(OSV News) – As the faithful continue to distill Pope Leo XIV's recently released encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas," OSV News spoke with Ines Murzaku, professor of ecclesiastical history and director of the Catholic studies program at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey.
Murzaku, an expert on Eastern Catholics and Christians, told OSV News that the Eastern Catholic perspective on the encyclical is crucial to understanding Pope Leo's call to ground artificial intelligence in God-given human dignity.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
OSV News: Broadly speaking, how would you sum up the general Eastern Catholic perspective on "Magnifica Humanitas”?
Murzaku: The Eastern Catholic take would be that this encyclical is not anti-technology; it is anti-Babel. Pope Leo XIV gives us a biblical contrast between Babel and Jerusalem. Babel is technological power without communion; while Jerusalem is patient rebuilding every brick through prayer and shared responsibility.
I believe the Eastern Catholic lens deepens this contrast by asking not only whether AI is useful, but whether it forms or deforms the human person. Does it help us see the person as an icon, heart and body? Or does it turn the person into a function or a media profile?
This is why the Eastern Catholic voice matters. The Second Vatican Council teaches that the Eastern patrimony belongs to the undivided heritage of the universal Church, as noted in "Orientalium Ecclesiarum" (sections 1 and 5). St. John Paul II insisted in "Orientale Lumen" that Catholics must become familiar with the Eastern tradition.
So, the Eastern reading (of "Magnifica Humanitas") is not optional; it is part of the catholicity of the Church. One can read the encyclical without the East, but one cannot read it fully as a global Catholic text without the light of the East.
OSV News: Eastern Catholics and Christians remind us of the "apophatic" way of approaching God -- that is, by recalling what God is not to better understand who he is. How can that approach draw us closer to God and to a better understanding of the human person, especially – as Pope Leo observes in his encyclical – amid the information age and the rise of transhumanism?
Murzaku: Apophatic, or negative, theology begins by saying that God is not an object we can possess, define or master. God can be truly known because God has revealed himself, but God can never be reduced to a concept. Likewise, the human person can be truly encountered, but can never be exhausted by data.
The Dionysian tradition gives classic language to this apophatic approach, while St. Gregory of Nyssa’s language of divine darkness shows that the closer one comes to God, the more one enters mystery rather than possession.
That matters enormously in the information age. We live in a culture that assumes that to know something is to capture or classify, quantify or control it, and AI intensifies that temptation.
But an apophatic anthropology says that the person, made in the image of the incomprehensible God, is never exhausted by data about the person. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (section 2563) calls the heart the human being’s "hidden center," the place of "decision," "truth," "encounter" and "covenant." Pope Francis makes the same point in "Dilexit Nos" (section 14): Algorithms show how predictable our thoughts and will can be, but "that is not the case with the heart."
You may know data about me, but you do not know me as God knows me. You may predict my behavior, but you have not mastered my conscience. You may model my preferences, but you have not reached my heart.
Against transhumanism, apophatic theology also says that human limits are not merely defects to be engineered away. Pope Leo warns that when the human being is treated as something to be optimized, vulnerable lives can be judged less useful or less worthy.
St. Athanasius offers the classic patristic foundation: The Word became human so that humanity might be raised into divine life. Apophatic theology protects the person from being reduced to information. Not everything real can be captured; not everything personal about a person can be predicted; not everything sacred can be controlled.
OSV News: In a particular way, Eastern Catholicism and Christianity also invite us to embrace asceticism in the spiritual life. Is it possible, amid this moment’s firehose of information and data, to truly practice digital asceticism? If so, what practical steps can we take?
Murzaku: Yes, but digital asceticism must be understood correctly.
It is not nostalgia, fear of technology or a romantic rejection of modern tools. It is training for freedom: the discipline of using technology without allowing technology to use us.
Pope Leo warns that digital platforms can capture time and attention, exploit vulnerability, and weaken inner freedom; that is why he calls for education in digital sobriety in "Magnifica Humanitas" (section 170).
Eastern Catholic theology helps because asceticism is not hatred of the body or hatred of the world. It is the purification of desire. Pope Leo, speaking to Eastern Christians, praised the East’s gifts of mystery, mystagogy, intercession, penance, fasting and penthos, or tears of repentance for oneself and for humanity. Those practices are medicine for a digital culture built on speed and distraction.
I would name three steps (toward digital asceticism), which people – myself included – might find hard to follow.
First, guard the first and last attention of the day: Begin and end without the phone, so the day opens and closes before God rather than before the feed.
Second, practice a real digital fast: one evening a week, without social media.
Third, restore embodied communion: no phones at meals, during prayer, at Divine Liturgy or Mass or during conversation with family and friends.
Digital asceticism also means restraint of speech: Verify before sharing, especially when AI can amplify disinformation and blur truth with falsehood.
And use AI with a rule of human judgment: Let it assist but never replace conscience, teaching presence or moral responsibility.
Digital asceticism is not less technology for its own sake; it is more freedom. It means fasting from the machine so the heart can remember how to pray and love.
OSV News: The martyr Catholic Churches have known all too well the horrors of war. How can they serve as a prophetic voice in a world that, as Pope Leo warns, has normalized conflict and embarked on AI warfare?
Murzaku: The martyr Churches can speak prophetically because they speak from wounds, not from theory.
Many Eastern Catholic and Eastern Christian communities know war, exile, persecution and occupation from the inside. Pope Leo XIV said to Eastern Christians that they know how to sing hope from the abyss of violence, naming communities scarred by conflict in the Holy Land, Ukraine, Lebanon, Syria, the Middle East, Tigray and the Caucasus.
Their witness matters because AI warfare risks making violence abstract. In "Magnifica Humanitas," Pope Leo warns that lethal or irreversible decisions must not be entrusted to artificial systems: "Moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation; it requires human conscience and responsibility. … No algorithm can make war morally acceptable."
The martyr Churches answer abstraction with embodied memory. They remind the world that there is no such thing as clean, data-driven war. There are mothers, children, churches and real lives destroyed.
In the patristic tradition, martyrdom is not love of violence; it is witness to Christ. "The Martyrdom of Polycarp" (the early Christian letter recounting the second-century saint's death) presents martyrdom as "according to the Gospel,” and St. Ignatius of Antioch shows martyrdom as fidelity to Christ rather than domination over enemies.
The martyr Churches are the conscience of the AI-war age. They tell a world of drones and algorithms: The victim is not data. The dead are not statistics. No machine can absolve the human conscience.
Read through Eastern Catholic lenses, "Magnifica Humanitas" is a call to recover the mystery of the person. AI can serve humanity only if it remains a tool before the icon, before the human heart, before the wounded body, and before God.
The future is not simply artificial intelligence versus human intelligence. It is Babel or Jerusalem.
The Eastern Catholic contribution to "Magnifica Humanitas" is not decorative; it is a test of Catholicity. If the East’s theology of mystery, icon, asceticism, martyrdom, theosis, and the heart is ignored, the Church’s undivided heritage remains undivided in doctrine but becomes divided in practice.
