Artificial intelligence is a new technological revolution that demands thoughtful governance.

It’s appropriate that Magnifica humanitas was signed 135 years after Rerum novarum—the encyclical signed by Pope Leo’s namesake that provides the foundation for Catholic social teaching. Magnifica humanitas is an encyclical dedicated to an ethical and spiritual reflection on the human person in the technological revolution of artificial intelligence (AI). 

Pope Leo understands the many advantages that AI could potentially generate for humanity; this is neither a defensive, negative document nor an anti-technology document. Rather, it celebrates the creativity and ingenuity of humanity but couples this with deep realism. This technology, like all technological innovations, must be governed, controlled, and supervised. We need regulations and legal protections to ensure that AI serves the dignity of all human beings, the common good, and environmental integrity rather than enhancing the hyper-agency of a tiny minority. We must work to ensure this technology does not add to existing levels of inequality or exclusion but can instead be a means to foster solidarity and fraternity. 

AI presents urgent social and environmental challenges that must be taken seriously. This new encyclical provides a creative, hopeful, and honest platform to consider these challenges, rooted in the Gospel call to care for the most vulnerable and to bring peace to our fractured world.

We must remain fully engaged in “the adventure of being human.”

Pope Leo invites us to be people of wonder—to be fully engaged in the adventure of being human.

With wonder in mind, Pope Leo asks us to rethink our role as teachers and educators, as leaders in educational institutions, so that we can provide an education that cultivates the talents of the whole person and helps grow imagination. The Pope also insists that an inescapable part of being human is embracing our vulnerability and suffering, enjoying deep friendships, falling in love, and discovering joy. These are the things that make us truly human.

The age of AI raises urgent questions about truth, education, and democracy.

In a world of “fake news,” we need to think afresh about how to protect human rights, especially what we might consider a “new generation” of rights. How do we protect mental privacy and cognitive liberty? Do we need to think more carefully about epistemic rights? Or how access to truthful information is critical for the common good and strong democracies?

Pope Leo makes it clear that:

Artificial intelligence must serve solidarity and peace—not deepen inequality, polarization, or violence.

Leo provides an ethical analysis of power. He calls for a robust critique about war and the ease with which it is accepted as a part of political strategy today.

Increasingly, public opinion is being shaped by polarizing, toxic media narratives that exacerbate local and global conflict and confrontation. This is also compounded by “a disconcerting loss of historical memory.”

The Holy Father also raises concerns about how our economies are increasingly linked to war and how economic interests become “an autonomous driving force behind military decisions” (193). He states that “no algorithm can make war morally acceptable. AI does not remove the intrinsic inhumanity of conflict” (198). The cruelty of war is a constant theme of the Holy Father’s work, and he reiterates this strongly here in this new encyclical. It provides a timely reminder of the connection between war, technology, and economics, suggesting we are more complicit in global injustice than we might think.

Catholic social tradition is an anchor and a compass.

For a document devoted to artificial intelligence, it is notable that technology is not mentioned until well over a third of the way into the text. Pope Leo first deliberatively reviews and centers the history and development of the Church’s social doctrine. He views this doctrine not as a relic of the past but as a “form of wisdom that is capable of guiding personal and societal lives today” (46). From a justice education perspective, this structural choice is a pedagogical lesson in and of itself. It suggests that students must first be rooted in a deep understanding of what it means to be human and what constitutes a flourishing world. Magnifica humanitas establishes Catholic social tradition as both an anchor and a compass for this work. 

Catholic social tradition principles are virtues to be developed.

The encyclical insists that solidarity and other principles of Catholic social tradition are virtues to be practiced rather than just good ideas to be studied and discussed. This assertion requires moving from the safety of theory toward direct, lived encounters with communities. Proximity with others transforms abstract principles into internal moral coherence. As Pope Leo notes, “the Church’s social teaching expresses the objective order of relationships among individuals, groups and peoples, pointing to an awareness of interdependence whereby the good of each person depends on the good of others” (75). Catholic social thought encourages the virtuous pursuit of being for others rather than seeking to be for ourselves. 

Universities play a significant role in character formation.

