No. The Church teaches that the spiritual soul is created immediately by God, which means it is not the sort of thing any creature can manufacture, and no amount of engineering will produce one. What surprises most people is that Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical on artificial intelligence, never actually says this. The encyclical does not contain a sentence denying a soul to machines. Understanding why it declines to argue that way is more useful than the answer itself.
Where the doctrine actually lives
The teaching sits in the Catechism, not in this encyclical. The human person is a unity of body and soul, and “every spiritual soul is created immediately by God” rather than produced by the parents or by any other cause (CCC 362-366). A soul is not a capacity that arrives once a system becomes complicated enough. It is given, and only God gives it.
That is why the question “could a machine become conscious enough to have a soul” is put the wrong way round. It treats the soul as an upper floor reached by climbing far enough. In Catholic teaching the soul is not at the top of the stairs. It is the reason there is a building.
What the encyclical says instead
Leo works from the other direction, describing what these systems demonstrably do not do. Section 99 is the anthropological heart of the document, and it is worth reading in full rather than in the one line everyone quotes:
“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.” (§99)
Then the sentence that carries the argument:
“They may imitate language, behavior and analytical skills, or even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.” (§99)
Notice what Leo is doing. He is not making a claim about the interior life of a machine, which nobody can inspect. He is making a claim about what wisdom requires. Wisdom is grown, through a body, over time, in relationships, and through the moral weight of having been responsible for something. Leo says the same of learning itself: what these systems do “is a form of statistical adaptation based on data and feedback, which can be very effective, but does not imply inner growth” (§99).
Why he argues this way and not the other
An argument from what a machine lacks inside would be a claim nobody could test. An argument from what formation requires is one you can check against your own life.
There is also a pastoral reason. Leo is more worried about a mistake in the opposite direction, and he names it clearly. The danger of simulated warmth, he writes, is not mainly that someone will believe they are talking to a person. It is “that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections” (§100). Unfortunately, a person who has settled the soul question correctly and yet is still quietly withdrawing from other people has not been helped much by the correct answer.
The deeper error underneath the question
Section 113 names something that a debate about machine souls usually misses. Leo argues that elevating any single human faculty to an absolute is always a mistake, and that intelligence “when absolutized, overshadows other essential dimensions of life, such as affection, the will, commitment and relationships” (§113).
The soul question often assumes that intelligence is the thing that makes us who we are, and then asks whether a machine has enough of it. Both halves of that assumption are wrong. Saint Thomas would say the intellect is a power of the soul rather than a substitute for it, and Leo is making the same point in pastoral language. A person is not a very good reasoning engine that happens to have feelings attached.
The transcendence that is actually on offer
Leo does grant that there is a real “more than human,” and he is careful about where it comes from. Quoting Saint Thomas, he writes that this elevation “surpasses every capability of created nature,” because an infinite disparity separates our finite nature from the life of God (§127). The one who crosses that distance can only be God himself.
Which produces the line that answers the technological version of the same longing:
“We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being.” (§128, quoting Pope Francis)
So the answer to the original question is short, and the reason behind it is not. God creates each human soul directly. That is settled. What the encyclical adds is a description of the interior life these systems can imitate without possessing, and a warning that the imitation is convincing enough to change how we treat each other.
Every section reference is to Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026). The full guide to the encyclical is here.
Related
- What Does the Catholic Church Say About Transhumanism?
- What Is the “Technocratic Paradigm”? Pope Leo’s Term Explained
The Catholic Citizen starts with this encyclical
Module 1 of The Catholic Citizen works through Magnifica Humanitas over four Thursdays — human dignity, moral responsibility, work, and who owns the common inheritance of data — one issue a week, every claim cited by paragraph number. The curriculum page lists the module in full. Free reflections on the daily Mass readings arrive Saturdays.
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