On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, his landmark encyclical calling the world to put human dignity at the center of the artificial intelligence revolution — the same question Sr. Herdiana Randut, SSpS, has been raising from the ground up, asking what it truly means to stay human in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms. For the SSpS missionaries working across more than 40 countries, the answer is neither fear nor blind enthusiasm — it is discernment: learning to use what serves the mission, resist what diminishes it, and remain, in every tool and every context, unmistakably themselves.
Magnifica Humanitas. Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, released on May 25, 2026, makes one central argument: AI is not a technology problem, it is a human one. When machines can simulate our faces, voices, creativity, and labor, the question isn’t what AI can do — it’s what we believe human beings are for. The Pope calls for a ban on autonomous weapons, stronger protections for workers displaced by AI, and governance that serves everyone, not just those who control the data. The test he proposes is simple: who benefits, and who gets left behind?
“The Human Face in the Digital Fog” Sr. Herdiana Randut, SSpS — World Communications Day 2025
Sr. Herdiana writes from inside a communication ecosystem no one fully chose. Algorithms decide what we see. AI generates what we read. And somewhere in the noise, the authentic human voice is struggling to survive. Her argument is moral, not technical: the real danger of AI isn’t malfunction — it’s the slow erosion of genuine human presence. When efficiency replaces encounter, and content replaces contact, something essential is lost. Her call is simple: stay human. Communicate with your face, your voice, your actual self. That is the only thing no algorithm can replace. But her warning invites a second question: what now? Missionaries are not permitted the luxury of stepping back from the world as it is. They are sent into it.
https://www.veritasindonesia.id/the-human-face-in-the-digital-fog-a-moral-stand-against-ai/
When the Spirit Meets the Algorithm: Artificial Intelligence and the Mission of the SSpS: Gift, Danger, and Discernment
St. Arnold Janssen was not afraid of new media. He launched newspapers and printing houses because he understood that the Word of God needs vehicles — and every generation inherits new ones. If he were alive today, he would likely want to understand artificial intelligence, test it, and ask: can this carry the Good News somewhere we cannot yet reach?
The honest answer is sometimes yes. AI translation tools are already changing what small mission teams can do. The SSpS newsletter reaches readers in English and Spanish, but the congregation’s sisters work across more than 40 countries in languages that rarely make it into any publication. A formation document can now be translated into Russian or Indonesian quickly enough to actually reach people before the moment passes. For sisters who have never received anything in their own language from the congregation they belong to, that is something close to a gift.
The same is true in education. In remote mission territories — the Bolivian highlands, isolated villages across remote places of Africa, parts of Papua New Guinea — quality learning materials have always been scarce. AI-assisted platforms and audio tools for low-literacy users are not perfect, but they extend what an already overstretched teacher can do. That matters, especially for the children the congregation has consistently named as a priority.
Even in justice advocacy, AI earns its place. VIVAT International works at the United Nations with evidence: data, documented patterns, hard numbers behind human stories. AI research tools can help build that case faster — and when machine support handles the data, human beings are freed to do what only they can: tell the story behind the statistics.
What Can Go Wrong
There’s a temptation with any powerful new tool to ask only: what can this do for us? The harder question is: what is this doing to us?
AI is good at making things look right — fluent translations, confident answers, polished content in seconds. But sounding right is not the same as being right. And for a ministry that runs on trust, a tool that gets things wrong with total confidence is not a minor problem.
Then there’s the quieter risk. The moment we start substituting a well-worded response for actual presence. The stories that move people aren’t produced — they’re lived. A sister celebrating Tết with a Vietnamese family. A sister standing beside someone who walked into that courtroom alone.
You cannot automate that. The moment you try, it stops being mission
The Spirit of the Founding Generation
The SSpS does not need a new ethics. Blessed Josepha’s motto has always been the measure: “To God the honor, to my neighbor the benefit, and to myself the burden.”
Run any AI tool through that test. Does it serve God’s love, or just make the institution look active online? Does it put something real into the hands of the poor and forgotten, or does it mostly serve those already managing fine? Does it demand accountability from the person using it — or invite us to switch off our judgment and let the machine decide?
Sisters do not need to become software engineers. But they do need to think — theologically, critically, together — about the tools being handed to them. That means formation at every level. Community conversations before any new platform enters a school, clinic, or social service program. And the whole Steyler family — SSpS, SVD, and SSpSAP — speaking with one voice from where they actually stand: among the poor, at the margins, in the parts of the world where technology’s promises have most often arrived alongside its costs.
The Spirit has never needed an algorithm. But the people who carry the Spirit have always needed courage — to engage the world as it is, use what is useful, resist what diminishes, and remain, in every season and every medium, unmistakably human.
That has not changed. And it will not.
