Why I’m writing this
In my first post here, I described what I’d been building quietly for several months: a Personal Operating Model — a structured system for living intentionally, applying the same enterprise architecture thinking I use with clients to the question of how to actually follow through on what matters. The core problem it addresses isn’t time management. It’s the gap between good intentions and consistent action. The core question it asks every day is: does what I’m doing today bring me closer to where I want to be?
Since that post, I’ve stopped calling it a Personal Operating Model. The name that fits better is the Faithfulness Coach — because the question the system is actually designed to answer isn’t how productive am I? but am I being faithful to what I said matters most? That’s a different standard, and it deserves a different name. I’ll use it from here on.
On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV signed Magnifica Humanitas — On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It was released ten days later and has been widely discussed since. I am not Catholic. I don’t read papal documents as a matter of course. But when I read this one, I kept stopping — not because it surprised me, but because it kept articulating, in principled and precise language, things I had arrived at intuitively while building the Faithfulness Coach.
That convergence seems worth writing about.
The same week the encyclical was released, Cal Newport — computer scientist, author of Deep Work, and a fellow at Georgetown’s Digital Ethics Institute — published a short essay called “On God and LLMs.” Newport is not Catholic, and makes no reference to the encyclical. He is working from Rabbinic commentary on the same Genesis 2 passage the encyclical draws on. Onkelos, a Roman-era Torah scholar, translates the Hebrew nefesh chaya — usually rendered “living being” — as ruach memalela: speaking spirit. Rashi reinforces it: speech is not merely central to the human person, it is what makes humans unique among all creation. From that foundation Newport asks whether we should be so quick to extend the ruach memalela to machines — letting them write and speak on our behalf. He calls it, simply, profane.
Two writers, different traditions, the same Genesis text, the same week. That convergence also seems worth noting.
I want to be clear about what this post is and isn’t. It isn’t a theological endorsement or a commentary on Catholic teaching. It’s a practitioner reading a carefully argued public document about AI and human dignity — and recognising the argument. If you’ve been thinking about how to use AI tools in your life without being quietly reshaped by them, the encyclical has useful things to say whether or not you share its theological premises.
I’ll take five statements from the document and show where each one lands in the context of a Faithfulness Coach.
What the encyclical actually argues
The encyclical’s central concern is what Leo XIV calls the technocratic paradigm: the tendency, once efficiency and control become the dominant standard, to measure everything — including people — by output, performance, and utility. It traces this logic through AI systems, labour markets, autonomous weapons, and the erosion of genuine human relationships. And it asks whether we are building toward something good, or just building faster.
The document is grounded in Catholic social teaching, but its diagnostic framework is accessible to anyone. It draws on the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem as two archetypes of how communities respond to transformative change. It borrows Paul VI’s distinction between having more and being more. It applies the principle of subsidiarity — that higher systems must never absorb the responsibility of lower ones — to the digital realm in a way I hadn’t seen done before.
You don’t have to accept the theological argument to find the analysis valuable.
Two ways to build: Babel or Jerusalem
The encyclical’s governing image is two building projects. Babel: a tower built on self-assertion, efficiency, and homogenisation — a single language to master everything, a monument to human capability, built without asking what it is for. Jerusalem under Nehemiah: rebuilt from rubble, relationships restored before stones, each household assigned its own section of wall, strength acknowledged as coming from a source beyond the builders.
Leo XIV calls the Babel failure mode the “Babel syndrome”: the pretence that a single system — even a sophisticated digital one — can translate the mystery of the person into data and performance. It’s not a failure of ambition. It’s a failure of purpose.
I wrote in my first post that the biggest risk in building this kind of system isn’t that it fails — it’s that it works perfectly while pointing at the wrong thing. Tasks done, areas managed, progress visible, soul running dry. I called it the good-idea cycle’s quieter cousin. The encyclical names it more precisely: a flawless system built on efficiency logic, without a prior question about what the efficiency is for, is a personal Tower of Babel.
The Jerusalem alternative isn’t less sophisticated. It’s differently ordered. Relationships before structure. Purpose before productivity. The governance question isn’t how do I optimise this? but toward what end?
The novelist N. Scott Momaday, writing about the dilution of language in the modern Western world, described the Babel pattern from the outside: “He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language — for the Word itself — as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.” Momaday was writing about print culture. He could have been writing about generative AI. Multiplying output is not the same as building something that matters.
