Cardinal Parolin: The law must govern AI and eliminate inequalities

Vatican News

Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin delivered an extensive reflection on Chapter Five of Magnifica humanitas — entitled “The Culture of Power and the Civilization of Love”— to open the five days of meetings and discussions marking the 150th anniversary of the Faculty of Canon Law at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome on Tuesday, October 20.

The Cardinal, a former student of the faculty, spoke about the importance of international law in light of Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical.

He began by explaining that the university’s aim in educating jurists is not merely to prepare “an interpreter of legal texts or a technician of procedures,” but rather a “guardian of legality” and a “guide for behaviors that form part of human relationships and, in this specific case, of a life of faith and belonging to the Church.”

This is the “boundary between limited human ambition and the power of God’s love,” a realm that is often “contested,” where “the idea of law as an instrument for exercising power confronts the reality of law as synonymous with justice and therefore as a barrier against illegality, oppression, and the use of force as a rule for the sole purpose of excluding the most vulnerable and defenseless,” he continued.

Law, legality, and justice

In the university’s Great Hall, Cardinal Parolin emphasized that law, legality, and justice concern our “daily existence” and “are determining factors in relationships between individuals, communities, and peoples.” They “establish limits, open up possibilities, govern the present, and also make it possible to envision the future.”

For this reason, in every age, “reflections are developed, debates are opened, and the necessary parameters for relationships within and between states are established” around their meaning.

The Church’s Magisterium regards the legal sphere as “a process that is constantly evolving,” one that, “in every historical period,” regulates relationships and shapes them, giving them continuity.

This is particularly evident today in the “promises” of “new technologies,” which, as Pope Leo XIV writes in Magnifica humanitas, can be “in a certain sense, a human form of participation in the divine act of creation.”

“Developers therefore bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility,” the Cardinal observed, because it is necessary to “verify whether the power of digital infrastructures and algorithms truly promotes participation and responsibility, protects the most vulnerable, ensures equitable access to opportunities, and remains directed toward the common good.”

Progress and human dignity

While Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical Rerum Novarum focused on preserving human dignity in the face of the Industrial Revolution, Magnifica humanitas projects its analysis in the context of the digital revolution and artificial intelligence, Cardinal Parolin noted.

He recalled Pope Leo XIV’s call not to reduce “creation to an object of exploitation and people to cogs in a system designed to become ever more efficient,” and to “adopt appropriate regulatory instruments capable of protecting justice and containing the distorting effects of technological power.”

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In Chapter Five of his encyclical, the Pope examines the “impact that emerging technologies have on warfare, the crisis of multilateralism, the normalization of conflicts, and broader changes.”

These are areas, the Vatican Secretary of State stated, that “now reveal a genuine transformation in concepts such as governance and the role of institutions, both domestic and international.”

“Technological innovations—including artificial intelligence—are not neutral: they can increase participation and justice, or widen inequalities, control, and exclusion.”

This chapter, therefore, presents jurists with “a challenge that touches the very essence of law, and even more so its rational function and its social impact.”

It also raises several questions: What place does “the legal norm have when a technology produced by an algorithm, in the name of efficiency, replaces its ethical foundation and moral understanding?”; “How can the law preserve its function in the face of the automation of force and its methods,” including those “justified in the name of ensuring domestic or international public order”?

In short, can we “stop the increasingly dominant ‘culture of power’ in relations between individuals, communities, and peoples?”

Cardinal Parolin highlighted how the Encyclical touches several principles of the Church’s Social Doctrine such as the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice.

Building a civilization of love

The Cardinal added that it is necessary to consider how to “lay the foundations for a new ‘civilization of love,’ mediated by a legal system genuinely committed to building structures of justice as a precondition for the common good.”

If the teaching of Saint Paul VI holds that the civilization of love consists of the “Christian project of building a global society founded on justice, peace, and fraternity, in opposition to the logic of violence and division,” then artificial intelligence “must serve to build that universal human family, with shared rights and duties, in which digital proximity becomes a genuine opportunity for encounter and mutual care.”

