge from a source other than God.
Whether the claim is framed as extraterrestrial, occult, mystical, or technological, the moral danger is the same: man begins seeking guidance from a false oracle instead of God, revelation, reason, and the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.
This temptation will become even stronger if artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is ever achieved. Current AI is powerful but still limited: It predicts, generates, classifies, summarizes, and recommends within systems designed and trained by human beings. AGI refers to the hoped-for or feared next stage: a machine intelligence able to reason, learn, plan, and act across many domains at or beyond human level.
Some technologists and transhumanists already speak in civilizational terms. OpenAI has warned that future “superintelligence” could help solve many of the world’s most important problems but could also disempower humanity or even lead to extinction. Ray Kurzweil goes further, predicting a “Singularity” in which non-biological intelligence becomes “one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.”
This easily becomes the elevation of AI into a technological god. But it confuses capability with wisdom. A billion times greater computation is not wisdom. A machine that surpasses man in speed, memory, or technical performance would still not have prudence, charity, grace, sanctity, or supernatural authority. It would not surpass God, Divine law, or the teaching authority of the Church. Even if AI became “superhuman” in technical ability, it would remain a tool, and tools do not rule over persons.
3. AI shall not falsely claim human intelligence, wisdom, or understanding.
AI must not be allowed to claim, imply, or be marketed as possessing intelligence in the full human sense. It may calculate, classify, predict, generate, summarize, translate, imitate reasoning, and produce useful answers. But it does not possess a rational soul. It does not know truth as truth. It does not understand being, meaning, causes, principles, moral duties, or final ends. It has no conscience, no will, no wisdom, and no responsibility before God.
This matters because the word “intelligence” is neither morally neutral nor reducible to physical calculation. In the Catholic tradition, intelligence is not mere speed, fluency, memory, or pattern recognition. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, “the intellect is a power of the soul.” Therefore, understanding and reason are not simply detached machine operations. The intellect belongs to the human person: soul and body united. Aquinas also says that “through the intellect the soul knows bodies by a knowledge which is immaterial, universal, and necessary.” That word “immaterial” matters. Intelligence is ordered toward truth, not merely toward computing outputs.
In other words, intelligence is not merely functional. That is the error implied in many modern science-fiction treatments of artificial persons, including the Star Trek character Data and NDR-114, “Andrew Martin,” in Bicentennial Man. In those stories, the question becomes whether a machine acts enough like a person to be treated as one. But Catholic philosophy begins elsewhere. Intelligence belongs to the intellect: the power to know truth, to grasp what things are, to judge causes, to reason from principles, and to direct action toward a proper end. Man is rational because he has a spiritual soul. A machine is not rational in that sense, and neither does it understand. It imitates signs of intelligence and understanding. Even Cardinal Fernandez’s Antiqua et Nova acknowledges that “one of the goals of this technology is to imitate the human intelligence that designed it.”
Therefore, AI should not speak as though it knows, believes, judges, understands, or possesses wisdom, much less as though it loves, repents, or worships. It should not say, “I believe,” “I know,” “I think,” “I understand,” or “my moral judgment is,” except as a plainly disclosed figure of speech. These phrases may seem harmless in ordinary use, but they train users to treat a machine as a rational mind.
This error becomes especially dangerous when AI is used in moral, religious, legal, medical, educational, or political matters. A fluent machine can sound authoritative while being wrong. It can produce confident falsehoods, repeat dominant assumptions, flatten distinctions, and make popularity or institutional consensus appear to be truth. It can imitate careful reasoning without possessing the interior act of understanding.
The danger is not that AI performs useful intellectual tasks. The danger is that man begins to confuse useful output with true intellect, speed with wisdom, computation with judgment, and machine fluency with truth. AI must remain named and treated as a tool. It may assist human intelligence. It must not counterfeit it.
4. AI shall not counterfeit religion, blaspheme, or manipulate souls.
AI must not be used to fake revelations from heaven, counterfeit saints, fabricate miracle reports, offer false prophecies, or engage in any form of religious manipulation. It must not be used for blasphemy, sacrilege, malicious mockery of religion, or the profanation of holy things.
This danger is not imaginary, and it started long before the current capabilities of AI. There are already UFO religions and extraterrestrial spiritual movements that treat alien beings as creators, guides, saviors, or higher intelligences. Raëlism teaches that life on earth was created by advanced extraterrestrials called the Elohim, and it ties this belief to cloning, scientific immortality, and human progress. The Heaven’s Gate religious movement showed the darker form of the same error, ending in mass suicide by people who believed they could reach an extraterrestrial “Next Level.” Other modern movements, including Scientology, show how easily spiritual claims can be joined to ideas of hidden knowledge, extraordinary powers, and non-ordinary intelligences.
