1. Introduction
In a midnight email that arrived while I was completing the final revisions of this article, Matthew Levering told me that he engages Ratzinger as ‘one of the heroes’ in The Abuse of Conscience. The remark, characteristically generous, pointed me back to his book with fresh eyes – and what I found there confirmed what I had been arguing from a different direction.
Levering’s central claim in The Abuse of Conscience is that the dominant trajectory of twentieth-century Catholic moral theology inflated the role of conscience by centering the moral life on individual moral judgment rather than on the Eucharistic self-offering – the logike latreia of Romans 12:1 – that Ratzinger identifies as the true center of the Christian moral life. The book’s title names the pathology with precision: the abuse of conscience is not the exercise of bad conscience but the elevation of conscience to a position it was never designed to occupy, making it the organizing principle of the entire moral life rather than one faculty within a larger moral organism.Footnote 1
The argument I want to develop in this article is that the twenty-first century presents a different but structurally related crisis. Where the twentieth century abused conscience by inflating it – by centering the moral life on individual moral judgment at the expense of virtue, prudence, and the Eucharistic center – the twenty-first century is producing the atrophy of conscience through the progressive delegation of moral judgment to algorithmic systems that are constitutively incapable of exercising it. Not too much conscience but too little. Not the inflation of the self-judging subject but his systematic replacement by a system that cannot judge at all – and that suppresses, in the persons who defer to it, the very capacity that genuine moral judgment requires.
Ratzinger’s name for that capacity is the anamnesis – the deep faculty of moral reception inscribed in every human being by the Creator, the place where God speaks to the person with an authority that no external system can replicate or replace. In ‘Conscience and Truth’ (1991), Ratzinger identified the atrophy of the anamnesis through habitual neglect of the moral demand as the real moral catastrophe of the modern age: not the person who does wrong knowing it is wrong but the person who has lost the capacity to recognize wrong as wrong.Footnote 2
That catastrophe, predicted in 1991, is being produced at civilizational scale in 2026 by the progressive deployment of algorithmic moral systems – systems that operate exclusively at the conscientia level, have no access to the anamnesis, and systematically suppress it in the persons who defer to them.
The argument of this article is that Levering’s diagnosis and my own, while focused on different centuries and different pathologies, converge on the same Ratzingerian foundation and point toward the same constructive response. The abuse of conscience in the twentieth century and the atrophy of conscience in the twenty-first are not unrelated pathologies. They are twin expressions of the same fundamental error: the displacement of the person’s constitutive receptivity to moral truth – what Ratzinger calls the anamnesis and what Levering, following Peter Casarella, calls the logike latreia – by a substitute that retains the external form of moral judgment while severing its connection to the source from which genuine moral judgment flows.
The constructive response is the same in both cases: the formation of the person in logike latreia – the Eucharistic self-offering through which the anamnesis is cultivated, the moral organism is formed, and the person becomes capable of the genuine moral judgment that neither existentialist autonomy nor algorithmic delegation can produce.
2. The abuse: Levering’s diagnosis of the twentieth century
Levering opens The Abuse of Conscience with a question that his entire survey of twenty-six moral theologians is designed to answer: why, in twentieth-century Catholicism, did conscience so easily and stubbornly take over the whole terrain of moral theology?Footnote 3
His answer, developed across four chapters engaging twenty-six theologians from George Tyrrell to Reinhard Hütter, is that the inflation of conscience in Catholic moral theology was driven by two converging forces. The first was the influence of the existentialist tradition – from Heidegger through Rahner and Häring – which located the moral life in the authentically self-judging subject rather than in the objective moral order to which that subject is accountable. The second was the failure of the pre-conciliar moral manual tradition, which, while not explicitly conscience-centered, effectively produced a conscience-centered moral practice by reducing the moral life to the adjudication of particular acts by a formed conscience, without adequate integration of virtue, prudence, and the Eucharistic center of the Christian life.