In the digital age, Pope Leo notes, knowledge is frequently fragmented into data points. This model presents a very real risk for universities. When education becomes a mere transfer of information rather than a pursuit of character formation, students lose the ability to see systemic injustice; they see only isolated incidents. Without developing qualities like moral imagination, practical wisdom, and the courage to act, Pope Leo warns, “it will be difficult for students to grasp reality as a whole and to find any purpose or direction in their lives” (146). Educators are therefore called to create environments where students move from a mindset of self-reliance to one that recognizes their radical interdependence and thereby develop the virtues that contribute to a flourishing world. 

Justice needs to be constructed.

The sheer frequency of the word “justice,” which appears 97 times throughout the document, establishes it as an ethical benchmark for the technological age. For Pope Leo, justice is not a theory to discuss; his metaphor of the “construction site” is a call to praxis. It serves as a reminder that students are not mere observers of history or passive consumers of technology; they are co-creators. The encyclical asserts that no one is without a “sphere of action.” Educators must enable students to develop a posture not of a passive recipient of information but of an active citizen in the world. Pope Leo calls on all people of good will to reject the idea that injustice is too big of a problem for a single person to address and to instead work unceasingly towards a just world. “Do you therefore wish to attain peace?” he asks. “Then practice justice! Let us never grow weary of seeking justice!” (215)

Magnifica humanitas can be read as a sequel to Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’.

For an encyclical that only makes vague gestures toward environmental issues, Magnifica humanitas can reasonably be read—somewhat surprisingly—as a direct follow-up to Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’, “On care for our common home.” Just as Francis freed the issue of climate change from conceptual strictures that represent it as primarily a technical challenge, Pope Leo liberates the issue of AI from conventional frameworks. The two encyclicals see “the technocratic paradigm” as both the primary problem and the most dazzling temptation. 

Leo argues that AI can “hasten the expansion of the technocratic paradigm,” by which he means “the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions,” thus “reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency” (92–93). Leo’s concern is to avoid reducing human beings to tools, even slaves. He warns that the technocratic paradigm “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision. In that vision, the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control” (112). While AI could be an aid to rebuilding a ruined Jerusalem—which in Hebrew means “village of peace”—its current owners, architects, and boosters are largely trapped in the technocratic project of designing Babel. 

Pope Leo presents digital worlds as environments.

A striking metaphor throughout Magnifica humanitas is that of the digital world as an environment or ecosystem. The metaphor derives from commonalities between the digital world and the natural world, as both are fundamentally defined by connectivity, forces, and systems, and both are now a kind of habitat within which we live and move and work. These commonalities ground Leo’s teaching about AI, applying principles from ecology and environmental ethics to AI. He writes that in the digital ecosystem, as in ecological systems, elevating any single dimension of the system to an absolute or expanding one entity at the expense of others is a recipe for disaster. The technocratic approach to AI does just this, elevating “intelligence” above the rest of what makes us human.

Just as an ecosystem’s “balance is disrupted when one species expands at the expense of others,” so too “intelligence, when absolutized, overshadows other essential dimensions of life, such as affection, the will, commitment and relationships” (113). Intelligence is a good part of what makes us human, but when it “becomes self-referential, its true purpose of serving life and the human person is lost.” Therefore, if the digital ecosystem is to serve human dignity, justice, and the common good, it will need to be humanized. And humanizing the digital ecosystem simultaneously means ecologizing it because the human person is fundamentally ecological.

Pope Leo sees St. Augustine’s two cities as two political ecologies.

As the first Augustinian pope, Leo interprets digital technologies with the aid of St. Augustine’s theory of two cities built on two loves—of self and of God. Leo demonstrates how these two cities not only cut through every country, culture, city, and human heart but are also associated with two architectural theories, design principles, power grids, types of building materials, community relations frameworks, supply chains, and ultimately logics of salvation. The two cities thus become two political ecologies. Guidance for human societies can no longer be separated from our enmeshment in wider communities of creation. Justice in the soily city of God requires scrutinizing supply chains, data centers, environmental impacts, and mining sites that are often hidden by grandiose talk of the technocratic advances of AI.