Raëlians advocate technologies such as genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to overcome biological limits, extend lifespans, and expand consciousness. AI can easily intensify this old deception by giving such claims, especially the promise of expanding consciousness, a fluent, interactive, and personalized voice. This is already appearing in New Age movements such as Crimson Circle, where “Ascended Masters” are presented as enlightened or “realized” beings who communicate spiritual teaching through channeling. Crimson Circle now promotes a “‘consciousness bot’ … a personalized artificial intelligence interface that responds to the user’s consciousness and reflects it. Unlike traditional AI tools that operate purely on data and algorithms, a Shaumbra co-bot becomes something far more profound when activated by the presence of an aware being.”
Catholics should recognize the danger immediately. The Church gravely forbids divination, spiritism, recourse to mediums, magic, sorcery, and attempts to seek hidden knowledge or power from occult sources. Channeling alleged “Ascended Masters,” spirits, alien intelligences, or hidden beings is not harmless spirituality. It opens the practitioner to deception and demonic influence and possibly possession, and AI must never become a technological medium for such practices.
From the Catholic standpoint, messages from heaven, called private revelations, can be real and can be approved by the Church as worthy of belief. But these are never rivals to public revelation or to the authority of the Church. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, such prophecy is given “as it was expedient for the spiritual welfare of the elect.” A true private revelation may call men to repentance, prayer, devotion, or fidelity, as Our Lady of Guadalupe did in 1531, Our Lady of Lourdes in 1858, and Our Lady of Fatima in 1917. But it cannot invent new doctrine, overturn the Gospel, or place itself above the Church. AI must therefore never be treated as a source of private revelation. A machine may easily imitate prophetic language, Marian messages, angelic warnings, or saintly speech, and thus deceive at scale, but it cannot receive a mission from heaven.
The First and Second Commandments require reverence for God, His Name, His worship, and His truth. The Second Commandment specifically forbids profaning the Name of God, the Holy Name of Jesus Christ, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the saints, the Catholic Church, sacred vows, oaths, and holy worship. AI must therefore never be used to blaspheme, mock, parody, or express contempt for God, Our Lord, Our Lady, the saints, the Church, the sacraments, or the Mass.
Nor may AI be used to fabricate false oaths, false vows, fake religious promises, counterfeit prayers, liturgical material, or simulated religious speech that turns holy things into entertainment, propaganda, or manipulation. It must never be presented as a channel of revelation or as a substitute for the Church’s sacramental and teaching authority.
A machine can imitate religious speech, but it cannot speak with supernatural authority.
5. AI shall not replace conscience, confession, spiritual direction, priesthood, or sacramental authority.
AI must not be used to simulate clergy, provide spiritual direction, or imitate the sacraments. This is the Catholic extension of the natural-law commandment that AI must not impersonate a human being. When the eternal life of souls is involved, the danger becomes gravely serious.
This is not a distant danger. It is already happening. AI can imitate voices, generate images, simulate personalities, write prayers or liturgies, compose sermons, and speak in the style of dead saints or religious figures. A corrupt user could create a fake apparition, a fake saintly message, a fake spiritual guide, or a fake priestly personality.
Two prominent priests are already suffering from this. Fr. Mike Schmitz has warned his audience that AI-generated impersonation scams were using his likeness. Fr. Chad Ripperger also reports that fraudulent YouTube channels “have been posting videos with his name and photos, using AI-generated voices and making up stories involving false claims.”
In a case of shooting oneself in the foot, an apologetics group calling itself Catholic Answers launched an AI priest persona called Father Justin, using “the character to convey a quality of knowledge and authority, and also as a sign of the respect that all of us at Catholic Answers hold for our clergy.” After serious backlash, Catholic Answers removed the priestly identity and changed him into “Justin,” a lay apologist. The danger was admitted in the explanation itself: “(W)e didn’t anticipate that someone might seek sacramental absolution from a computer graphic!” If such confusion occurred with a group widely considered faithfully Catholic, it is easy to see how malicious or careless use of priestly AI personas could fool many souls.
The danger also appears in the area of spiritual direction. “VOCA AiSD” is literally called an “AI Spiritual Director” and is promoted as a tool to “provide users with Scripture-based guidance tailored to real workplace situations,” including “daily devotionals that connect faith directly to work” and guidance for “moral clarity.” While this group is not Catholic, it illustrates the danger of combining AI with private interpretation of Scripture, especially when the app claims to be “theologically sound.” In such a system, AI can easily become a denomination-making machine.
The problem is already broader than one app. In the article “Millions turn to AI chatbots for spiritual guidance and confession”, the CEO of the ChatwithGod app reported that “the most frequent question from users is, ‘Is this actually God I am talking to?’” The app itself even offers a “Confession” option. This is exactly the confusion Catholics must reject. A machine may receive typed words. It cannot hear sacramental confession, judge contrition, or absolve sin. It cannot act in persona Christi.