‘Existentialism’ is too broad a term for what is at issue here, and the argument requires saying precisely what within it produced the effect Levering describes. The decisive text is Heidegger’s analysis of conscience in Sein und Zeit, §§54–60: the call of conscience summons Dasein out of its absorption in das Man toward the appropriation of its ownmost possibility; the call communicates no content, names no state of affairs, and discloses no authority other than the self that is summoned. What was available for inheritance was therefore a form – conscience as the summons to authenticity – emptied of the material determination that a moral claim requires. Sartre’s 1946 lecture states the consequence without reserve: confronted with the student who must choose between his mother and the Free French, there is no a priori good and no sign to be read, and the value is constituted in the act of choosing it.Footnote 4
The route into Catholic moral theology runs through the reception of that formal structure rather than through the systems entire. Rahner’s formal existential ethics locates a binding individual moral demand not deducible from universal norms; Häring’s Das Gesetz Christi (1954) casts the moral life in the idiom of response to a call addressed to this person; the later fundamental-option literature develops the same structure at the level of basic self-disposition. Conversely, the existentialisms of religious obedience – Kierkegaard above all, and Marcel – do not fit the diagnosis at all, which is why Levering’s procedure of naming particular thinkers rather than a movement is the correct one. For clarity, the present article speaks hereafter of the authenticity paradigm, meaning the specific claim that the self’s appropriation of itself is the criterion of moral truth; where the word ‘existentialism’ appears, it is shorthand for that claim and not for the movement in its breadth.Footnote 5
Ratzinger is among Levering’s heroes precisely because he resisted both forces. His anamnesis/conscientia distinction – developed in ‘Conscience and Truth’ (1991), and the focus of the present article’s second section – places conscience within a larger moral structure. The conscientia is the concrete act of practical moral judgment. The anamnesis is the deeper capacity for moral reception from which conscientia draws its life. Conscience is not the foundation of the moral life but a faculty within it – one that functions well only when it is properly formed and properly embedded in the moral organism of virtue, prudence, and above all the Eucharistic center.
The Eucharistic center is Levering’s most significant Ratzingerian insight. Drawing on Peter Casarella’s reading of Romans 12:1, he argues that ‘the full interior connection between culture and conscience can be found in Benedict’s retrieval of the Pauline notion of logike latreia (Romans 12:1, “spiritual worship”)’. The logike latreia – the reasonable, spiritual, rational worship that Paul calls the Christian’s ‘true worship’ – is the offering of the entire person, body and soul, as a living sacrifice to God. It is the Eucharistic logic of gift received and returned, of the creature who gives himself back to the God who gave himself first.
Levering’s formulation is precise: ‘in the Christian moral life, supernatural love – sharing in Christ’s Eucharistic self-offering – is the very center, but conscience, within the matrix of the virtues (especially prudence), has an important place in orienting us toward God’s word’.Footnote 6
The abuse of conscience is precisely the failure of this integration: the elevation of conscience from its proper place within the moral organism to the organizing principle of the entire moral life. When conscience becomes the center, the logike latreia is displaced – and with it the Eucharistic formation that gives conscience its proper orientation. The person whose moral life is organized around his individual conscience rather than around his participation in Christ’s self-offering has placed himself, rather than Christ, at the center. And the existentialist tradition’s most powerful contribution to Catholic moral theology was precisely to make this displacement theologically respectable.
2.1. The Ratzingerian counter
Ratzinger’s counter to the existentialist inflation of conscience is not the restoration of the pre-conciliar moral manual – which Levering also criticizes as an inadequate alternative – but the recovery of the anamnesis as the deeper faculty of moral reception from which conscientia draws its life.
