Artificial Intelligence, and the Aims of Interior Integration in Christian Education (26 October 2026)

Below, I offer considerations on AI and Catholic Education based on “Drawing new maps of hope”, Pope Leo XIV ‘s Apostolic Letter (Oct 28, 2025) marking the 60th anniversary of the Conciliar Declaration Gravissimum educationis, on the extreme importance and current relevance of education in human life.on the importance and relevance of Education in human life.

Artificial Intelligence, and the Aims of Interior Integration in Christian Education

+Daniel E Flores

Bishop of Brownsville

(Address to participants in the Texas Catholic Conference Diocesan Educators Assembly, 26 October 2026.)

In October 2025 Pope Leo XIV published an Apostolic Letter on Catholic Education entitled Drawing new maps of hope. In it the Holy Father describes our task as Catholic educators. I will spend a little time with you today exploring some of the key aspects of Pope Leo’s teaching in this document. My hope is that you will take time to read and meditate the the letter yourself. Such an aim involves encouraging you to give some time to it. Generating an AI summary is not going to suffice. We have to read so as to wrestle with the angel for a while, and thus take into ourselves the sense of what he says. And that can only happen if you let the reading attain the depth of human heart speaking to human heart. You have to let it connect with your experiences, your wonderings and curiosities. And then, set to the task of creatively thinking and imagining how this might have relevance in our common vocation as Christian educators.

The title of the Apostolic Letter suggests that the way forward is into a kind of uncharted territory, particularly difficult to navigate. Things are moving very fast, and the tendency is for us to think that pathways we are familiar with need only be applied with greater concentration. Same map, more sweat, so to speak. The previous pathways we are familiar with are very much a part of the way forward, but what is needed is not so much more concentration as a more refined attention. Concentration is not the same as attention. What do our rapidly changing human circumstances require in terms of greater human attentiveness? This is the question. The short answer to the question is in the question itself: we must seek to be more attentive to how our own humanity expresses itself within the human dynamic of teaching and learning, learning and teaching.

This human attention is tied to the pathways of hope. Hope does not disappoint, as St Paul says in Romans 5,5. And this is so because the love of God has been poured into our hearts through our faith in the great gift of Christ Jesus, Son of the Father, born of the Virgin, Crucified and Risen from the dead. This hope, its sources and its guidance in the charity of Christ dwelling in us, is the very form that prepares the future of our educational mission.

When you read the Apostolic letter you will notice that the Holy Father offers a consistent theological anthropology of human integration that aims to overcome the either/or anthropologies of late modernity. It is not about separations: either mind or body, intellect or will, faith or reason, mind or heart; rather, it is all these elements together, respected, ordered, and integrated. And among these, for the Holy Father, education of the heart is primary. The letter on Catholic education is thus a continuation of the Christian humanism articulated by Pope Francis in Dilexit nos (on the Sacred Heart) and by Pope Leo XIV in Dilexi te (on care for the poor), for the love of the heart of Jesus and the Church’s love for the poor are inseparable concerns. In 1.2. of the letter on education, Pope Leo insists that we preserve the unity between faith and reason, between thought and life, between knowledge and justice. And in 4.2. he further insists that Christian formation embrace the entire person: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, social, physical. The overcoming of divisiveness within human nature itself is a principal aim of the grace of the redemption, and therefore a principal concern of Christian education. This concern for the interior divisions we suffer further mirrors the Christian concern to temper and heal a divided human social order (1). Hence, the Holy Father’s ongoing concern for justice, the poor, and peace.

Attentiveness to young people

Late in the Apostolic Letter, Pope Leo reminds us of something dear to the heart of Pope Francis: namely that Catholic educators need to be attentive to, and listen to children and young people (2). By “listening” both Pope Francis and Pope Leo mean trying deeply to understand where their questions are coming from, and interpreting the sense of the words and images they put together. It’s a work of translation, really. If a young person asks you a question in Spanish, and you only know a little bit of Spanish, you can put the question through an AI translating App, but the accurate correspondence of words will not tell you where the question is coming from, or why it is important to the young person. The same is true even if you and the young person speak the same language. The full sense of the question goes way beyond what the words mean. To get the sense, we need to know the person, at least to some degree. Human communication, always something of a miracle, requires patience with presence; and patience with presence is a matter of time. Despite our technical advances, time, it seems, is something we humans have both too much of, and not enough of. Education, therefore, is a most thoroughly human endeavor. A person, the Holy Father says in 4.1, is not a “skills profile”, and cannot be reduced to a predictable algorithm, but is a face, a story, a vocation.

