What does it mean to be human when the very structure of thought, work, and belief is being rewritten by machines that learn? This is the question at the heart of Magnifica humanitas, the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, signed on May 15, 2026. The document is not a treatise on artificial intelligence. It is a treatise on the human person, composed from inside a technological revolution that has already altered the coordinates of experience. Taken together with the Rescriptum ex audientia issued the following day—establishing an interdicastery Commission on Artificial Intelligence uniting seven Vatican institutions—these two acts represent the most far-reaching institutional response to AI by any major religious body in the world.
The date itself is a statement. May 15 marks the hundred-and-thirty-fifth anniversary of Rerum novarum, Leo XIII’s landmark 1891 encyclical on labor and industrialization. The parallel is plainly intentional: just as the first Leo placed the dignity of work before the upheavals of the factory age, so the new Leo places the dignity of the person before the upheavals of the algorithmic age. What Leo XIII did for wages and the right of association, Leo XIV does for the human person in the era of the algorithm.
Leo XIV did not begin from nothing. In January 2025, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education jointly published Antiqua et nova, a doctrinal note on artificial and human intelligence commissioned by Pope Francis. That document drew a philosophical line between what machines do and what the human mind is, insisting that intelligence in its fullest sense implies conscience, responsibility, and spiritual openness to truth. Magnifica humanitas takes a decisive step further: it elevates that analysis from an interdicastery instruction to a papal encyclical carrying the full weight of social teaching. Here, artificial intelligence becomes the lens through which the principles of that teaching—dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good—are rethought for a new era.
The narrative architecture of the encyclical rests on two biblical icons: the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls in the Book of Nehemiah. Babel stands for the technocratic dream of a humanity homogenized under a single algorithmic language, sacrificing the dignity of persons to efficiency. Against this architecture of domination, the pope sets the example of Nehemiah: an exile who returns to a ruined city, summons the families there, and entrusts each with rebuilding a section of wall. The city is reborn through shared responsibility. The choice is not fundamentally about technology, but about two ways of dealing with of power: concentrating it or distributing it. In warning against the former, Leo XIV coins an expression destined to endure: the “Babel syndrome,” the idolatry of profit that translates everything—even the mystery of the person—into data and measurable outputs.
The doctrinal substance of Magnifica humanitas unfolds along five major lines. First, the encyclical asserts that artificial intelligence is not morally neutral: every technical artifact carries embedded choices, priorities, and therefore responsibilities. AI is not just one tool among many; it creates a whole new social environment that can restructure consciousness. The response, the pope argues, cannot be merely ethical—it must be theological.
Second, the principle of subsidiarity is turned upside down. In classical Catholic social doctrine, subsidiarity protects intermediate bodies from the encroachment of the state. In the digital context, the power that absorbs competencies and decision-making capacity is no longer the state but corporations and platforms, which define conditions of access, rules of visibility, and economic opportunities. Subsidiarity thus becomes a critical instrument against private technological monopoly.
Third—and perhaps most disruptively—the encyclical extends the universal destination of goods to the digital domain. Among the goods universally destined for all, Leo XIV writes, we must now include patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure, and data. The pope applies to the economy of algorithms the same logic Catholic tradition has always applied to the land: when such goods remain concentrated in a few hands, the gap between the included and the excluded widens. No pontifical document had ever stated with such clarity that data are goods whose distribution is a matter of justice, not of the market.
Fourth, the encyclical introduces a powerful keyword: “disarm.” To disarm AI means to withdraw it from the logic of armed competition—military, economic, and cognitive. On the military front, the refusal is categorical: weapon systems with operational autonomy make war easier and therefore more likely, as well as less subject to human control. On the economic front, the document calls on governments to keep track of AI’s impact on the dignity of labor and on social and economic inequality.
Fifth, Leo XIV devotes an entire section to the “new slaveries” of the digital economy. He mentions the millions of data labelers and content moderators in the Global South who are paid a pittance to train the large language models and sanitize the algorithms. He mentions Big Tech’s reliance on the mining of rare-earth minerals in dangerous conditions. The pope defines this grueling work as a kind of contemporary slavery, and he identifies digital colonialism as the new extractivism. In a passage of extraordinary intellectual honesty, he acknowledges that it took the Church itself centuries to condemn slavery, and he asks for forgiveness. But his point is not just about the past. The memory of yesterday’s moral blindness must awaken vigilance toward today’s structural injustices.
Running through these doctrinal lines is a deeper insight: algorithmic design is a cultural act, not merely a technical one. The pope uses a revealing verb—“cultivate.” Modern artificial intelligences, he writes, are “more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built’” (98). Developers create an architecture upon which the system grows, much as a farmer prepares the soil but does not manufacture the fruit. Responsibility does not diminish on this account; it increases, because the outcome is less predictable. Leo XIV claims that “creative intelligence” is a gift ordered to the common good (129). The word “gift” withdraws such creativity from the Promethean register of self-assertion and places it in the register of grace. An algorithm may be able to generate an image never seen before, but an artist creates an image that says something true about the human condition. The difference lies not in the novelty of the result but in the relationship between the one who creates and the community for whom he does so. Creativity, in the vision of the encyclical, is always relational: it is born within a web of bonds. No creative act—whether a painting or a line of code—can invoke the neutrality of technique to evade social responsibility.