The anamnesis is not a set of rules or a list of prohibitions. It is a constitutive openness to moral truth, inscribed in the person’s being by the Creator. Every human being, regardless of religious formation or cultural context, has access to the basic moral order because that order has been written into his nature. The anamnesis is the faculty through which that inscription is legible – the place where the person encounters the truth about himself and about the good that no external authority can either bestow or remove.Footnote 7
The key sentence in ‘Conscience and Truth’ is this: ‘Conscience signifies the perceptible and demanding presence of the voice of truth in the subject himself’.Footnote 8
Note what this sentence does and does not say. It does not say that conscience is the voice of the self’s own most authentic preferences – the existentialist position that Levering criticizes. It says that conscience is the perceptible presence of the voice of truth in the subject – a truth that transcends the subject’s own subjectivity and addresses him from within. The anamnesis is receptive, not productive. It is the person’s capacity to hear a voice that is not his own – and the moral disaster of the modern age is the progressive suppression of that receptive capacity by a culture that insists the only authoritative voice is the self’s own.
This is why Ratzinger identifies the atrophy of the anamnesis – not its overuse but its disuse – as the most serious moral pathology of the present moment. ‘The guilt lies then not in the present act, not in the present judgment of conscience but in the neglect of my being which made me deaf to the internal promptings of truth’.Footnote 9
Levering and Ratzinger are, in this analysis, diagnosing the same pathology from different angles. Levering diagnoses the abuse: the inflation of conscientia at the expense of the larger moral organism. Ratzinger diagnoses the atrophy: the neglect of the anamnesis that makes conscientia possible. The two diagnoses are not competing but complementary – and together they constitute a more complete account of the moral crisis of the modern age than either provides alone.
And the connection to the logike latreia is direct. The anamnesis is the moral dimension of the same constitutive receptivity to truth from beyond the self that the logike latreia enacts liturgically. The person who offers himself in Eucharistic worship – who allows himself to be received rather than merely self-expressive, who participates in Christ’s self-offering rather than merely his own – is enacting, in the most concentrated available form, the same constitutive receptivity that the anamnesis exercises in the moral domain. The worship and the conscience are not separate faculties. They are the same constitutive receptivity operating in two different registers.Footnote 10
2.2. The natural register: conscience as common ground
Levering’s survey, organized as it is around the inflation of conscience, gives comparatively little attention to a second and older function that the concept has performed in the tradition, and the omission is consequential for the present argument. Long before conscience became the organizing principle of a moral theology, it served as the point at which the moral order was held to be accessible to natural reason as such – and therefore as the ground on which the Church could address those who did not share her faith. In a world where Christian belief can no longer be presumed, that function is not peripheral but primary, since it is what permits a moral claim advanced from within revelation to be intelligible outside it. Were the argument of this article to terminate in the liturgy alone, it would forfeit precisely that ground at the moment it is most needed: the algorithmic systems under discussion are designed, deployed, procured, and regulated overwhelmingly by persons and institutions that do not worship.
The resources for holding both registers together are already present in Ratzinger’s text. The anamnesis is not a Christian endowment but a created one, and Ratzinger grounds it where the tradition has always grounded it, in the Pauline claim that the requirements of the law are written on the hearts of those who do not possess the law, their conscience bearing witness (Rom 2:14–15). His terminological proposal is itself an argument: he offers anamnesis in place of the scholastic synderesis, whose transmission he regards as textually corrupted, in order to recover the ontological depth of a capacity that the manual tradition had flattened into a faculty for generating rules.Footnote 11
The structure so recovered is Thomistic. Aquinas distinguishes synderesis – the natural habitus of the first principles of practical reason, which cannot be extinguished – from conscientia, the act by which those principles are applied to a particular case and that can and does err. Ratzinger’s distinction is a retrieval of that architecture rather than an innovation upon it, and the consequence for the present argument is decisive: the capacity whose atrophy this article describes is not a confessional possession, and its erosion is not a Catholic problem but a human one.Footnote 12
