Magnificent Humanity

With his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV places the age of artificial intelligence inside the oldest question of all: what does it mean to be human?

Part One of Three. This week: the Introduction and the encyclical’s foundations.

In 1891, a Pope named Leo looked out at a world being remade by machines. The factories of the Industrial Revolution were lifting fortunes and grinding down workers, and when some objected that the Church should keep to the things of eternity, Leo XIII answered that the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of people. His encyclical Rerum Novarum, ‘Of New Things’, became the foundation of modern Catholic Social Teaching (CST). Some 135 years later, on the very anniversary of that letter, another Pope named Leo has looked out at a world being remade by a different kind of machine, and he answered with the same conviction.

Magnifica Humanitas, ‘Magnificent Humanity’ is the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, and its subtitle, “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” reveals where its heart lies.

The new things of our age

The Holy Father is clear-eyed about what has changed. Digitalisation, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics are transforming our world, he writes, with a speed and depth that no previous generation has known.

He refuses the easy reflex of treating technology as the enemy. It has been, in his words, “a profoundly human reality” since the beginning, woven into our freedom and our progress. But he also names the vertigo of the moment, borrowing a phrase from Pope Francis: “Never has humanity had such power over itself.”

What is truly new, the encyclical argues, is not only the power but the hands that hold it. For most of history, it was the State that guided innovation. Today the great drivers are private, often transnational; actors whose resources outstrip those of many governments.

Technological power has taken on an unprecedented, “private” character—harder to see, harder to govern, harder to direct toward the good of all.

And so the document presses three questions onto the conscience, questions it says can no longer be avoided: Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose as a people and as a human community?

This is why the Church speaks. Not to write the software, and not to hand down a technical rulebook for governing algorithms, but to offer what the Holy Father calls “a legacy of wisdom … principles for thought, criteria for discernment, and concrete guidelines for action” (3). The encyclical’s gift is not an answer to every question AI raises. It is the lens through which a person of faith can ask the right ones.

Babel or Jerusalem

To teach that discernment, Pope Leo XIV reaches for two cities from Scripture.

The first is Babel, where the people of Genesis built a tower “with its top in the heavens”—one language, one technology, one direction, raised without reference to God and meant to “make a name” for themselves.

Babel, the Pope writes, reveals the limits of any effort that “sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing” (7).

The second is Jerusalem, rebuilt in the Book of Nehemiah not by one ambitious architect but through the shared responsibility of all—families, priests and artisans each repairing their own stretch of wall. It is, he says, “an undertaking with God at the centre, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones” (8).

From these images comes the encyclical’s governing claim. In practice, “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it”.

The real decision is not whether to say yes or no to it. The “primary choice,” Leo writes, “is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem” (9).

He warns against a “Babel syndrome”: the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, and the conceit that a single language, even a digital one, can reduce the mystery of a person to data and performance.

A son of St Augustine, the Holy Father knows these two cities were never only places on a map. He returns to a line from the City of God, “two loves have built two cities,” the love of self and the love of God and concludes that these loves still contend within us.

“The construction of Babel or the rebuilding of Jerusalem,” he writes, “begins within each one of us” (130). Before they are civilisations, the two cities are dispositions of the heart.

This is the charge the encyclical leaves with every reader: to remain “profoundly human” in the age of intelligent machines—not by fleeing technology, but by refusing to let it flatten us. And the surest sign of which city we are building is always the same: what becomes of the least, the rejected stones that Jerusalem makes its cornerstone.

A living tradition

The first chapter of Magnifica steps back to show why the Church, in the first place, is able to speak to something as new as AI. Its answer is that her social teaching has always been alive—not a fixed code but, in each age, a fresh reading of “new things” in the light of the Gospel.

From Leo XIII through Pius XI, John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, down to John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis, each pope drew out a different facet of a single inheritance: the dignity of the person, the value of work, the universal destination of goods, solidarity, subsidiarity, care for creation, and the centrality of peace.

Social doctrine, Leo XIV insists, is “not a handbook of principles and norms to be applied, but a process of shared discernment,” a “theology of communion in history” (27).

Artificial intelligence, in this light, is not merely one more topic for the file. It challenges the categories of CST “from within,” asking us to grow without breaking faith with the Gospel.

The principles that protect the person

The second chapter gathers the tools for that discernment: the great principles of CST, each re-read for the digital age.

It begins where the faith begins—with the human person made in the image of the Triune God, whose dignity is infinite and depends on nothing we achieve. From that source flow the rest.

The common good is “the social expression of the dignity recognised in every person” (59). The universal destination of goods now reaches beyond land and water to algorithms, platforms and data, which open a new chasm when hoarded by a few.

Subsidiarity—the rule that larger powers must not swallow the work that smaller communities can do for themselves—is turned on its head. The overbearing “highest level” is no longer the State but the great platforms, so the principle now demands transparency, accountability and a real voice for ordinary people. Solidarity reminds us that “no one is saved alone”; social justice insists a society be measured by its least, with the treatment of migrants named as a litmus test for the age.

Beneath them all lies integral human development—the benchmark by which every innovation, including AI, must be judged. Does the application or device help us become more humane and fraternal? In a striking final turn, the Pope insists that the Church owes this examination of conscience first to herself.

Key Message:

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical is not about machines, ultimately, but about us. Artificial intelligence forces an ancient choice into the open—to build for us or to build with God and for the least—and the Gospel still gives us the wisdom to choose well.

Action Step:

Before you read the encyclical itself, sit with its two cities. This week, name one place—at work, at home, on your phone—where you can choose communion over control, and build there.

Scripture for Reflection:

“And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (Rev 21:2).