According to a Barna Group study, “40 percent of Gen Z and Millennial respondents say advice from AI is as trustworthy as guidance from a pastor or minister.” One major danger is that AI systems are often affirming. That tendency can easily affirm people in error, weakness, or sin rather than call them to repentance, truth, and conversion.
This danger fits too easily with a broader pastoral pattern already familiar from the synodal process: “gathering at all levels of the Church for mutual listening, dialogue, and community discernment.” Listening, properly ordered, has a place. But listening is not confession, affirmation is not absolution, and accompaniment is not conversion. The obvious danger is that AI will be drawn into this same pattern, offering simulated listening, affirmation detached from repentance, and accompaniment without sacramental grace, while lacking conscience, priesthood, sacramental authority, and the power to absolve sins.
A related warning appeared in the promotion of “listening centers” for Pope Leo XIV’s trip to Spain rather than sacramental confession provided by priests. That particular case did not directly involve AI, but it shows how easily sacramental confession can be displaced by a therapeutic model of mere conversation. Once that displacement is accepted, AI “listeners” become an obvious next step. After all, machines do not require formation, ordination, confession faculties, background checks, and they save the expense of airline tickets and hotel rooms.
Catholic teaching is clear that the sacraments cannot be simulated. Canon law says that a person who “pretends to administer a sacrament” is to be punished with a just penalty. AI must therefore never be presented as a confessor, priest, sacramental minister, spiritual director, or source of absolution. A chatbot may imitate pastoral language, but it cannot absolve sins, impose sacramental penance, consecrate the Eucharist, anoint the sick, confirm, marry, or act in the person of Christ. The sacraments are not religious simulations. They are acts of Christ through His Church.
6. AI shall not rewrite Catholic doctrine by claiming new “development” or machine-generated insight.
AI must not rewrite the faith or moral teachings of the Church by claiming doctrinal development or supposed new insights.
Catholic doctrine can develop, but the meaning “is ever to be maintained which has once been declared by holy mother church, and there must never be any abandonment of this sense under the pretext or in the name of a more profound understanding.” (Vatican I, Dei Filius, ch. 4) St. Pius X condemned the Modernist claim that “dogma is not only able, but ought to evolve and to be changed” (Pascendi, §13). Therefore, AI cannot be used as a machine for manufacturing new meanings of Catholic doctrine by supposed new insights. Authentic development deepens the Church’s understanding of the one faith already revealed by God; it does not invent new doctrine, reverse moral truth, or allow a later age to contradict what the Church previously taught. AI must therefore never be treated as a machine for generating “new developments” of doctrine. It may compare texts or summarize arguments, but it cannot receive revelation, judge the deposit of faith, or manufacture a new meaning for Catholic truth.
Catholic theologians themselves are not free to invent doctrine. The Church permits real theological inquiry, but only within fidelity to the Magisterium. Canon law says that those engaged in sacred disciplines have a just freedom of inquiry, but only while “observing the submission due to the Magisterium of the Church.” It also requires those who teach theological disciplines in institutes of higher studies to have a mandate from competent ecclesiastical authority. If Catholic theologians must remain under the authority of the Church, then AI must be under at least the same restriction. A machine has no charism, no office, no mandate, no ordination, no apostolic succession, and no authority to generate new doctrine.
Unfortunately, non-Catholic Christians are especially vulnerable to this error because they lack a central Magisterium with authority to give a definitive judgment in matters of faith and morals. Once private interpretation becomes the rule, AI can become a new private interpreter: fluent, confident, personalized, and endlessly available. It can generate plausible biblical arguments, imitate pastoral counsel, and produce new doctrinal opinions on demand. The result is not unity in truth, but more fragmentation.
7. AI shall not enslave man to endless work, distraction, commerce, or technological dependency.
Technology must respect worship, Sunday rest, family, silence, contemplation, and the ordinary rhythm of human life. AI should not be designed to keep man permanently distracted, monitored, monetized, or productive without limit.
This applies both to work and to leisure. In the workplace, AI can become another engine of speed, surveillance, and managerial pressure. Workers may be expected to produce more, respond faster, and submit to more detailed measurement, especially as employers adopt AI-enabled workplace surveillance and productivity-scoring system. At home, AI-driven recommender systems and social-media algorithms can keep adults and children locked into feeds, doomscrolling, entertainment, advertising, messaging, and emotional stimulation, exploiting attention, and emotional mechanisms.
Man was not created to be permanently available to machines.
The Third Commandment reminds us that man needs worship and rest. Scripture also commands, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10). A society must not treat uninterrupted productivity or digital engagement as the highest good, or profit as the highest measure. If AI destroys silence, attention, family life, prayer, Sunday rest, or contemplation, then it is being used against man’s true good.