Cardinal Parolin stressed that this goal stands in contrast to today’s reality, in which “technological power assumes a new, predominantly ‘private’ face” and is therefore “more difficult to discern, govern, and direct toward the common good.”

The three guiding principles

According to Magnifica humanitas, jurists—and diplomats as well, Cardinal Parolin specified—can contribute to building the “civilization of love.”

Legal provisions should therefore embody “three principal guiding principles.” Firstly, disarming words, meaning using “language capable of mediation” and being open to “mutual respect and dialogue.” Cardinal Parolin noted that diplomacy also has this role.

Secondly, adopt the perspective of victims. This means “looking at the suffering of civilian populations, displaced persons, refugees,” and the “victims devastated by conflicts.”

Lastly, cultivate a healthy realism which, in “the language of international relations”, this means neither reducing “politics to morality nor surrendering it to violence.” Instead, it means seeking “practical paths so that peace becomes more than a word: credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiations, and conflict prevention.”

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In summary, the Cardinal emphasized, “the civilization of love stands in opposition to the culture of power by pursuing justice and building effective institutions,” using the “instruments proper to law, constructing them patiently and verifying their effects.”

For this reason, Pope Leo XIV urges people to “be a body, to work as a system.”

Yet, Parolin observed, “the processes of innovation and scientific research themselves are increasingly finding no corresponding response in the actions or reactions of state institutions,” because they are firmly in the hands of “private actors, often transnational, endowed with resources and capacities for intervention greater than those of many governments.”

Within states, meanwhile, the fundamental elements of governance “are experiencing a crisis of content,” he stressed. Concepts such as “sovereignty, territorial boundaries, the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the hierarchy of legal sources are increasingly losing their ability to constrain the exercise of power,” the Cardinal explained.

Moreover, an increasingly prevalent conviction holds that, to guarantee internal order within nations, the effective exercise of power is synonymous with a monopoly on force. At the international level, this is made evident by “the crisis of the multilateral system.”

In international relations in particular, “the failure or limited contribution of law in governing the digital sphere and algorithms makes the ‘culture of power’ evident, both as an exercise of power and as an attitude.”

This culture grows through the vast quantity of information that shapes public opinion and through the concentration of control in methods and structures that use the collection, storage, and management of data to predict, influence, and determine human behavior, Cardinal Parolin said.

Furthermore, “new technologies” affect our ability to perceive phenomena, assess their impact, and put responses into practice—or to refrain from opposing them—as happens with “the automation of weapons technologies.”

Moving beyond the theory of just war

Today, “the conviction has taken hold that conflict is the only instrument for managing relations between individuals, communities, and states,” the Vatican Secretary of State asserted.

“This makes war seem normal and conceals its causes, its methods of execution, and its effects.”

For this reason, Pope Leo XIV argues in Magnifica humanitas that it is necessary to move beyond the theory of “just war,” which is too often invoked to justify any war, while retaining the right to legitimate self-defense in its strictest sense.

Cardinal Parolin continued that “the destructive power of modern weapons and the unpredictability of technological developments make it impossible to contain the effects of a conflict or to keep it within the bounds of justice.”

Governing AI

Faced with a technology that separates itself from every other factor until it achieves complete autonomy, almost a form of supremacy, “law, legislation, and regulations are legitimate only if they have the capacity to manage situations,” the Cardinal summarized.

A legal rule is legitimate “because it is a concrete instrument for guaranteeing people’s existence, freedom, and relationships.”

But if the decisions of legislators or judges are delegated to a predictive system based on algorithms, the fundamental principle requiring legal decisions to be reasoned and justified is undermined. In that case, “the ‘culture of power’ that Pope Leo XIV speaks of will prevail,” reducing law to a regulatory technique stripped of any substantive dimension of justice.

It is therefore necessary to “develop rules that make it possible to govern the phenomenon of artificial intelligence,” Cardinal Parolin concluded, eliminating “inequalities” and creating space for “greater justice.”