The anthropological vision of the encyclical is its deepest layer. Leo XIV does not oppose the sacred to the machine; instead, he sets them in creative tension with each other. The risk he identifies is that the technocratic paradigm normalizes an antihuman vision in which the fullness of life consists in having more, eliminating the unforeseen, and controlling as much as possible. The danger is not that machines will become human, but that humans will be reduced to machines. Against the Promethean dream of transhumanism, the pope sets the mystery of the Incarnation: the Christian God does not upgrade the human being from the outside but descends into human fragility and transforms it from within. The Word became flesh, not code. The magnified humanity of the encyclical’s title is not the enhanced humanity of Silicon Valley but the humanity inhabited by God.
The philosophical texture is rich and deliberately ecumenical: Augustine’s two cities and two loves structure the third chapter; Romano Guardini warns of modern man uneducated in the right use of power; Hannah Arendt is cited on the dissolution of the distinction between fact and fiction; we are reminded of Plato teaching that the deepest things are learned only through time and effort; Viktor Frankl and J.R.R. Tolkien both make appearances. The encyclical’s theological foundation is deep, but its arguments will speak to anyone who takes seriously the question of what it means to be human.
On concrete matters, the encyclical shows the same willingness to enter the real that made Rerum novarum so effective. On labor, it demands that every introduction of automation be accompanied by enforceable commitments to protecting employment and retraining. On education, it proposes that we learn to “fast from artificial intelligence” in order to protect critical thinking—a striking image that translates theoretical discernment into daily discipline. It also calls for legislation setting age limits for access to digital devices. On weapons, it reaffirms that the decision to authorize the use of lethal force cannot be delegated to automated processes.
The encyclical also has an important geopolitical dimension. Without naming names, it denounces a culture of power that feeds on polarization and a “false realism” that presents war as inevitable. It makes a special point of rebuking those who use their technical and economic resources to mislead millions of their fellow human beings about questions of fundamental importance, describing this as “pure power devoid of truth.” This pope’s connection with Leo XIII runs deeper than a name: just as the first Leo confronted Americanism in 1899 with Testem benevolentiae, so this Leo faces a new Americanism—far more powerful—that sacralizes power and success, divinizes efficiency, and regards any limitation as a defect to be corrected, exactly what transhumanism promises on the technological plane. What one might call the ecumenism of hate—the alliance between Evangelical fundamentalism and the new Catholic integralism—finds in artificial intelligence a perfect multiplier: algorithms that reward confrontation, platforms that amplify polarization, deepfakes that dissolve the distinction between true and false.
Finally, the institutional architecture established by the Rescriptum deserves particular attention. The new Commission on Artificial Intelligence brings together seven Vatican bodies—from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences—under an annually rotating coordinator. The organizational form mirrors the technology it addresses: not a pyramid but a network, governed with the vocabulary of synodality. The Vatican intends to address the technological question with the same method it used for the ecclesiological question: shared discernment.
The public presentation of the encyclical, on May 25 in the Synod Hall, offered its own message. Alongside Cardinals Fernández and Czerny, the panel included Anna Rowlands, a political theologian at Durham; Léocadie Lushombo, a Congolese theologian at the Jesuit School of Theology in Santa Clara; and Christopher Olah, cofounder of Anthropic and a leader in AI interpretability research. The presence of someone who actually builds these systems—and works to make them legible—in the Synod Hall was perhaps the most revealing detail of the event. Here a productive tension surfaces: the encyclical denounces the concentration of technological power while seeking dialogue with those who hold it. But what may look like a contradiction is in fact a venerable tradition of papal diplomacy—engagement with the uncomfortable interlocutor.
The encyclical closes with Mary’s Magnificat: the song of a young woman who sees the mighty cast down and the lowly raised up—not as utopia but as a promise already at work. It also cites Tolkien: “It is not for us to master all the tides of the world, but to do what we can for the salvation of the years in which we live.” That an encyclical on artificial intelligence closes with a first-century Marian hymn and a passage from The Lord of the Rings tells us that for Leo XIV the answer to the technological challenge is not a better algorithm but a different quality of vision. Magnifica humanitas builds its analysis of AI on the foundations of the Church’s social teaching, not alongside them. Like every great encyclical, it opens more roads than it closes, and some of its most audacious intuitions—the universal destination of data, the disarmament of AI, the new digital slaveries, the technological fast—await the testing ground of history. Leo XIV has chosen an approach that is neither apocalyptic nor enthusiastic: he has chosen to think. In a world that lives on instant and polarized reactions, this may be the most radical form of resistance.
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