The Faithfulness Coach application: before you automate a single workflow or build a single dashboard, name what the system is for. Not what it does — what it serves. That question has to be upstream of every design decision, or you’re building Babel.
Having more without being more
Paul VI wrote this in 1967. Leo XIV quotes it because it describes something that AI makes newly urgent: the possibility of accumulating capability — speed, reach, information, output — while the person doing the accumulating remains exactly as they were, or becomes less.
This is the encyclical’s most direct challenge to the optimisation mindset. More productivity tools, more automation, more AI assistance — none of it answers the prior question: is this making you more the person you want to be, or just making you faster?
The Faithfulness Coach turns on exactly this hinge. The core governance question I’ve built into my monthly review is: does what I’m doing today bring me closer to where I want to be? Not how much did I accomplish? but am I moving in the right direction?
That’s a different question from anything a task manager asks. Productivity systems optimise for throughput. A Faithfulness Coach — if it’s designed correctly — optimises for faithfulness to purpose. Efficiency in service of the wrong things is just faster drifting.
Newport’s ruach memalela argument sharpens this further. It is possible to have vastly more output — AI-generated words in your inbox, AI-written posts under your name, AI responses to emails you signed — while becoming less of a speaking spirit. More words does not mean more voice. If your system is producing more while your own articulation, reflection, and genuine communication atrophies, it has solved the wrong problem.
The encyclical gives this distinction a name and a principled argument. It also makes the stakes clearer: the same dynamic that plays out in individual lives plays out at civilisational scale. A society that measures human worth by productivity and utility has the same design flaw as a personal system that mistakes activity for progress.
The Faithfulness Coach application: audit your review cadence. Does it ask how much? or toward what? If only the former, the system is optimised for Babel.
The tool should support you, not replace you
This is the idea I found most generative — and the one least discussed in the public reaction to the encyclical. The encyclical gives it an old, slightly forbidding name: subsidiarity. But the principle underneath is simple.
It says a decision should be made at the lowest level that can make it well, and that bigger systems exist to support the smaller ones — never to take over what they can do for themselves. A good manager doesn’t do their team’s work for them. Decisions are better made close to the people they affect. The higher level’s job is to help — the Latin root, subsidium, simply means help — not to absorb.
Leo XIV applies this to the digital era with a sharp move: in modern life, the de facto “higher level” is no longer the State or the institution — it is the platform, the model, the algorithm that quietly sets the terms of what we see, decide, and expect. When these systems take over human judgment instead of supporting it, they break the principle even when they “work.”
Turned inward, this becomes a design rule for any system like the Faithfulness Coach:
The automation-and-AI layer may handle the mechanical. It must never take over judgment, discernment, or genuine conversation. Where it replaces your own deliberation — even efficiently — it has crossed the line.
I didn’t have a name for this when I wrote my first post, but it’s what the three-tier AI strategy I described is doing: simple deterministic scripts for routine processing, a smaller model for classification, a frontier AI reserved for the dialogues where being challenged is the point. The principle behind that design is that AI should strengthen my capacity to decide — not replace it. A tool that makes you a better thinker keeps the decision where it belongs — with you. One that thinks for you takes it away, even if the output is good.
The clearest case of crossing that line is also the most intimate: letting AI speak for you. Newport’s ruach memalela argument names why this feels wrong in a way that the efficiency critique doesn’t. It is not merely that AI-written emails are impersonal. It is that speech — the alchemisation of your state of mind into words that land in another person’s mind — is constitutive of what it means to be human. When you delegate that upward, you are not saving time. You are ceding something that cannot be recovered by working harder on something else.
None of this is an argument against using the tools. I use AI constantly, including in my writing — this post included. The line is not whether a machine helped shape the words; it is where the idea, the judgment, and the accountability sit. If the thinking is mine, if I own what goes out under my name and stand behind it, the tool has done its job. What must never move to the machine is authorship in the deeper sense: the source of the idea, the creative ownership, the responsibility for the result. Use the tools freely. Just keep those.
This is also the right test for any AI personal assistant product: does it strengthen the user’s own discernment, or does it quietly become the discernment? The answer matters both ethically and practically — a product that creates dependency isn’t a product that serves its user.