Three questions follow, and the position must answer all three. The first is whether non-Christians act morally. On this account they must, and manifestly do, because the inscription is natural and not baptismal; the Council teaches as much of those who, ignorant of the Gospel, strive to do God’s will as they know it through the dictates of conscience. Magisterial practice presumes it as well: both Antiqua et Nova and Magnifica Humanitas are addressed to all persons of goodwill and argue from a dignity they take to be accessible to unaided reason, the encyclical insisting that reason, when it examines human nature seriously, discovers values that hold for everyone.Footnote 13
The second is whether Christians are therefore morally superior, and if so why this is not self-evident. They are not, and the two-register account explains why not. Grace supplies a school, not a guarantee: Aquinas allows genuine acquired virtue apart from charity while denying it perfection, and the sacramental economy offers a formation that may be received badly, resisted, or reduced to routine. The abuse Levering documents occurred inside Catholic moral theology, not outside it; Magnifica Humanitas names abuses of conscience among the injuries requiring reparation within the Church herself. Atrophy of the anamnesis is available to the baptized on precisely the same terms as to anyone else, which is why the argument here is diagnostic before it is apologetic.Footnote 14
The third is what the liturgical claim then asserts. Ratzinger’s sentence quoted below – that what approaches the worshipper derives ultimately from divine revelation – names the term of the movement rather than its condition of entry. The claim is not that only the worshipper can receive moral truth, which would contradict the natural register just described, but that the eucharistic liturgy is the most concentrated and most embodied school available of the disposition that all moral reception requires. The argument may, therefore, be stated twice without inconsistency. In the natural register, addressed to a plural public, habitual algorithmic delegation erodes a capacity that every human being possesses and every polity presupposes in the citizens it holds responsible. In the sacramental register, addressed to the Church, the formation that repairs it is offered in the logike latreia. The second does not withdraw the first; it specifies where the Church’s own resources lie, and it is the reason her contribution to the public question is not reducible to what any ethics committee could supply.Footnote 15
3. The atrophy: the algorithmic crisis of the twenty-first century
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith’s Antiqua et Nova (January 2025) provides the most authoritative recent Catholic assessment of the anthropological challenge of artificial intelligence. Its central anthropological warning concerns the migration of decision to the system, and it grounds that warning in a distinction Francis had already drawn: the machine makes a technical choice among several possibilities, whether on well-defined criteria or on statistical inference, whereas human beings not only choose but in their hearts are capable of deciding. What the sustained delegation of that capacity produces, I argue, is a new type of human being who no longer exercises authentic moral decision-making.Footnote 16
That distinction – between choosing and deciding – is the twenty-first-century counterpart of Ratzinger’s catastrophe sentence from 1991. The person who has lost the capacity to exercise authentic moral decision-making is the person whose anamnesis has been suppressed – not through the inflation of individual conscience but through its progressive replacement by systems that cannot exercise conscience at all.
3.1. What algorithmic moral systems actually do
Algorithmic moral systems operate exclusively at the conscientia level. They process inputs – human moral behavior, moral judgments encoded in text, moral norms specified by designers – and they generate outputs: recommendations, assessments, flags, scores. They have no access to the anamnesis. They cannot receive moral truth because they have no constitutive openness to it. They can only aggregate what human beings have already done and judged – which is precisely the corrupt input that distorts conscientia when the anamnesis is suppressed.
The value alignment problem that occupies the frontier of AI safety research is, in Ratzingerian terms, the attempt to encode the anamnesis into a system that has none. A system optimizing for human-specified values derived from human moral behavior is optimizing for what we have done – not for what we ought to have done. That gap is not a technical problem. It is a moral one. And it is precisely the gap the anamnesis exists to bridge.Footnote 17
3.2. The atrophy mechanism
The more serious claim is not that algorithmic moral systems fail to exercise conscience but that habitual deference to them actively suppresses the anamnesis in the persons who defer. The mechanism is straightforward: any capacity that is consistently not exercised atrophies. The person who consistently allows algorithmic systems to identify moral problems, flag morally problematic content, and guide moral decisions is systematically not exercising the anamnesis. He is consuming moral outputs from without rather than receiving moral truth from within. The faculty that would otherwise be exercised goes quiet.
