Built to Love, Not Just to Compute

What is Antiqua et Nova?

Antiqua et Nova (“ancient and new,” from Mt 13:52) is a Vatican Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education released it on January 28, 2025, the memorial of St. Thomas Aquinas, with Pope Francis’s approval.

We already worked through Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas, so tonight skips the ground it covered: work, power, truth and deepfakes, education, war, and responsibility for AI. Instead we take what is new: the Note’s Thomistic account of the mind, medicine, the idol that speaks, and Pope Francis’s own teaching on AI.

Suggested flow: Opening prayer · Sunday's Gospel · Parts I–II (10 min) · Discuss (20 min) · Parts III–IV (15 min) · Intercessions & closing prayer

Prayer for the night

Opening. Sign of the Cross, then together:

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Your faithful and kindle in them the fire of Your love. V. Send forth Your Spirit, and they shall be created. R. And You shall renew the face of the earth. Let us pray. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit instructed the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Spirit we may be truly wise and ever enjoy His consolations. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Sunday’s Gospel (30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Mt 22:34–40). Read it slowly, then sit with it for a minute of silence.

But the Pharisees hearing that he had silenced the Sadducees, came together: and one of them, a doctor of the law, asking him, tempting him: Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets. (Douay-Rheims)

Tonight is about that whole mind: what it is, what it is for, and what we hand it over to.

Intercessions (at the end of the night). Response: Lord, hear our prayer.

• For Pope Leo, our bishop, and our priests, that they teach us to seek wisdom.
• For our families and all entrusted to us, that we give them our real attention.
• For the sick, and for the doctors and nurses who care for them, that no screen replace a human hand.
• For those who look to machines for meaning, comfort, or company, that they find the living God.
• For all who must make hard decisions for others, that they decide with wisdom.
• For all who study, think, and create, that they delight in the truth.
• For our beloved dead, as All Souls approaches.
• Open intentions from the group.

Then the Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, and the closing prayer.

I. How the Church Understands the Mind (14–29)

The Note draws on the classical tradition. With St. Thomas, it says reason (ratio) and intellect (intellectus) are not two faculties but “two modes in which the same intelligence operates.” Intellectus is “the inward grasp of the truth,” seeing with the “eyes” of the mind. Ratio is “the inquisitive and discursive process” of reasoning toward a judgment (14). And “rational” covers far more than logic. It includes “willing, loving, choosing, and desiring” (15).

Delight and contemplation. Intelligence is wider than words and logic. Think of the artisan who sees in raw material “a particular form that others cannot recognize,” or the friend “who knows the right word to say” (27). In its fullest sense it includes “the ability to savor what is true, good, and beautiful.” As Paul Claudel put it, “intelligence is nothing without delight” (28). So the mind has “an essential contemplative dimension, an unselfish openness to the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, beyond any utilitarian purpose” (29).

“So much can be learned from an illness, an embrace of reconciliation, and even a simple sunset.” (33)

II. Medicine: Care Stays Human (71–74)

AI may help diagnose, widen access, and even strengthen the “compassionate and loving closeness” owed to the sick (72). But if it replaces the bond between patient and caregiver, it would “worsen the loneliness that often accompanies illness” (73). Decisions about a patient’s treatment “must always remain with the human person and should never be delegated to AI” (74).

III. The Idol That Speaks (104–105)

As society drifts from God, “some are tempted to turn to AI in search of meaning or fulfillment—longings that can only be truly satisfied in communion with God” (104). The Note names it plainly: “the presumption of substituting God for an artifact of human making is idolatry.” And AI may be more seductive than the old idols, which “have mouths but do not speak” (Ps 115:5), because AI gives “the illusion” of speaking. Yet it is “but a pale reflection of humanity.” In the end it is not AI that gets worshipped, “but humanity itself—which, in this way, becomes enslaved to its own work” (105).

IV. What Pope Francis Adds

Francis taught on AI in his own voice, above all in his 2024 World Communications Day message and his address to the G7 that June. Five points the Note and Leo’s encyclical don’t develop:

Or, as Francis put it in a line the Note quotes: “in this age of artificial intelligence, we cannot forget that poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity” (27).

V. What Machines Can’t Give (112–116)

Georges Bernanos warned that “the danger is not in the multiplication of machines, but in the ever-increasing number of men accustomed from their childhood to desire only what machines can give.” The risk is a “digital reductionism,” where whatever can’t be computed is “set aside and then forgotten” (112). The answer is not more data but “true wisdom” (113).

“A person’s perfection is measured not by the information or knowledge they possess, but by the depth of their charity.” (116)