Essay III: Stewarding the Machine
Prudence, Subsidiarity, and Living Well with Artificial Intelligence
The first two essays argued that artificial intelligence must be understood within a proper understanding of the human person. The third essay turns from diagnosis to practice. The question is no longer what AI is or why the debate has become so contentious. The question is how Christians should live faithfully in a world where these tools are increasingly common.
The answer is neither panic nor surrender. Artificial intelligence should be approached neither as a savior nor as a threat to civilization but as a powerful tool whose benefits and dangers are best governed through prudence, subsidiarity, and informed moral judgment. The central challenge of the coming decades will not be technological. It will be human. We must learn how to live wisely with increasingly powerful tools while preserving the dignity of the human person, the integrity of local communities, and the habits of judgment upon which free societies depend.
The Virtue of Prudence
The Church has long called prudence the queen of the cardinal virtues. It is not timidity or resistance to change. As St. Thomas Aquinas teaches, prudence is “right reason applied to action.”¹ Prudence is the habit of seeing reality clearly and choosing the right means to achieve good ends. In an age of rapid technological advance, this virtue keeps us from both idolatry and despair. Prudent Christians neither worship the machine nor fear it. Instead, we test everything and hold fast to what is good.
Tools and Human Ends
Technology is morally neutral in itself but never neutral in its use. A hammer can build a house or crush a skull. A printing press can spread Scripture or lies. Artificial intelligence amplifies human intelligence the way engines once amplified human strength. The tool does not determine the end. Human beings do. AI has no goals of its own, no conscience, and no moral agency. It cannot love, repent, or stand before God. These remain exclusively human responsibilities.
The Principle of Subsidiarity
Catholic social teaching gives us a vital principle for this moment: subsidiarity. Pope Pius XI articulated it powerfully in Quadragesimo Anno: “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.”² Higher authorities should support lower ones rather than absorb them. Families, parishes, schools, and local communities should make the decisions that belong to them. AI naturally tempts societies toward centralization because massive datasets and powerful corporations favor scale. Subsidiarity pushes in the opposite direction. It calls us to keep authority as close as possible to the people most affected so that local judgment can govern how AI is used in our schools, homes, and congregations.
Education, Formation, and Human Judgment
Education may be the area where prudent use of AI matters most. Students now have tools that can write essays, summarize books, solve problems, and conduct research with remarkable speed. These capabilities offer genuine benefits when used rightly. Yet education is not primarily about information. It is about formation, which involves the slow and difficult work of building attention, memory, reasoning, and moral judgment.
St. John Henry Newman captured this vision when he described the goal of education as the cultivation of the intellect so that a person gains “a connected view or grasp of things” and develops “good sense, sobriety of thought, reasonableness, candour, self-command, and steadiness of view.”³ The goal of education is not the production of answers but the formation of persons capable of judging answers. AI can help people learn by organizing research and clarifying difficult concepts. At the same time, it can tempt people not to learn by short-circuiting the hard work of thinking through problems. A student who uses AI to organize research and improve drafts can learn more effectively. A student who uses AI to avoid thinking learns less.
In writing this very series, I have used AI extensively to organize large bodies of research, locate sources, structure arguments, and refine drafts. But AI did not decide the thesis. It did not exercise prudence. It did not supply the moral judgment or the Christian vision that animates these essays. That distinction is essential.
Work, Creativity, and Collaboration
AI will change work more than it eliminates it. Routine cognitive tasks, such as document review, administrative paperwork, basic coding, and data analysis, can be automated or accelerated. This shift creates both disruption and opportunity. The Christian vision of work is richer than economic productivity alone. In Laborem Exercens, St. John Paul II taught that “work is a good thing for man—a good thing for his humanity—because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his own needs, but he also achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being.’”⁴
As AI takes over mechanical aspects of labor, distinctly human qualities, such as creativity, relational wisdom, moral responsibility, and leadership, should become more valuable rather than less. For generations, mathematicians assumed certain limits to what machines could achieve in original discovery. The recent disproof of a longstanding Erdős conjecture on the unit distance problem challenged those assumptions. OpenAI’s model produced a new family of configurations that significantly improved previous bounds.⁵
Mathematician Noga Alon described the result as a milestone, stating that if a human had submitted it, “I would have recommended acceptance without any hesitation.”⁶ Timothy Gowers, a Fields Medalist, called it “a milestone in AI mathematics” while stressing that human experts remained essential to verify and interpret the proof.⁷
What made the episode noteworthy was not simply that a machine produced a surprising result. Human mathematicians still had to evaluate the proof, understand its significance, and determine how it fit within the broader field. The machine contributed something valuable, but it did not assume responsibility for understanding what it had produced. That responsibility remained with human beings. In this respect, the event illustrates a recurring theme of this essay: increasingly powerful tools may assist human intelligence, but they do not relieve human beings of the obligation to exercise judgment.
Human Responsibility in High-Stakes Decisions
Artificial intelligence promises better diagnoses, faster legal research, and more efficient administration in medicine and law. These developments should be welcomed where they truly serve persons. Yet responsibility cannot be delegated to algorithms. A physician remains accountable for the care of the patient. A judge remains accountable for rendering justice. A lawyer remains accountable for the advice given to a client. Efficiency must never replace moral accountability. The more sophisticated our tools become, the more important human accountability becomes.