This atrophy mechanism is already empirically visible. Research on the moral development of adolescents heavily mediated by social media algorithms – systems designed to maximize engagement by presenting content that confirms existing beliefs and emotional dispositions – shows measurable changes in the capacity for independent moral judgment. The person who consistently responds to algorithmically curated moral content is being formed in the habit of responding to algorithmic prompts rather than exercising the anamnesis. The conscientia is active – moral judgments are being made constantly – but the anamnesis is being bypassed.Footnote 18
The claim advanced here – that a new type of human being is emerging who no longer exercises authentic moral decision-making – is not merely a theoretical concern, and the magisterial texts supply its premises rather than the conclusion itself. It is a present reality being produced at civilizational scale by the progressive delegation of moral judgment to systems constitutively incapable of exercising it.Footnote 19
A concrete case shows what the failure looks like where nothing lethal is at stake. A parish priest faces a difficult question about admission to the sacraments, or a diocesan communications officer must decide whether a statement wounds the person it concerns; each submits the case to a generative model and adopts the reply. Magnifica Humanitas names the three features that make this so easy: the ease with which results are obtained, the impression of objectivity, and the simulation of human communication. The answer arrives fluent, apparently disinterested, and phrased as though a colleague had spoken. The temptation is not to believe something false – the output may be entirely sound – but to omit the step in which one asks what one sees oneself. The institutional form of the same failure is content moderation, which replaces the question whether this utterance harms this person with the question whether the classifier has flagged it, and trains a generation of reviewers in the second question only. Antiqua et Nova describes the outcome in its warnings about deskilling and the erosion of critical judgment: an operator whose conscientia is busier than ever and whose anamnesis has not been consulted in months.Footnote 20
3.3. The military context
The argument from military experience is not a rhetorical device. I served for thirty-one years as a Navy and Marine Corps chaplain, present in various operational contexts at the intersection of human moral judgment and increasingly sophisticated algorithmic recommendation systems – systems designed to assist targeting decisions, threat assessment, and the allocation of lethal force.Footnote 21
The most dangerous moral situation I encountered across those three decades was not the person who did wrong knowing it was wrong. It was the person who had been so thoroughly formed by institutional culture, chain of command, and technological systems that he had lost the capacity for independent moral judgment in high-stakes situations. The person whose anamnesis had gone quiet.
Autonomous weapons systems represent the most extreme form of the algorithmic conscience problem. The most important question is not the accountability question – who is responsible when an autonomous system makes a lethal decision – but the formation question: what happens to the moral capacity of the human beings who operate within a system that increasingly delegates lethal moral judgment to algorithms? The chaplain’s role in military moral formation is precisely to resist this atrophy – to insist, in the face of institutional and technological pressures toward algorithmic deference, that the moral judgment required in lethal situations cannot be delegated and cannot be automated.
The operational case is instructive because the failure is not the one the accountability literature anticipates. Consider a watch officer presented with a fused track and a machine-generated confidence score, in a decision cycle measured in seconds, and a culture in which the system is rarely wrong. He concurs. Asked afterward why, he answers that the system rated the track hostile with high confidence and that no one dissented. He has not made a bad judgment; he has not made a judgment. The imputation remains his, since nothing in the workflow removed it, but the act to which imputation attaches was never performed. The defect is invisible in the outcome: if the track was hostile, the engagement was licit, and the officer’s silence goes unremarked, and the anamnesis was equally unexercised either way. This is Ratzinger’s guilt lying ‘in the neglect of my being’ transposed into an institutional workflow. The officer is deaf not because he has decided wrongly but because he has ceased to be the kind of person from whom a decision is expected.Footnote 22
The ITC’s Quo Vadis, Humanitas? (March 2026) confirms that this formation question is the most fundamental one: the future of humanity is decided not in bioengineering laboratories or algorithmic architecture but in the ability to maintain the ‘openness to transcendence’ that Ratzinger called the anamnesis and that Levering’s logike latreia enacts.Footnote 23