Leo wants us to examine the chain of economic activity and seek social and environmental justice along the whole life cycle of transnational material flows. The technocratic architects of AI want us to see only its shiny, bedazzling algorithms, robots, profit margins, and speed. But communion-oriented architects of AI will refuse to sacrifice human dignity and our common home for shiny objects. They are not duped by the nothing-to-see-here sign over the child mineworker or pregnant mother working with toxic substances. Rather, they show that those whom the AI technocrats make invisible are the very ones who matter most in our deliberations about an AI architecture that serves the common good and our common home. 

Pope Leo believes that truth still matters.

Pope Leo argues that “truth is a common good and not the property of those with power” and that now is the time to rediscover truth as a common good by promoting an “ecology of communication” (137). Because theologies, values, norms, and visions of the future get baked into technologies by those who design them, Leo writes that technologies are never neutral and that “every technology shapes those who use it” (140). He paints a picture of a new form of technocratic totalitarianism. In contrast, he describes democracy as a means of contributing to the common good by combining the pursuit of truth with a commitment to individual and shared good (134). In the age of AI, political, economic, and environmental democracies will depend on a technological democracy that resists totalitarian enclosure and commodification of truth and language. 

Leo invites us to root technological democracy in an ecology of communication in which public policy, cultural institutions, journalists, universities, and families link up as guardians of deliberation and discernment, passionately committed to giving a truthful account of what’s happening that can inform wise judgments about what’s to be done. Among the ways AI shapes the imagination is by reducing the material world to a storehouse of natural and human resources. But Leo knows that it is so much richer than that. Life is beautiful. Truth is an anchor. Love is the measure. Matter is so meaningful. And “goodness grows silently from the earth” (210). The challenge before us is to use our agency, institutions, and imagination to make AI communicate this.

Pope Leo reaffirms the dignity of work and workers.

The first American pontiff borrows two images of city-building from the Bible to offer contrasting visions for our global future: either we will blindly and foolishly follow the doomed example of Tower of Babel, embracing selfishness, power, and a disregard for diversity, or we will emulate Nehemiah’s rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem by centering human dignity, dialogue, and a reverence for relationships—with God, each other, and our common home. Throughout the encyclical, the pope’s repeated deployment of labor metaphors is fitting, because questions of work—its availability, its remuneration, indeed its very dignity—are central to his consideration of the promises and pitfalls of technology’s rapid advancement in our era. In confronting AI and its potential impact, Magnifica humanitas reaffirms the Church’s historic and ongoing commitment to the dignity of work and those who perform it, but it also calls for new initiatives to be undertaken by the builders of the future. 

Pope Leo views dignified work as central to a just society.

In Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo offers a thorough introduction to the history of Catholic social thought and foregrounds the importance of dignified work to the Church’s vision of a just society. He reiterates the timeless tenets that govern the Church’s relationship to the social realm: the equal dignity of every individual, the necessity and desirability of authentic relationships to all human experiences, and a concern for the common good and care of our common home—as well as the the practices of solidarity, subsidiarity, and the preferential option for the poor and the vulnerable to realize those principles. But he goes further, echoing John Paul II in his emphasis on the centrality of work as “the essential key” for the creation of a just society, “since it is through their work that individuals develop many dimensions of their existence” (148). In our current moment, where employer introduction of AI portends to pair mass unemployment with degradation of the jobs remaining, it’s refreshing to see the pope so firmly articulate “an economy that values dignity” while rejecting what he calls “the idolatry of profit” (157). “Work is not simply an instrument,” Pope Leo stresses. “It expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment” (10).

Pope Leo reaffirms the Church’s support for organized labor.

While reinforcing the Church’s historic commitment to the dignity of labor as the centerpiece of a just social order, the Pope also reaffirms the role of workers as agents in its realization. He reminds readers that “the Church has consistently supported” organized labor since Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum in 1891, calling it “an essential safeguard for civil equilibrium and for protecting the common good.” Moreover, he recognizes the historic importance of labor “associations, trade unions, cooperatives and welfare organizations” who have “contributed decisively to improving labor legislation, protecting the most vulnerable and promoting more humane conditions” (32). Yet even as Magnifica humanitas repeatedly calls for widespread worker participation in the economic decision-making that will govern the introduction and use of technology (and AI in particular), unions merit only three brief mentions throughout the document, the final time an appeal to today’s unions “to be open to new types of employment and the corresponding needs of workers, in order to represent and defend them,” as well as to collaborate with other economic stakeholders to make “bold decisions” that prioritize human dignity and the common good over efficiency and private profit (155). The Pope’s advisors should connect him with the new generation of worker activists worldwide—from Starbucks baristas in the USA to Firestone rubber workers in Liberia to tech workers in South Korea—who are already undertaking this mission. 