Children around the age of reason already have an interior life. In fact, by definition, that is what the phrase “age of reason” actually involves. It is that self-aware inner conversation of the heart where wonder and curiosity reside. It is where questions begin their tenuous formulations. It is where a sense of desire and hope emerge; it is also where the earliest perceptions of personal sorrow and regret happen. Dealing with the experience of disappointment occurs there also.

We wonder what it’s like to see with the eyes of a young person, and when we do that, we are also trying to remember and recover something we know we once knew. I doubt we appreciate this aspect of ourselves enough. Human memory is not data storage, unless that is what we want it to be. It is a remembering that is inseparably an awareness of what something we have lived might mean. It takes interiority to remember and understand the important things.

We cannot assume we understand the way a child or young person understands things; nor can we presume that the way a young person sees reality is inherently inferior to our own. Young people have something to show us. Jesus said that for us to inherit the Kingdom we must receive the heart of a child. He knew this would be an enigmatic saying to adult ears. He was telling us, among other things, that our way forward in grace includes a recovery of wonder, and an appreciation for the gift and spontaneity of life. It also invariably includes a deep sense of the given-ness of human relations with other humans and with the natural world.

A child moves into the age of reason profoundly aware of that connectedness to others upon which human survival depends. It is only after the age of interior reflection that it even becomes possible to question whether the mutual relations and dependences among human beings is a good thing or a bad thing, a perennial thing, or a thing from which we should try to escape. Much of modernity, with its many forms of individualism, is obsessed with this question.

On the other hand, the basis of the Catholic understanding of the common good, which flows through the social magisterium of the Church, roughly coincides with these earliest human perceptions of our in-built interconnectedness. Catholic interpretation of human nature, through the Scriptural revelation and sound philosophy, presupposes that the human race is made in relations to others, and in relations for others. This is not irrelevant to contemporary discourse about justice and its relation to compassion, and our obligations to the poor. Much of our contemporary political discourse begins with the presupposition that we are autonomous by nature and related to one another largely by choice. When Catholic Social Teaching engages modern social discourses, these two vastly different anthropological starting points are bumping against each other like tectonic plates in the earth’s crust.

We can win that philosophical argument, and yet still lose the hearts of our children. This is the issue today. Education, as Pope Leo insists, must engage the heart of the child. Catholic Education, as he says in 1,1, is the concrete way in which the Gospel becomes an educational gesture, a relationship, a culture. This is reiterated in 6.2, where he notes that Catholic education becomes leaven in the human community: it generates reciprocity, overcomes reductionism, and opens up to social responsibility. The task today is to dare to pursue an integral humanism that addresses the questions of our time without losing sight of its source.

Young people and spaces for Silence

With this in mind, I want to draw attention to 10.3 of the Holy Father’s Letter where he asks us to note that Young people ask for depth; they need spaces for silence, discernment, and dialogue with their conscience and with God. Young people need educators wise and humble enough to create these spaces for silence, and interior awareness. If we listen to our children and young people, we will note how distraction and excessive sensory stimulation can stifle the early and crucial experiences of child-like interiority The Holy Father explicitly points to this reality when in 11.1, he warns that hyper-digitalization can fragment attention; the crisis of relationships can wound the psyche; social insecurity and inequalities can extinguish desire. This describes the thwarting of interiority at an early age. It is a thwarting of sensitivity to our relationships with others who inhabit our world, and therefore a stunting of human conscience.