3.4. Instrument and delegation: the licit use of algorithmic systems
The account given so far might be taken to condemn algorithmic systems as such, and the magisterial texts on which it draws plainly do not. Antiqua et Nova treats artificial intelligence as a tool that may serve the common good or detract from it, locates responsibility for its design and use in human persons precisely because such systems are incapable of moral judgment, and states that while these systems may assist human decision-making, only human beings decide; the same passage warns against overreliance. Magnifica Humanitas is more emphatic still that technology is neither antagonistic to humanity nor inherently evil, while fixing responsibility at every stage from those who design these systems to those who rely on them for concrete decisions. The tension with the atrophy thesis is apparent rather than real, and resolving it sharpens the thesis.Footnote 24
The distinction required is available in the classical anatomy of prudence. Aquinas distinguishes counsel, by which the agent inquires into the circumstances and the available means, from judgment, and both from the command in which prudence is chiefly completed. Nothing in that account requires that counsel be gathered unaided; the tradition has never regarded libraries, advisers, casuistic manuals, or staff work as encroachments upon conscience. An algorithmic system can serve the material of counsel with unprecedented reach: it can assemble circumstances, retrieve precedent, model consequences, test consistency, and present what the agent had not considered. What it cannot do is judge, and what it must not be permitted to do is command – not because its outputs are unreliable, but because judgment is the act of a person possessed of the anamnesis, and imputability follows the act.Footnote 25
Three criteria follow, and they are stated here as a proposal rather than as settled doctrine. An algorithmic process functions non-delegatively when, first, it supplies data, options, or objections rather than verdicts; second, the act of judgment together with its imputability remains with a named person who can be required to give reasons that are his own and not the system’s; and third, its use exercises rather than displaces the user’s own reception, so that the system can be interrogated, contradicted, and set aside without institutional penalty. Where these conditions hold, the instrument is a magnification of counsel. Where they fail, what has migrated from the person to the system is not information but the act itself, and the atrophy described in this section is the predictable result.
The Magisterium marks the limit exactly where irreversibility begins. Magnifica Humanitas subjects the development and use of artificial intelligence in warfare to the most rigorous ethical constraints and rules out entrusting lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems; Antiqua et Nova grounds the same conclusion about lethal autonomous systems in their lack of the human capacity for moral judgment. The encyclical’s treatment of education then supplies the positive form of the same rule: the young are to be taught not only how to use these systems but what not to use them for, against an appetite for immediate answers that displaces the patience proper to inquiry and discernment. The teaching is therefore not a hesitation between permission and prohibition but a determinate rule – the instrument is licit, the delegation of judgment is not – and formation is what allows a person to tell the difference under pressure.Footnote 26
4. The same root: autonomy and the algorithm as twin expressions of the same error
The abuse of conscience and the atrophy of conscience are not unrelated pathologies requiring separate diagnoses and separate responses. They are twin expressions of the same fundamental error: the displacement of the person’s constitutive receptivity to moral truth from beyond himself.
The existentialist tradition displaced this receptivity by centering moral life on the self-judging subject whose most authentic act is the exercise of his own individual conscience. The logike latreia – the offering of the self to a truth that transcends the self – was replaced by the logos of authentic self-expression. The person whose moral life is organized around his individual conscience rather than around his participation in Christ’s self-offering has placed himself, rather than God, at the moral center.
The algorithmic culture displaces the same receptivity by a different mechanism. It does not inflate the self-judging subject. It replaces him – with a system that aggregates the moral judgments of many self-judging subjects and produces a recommendation that appears objective precisely because it is no one’s individual judgment. The person who defers to algorithmic moral recommendation has not asserted his individual conscience against objective truth. He has delegated his conscience to a system that has no conscience at all. The result is the same: the anamnesis is not exercised, the logike latreia is not enacted, and the person is formed in the habit of receiving moral outputs from without rather than moral truth from within.