The stakes rise even more sharply in warfare. Autonomous weapons that make lethal decisions without meaningful human oversight cross a serious moral line. Technology can assist in intelligence gathering and targeting, but the moral responsibility for the taking of human life belongs to persons, not machines.
Families, Parishes, Local Communities, and Evangelization
Most people will encounter AI not as policymakers but as parents, pastors, teachers, and neighbors. These are the places where prudent stewardship matters most. Families will decide how children use these tools and how best to protect the formation of virtue. Parishes can use AI for administration, sermon research, or outreach, but they must never allow it to replace personal pastoral care or communal worship. Local communities can harness AI for practical goods, such as disaster response, resource distribution, and small business support, while resisting its tendency to homogenize culture and erode local distinctiveness.
These same tools can assist the work of evangelization. AI helps with research, writing, source comparison, and preparation of materials for teaching and publication. “How are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Romans 10:14). Yet the Gospel is ultimately transmitted through persons, not platforms, and through witness, not automation. Prudence allows us to use AI in service of the Great Commission without letting it displace the irreplaceable human elements of discipleship.
Renewal Often Begins Before We Recognize It
Throughout Christian history, the Church’s response to periods of profound social change has rarely emerged from a single plan, institution, or directive. The Church teaches, guides, warns, and blesses, but renewal often unfolds simultaneously through many different vocations and communities. Families, schools, parishes, religious orders, educators, writers, missionaries, and saints frequently begin responding to new challenges long before anyone can see the larger pattern.
History offers countless examples. St. Elizabeth Ann Seton helped establish a Catholic educational system in America. St. John Bosco transformed the lives of vulnerable young people during the disruptions of industrialization. St. Frances Xavier Cabrini built schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions to serve immigrant communities. St. Thérèse of Lisieux, though hidden within a Carmelite convent, helped renew the Church’s understanding of holiness through her “little way.” Other figures, such as Sister Mary of St. Peter and Concepción Cabrera de Armida, contributed to spiritual renewals that would bear fruit far beyond their own lifetimes.
These individuals were not coordinating a common strategy. Yet viewed in retrospect, their efforts reveal a deeper unity. The Holy Spirit was already at work in many places at once, preparing responses that only later became visible as part of a larger movement of renewal.
The same may prove true in the age of artificial intelligence. While governments, corporations, universities, and Church leaders all have important responsibilities, Christians should not assume that every faithful response must originate from a central authority. Grace often works through ordinary vocations and local communities. The future of AI will be shaped not only by policies and institutions but also by parents forming children, teachers cultivating judgment, pastors guiding souls, entrepreneurs serving their neighbors, and faithful Christians exercising prudent stewardship in the responsibilities entrusted to them.
The question is not whether the Holy Spirit will respond to the age of artificial intelligence. The more interesting question is whether we will recognize that response when it begins appearing in ordinary people, ordinary vocations, and ordinary acts of fidelity.
The Human Person Remains Irreplaceable
No matter how powerful AI becomes, the human person, who is embodied, rational, relational, and made in God’s image, remains the center of the story. AI can organize knowledge, but it cannot love, suffer, forgive, or worship. It has no soul to save and no neighbor to serve.
Stewarding the Machine
Christians are called to be faithful stewards, not slaves or masters of technology. Stewardship is itself a Christian vocation. This requires ongoing habits of discernment. We should conduct regular moral audits of AI use in our institutions. We should preserve analog practices, such as deep reading, face-to-face conversation, and manual work. We should also form small communities committed to the wise use of these tools. We should advocate for policies that respect subsidiarity rather than concentrating power in distant corporations or governments.
As Vice President JD Vance urged in his commencement address at the United States Air Force Academy on May 28, 2026: “Use technology to make you better, but never submit to it.”⁸
Pope Benedict XVI warned that “entranced by an exclusive reliance on technology, reason without faith is doomed to flounder in an illusion of its own omnipotence.”⁹
The question before us is not whether artificial intelligence will become more powerful. It almost certainly will. The question is whether human beings will remain wise enough to govern powerful tools without surrendering responsibility for their use. Prudence, subsidiarity, and stewardship remain as necessary in the digital age as they were in every age before it.
Artificial intelligence, like every other human creation, finds its proper place when it serves the flourishing of persons created in the image and likeness of God. We do not begin by making reality but by encountering it. From that encounter arise understanding, judgment, and stewardship. The future will be shaped not by the machine itself, but by the wisdom with which human beings choose to use it.
Endnotes
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II-II, q. 47, a. 2.
- Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno, no. 79.
- John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Discourse 5.
- John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, no. 9.
- OpenAI, “An OpenAI Model Has Disproved a Central Conjecture in Discrete Geometry,” May 20, 2026.
- Noga Alon, “Remarks on the Disproof of the Unit Distance Conjecture,” May 20, 2026.
- Timothy Gowers, “Remarks on the Disproof of the Unit Distance Conjecture,” May 20, 2026.
- JD Vance, Commencement Address, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado, May 28, 2026.
- Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 74.