Dominican Superior General Establishes a Study Group on Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technologies
Dominican Master of the Order Gerard Francisco Timoner III appointed eight friars to a study group on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. The group will examine how these technologies affect consecrated life, preaching, and Dominican institutions. The appointment carries forward a mandate from the Order’s 2025 General Chapter in Kraków; Brother Dominik Jarczewski was named chair.
2 days ago
The Dominican Order’s Master General, Brother Gerard Francisco Timoner III, has appointed an eight-member study group to examine artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. Its work will cover the technologies’ effects on Dominican life and mission, including preaching, formation, administration and pastoral guidance.
The group was established in response to a call from the Order’s 2025 General Chapter in Kraków. Brother Dominik Jarczewski will chair it, with Brothers Nicanor Austriaco, Salvatore Di Fazio, Ghislain-Marie Grange, Rodrigo Hidalgo Torres, Łukasz Mścisławski, Anselm Ramelow and Gabriele Scardocci as members. The group will coordinate with the Order’s Curia offices, including the Socius for the Apostolic Life.
The group will consider how AI affects preaching and the discernment of truth, particularly when information and images can be generated or manipulated. It will also examine theological, philosophical and ethical questions raised by emerging technologies in consecrated life, drawing on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which the article identifies as a reference for its work.
Its work will extend to houses of study, formation programs and libraries. The group is expected to advise on responsible use of technology while preserving personal study, lectio and disputatio—practices central to the Dominican tradition. It will also propose guidelines or possible legislation on AI in the Order’s governance, administration and communications, from the General Curia to local communities.
The group will prepare ethical guidance that friars can share with the faithful, with particular attention to human dignity, human labor and directing technology toward the common good. It is also expected to collaborate with Dominican universities and study centers, other relevant bodies and, where appropriate, Holy See dicasteries.
One initiative it may engage with is an AI research tool being developed at the Institut dominicain d’études orientales in Cairo, intended to encourage dialogue and counter extremist narratives. Timoner said he expects the group to draw on the Order’s tradition of putting reason at the service of faith as it considers how to live out Dominican preaching in a technological age.
Artificial intelligence challenges human dignity, vocation, and religious witness
Artificial intelligence challenges human dignity, vocation, and religious witness not simply because it can perform tasks once associated with people, but because it can encourage society to measure human worth by performance, efficiency, or computational ability. The Catholic response is neither to reject technology outright nor to treat it as a substitute for human persons: AI should serve human beings and the common good, while human responsibility and the deeper dimensions of life remain central.
Catholic teaching grounds human dignity in being created in the image of God—not in intelligence, productivity, independence, or success. That dignity therefore remains intact when someone cannot exercise particular abilities, including in conditions of profound vulnerability. If AI leads people to value one another according to what they can do, it risks a “functionalist” view of the person: treating people as valuable chiefly for their usefulness.
This matters in debates about whether a machine that imitates human abilities should be regarded as equivalent to a human person. The supplied Church teaching draws a distinction between AI as a human creation and the dignity of the human being, whose life and worth are not reducible to computation. AI can be useful without being accorded a value that displaces or rivals human dignity.
Human intelligence and technical skill are gifts to be exercised in responsible stewardship of creation. The Church therefore recognizes the good that can come from scientific and technological advances; the moral question is how they are developed and used.
Work, in this view, is more than an economic output. It can contribute to personal growth, development, and fulfillment. Accordingly, AI should assist rather than replace human judgment, and technological progress should promote human labor rather than reduce workers to interchangeable components. The Church’s concern includes the effects on livelihoods, just wages, job security, and the distribution of benefits: replacing workers while concentrating gains among a few risks deepening poverty and treating people’s economic output as the measure of their worth.
This does not mean every task must remain human-performed. It means decisions about automation should be judged by whether they respect workers and serve the common good—not merely whether they increase speed or reduce costs. The available teaching establishes this moral direction, though it does not prescribe a single policy for every workplace or technology.
For Christians, religious witness includes affirming that human life has a meaning and dignity that cannot be captured by data or performance. The Church warns of “digital reductionism”: the tendency to neglect or dismiss what cannot be quantified. AI may support human intelligence, but it cannot replace its richness; Christians are called to cultivate forms of life and relationship that exceed calculation.
Religious witness also involves resisting the elevation of technology into an ultimate authority or object of undue trust. AI is made by human beings and can serve humanity, but it is not divine and should not receive a worth that eclipses the living person or God. In practical terms, this calls for discernment: asking whether a use of AI serves truth, human dignity, and the common good, and keeping human responsibility visible when systems generate persuasive content or make consequential recommendations. The Church’s note specifically highlights concerns about truth, ethical responsibility, and safety.
The core Christian witness is therefore not fear of every new machine, but a clear ordering of means and ends: technology is a human instrument, while persons are never merely instruments. AI is most appropriately used when it supports human judgment and creativity, protects the vulnerable, and helps people flourish—without pretending that what can be computed is all that matters.