Too early an exposure to the algorithmic world of AI data and its socially persuasive marketing tools can be devastating to children and young people. It inhibits the development of firm awareness and habits of interaction with other human beings. The key moments of human development as persons capable of relating well to and with others are at the dawn of self-awareness and the birth of the interior dialogue. A human and Christian education is built upon a realist relational sensibility. In 5.2. the Holy Father says: Technical updates are not enough: it is necessary to cultivate a heart that listens, a gaze that encourages, and an intelligence that discerns.

The thorny thicket that makes a map forward in hope difficult is our human vulnerability to losing, or never really developing, a stable interiority where human relations are acknowledged and conscience is at least strong enough to raise an objection to an injustice, and where conscience can be moved to compassion for the suffering of another. This vulnerability is exploited in a technological culture that prevents young people from developing the interior space where other human beings are humanly perceived. We must help them, and ourselves, treasure and develop this space.

In a sense, technology offers something like a perilous realm for student and educator alike. Not only is there distraction, but there is also the ambiguation of real human relation. Tolkien in his essay On Fairy Stories makes the distinction between the primary world and the secondary world, between the world we inhabit and the one we construct in and with our imaginative minds. This distinction was useful to him as a literary critic to distinguish the characteristics of life lived, and of life imagined in a fairy tale. The distinction between the two realms is usually obvious to a reader of the fairy tale genre. Yet, the enchantment such stories offer can be intoxicating, and the stories themselves involve the reader in the risk of falling into the secondary world where we desire, and then will it to be our primary world. The fairy tale genre is a complex and serious one. Even children know this.

A common trope within fairy tales is the desire of the secondary world to convince participants in the primary world that there is no need to return to a primary world, because the secondary world is more attractive and more things are possible there. There is a fine fairy tail recently published by Susanna Clarke entitled The Bishop of Durham Attempts to Surrender the City. Partof the charm and drama of the little book is the king’s having to decide to which world he wants to belong. He skirts the boundaries between the land of fairy and the world of other human beings and the natural world as we know them; the boundaries are fluid and at certain points dissolve.

Now let us look at the distinction between primary and secondary worlds in light of our current situation. Our growing technological capacity can create mechanized interlocutors capable of mimicking our most intimate human qualities, imitating empathy, sorrow, and even the ability to deceive. The machine imitates its maker in more ways than we currently know. And these our technological creations are designed to persuade us that they share fully in our primary human reality. The enchantment is a powerful one.

I am not suggesting that the AI machine we have at our disposal desires this dissolving of the boundary between what is primary reality and secondary reality; the program cannot desire. But I do suggest that the makers of the programs and algorithmic functions often have a strong economic interest in convincing adults and children that we have created a suitable partner world to our own, where what acts like the human we want is in fact human. And so choosing which world to dwell in primarily becomes a matter of indifferent choice.

Our technical creations can be visualized and produced materially through mathematical patterns in the human mind; but the program cannot make the projection be human flesh. This is the crux of the program designer’s anthropological problem. Human flesh and blood are not produced by equations, even if materially modeled. Embodied human life is what thinks, feel, cries, forgets and remembers, and relates to others humanly. For Catholics, the frailty of human flesh is not a problem to be solved; it is the glory of the Eternal Word. This is the great mystery.

To address this confusion of realms, Catholic educators must work closely together with parents to create the kinds of interior spaces Pope Leo speaks of, spaces young people depend on to sort out the real human heart from the ingeniously produced and manipulable facsimile (3). What are these spaces we can create for young people? I have some ideas about that, like for example incorporating visits to the Blessed Sacrament for the young people we teach. We can prepare them in age appropriate ways to expand the inner dialogue to consciously include dialogue with the God who is with us. In that space young people, and their teachers, are at the heart of the primary world. Healthy and frequent interactions with the primary world are the best remedies for the tendency to take refuge in a secondary one.

Before a child begins to wonder, then ask, and then perhaps struggle to accept what it means that there is an image of the Crucified Christ in the Church, a child and young person is developing interiorly the basic habits of heart that will allow an understanding of what he or she sees there. To understand the mystery of Faith means, among other things, integrating it into the wondering, questioning, ever-in-relation interior space that is the human heart. For a young person, the nascent wondering about the faith is primarily about how does this Jesus I see there fit in my heart? This is also the enduring question of the perceptive adult.

