Beyond Cognitive Offloading: A Catholic Theological-Ethical Framework for Human Intelligence, Critical Thinking, and AI Integration within Health-Professional Education

The growing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into medical and health-professions education offers opportunities for personalized learning, access to information, and cognitive support, while raising concerns about cognitive offloading and the potential displacement of critical thinking and independent judgment. This article presents a conceptual and normative theological-ethical analysis of the responsible integration of AI into health-professions education. It draws on a focused, critical, and integrative review of empirical and theoretical scholarship on AI, cognitive offloading, critical thinking, clinical reasoning, self-regulated learning, and human-AI interaction. The literature is analyzed using the See-Judge-Act method: the See phase identifies contemporary educational tensions associated with AI; the Judge phase evaluates these tensions through Catholic theological anthropology; and the Act phase develops a normative educational framework. The theological analysis draws particularly on Antiqua et Nova, Quo vadis, humanitas?, and Magnifica humanitas, which, respectively, illuminate the distinction between artificial and human intelligence, the embodied, relational, and situated character of human intelligence, and human primacy amid technological development. The analysis results in a human-centered, human-in-the-loop framework in which AI functions as cognitive support while learners retain responsibility for reasoning, judgment, reflection, and decision-making. The framework translates these principles into implications for curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, clinical simulation, AI literacy, and professional formation. As a conceptually derived framework, it has not yet been empirically validated and should therefore be understood as a normative and theoretically grounded proposition for subsequent empirical testing. The article contributes a theological-ethical model for integrating AI in health-professions education while preserving human intelligence, critical formation, and professional responsibility as central aims of education.