By the time you finish this article, Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, will bear the tire marks of a thousand different journalists, columnists, and influencers, each driving his or her own interpretive agenda across its 245 paragraphs. So for the impatient or exhausted, I’ll begin where I plan to end. As a reflection on human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas is the finest papal encyclical in many years. It’s continuous with the spirit of the Francis pontificate, but it has the clarity and intellectual excellence of his predecessors. It’s well-written, methodically organized, smoothly argued, and enormously rich in content.
The encyclical’s chapter 3, on “Technology and Dominance: The Grandeur of Humanity in Light of the Promises of AI,” has the urgency and relevance of water in a desert. Given the turgid nature of so many Vatican documents, Leo’s text is not just interesting and important. It’s exhilarating. More to the point: It’s what people of faith need now.
So much for the preamble. I’ll get to the substance of the text in a moment. But first, a couple of useful asides.
Thirty years ago, speaking with Neil Postman, I made the mistake of burbling on about how the (then) “new technologies” might give us all a better life—more knowledge, more power, more leisure, more equality, a bigger voice in public affairs. The author of Technopoly and Amusing Ourselves to Death listened politely. Then he said simply, “Be careful what you wish for.” Postman had a Job-like wisdom about human progress. And for good reason: Technology giveth, but it also taketh away. Progress is always an alloy of unintended consequences. Every major tech breakthrough creates a new class of winners and losers. Some people adapt and thrive. Others can’t and don’t. Which is why it’s so hard to find a good blacksmith these days.
Postman was never a Luddite. He valued the great good in modern technologies. Given human ingenuity, he saw material progress as inevitable and irreversible. But he seasoned today’s naive tech optimism with a history-informed caution. He understood the Luddite cause as the rearguard defense of an entire way of life. The English textile workers who smashed their machines in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution (followers of a legendary weaver named Ed Lud, hence the name) were not brainless ruffians. Nor did they instinctively fear the new. They were skilled craftsmen. They spent years mastering their trade. But they suffered the implications of unregulated manufacturing progress in real time. When factories introduced new power looms and stocking frames, the owners improved their profits by speeding up production and reducing the need for skilled labor. They also wiped out an entire dignified craft and the communities that depended on it. In the absence of any social safety net, widespread working-class poverty, demoralization, crime, and family collapse were the result.
Postman only alludes to this disaster in passing. But in so doing, he channels one of the key analytical works of the last century, Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. Published in 1944, amid a world war, Polanyi’s book is a study of the industrialization era in Europe and its disruptive, revolutionary effect on everyday social and economic life. Polanyi identified as a socialist, and his book is sharply critical of market economies. But it has value well beyond the political left. It’s brilliant and flawed; compelling and naive, all at the same time. And its pertinence to our current moment can be boiled down to two simple quotations from the text.
Here’s the first: “At the heart of the Industrial Revolution . . . there was an almost miraculous improvement in the tools of production, which was accompanied by a catastrophic dislocation [in] the lives of the common people.” Polanyi argued that everyday prudence and humane foresight were too often “erased from the thoughts of the educated [classes] by the corrosive of a crude utilitarianism, combined with an uncritical reliance on the alleged self-healing virtues of unconscious growth.” The process he described has an uncomfortable modern ring to it.
And here’s the second: “Much of the massive suffering inseparable from a period of [industrial] transition is already behind us.” Alas, the author wrote those words toward the end of his book, and before Hiroshima, the transistor, the computer chip, the birth control pill, the internet, the sequencing of the human genome, transsexual surgeries, autonomous combat drones, and now the looming prospect of AGI—artificial general intelligence—a hypothetical form of AI that can perform any intellectual task a human can, at human level or beyond, across virtually any domain. In the real world, our current “period of transition” dwarfs anything similar in human history. Which makes Magnifica Humanitas all the more pressing to study, understand, and incarnate in our daily lives.
The encyclical is the fruit of two other Roman documents that preceded it: Antiqua et Nova (January 2025) and Quo Vadis, Humanitas? (February 2026). Both make valuable reading. The former has the same clean style, sharp focus, and accessible content as the encyclical. Together, the two preliminary texts reflect the sustained thought and broad consultation the Church brought to the issue of AI well before the release of Magnifica Humanitas.
Others have already noted the vivid imagery Leo uses right from the start of his encyclical. The choice posed to us by the power of AI is between the hubris of building a new Tower of Babel (see Genesis) and the communitarian effort and love involved in rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem (see Nehemiah). As he argues in his Introduction:
When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency, and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing. (§ 7)
“Technology,” he adds, “is never neutral because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it and use it” (§ 8). Since we “cannot condone naive enthusiasms, nor fuel unfounded fears,” the task for humanity becomes establishing AI standards of development and use that respect “the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, care for our common home and peace” (§ 14).
