I recently completed a thesis on Catholic Education and Artificial Intelligence. The thesis has now been graded and I am set to graduate with a Master of Liberal Arts in May 2026. It was a wonderful learning experience. Indeed, writing the thesis enabled me to clarify my thinking and understand more clearly the ultimate and proximate ends of Catholic education. In doing so, I was able to bring into dialogue the philosophical and theological tradition of the Church with the latest stage of artificial intelligence (AI) development—namely, Generative AI—to reflect on whether these highly advanced technologies can be used in the service of Catholic education. This article summarises the conclusions that I arrived at.
I dedicated the first chapter of the thesis to highlighting that true education aims to form the whole human person in light of their final end: education “consist[s] essentially in preparing man for what he must be and for what he must do.”1 By establishing that Catholic education is first and foremost, an apostolate of the Church, I argued that Catholic education exists (or has a presence) in the field of education, in order to form whole human persons for eternal communion with God, in keeping with the Christian concept of the person, as taught by the Magisterium of the Church.2 Accordingly, the proximate ends of Catholic education—which include integral human formation, within which the cultivation of the mind is further pursued—find their meaning within its ultimate end. That is to say, Catholic education exists to cultivate the mind in the service of integral human formation, disposing the person toward truth—especially truth illuminated in Christ—and thus gradually forming students as Christian men and women, for communion with God.3 As was pronounced by the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, Christian education does “not merely strive for the maturing of a human person,” but it gradually introduces students to “the knowledge of the mystery of salvation,” so that the person can develop “to the mature measure of the fullness of Christ,” “strive for the growth of the Mystical Body,” and thereby “contribute to the good of the whole society” as children of God.4
I then considered AI in the second chapter: its definitions, designs, and engineered ends. I underscored that machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence, one which enables machines to appear ‘intelligent’ in that they are specifically engineered by human designers to solve problems and make inferences and predictions based on data.5 I clarified that while the deep learning revolution of 2012 drove rapid developments in the field of AI, many contemporary machine learning systems—including Generative AI, “the latest stage of AI development”—are still designed to analyse and learn patterns from data, albeit in a much more sophisticated way, but nevertheless with the same extrinsic goal to solve ever more complex problems assigned to them by human developers.6 Accordingly, in virtue of their inherent algorithmic designs, I argued that AI technologies, no matter how advanced, remainfunctionally trained machines, with the specifically engineered ends ‘programmed’ into them by human designers, in order to solve (highly complex) problems. Indeed, as was generally described by Pope Francis at the G7 Session on Artificial Intelligence:
… artificial intelligence is above all else a tool… a tool designed for problem solving… in order to solve specific problems.7
Finally, in the third chapter, I brought this account of AI into dialogue with the philosophical and theological tradition of the Church. Within the tradition of integral human formation in Catholic education, I reflected on how by using AI—electronic machines in general—to ‘increase’ a particular kind of connection between humans and improve access to education through digitally mediated outcomes, AI can simultaneously erode the relational structures of Catholic learning communities that are required for real connection with other persons. Moreover, I considered how by using AI technologies to improve efficiency, these technologies can also render teachers vulnerable to being replaced by far more efficient machines, thus replacing an indispensable dimension—namely, the physical presence of a real human teacher in Catholic education—required for integral human formation. Finally, by using AI technologies to improve learning outcomes, I raised the grave concern that Generative AI—and large language models—can supplant human intelligence itself, or risks eclipsing it, and thus undermine the very intellectual development that it promises to support.8 In light of these reflections, it became clearer to me that the very reasons that make AI technologies appear promising in Catholic education can also be precisely the ones that present the greatest danger to integral human formation.
As a Catholic educator, working across secondary and tertiary education and contexts in legal governance, my goal was to reflect on the implications of using AI in Catholic education, particularly in light of whether and to what extent it can be used in the service of the authentic goals of the educational mission of the Church.9 My concluding view is that the very reasons that make AI technologies appear promising in Catholic education are also, in fact, precisely the ones that present the greatest danger to Catholic education.