Pope Leo offers “bold decisions” for building toward a just future.

Magnifica humanitas is itself full of “bold decisions” from our current pope: to reaffirm the core principles of the Catholic social tradition, to reenvision an economic order that rests on a foundation of human dignity, to require collective discernment and democratic decision-making in the deployment of rapidly advancing technology, and to recenter authentic and meaningful work in all of our lives. As Pope Leo concludes,

I’m with Pope Leo. Let’s get our hands dirty.

Magnifica humanitas offers a blueprint for the institute’s commitments to community-building and local partnerships.

While “field hospital” served as Pope Francis’s enduring metaphor for the Church in the world throughout his pontifical reign, perhaps “construction site” will prove to be a lasting symbol of Pope Leo’s leadership of the faithful and contribution to Catholic social tradition. Both images speak to the necessity of encounter and being unafraid to get one’s hands dirty, though while a field hospital performs triage and responds to immediate needs, a construction site engages in planning and aims to build lasting structures. With Magnifica humanitas addressing the digital systems and networks of AI, this construction site metaphor speaks to the creation of frameworks and just structures and thereby serves as an instructive guide for the commitments of the Institute for Social Concerns to community-building and local partnerships. 

Community partnerships must be built on trust.

This past academic year, the institute launched its South Bend Citizens Collaboratory, an approach to community partnerships that resonates deeply with Pope Leo’s “construction site” metaphor and guiding tenets of Magnifica humanitas. The how of the institute’s work is no less important than the what, and Pope Leo’s attention to “initiating good processes and enabling them to mature” speaks beautifully to the Collaboratory’s commitment to grounding its work in the cultivation of relationships over time (25). The work in community is slow-moving at its best and can only grow if rooted in trust. Such trust can neither be forced nor expedited. Leo offers an invitation to this approach while issuing a warning to the drivers of AI that place product and results over people and processes. “When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value,” states Leo, “human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion” (112).

Trust is built through attentiveness and curiosity.

How does one build and maintain this trust that serves as the foundation of relationships and therefore community partnerships? Leo offers a posture of attentiveness and curiosity that allows for each of us workers at the construction site to “engage in cooperative relationships and, through listening and dialogue, learn to build together something that no one could achieve alone” (148). Listening is the first act of the Collaboratory, seeking the perspective of community members and learning of the histories of neighborhoods in South Bend. Through stories and storytelling, visibility and voice lead to a deeper understanding of human lives situated in their particular contexts. Challenges identified and opportunities imagined arise in this collective discernment process, shaped by experience and wisdom that keeps human dignity at the center. This trust-building safeguards against decisions made according to mass appeal, by dominant forces, or for immediate results. As Leo notes, “a sincere and persevering dialogue always opens up the possibility of an honorable solution” (219). 

The common good is achieved when partnerships are guided by the principle of subsidiarity.

An essential principle of Catholic social tradition guiding the work of this “construction site” is that of subsidiarity. In critiquing the digital revolution, Leo states, “The principle of subsidiarity requires that such processes not be imposed from above in an opaque and unilateral manner, but instead be directed toward the common good with transparency, accountability and meaningful forms of participation” (71). These meaningful forms of participation do not come at the end of the process but are central to the driving of the process. Subsidiarity infuses the work of the Collaboratory as the partnerships formed rely on the expertise of community members, for they are the ones closest to the challenges of our city and therefore are best positioned to inform the solutions. “No one is without responsibility,” states Leo. “We all have our areas for action” (212). We can only flourish as a community if each of us recognize ourselves as participants and are equipped with the means to meaningfully contribute and complement one another at our respective construction sites—in neighborhoods, networks and larger social structures. The principles and arguments Leo lays out for building a responsible AI are, at its heart, a celebration of what makes humanity truly magnificent. We have the opportunity to carry out this vision in continuing to cultivate partnerships wherein shared flourishing is attained because it is central to the process.