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Comment by devilbunny | Hacker News Reader

The Roman Catholic Church has a lot of things wrong with it, now and in the past, but it’s a human institution older than almost any other, and it’s composed of a lot of very intelligent people. Agree or disagree with them, but a papal encyclical is almost always worth reading and understanding.

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Indeed. And because of it’s age and outlook its view is very far back and very far forward.

The casual reference to a 135 year old encyclical that dealt with the seismic shift of industrialisation took me quite aback for a number of reasons.

There are so many encyclicals, apostolic letters, etc. One could spend years reading just a fraction of them, depending on reading and comprehension speed, of course, which varies by person.

Two I recommend, from the last 40 years:

Veritatis splendor, John Paul II, 1993

Argues that Christian freedom is fulfilled, not limited, by objective moral truth: some acts are intrinsically evil regardless of intention or circumstance, conscience must be formed by divine law rather than self-authorization, and the Church must faithfully teach this moral truth as the path to authentic human flourishing in Christ.

https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...

Fides et Ratio, John Paul II, 1998

Argues that faith and reason are complementary paths to truth: reason needs faith to avoid skepticism, relativism, and reductionism, while faith needs reason to express, defend, and deepen its understanding of divine revelation and the human search for meaning.

https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/d...

Note that, as anybody, the Catholic Church may have is bias.

For example. Their dualist view of the world makes them see AI as something very different from human intelligence. So, without having read it, the church may negate that it could be at human level. A few years ago that would negate that computers could be creative because they do not have a soul.

Anyway, kudos for focussing on the important issues and the impact on human.(And less on sex)

I have yet to read the whole thing - but I agree that the Church's view of intelligence is not to the level of sophistication needed to counter the Valley's pantheistic view of intelligence. I think that is because of how Aquinas was utilized to counter the Reformation. That being said, I don't believe that such a view cannot be elaborated, it will just take time. The key is embodiment, wherein how we view sex ends up being incredibly important because it necessarily relates to how we take on flesh to begin with. Once sex is divorced from procreation (and vice-versa), intelligence is divorced from humanity. It's very relevant - but the culture of dehumanization is so deeply rooted today that it's difficult to be productive when tackling that dehumanization via sex.

Fwiw the teaching of the church is that (today's) AI isn't at a human level because human intelligence is something that we experience whereas artificial intelligence seems to be merely a sophistication in performing tasks.

This week's encyclical didn't go into this. Last year's "Doctrinal Note" (less authoritative) did though: https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docu...

and I did a write-up on it here: https://twitchard.github.io/posts/2025-06-28-the-catholic-ch...

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