Chapter 1 of the document is a methodical guide to the development of Catholic Social Teaching, especially in the century since Leo XIII’s great encyclical Rerum Novarum. Today’s Leo, Leo XIV, notes that the Church’s social doctrine “is not the result of a project devised at a desk, but rather the product of a patient process in which each pontiff—together with the Second Vatican Council—made a unique contribution in light of the ‘new things’ of each particular era” (§ 45).
The Catholic social principles resulting from that “patient process” comprise the document’s chapter 2. Simply put: Every human person is an image of the Triune God. All human beings possess equal, intrinsic dignity. Human rights have a supreme value. And in serving these qualities, we need to repudiate selfishness, pursue the common good, recognize the universal destination of goods, and build a shared life of solidarity, subsidiarity, and social justice.
It’s worth noting here that Catholic sexual morality—“pelvic theology” in the words of the usual Church snarks—is not some exotic, tribal behavior discrete from the DNA of social justice, but a foundational part of it. It’s in the mutual, marital dependence, fidelity, and self-giving of a man and woman—the two differing embodiments of the same humanity—where new life begins; where “social justice” and a “civilization of love” are first intimately learned and shared. On a human level, it’s where the word love becomes flesh, and that new flesh, that new child, is sacred.
Thus, when Leo speaks of the “supreme value of human rights,” he adds that “among these rights, the first is the right to life, from conception to its natural end, without which it is impossible to exercise any other right. When this fundamental right is denied—as in the cases of induced abortion, killing the innocent, and euthanasia—we are faced with choices that the Church considers gravely wrong” (55). Note that it’s not just wrong but gravely wrong without exception. If, as Leo affirms, every human being is “an image of the Triune God,” then intentionally killing the innocent, in utero or out, is a form of blasphemy. No amount of weaseling about whether the unborn child is fully a “person” changes that.
As the rest of Magnifica Humanitas persuasively shows, our obligations begin with defending the right to life, but they also go well beyond it. “It is individuals that matter,” Leo writes, “each and every person, together with their families. Social movements, communal ideologies and grand political proclamations in favor of a population are worthless unless they lead to the flourishing of persons—men and women—with their inalienable rights. Similarly, it is not enough to extol individual freedom or private enterprise if we then allow a multitude of people to continue living without decent work, protections or access to basic necessities” (§ 58, emphasis added).
He later adds this: “Social justice is, therefore, characterized by the capacity of a social, economic, and political order to allow everyone—particularly the weakest—to live a truly dignified life, without leaving anyone behind” (§ 77).
Chapter 3, on “technology and dominance,” is the heart of the text, and it’s impossible to capture it adequately here. Paragraphs 93, 98, 99, 100, 106, 114, 120, and others in my copy of the text are entirely highlighted in yellow. The astonishing quality to Magnifica Humanitas is its modest but powerful Christian confidence. It radiates a spirit of careful reasoning. It’s remarkably well-informed. It exudes a complete command not only of Catholic thought but of the risks and advantages of AI technology as well. And it’s utterly lacking in confusion and ambiguity; a refreshing break from various other such Roman documents over the past 13 years. The highest praise I can give the encyclical is that it inspires trust. It excites the mind and heart. It makes one want to live one’s faith in a manner consistent with its wisdom.
Chapter 4, on “safeguarding humanity at a time of transformation,” has two passages worth sharing, in part, as we Americans approach our nation’s 250th birthday. The first is from paragraph 133:
Those who command powerful technological and economic resources—along with substantial human capital for intervention—possess significant capabilities for influencing cultural change. Ultimately, they can influence a significant number of people concerning the truth about humanity, the world, the meaning of existence, the family and even God. This is pure power detached from truth, which subtly or overtly imposes what it wishes others to accept as true. At its root lies a deeper and often unrecognized “sickness”: the fact that [as Benedict XVI wrote] “modern man is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life and society.”
And then note this, from paragraph 134: “Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but surely, to a descent into totalitarianism. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote, the ideal subjects of such regimes are not so much those who are ideologically convinced, but rather ‘people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.’” The United States, as we now have it, is not immune to Arendt’s concerns. Too many of us already struggle with indifference about higher things. We ignore the moral and cultural descent that inevitably follows.
We live in a time and culture that Pontius Pilate, were he available, might find quite familiar in their attitudes toward binding truths. It’s easy to feel powerless in the face of tectonic social change and risks, which is exactly where we are today ourselves. But Leo has an answer for that, and it’s worth ending on:
The twentieth-century Catholic author J.R.R. Tolkien, in the words of a protagonist in one of his novels, describes our responsibility in this way: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.” The civilization of love will not arise from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization. (§ 213)
Our lives do matter. Our individual efforts do have an effect. And as for Leo: A Pope who quotes Gandalf in The Return of the King alongside Hannah Arendt may be an ecclesial novelty. But who he is and what he says has my attention—now and going forward.