The Faithfulness Coach application: for each AI tool in your system, ask honestly: is it handling the mechanical so I can focus on the meaningful, or is it absorbing judgment I should be exercising myself? And specifically: is your voice still yours?
Technology takes the character of its makers
This is the encyclical’s sharpest empirical claim (§9, §104): technology is never neutral. It embodies the choices, priorities, and anthropological vision of those who designed, financed, regulated, and deployed it. When efficiency, control, and profit are the dominant values in a system, the technology that emerges from that system carries those values — regardless of what its makers intended.
For someone building a personal system using enterprise tools — and I am drawing on TOGAF, ITIL, Wardley Mapping, and GTD — this is a genuine caution. Those frameworks were designed to optimise large organisations. They are instruments of efficiency logic. Importing them wholesale into a personal system imports that logic too.
My response has been to strip them — ruthlessly — and subordinate what remains to a purpose order that predates the tools. The frameworks are useful; they’re not in charge. The governance question I described earlier (is the system helping me achieve my goals, or am I just enjoying building it?) is exactly the antibody the encyclical’s diagnosis calls for: a deliberate check on whether the technocratic logic has quietly taken over.
The Faithfulness Coach application: examine the tools and frameworks you’ve adopted. Whose values do they carry? Are those values upstream or downstream of your purpose? If your system was designed by efficiency logic and you’ve placed your purpose inside it, the hierarchy may be inverted.
Accountability cannot be delegated upward
The encyclical insists that conscience is irreducibly personal. No system, however sophisticated, can hold it on your behalf. When an AI makes a wrong call, a human in a role still owns it. When a decision affects real people, the fact that an algorithm made it does not distribute the moral weight — it concentrates it in whoever deployed the algorithm and structured the choice.
For the Faithfulness Coach, the application is more intimate. The system surfaces information, tracks commitments, asks questions. It does not decide. My morning AI conversation is structured around questions, not answers — the point is to be challenged toward my own judgment, not to receive the judgment pre-formed. Whatever the system recommends, I still own the choice.
That’s not just an ethical stance. It’s what makes the system worth using. A system that decides for you is a system you cannot trust, because you don’t know whose values it’s actually serving.
The Faithfulness Coach application: look at where your system makes choices on your behalf. Are those choices ones you’ve genuinely delegated — or ones that have quietly drifted outside your oversight? Accountability follows design.
What this means in practice
I’m not suggesting you read a papal encyclical to build a better morning routine. But I am suggesting that the encyclical surfaces something real: AI tools are not neutral productivity accessories. They carry a logic, they shape how you think, and they can gradually supplant the very judgment they were meant to support.
The five principles above are, in my reading, the diagnostic toolkit the encyclical offers:
- Babel or Jerusalem — what is your system actually for?
- Having more without being more — are you optimising for throughput or for faithfulness to purpose?
- Support, don’t replace — does each tool strengthen your judgment or quietly take it over?
- Technology takes the character of its makers — whose values are built into the frameworks you’ve adopted?
- Accountability cannot be delegated — where your system decides, you still own it.
None of these require a theological commitment to apply. They require honesty — which is harder.
Newport frames digital ethics as being where bioethics was fifty years ago — before norms crystallised around transplants, genetic testing, and end-of-life care. The encyclical is one of those early crystallisations. The questions it asks are not going away. Better to work through them deliberately than to have the technology answer them for you by default.
There’s more to come in this series — including why I stopped calling it a Personal Operating Model and what that change is really about, and a closer look at the review cadence that makes the system work in practice (getting the cadence wrong is the most common way a good system quietly fails).
This is the second post in an ongoing series on the Faithfulness Coach. The first post, The Intentional Living Engine — Why Your Life Needs an Operating Model, introduces the framework. References: Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas* (15 May 2026), Vatican.va. Cal Newport, “On God and LLMs,” calnewport.com (25 May 2026); “The Pope vs. Silicon Valley,” calnewport.com (1 June 2026).*
Martin Kallenbach is an independent IT management consultant based in Helsinki. He helps organisations with transformation, service integration, and governance — and is applying the same thinking to the question of how to live well and intentionally.
Get in touch at martin@bilboconsult.com or connect on LinkedIn.
PS — I’m exploring whether the Faithfulness Coach becomes something others can use. If you’re working through similar questions and would want something like this, I’d be glad to hear from you.
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