Why Mary's Fiat Is the Most Radical Act of Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas arrived as the Church's most significant contribution to the global conversation on artificial intelligence and Catholic social teaching, and it surprised most readers. Many expected a document about algorithms, labor markets, and digital ethics. What they found was a theological anthropology anchored, in part, in the person of Mary of Nazareth. Professor Mark Miravalle, in an interview with the National Catholic Register published June 16, 2026, offers a window into why this Marian dimension is not incidental to the encyclical's argument but central to it. His framing deserves serious attention from anyone working at the intersection of faith, psychology, and the human future.

No figure in the history of human existence more completely manifests what it means to be a human person than Our Lady. That is a philosophical and theological proposition with direct implications for how Catholic thinkers understand consciousness, freedom, relational identity, and the irreducible dignity that artificial intelligence cannot replicate.

The Anthropological Wager at the Heart of the Encyclical

Artificial intelligence has forced a reckoning that psychology, philosophy, and theology had long deferred: what, precisely, distinguishes human cognition from sophisticated pattern recognition? Large language models generate coherent prose, compose music, and simulate therapeutic dialogue with enough surface fluency to deceive the untrained observer. The pressure to define human uniqueness has never been more urgent or more practically consequential.

Catholic social teaching has always operated from a specific model of the person, one grounded in the conviction that human beings are creatures made for relationship, for truth, and for transcendence. Magnifica Humanitas extends this tradition into digital territory. The encyclical's wager, as Miravalle reads it, is that the most powerful counter-argument to a reductive, mechanistic account of the human person is a person. Specifically, the person whose singular act of free consent inaugurated the redemption of the world.

Mary's fiat at the Annunciation is the paradigmatic human act. It is a moment of total cognitive clarity, complete emotional integration, freely chosen vulnerability, and relational trust directed toward a purpose that exceeds individual calculation. Algorithms optimize. They select from probability distributions. They do not say yes to something that transcends their own architecture.

Freedom, Consent, and the Limits of Machine Intelligence

The distinction between execution and consent is the difference between a machine and Mary, and it matters enormously for mental health practitioners working within a Catholic framework. Therapeutic alliance, the research-validated foundation of effective psychotherapy, depends on precisely the qualities that Mary's fiat embodies. It requires a therapist who is genuinely present, genuinely free, and genuinely oriented toward the good of another person through a relationship that cannot be reduced to technique.

The quality of the relational bond between therapist and client accounts for a larger share of positive outcomes than any specific therapeutic modality. Landmark meta-analytic work places the alliance contribution to outcomes at approximately 30 percent of explained variance, often exceeding the contribution of the specific treatment approach.¹ What those statistics measure is the quality of human presence: the degree to which a client experiences being genuinely seen, genuinely accompanied, and genuinely cared for by another free person.

Artificial intelligence cannot colonize this terrain. A language model does not choose to be present. It does not exercise freedom in any philosophically meaningful sense. It does not consent to accompany another person through suffering. The limitation is ontological: AI tools lack the ground from which authentic presence grows.

Magnifica Humanitas and the Catholic Model of the Person

The human person is simultaneously body, soul, intellect, will, and relational being, oriented toward God and toward others in a way that constitutes rather than merely describes human identity. What makes Miravalle's reading of Magnifica Humanitas so generative for Catholic mental health is its insistence that this model has a face. The fullness of creaturely human personhood is revealed in the one who received the Word with complete freedom and complete love.

Restoration of the capacity for something like a fiat is the deeper therapeutic goal — the recovery of interior freedom to say yes to life, to relationship, to growth, to God. That goal acquires new urgency in a cultural moment when the very concept of human agency is being theoretically compressed by AI determinism. When a therapist sits with a client who feels imprisoned by anxiety, depression, or compulsive patterns, the Marian model names what healing is actually for.

The AI Moment as an Invitation to Deeper Anthropology

Artificial intelligence places pressure on settled assumptions about human uniqueness, and that pressure is also an invitation to articulate that uniqueness with greater precision than previous generations needed. The answer that emerges from Catholic anthropology is richer than anything the secular academy has yet produced. The person is a being capable of love, consent, sacrifice, worship, and genuine relationship — constitutive features of a creature made in the image of God, and irreducible to byproducts of neural complexity.

Mary's fiat remains the most radical act of human agency on record, and the age of artificial intelligence makes this truth more vivid. Human uniqueness is contested terrain, and the model of total, free, relational, transcendently oriented consent that Mary embodies is the most contemporary thing in the room.

Endnotes

¹ Wampold, B. E., & Imel, Z. E. (2015). The great psychotherapy debate: The evidence for what makes psychotherapy work (2nd ed.). Routledge.