Faith and artificial intelligence

Where the question comes from

The research began far from technology: with the growing number of Brazilians who, in the 2022 Census, declared that they had no religion. Most of them are not atheists. They pray, light candles, ask for blessings, follow preachers on social media. The sacred has not disappeared; it has moved from the institution to the flow of information. It is this form of religiosity that Father Jocleilson and his coauthor have called inforsacrality.

Artificial intelligence comes in as the next step in that displacement. If faith was already mediated by screens, it is now mediated by systems that answer, advise and, increasingly, appear to understand. Assistants explain the Gospel, generate prayers, simulate confidants. What was a tool begins to work as an oracle.

The encyclical

In May 2026, Leo XIV devoted his first encyclical to the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. Magnifica Humanitas asks that technology be "disarmed": not refused, but kept from turning technological power into a right to govern. The document takes in the precarious labor that trains the models, the extraction of minerals, the manipulation of attention and the temptation to replace human relationship with an imitation of it.

Father Jocleilson went through the text chapter by chapter in a video series and has been presenting it to bishops, universities and communities, under a title that sums up his reading: "when the Pope is more secular than Big Tech". It is the reading of a pastor who knows the sertão and of a philosopher trained in Rome: the encyclical is not a document about machines, it is a document about what makes us human.

The dissertation

In the doctorate in Religious Studies at PUC Goiás, supervised by Prof. Dr. José Reinaldo Felipe Martins Filho, the investigation moves from Heidegger’s concept of being to Byung-Chul Han’s diagnosis of exhaustion. The question is what happens to the religious ethos when it comes to be measured by efficiency: a faith assessed by performance, engagement and results stops being an encounter and becomes one more task.

The work is not solitary. He is part of the team of RELEREA, the Lusophone network of studies in religion, spirituality and art, takes part in ODUCAL’s international project on Catholic philosophy in Latin America and is a peer reviewer for the journals Caminhos and Fragmentos de Cultura.

What he proposes

• Discernment before adoption. Parishes and dioceses need clear criteria before placing AI assistants in catechesis, in communication and in the parish office.
• Formation of formators. Seminarians and pastoral workers should understand how the systems work, so as to treat them neither as neutral nor as enemies.
• Listening to the religiously unaffiliated. The same internet that scatters people can be a place of encounter, if the Church learns to speak where they are.
• Research with real data. Hence the tool that analyzes the sentiments expressed in comments on religious videos: measuring, rather than assuming, what digital faith produces.