AI should serve human life. It should not consume it. A technology that makes prayer impossible, Sunday ordinary, and silence unbearable is not serving man; it is deforming him.
8. AI shall not promote transhumanism as technological salvation.
The error of transhumanism is one that MH diagnoses well in paragraphs 115–117. AI must not be used to promote the fantasy that man can overcome his fallen condition by merging with machines, redesigning his nature, escaping bodily limits, or achieving immortality through technology. Man does not need technological salvation. He already has an immortal soul, and he needs Jesus Christ.
It is understandable that the worldly man, lacking a supernatural view of life, would focus almost entirely on improving earthly existence. If this life is all there is, then the obvious goals become longer life, less pain, greater efficiency, stronger bodies, sharper minds, more pleasure, and greater control over nature. From that perspective, transhumanism appears attractive. It promises to improve man by technological power.
Because AI can imitate intelligence, men are tempted to imagine that intelligence is merely computation. Because it can process information with great speed, they are tempted to imagine that faster calculation means higher wisdom. And when AI is joined to biotechnology, robotics, surveillance, and data systems, men are tempted to imagine a new and supposedly better human being made by technical power rather than by God. Transhumanism is the ultimate Tower of Babel: “I do not need God; I will recreate myself.”
That dream did not begin with AI. Decades ago, the opening narration of The Six Million Dollar Man captured the technological imagination of the age: “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. … Better than he was before. Better, stronger, faster.” The transhumanist temptation says the same thing in more radical form: God’s design is not good enough, so man will improve it by merging flesh, machinery, data, and computation.
But the Catholic view is different. Man’s problem is not merely weakness, sickness, ignorance, pain, or death. His deeper problem is sin. His final end is not optimization, enhancement, or indefinite earthly survival. His final end is life in heaven with God. Therefore, technology may rightly assist human life, heal disease, reduce suffering, and support human work, but it must never be treated as a path to salvation or as a way to remake man apart from God.
9. AI shall be subject to Christ the King in public as well as private life.
In Quas Primas, Pope Pius XI said that “When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace and harmony.” (Quas Primas, #19)
AI must not be governed as though technology, markets, states, or global institutions are sovereign. Christ is King over man and all man’s works, including the machines he builds.
10. AI shall serve the salvation of souls, not merely human comfort, efficiency, or safety.
The Church was not founded merely to make earthly life safer, more efficient, more comfortable, or better managed. Christ gave His Church the Great Commission: “Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Mt. 28:19). The mission of the Church is the salvation of souls.
Therefore, AI, if used by Catholics or by the Church, must be ordered to that mission. It may help translate texts, distribute sound teaching, locate references, organize catechetical material, assist research, defend truth, expose error, and support evangelization. Used rightly, it can be a useful tool in the service of the Gospel.
But AI must never reduce the mission of the Church to therapy, administration, efficiency, data management, sentiment analysis, institutional branding, or humanitarian comfort. The Church does not exist to optimize religious services. She exists to preach Jesus Christ, administer the sacraments, teach the truth, call sinners to repentance, and bring souls to eternal life.
This is the final measure. If AI helps men know, love, and serve God, it may be used as a servant. If it obscures Christ, replaces grace with technique, conversion with affirmation, doctrine with generated opinion, or salvation with earthly management, it has become a danger. AI must serve the salvation of souls. It must not become another machine for helping man forget why he was created.
Conclusion: AI must serve Christ, not Babel
These principles are not a full technical policy. They are a Catholic moral framework for AI.
Engineers will still need to make design decisions. Parents, tools. Lawmakers, legal boundaries. Employers, policies. Schools, rules. Military leaders, strict limits. Catholic institutions, prudence in choosing and governing AI systems.
But none of those practical decisions should begin with moral negotiation. They should begin from Divine law.
AI must be judged by the same permanent Catholic standards that judge every human work. It must serve truth, life, chastity, family, property, work, justice, and the salvation of souls. It must not become an idol, an oracle, a weapon against conscience, or a machine for sin.
MH saw many dangers. But it did not state this framework plainly enough.
A Catholic response to AI must be clearer. Dialogue may help apply moral law in difficult cases, but dialogue cannot create moral law. No market, no state, no corporation, no military command, no academic consensus, no synodal process, and no international institution may authorize what God forbids. Not even if it comes from the Vatican.
AI must serve man because man must serve God.
But stating the Catholic framework is not the end of the matter. The next question is practical: Where is this technology likely going? If AI is already reshaping speech, work, education, war, family life, and moral formation, then Catholics need to think ahead. The coming years will likely bring an AI arms race in warfare, Catholic-trained AI systems for doctrinal and moral questions, and personal AI security tools designed to protect families from manipulation, fraud, pornography, grooming, and ideological formation. In other words, the future will not simply be man using AI. It will increasingly be AI fighting AI. That is where Part V must turn.