Planting seeds

The Holy Father speaks in 10.3 of harmonizing technical, emotional, social, spiritual and ecological intelligence. Following from what I have said about the primary world, I want to say a little about ecological intelligence in Catholic education. In important ways it is a good counter-weight to our preoccupation with Artificial Intelligence.There is a beautiful passage in the Apostolic Letter calling to mind the tradition of St Bonaventure on how to read nature properly, as a multiplicity of created traces reflecting to us some aspects of the divine goodness and beauty (4). It is in number 7 of the letter, and I will leave it to you to meditate it.

Related to this, yet more to the present point, however, is the fact that our young people have less and less contact with the natural world of plants and trees and animals. Dogs and cats are great to have around, of course, but the wildness, interdependency and delicacy of nature is only peripherally present to us. I for one think every learning environment should have a seed garden by the window or right outside the school doors. And I think the students should work together to cultivate it.

Growing things from seeds is enormously instructive. It requires patience, because though we plant, we do not cause or control the growth. Light, water, and earth are required along with an eye for signs of things that might inhibit or kill a sprouting garden. Nature responds to us, but unlike the technology we make, it does so in ways that do not imitate us. Tomato plants have no mimetic relation to us. Their natural desire is elsewhere. This is because we are not the authors of a garden in the same way we are the human authors of technology. God’s authorship over seedlings is more reflected in them than is our cultivating work of these same seedlings.

There is a wisdom in the farmer’s craft that is of another order. This cultivation of living things is one of those spaces that can help young people wonder, and learn; and that can help us distinguish not just between a primary world and a secondary one, but also distinguish between knowing many things, that is, having much informational data, and knowing important things about life and how to sustain it for its own sake. The knowledge derived from caring for a garden is a disarming knowledge.

The judicious use of technology

Pope Leo also mentions in 10.3. the following: let us educate in a judicious use of technology and of AI, placing the person before the algorithm and harmonizing technical, emotional, social, spiritual and ecological intelligence.

“Judicious use of technology contrasts to what Pope Leo calls “technophobia” (5). We need not create a technology we are honor bound to fear. The arc is ours, and it can be bent by us to support human creativity rather than replace it. Here, I suggest we all have to think about what it means for us to say with Pope Leo (9.2.) that no algorithm can substitute what makes education human: poetry, irony, love, art, imagination, the joy of discovery and even learning from mistakes as an opportunity for growth. This aspect of the educator’s role focuses primarily on encouraging the creativity of the human person. Artificial intelligence can be used to encourage this, but not substitute for it. The norm is a prudential one, and prudence judges better with time and experience. We need to cultivate and teach the reasonable distinction between what it means to think about information, and what it means to ingest information without thinking.

Better is the badly constructed poem I write, rooted in the experience of wanting to say what seems in me unsayable, than the technically correct blend of other authors that the machine can give me. To open up this possibility, judiciously asking students on occasion to put away the institutionally provided iPad and pull out a sheet of paper and a pencil might be the most human thing to do at certain times in a classroom.

T.S. Eliot wrote the diminutively hopeful line in the The Four Quartets: We had the experience but missed the meaning, / And approach to the meaning restores the experience. (6)The line offers a consolation that even in a desert, meaning can come to mind upon recalling something from the past that at that time we did not quite understand. Surely a high school student can ask AI to write a two page essay on the meaning of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets, in which case the student is given a text about the meaning of a poem he or she did not experience. The exercise is a barren one, because without the experience of having wrestled with the meaning of a memory, the meaning of the poem is but a shadow in us. Memorable meaning happens when a young person recalls a personal memory and discovers it meant more than he or she realized at the time. This kind of reflection is intensely human, and what we can rightly call the way of Augustine’s Confessions.

