Archdiocese of Seoul honors AI scholar Fr Paolo Benanti
The Archdiocese of Seoul’s 20th Mystery of Life Awards ceremony honored AI scholar Fr Paolo Benanti, who received the Achievement Award in Humanities and Social Sciences. The event, held at the Catholic University of Korea, highlighted the importance of human dignity amid advances in artificial intelligence, with Benanti warning against reducing people to data. Key church leaders, including Archbishop Peter Soon-taick Chung and Cardinal Andrew Yeom, and Korean Prime Minister Kim Min-seok attended, emphasizing the cultural and national significance of life protection. The ceremony aimed to promote a culture of respect for life ahead of World Youth Day Seoul 2027, linking religious values with societal responsibility.
3 months ago
The Archdiocese of Seoul presented the 20th Mystery of Life Awards on 11 June 2026, highlighting the dignity of human life in an era of artificial intelligence and linking the ceremony to preparations for World Youth Day Seoul 2027. 1
The awards ceremony was held at The Catholic University of Korea and organized by the Committee for Life of the Archdiocese of Seoul, chaired by Archbishop Peter Soon‑Taick Chung. 1
Key church leaders—including Cardinal Andrew Soo‑jung Yeom, Archbishop Emeritus of Seoul, and Bishop Job Yo‑bi Koo—attended, as did Prime Minister Kim Min‑seok, who delivered congratulatory remarks. 1
Fr Paolo Benanti, T.O.R., received the Achievement Award in Humanities and Social Sciences for his work on AI ethics, serving as an advisor to the Holy See, chair of Italy’s AI Commission, and former member of the UN Secretary‑General’s High‑level Advisory Body on AI. 1
In his acceptance speech, Benanti warned that AI “does not know how to see a person” and stressed that technology must be judged against the measure of human dignity. 1
Four additional winners were honored:
Each Achievement Award included KRW 100 million; each Encouragement Award included KRW 30 million. 1
Archbishop Chung linked the awards to the upcoming World Youth Day, stating that the event aims to spread the “value of life” to the youth who will gather in Korea in 2027. 1
Prime Minister Kim emphasized that protecting life is a national responsibility, noting that issues such as industrial accidents, suicide, and public safety cannot be solved by systems alone without a foundation of human dignity. 1
Archbishop Chung expressed hope that the ceremony would deepen a culture of respect for life throughout Korean society, reinforcing the Church’s bioethical mission. 1*
Human dignity must guide artificial intelligence development
Human dignity is not a decorative add-on to artificial intelligence (AI); it is the Church’s criterion for evaluating whether AI is truly good—morally, socially, and spiritually. Catholic teaching insists that humans must remain more than “data points,” and that technology’s “ends and means” must be judged by whether they respect the person and serve the common good.
A central danger addressed in the Church’s AI reflection is functionalism: valuing persons by what they can do or produce. The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education warns that “a person’s worth does not depend on possessing specific skills… but on the person’s inherent dignity, grounded in being created in the image of God,” and that this dignity remains even when someone cannot exercise abilities (e.g., the unborn, unconscious, or elderly suffering).
In other words, AI may excel at tasks—but the human being is judged by dignity, not performance metrics.
Pope Francis describes AI’s basic nature as a mechanism for solving problems through logical operations on data to find correlations and improve results. However, he cautions that users can be tempted to draw broader conclusions about persons—sometimes even allowing AI-like systems to “have access to categories of data” about private life and to influence decisions in ways that risk effectively delegating “the last word concerning a person’s future.”
This directly connects to dignity: when AI outputs are treated as if they were the person’s destiny, dignity is undermined by reducing persons to patterns, probabilities, and classifications.
Pope Francis (citing a principle he repeats in his reflections on AI and peace) teaches that the “inherent dignity of each human being” and fraternity “must undergird the development of new technologies” and serve as “indisputable criteria” for evaluating technologies before they are employed.
So the Church’s criterion is not merely “limit harms later,” but “judge the technology’s ethical soundness now,” based on dignity and the common good.
The Church’s AI note is explicit: “the ends and the means used in a given application of AI, as well as the overall vision it incorporates, must all be evaluated to ensure they respect human dignity and promote the common good.”
This is a distinctly Catholic moral method: not only what results occur, but also what human goods and values are being targeted and what methods are being used.
The note stresses that human intelligence is crucial not only in designing AI, but also in directing its use toward the “authentic good of the human person.”
Responsibility for wise governance of AI belongs to “every level of society,” guided by Catholic Social Teaching principles including subsidiarity.
Subsidiarity (in simple terms) means decisions should be made at the most local and competent level, rather than centralizing power in ways that crush human agency—an important safeguard against technocratic domination.
Pope Leo XIV explicitly links AI to the formation of persons: rapid changes affect “critical thinking, discernment, learning and interpersonal relationships.” He then asks how to ensure AI serves the common good rather than consolidating wealth and power.
He urges special attention to “the freedom and inner life of our children and young people” and the “possible impact of technology on their intellectual and neurological development,” insisting that new generations must be “helped, not hindered,” in maturity and responsibility.
A key distinction follows: “access to vast amounts of data… should not be confused with the ability to derive meaning and value,” which requires openness to truth, contemplation, and the core questions of existence.
So dignity-guided AI is not only about privacy or safety; it is also about formation: whether AI supports wisdom, truth-seeking, and responsible freedom—or replaces them with manipulation, superficiality, and dependency.
Pope Francis’s example of AI used to predict recidivism shows how AI can silently incorporate prejudices embedded in data categories—such as ethnic origin or past infractions—leading to decisions influenced by classifications rather than by the person’s lived complexity and capacity for change.
Dignity is protected when decision-making refuses to treat people as “fixed profiles” and refuses to let AI outputs become unjust “final words” over the future.
The AI note also connects dignity to human rights discourse, mentioning that “neuro-rights” (rights linked to the protection of the mind/brain from harmful interference) can guide ethical discussions for the responsible development and use of AI.
While the document frames this as part of a broader ethical convergence, the underlying point is clear: dignity includes the integrity of the interior life, not only bodily safety.
Because AI is global, Pope Francis argues that international organizations should help create binding agreements and coordinate application and enforcement. The goal should not only be “the prevention of harmful practices” but also “the encouragement of best practices.”
He also emphasizes that voices of the poor and powerless must be included in global decision-making, since peace and fraternity require recognizing others in their “inalienable dignity.”
Thus, a dignity-guided approach is inherently political and communal: it is not left solely to market forces or technical experts.
“Human dignity must guide AI development” means that AI must be judged—at the design stage and before deployment—by whether it respects persons as created in the image of God, protects the freedom and inner life especially of the young, avoids reducing people to data-driven probabilities, and is governed toward the common good through ethically evaluated ends and means.