Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical on May 25, 2026.
Magnifica Humanitas — "The Magnificent Humanity" — is a 42,000-word document about technology, human identity, and the specific threat AI poses to human dignity. It is the most significant official church statement on artificial intelligence ever written.
One line from it stopped me:
"We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace."
I've been building a sermon prep tool for the last two years. I've been in the middle of a conversation about AI and preaching that has gotten heated, honest, and sometimes ugly. And the Pope just named the thing underneath all of it.
Not that AI is dangerous. Not that AI is a sin. That there is something in the human person that a machine cannot touch. Cannot replace. Cannot even approximate.
That's the thing at stake when a pastor lets AI write their sermon.
When I posted about SermonCoach in a United Methodist clergy group, the response was swift. Pastors pushed back hard. "No AI. Not for research, not for writing, never." One person said "Ewww." My 13-year-old daughter heard about the thread and joined in on the bashing.
I wasn't surprised by the opposition. I was surprised by how quickly I recognized what was underneath it.
These pastors were not afraid of a new tool. They were afraid of the same thing the Pope just named in 42,000 words: that something irreplaceable might be quietly swapped out, and nobody would notice until the damage was done.
They were right to be afraid.
I know, because I preached that sermon. The AI-written one. After 12 years in the pulpit, spread thin, I let a tool do the thinking. The words were right. The structure was clean. And standing there, I knew something was missing. My congregation couldn't name it. But they felt it.
That gap — between technically correct and actually preached — is what I built SermonCoach to close.
Pope Leo chose his name deliberately. Leo XIII addressed the industrial revolution and its threat to workers. Leo XIV is addressing the digital revolution and its threat to something harder to name: the irreducibly human act of thinking, wrestling, and arriving at conviction.
For pastors, that act is sermon preparation.
The sermon is not a product. It is the record of a pastor wrestling with a text, a congregation, and a week in the life of the world. The congregation can feel the difference between a sermon born from that wrestling and one assembled from a prompt.
The Pope is saying: don't let the machine do what only you can do.
SermonCoach is built on that same conviction. It doesn't write your sermon. It asks questions until you do. You cannot advance to the next step until you've genuinely engaged with the current one. The draft unlocks only after all the thinking is yours.
That's not a product feature. It's a theological position.