Levering’s Ratzinger and my own Ratzinger are, therefore, the same Ratzinger – the theologian who insisted, against the existentialist inflation of the twentieth century and in terms that apply with equal force to the algorithmic culture of the twenty-first, that the person’s constitutive receptivity to moral truth from beyond himself is the foundation of genuine moral agency, and that its displacement – whether by inflation or by atrophy – produces the same result: a moral life organized around a substitute that cannot sustain what it has been asked to carry.Footnote 27
MacIntyre’s diagnosis of modernity as the wreckage of the moral tradition applies equally to both expressions of the error: a culture that has lost the tradition within which moral concepts derive their meaning cannot recover moral agency by inflating individual conscience or by delegating to algorithmic consensus. Both moves abandon the tradition that alone can give moral judgment its proper form.Footnote 28
5. The constructive response: logike latreia as the school of the anamnesis
The constructive response to both the abuse and the atrophy is the same: the formation of the person in logike latreia – the Eucharistic self-offering through which the anamnesis is cultivated, the moral organism is formed, and the person becomes capable of the genuine moral judgment that neither existentialist autonomy nor algorithmic delegation can produce.
This is not a new argument. It is the oldest argument in the Christian moral tradition, recovered by Levering from Ratzinger and by Ratzinger from Paul: the offering of the whole person as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is the person’s logike latreia, his rational and spiritual worship (Romans 12:1). What Paul calls logike latreia and what Ratzinger’s liturgical anthropology in The Spirit of the Liturgy develops as the formation of the creature in constitutive receptivity before the Creator are the same movement: the person who learns, week by week in authentic Eucharistic worship, to receive before he produces, to listen before he speaks, to offer himself to a truth and a good that transcend his own subjectivity.Footnote 29
5.1. The liturgy as the school of the anamnesis
Ratzinger’s most concentrated formulation in The Spirit of the Liturgy is this: ‘I discover that something is approaching me here that I did not produce myself, that I am entering into something greater than myself, which ultimately derives from divine revelation’.Footnote 30
That sentence is, in the context of the present argument, the central description of what the well-formed anamnesis does in the moral domain. The person who worships rightly discovers himself as recipient, not producer – as one who enters something greater than himself, who allows something to approach him that he did not generate. The anamnesis, in its moral operation, is precisely this: the discovery that moral truth is approaching from beyond the person’s own preferences, beyond the algorithmic consensus of his social environment, beyond the existentialist imperative of authentic self-expression.
The worshipping person and the person of formed conscience are, in this analysis, the same person approached from two different angles. The liturgy is the school of the anamnesis because it enacts, week by week, in the most embodied and most communal form available, the fundamental disposition of constitutive receptivity to truth from beyond the self that the anamnesis, in its moral operation, requires. The person formed in this disposition – who has learned to receive before he produces, who has been formed in logike latreia – is the person best equipped to resist both the existentialist inflation of the twentieth century and the algorithmic atrophy of the twenty-first.
5.2. Formation before regulation
The most practically urgent implication follows directly: the adequate response to both the abuse and the atrophy of conscience is formation before regulation.
Levering’s argument throughout The Abuse of Conscience is not primarily regulatory – he does not propose new canonical norms for the exercise of conscience. It is formational: the recovery of the moral organism, centered on the Eucharistic logike latreia, that gives conscience its proper place and its proper formation. The same priority applies to the algorithmic crisis: AI systems that suppress the anamnesis should be regulated. But regulation addresses the behavior of AI systems. It does not address the moral capacity of the persons who design them, deploy them, and defer to them.