Unarmed and disarming peace

Again in 10.3. Pope Leo traces a third roadmark for our time: regarding unarmed and disarming peace: let us educate in non-violent languages, reconciliation, bridges and not walls. “Blessed are the peacemakers” (Mt 5:9) becomes the method and content of learning.

We know with Pope Leo in 7.2. that Forgetting our common humanity has given rise to divisions and violence; and when the earth suffers, the poor suffer the most. Our young people, and our adults as well, experience the world as a deeply conflicted. They wonder if this is insurmountable; if this is just the way things are and always will be world without end.

Christian hope is rooted in a vision of reconciliation and peace, won by Christ and being enacted in history by the grace of Christ’s victory. The Christian struggle is not the same as a worldly struggle. Ours involves conformity to the mind and will of Christ, in whose crucified and risen flesh the Kingdom comes. Christ is the sower of the seed of the Kingdom. And he is also the seed that falls to the ground and dies, so as to bear much fruit. Because Christ is the unarmed sower, his unarmed and disarming peace is foundational to the style and content of Catholic Education. I think it is fitting to let Pope Leo XIV speak to us in his own words on this final of points:

11.2. I ask educational communities: disarm words, raise your eyes, and safeguard the heart. Disarm words, because education does not advance with polemics, but with meekness that knows how to listen. Raise your eyes. As God said to Abraham, “Look toward heaven, and number the stars” ( Gen 15:5): know how to ask yourselves where you are going, and why. Safeguard the heart: relationships come before opinions, people before programmes. Do not waste time and opportunities: “to quote an Augustinian expression: our present is an intuition; a time we live and must take advantage of before it slips through our fingers”

Thank you for your kind attention.

+df

1) 4.2. Christian formation embraces the entire person: spiritual, intellectual, emotional, social, physical.

It does not pit manual and theoretical skills, science and humanism, technology and conscience against each other; rather, it demands that professionalism be imbued with ethics, and that ethics be not an abstract concept but a daily practice. Education does not measure its value only on the axis of efficiency: it measures it according to dignity, justice, the capacity to serve the common good.

This integral anthropological vision must remain the cornerstone of Catholic pedagogy. Following in the wake of the thought of Saint John Henry Newman, it goes against a strictly mercantilist approach that often forces education today to be measured in terms of functionality and practical utility.

2) 10.1. I gratefully accept this prophetic legacy entrusted to us by Pope Francis. It is an invitation to form an alliance and networks to educate in universal fraternity. Its seven pathways remain our foundation: putting the person at the centre; listening to children and young people; promoting the dignity and full participation of women; recognizing the family as the first educator; opening ourselves to welcome and inclusion; renewing the economy and politics in the service of humanity; and caring for our common home.

3) 5.3. The family remains the first place of education. Catholic schools collaborate with parents; they do not substitute them, because the “duty … devolves primarily on them”.

4) The contemplation of Creation: 7.1. This aspect is not new in the Christian philosophical and theological tradition, in which the study of nature also had the purpose of demonstrating the traces of God ( vestigia Dei) in our world. In the  Collationes in Hexaemeron, Saint Bonaventure of Bagnoregio writes that “The entire world is a shadow, a pathway, an imprint. It is a book written from outside ( Ez. 2:9), because in every creature there is a reflection of the divine model, but mixed with darkness. The world is, therefore, a path similar to opacity mixed with light; in this sense, it is a path. Just as you see how a ray of light entering through a window is coloured according to the different colours of the different parts of the glass, the divine ray is reflected differently in each creature and takes on different properties” [19]. [In Hexaemeron XII]

5) 9.2. Pastoral creativity is needed in order to inhabit these spaces: strengthening the formation of teachers, including in the digital sphere; enhancing active teaching; promoting service-learning and responsible citizenship; and avoiding any technophobia. Our attitude towards technology can never be hostile, because “technological progress is part of God’s plan for creation” [22]. But it requires discernment in didactic planning, evaluation, platforms, data protection, and equitable access. In any case, no algorithm can substitute what makes education human: poetry, irony, love, art, imagination, the joy of discovery and even learning from mistakes as an opportunity for growth.

6) T.S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages, Section 2.