Antiqua et Nova is explicit on precisely this point: moral education and conscience formation are prior to and more fundamental than regulatory frameworks.Footnote 31
Magnifica Humanitas gives that priority a determinate pedagogical shape. Its treatment of education argues that the young must be taught not merely how to use these systems but what not to use them for, and identifies as the specific danger an appetite for immediate answers that displaces the patience proper to research, reflection, and discernment. The point is not that regulation is dispensable. It is that regulation and formation address different objects: regulation can require that a named person sign, but it cannot produce the person capable of signing for reasons that are his own. That capacity is the product of formation, which is slower than legislation and prior to it.Footnote 32
The resources for that formation are in the tradition – in Ratzinger’s liturgical anthropology, in Levering’s recovery of the Thomistic moral organism, in the accumulated wisdom of two thousand years of a community that has been learning, through the weekly enactment of the logike latreia, to offer itself to a truth and a good that transcend its own subjectivity. The person formed in that tradition is the person whose anamnesis has been cultivated rather than suppressed – whose moral capacity has been developed through the practice of constitutive receptivity rather than atrophied through habitual delegation to systems that cannot exercise it.Footnote 33
Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas (May 2026) grounds this program in its Christological center: Christ, the final Adam, fully reveals man to man himself. The person who knows himself in the light of Christ – formed in logike latreia, his anamnesis cultivated by the weekly enactment of the Eucharistic self-offering – knows that his deepest identity is received rather than produced, that his moral capacity reaches toward a truth and a good that transcend his own subjectivity, and that no algorithm, however sophisticated, can either replicate or replace the constitutive receptivity in which genuine moral agency consists.Footnote 34
6. Conclusion
The twentieth century abused conscience by placing it at the center of the moral life. The twenty-first century is atrophying conscience by delegating it to systems incapable of exercising it. Different centuries, different mechanisms, different names – but the same fundamental displacement of the person’s constitutive receptivity to moral truth from beyond himself.
Levering saw the abuse clearly and named Ratzinger as the hero whose anamnesis/conscientia distinction and logike latreia provided the most adequate available response. The present article has argued that the same Ratzingerian resources – the same anamnesis, the same logike latreia, the same Eucharistic formation – are the most adequate available response to the atrophy the algorithmic age is producing.
‘Conscience signifies the perceptible and demanding presence of the voice of truth in the subject himself’. That is Ratzinger’s definition – from 1991, before neural networks, before large language models, before autonomous weapons systems.Footnote 35
The date matters to the argument. The sentence was written in response to a wholly different pathology, at a moment when the pressure on conscience came from the imperative of authentic self-assertion rather than from the availability of processed moral consensus. That it applies without alteration to a mechanism its author could not have foreseen is evidence that the analysis reaches the structure of moral agency rather than the accidents of one cultural moment. What the authenticity paradigm and algorithmic delegation have in common is legible only at that structural level: in both, a substitute occupies the place of the voice, and in both the substitute is credible precisely because it speaks in the idiom of judgment.
The voice has not changed. What has changed is the range of the obstacles to hearing it – obstacles that now include not only the existentialist imperative to trust one’s own authentic self-judgment but also the algorithmic imperative to defer to a consensus of processed moral data.
Against both obstacles, the response is the same: the formation of the person in logike latreia – the weekly, embodied, communal enactment of the creature’s constitutive receptivity before the Creator – through which the anamnesis is cultivated, the moral organism is formed, and the person becomes capable of hearing the voice that the twentieth century inflated beyond recognition and the twenty-first century is progressively silencing.
Levering’s The Abuse of Conscience and the present article share a conviction: that the restoration of genuine moral agency in the Church requires neither the autonomy of the self-judging subject nor the consensus of the algorithmic system, but the formation of the person whose anamnesis has been cultivated by the logike latreia – who has learned, at the altar, to receive before he judges, and who brings that constitutive receptivity to every moral situation the algorithms are now being deployed to resolve.Footnote 36
It is worth observing, finally, that the encyclical on which this argument has drawn arrives at the same terminus by its own route. Having treated artificial intelligence, warfare, labor, and education, Magnifica Humanitas closes by placing the Incarnation at the heart of everything and commending a eucharistic spirituality – a spirituality of ecclesial unity in love. The convergence is not decorative. An argument that begins from the atrophy of a natural capacity and ends at the altar might be suspected of a merely rhetorical piety; that the Magisterium, addressing the same technological crisis and addressing it to all persons of goodwill, ends in the same place suggests instead that the logike latreia is where the analysis of this crisis properly terminates.Footnote 37
