The Purpose of the Document
Issued on 15 May 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Magnifica Humanitas is Leo XIV’s encyclical on “safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence.” Its purpose is not to regulate a technology but to defend an anthropology. Leo frames the present “change of era” as a single decision posed to humanity: build a new Tower of Babel, a project of self-affirmation, uniformity, and efficiency conceived “without reference to God” (§7), or rebuild the walls of Jerusalem with Nehemiah, through shared responsibility, with God at the center (§8). AI is treated not as one more topic for ethical management but as a force that “challenges the categories of Social Doctrine from within” (§17). The document, therefore, reads the digital revolution through the inherited principles of Catholic social teaching, namely dignity, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice, and asks of every innovation the question Leo borrows from John Paul II: does it make human life “more human” and “more worthy of man” (§129)?
The Common Thread
The thread running through all five chapters is the primacy and irreducibility of the human person against every logic of optimization. Leo’s recurring claim is that dignity is ontological; it “is neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified” (§53), and the gravest temptation of the age is the “particularly insidious” ideology “that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth” by efficiency or output (§51). This is the spine of the encyclical. The technocratic paradigm (Chapter Three) reduces persons to “cogs in a system” of ever-greater efficiency (§92); transhumanism and posthumanism (§§115–117) promise to surpass the human limit rather than mature through it; and the authentic “more than human,” Leo insists, comes not from technological self-sufficiency but from grace, since “we become fully human when we become more than human” by letting God draw us beyond ourselves (§128). The two-cities image from Augustine closes the loop: every choice about AI is finally a contest between “the love of God” and “the exclusive love of self” (§130). Babel and Jerusalem are simply that contest in architectural form.
What Is New
Several subjects here genuinely extend the tradition rather than repeat it. First, Leo names the migration of power from the State to private, transnational technological actors, a de facto “highest level” that monopolizes data and decision-making, and reapplies subsidiarity to it (§§71–72). Second, he expands the universal destination of goods to immaterial goods: patents, algorithms, platforms, infrastructure, and especially data, which “should not be treated as something to be sold off” but managed as a common good (§§67, 108). Third, he insists that AI cannot be morally neutral, because “every technical tool embodies choices and priorities” in what it measures, ignores, and optimizes (§104), so ethics must shape design, not merely use. Fourth, and most striking, he extends his own watchword to the machine: to “disarm” AI means freeing it from the “armed competition” of ever-larger models and monopolistic control, treating it as an environment, an ecological reality of our common home, not just a tool (§110). Finally, the candid admission that AI systems are “more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built'” and only partly understood even by their makers (§98) is a notably realistic concession for a magisterial text.
Critique: Chapter Four and the Missing Link of Labor
Chapter Four, “Truth, Work, Freedom,” is where the encyclical’s promise thins. Having diagnosed an “anti-human vision” that equates fullness with “having more” (§112), Leo arrives at work and retreats into the familiar grammar of Rerum Novarum and Laborem Exercens: the value of work, the dignity of the worker, the problem of unemployment, fair remuneration, “an economy that values dignity.” These are true and necessary, but they are the categories of 1891 and 1981. They presuppose the very thing the AI transition calls into question, namely that the normal arena of human work is paid employment inside industrial-capitalist relations of production. Leo defends the worker’s place within that system; he does not imagine what labor might be when that system no longer needs most human labor. This is the document’s central omission, and it is a theological one before it is an economic one.
The deeper failing is that Magnifica Humanitas never connects its own crisis of identity to the theological meaning of labor. It could have. In Genesis, the first description of human existence is vocational: man is placed in the garden “to till it and keep it,” revealing that work is not merely economic activity but a constitutive dimension of the imago Dei, the arena in which the person discovers his identity through stewardship, service, and self-gift. John Paul II made exactly this connection the foundation of his Catechesis on Human Love. Reflecting on the second creation account, he taught that “man can dominate the earth because he alone, and no other of the living beings, is capable of ’tilling it’ and transforming it according to his own needs,” and that “this outline is intrinsic to the meaning of the original solitude and belongs to that dimension of solitude through which man, from the beginning, is in the visible world as a body among bodies and discovers the meaning of his own corporality.”[^1] For John Paul II, tilling is not first an economic act but the very experience through which man “is distinguished from all the animalia… and through it he is a person.”[^1] Gaudium et spes, which Leo cites for the claim that man “finds himself” only through “sincere self-giving” (§48), locates that self-gift concretely in labor. Genesis frames work first as labor for God, service for which man was created in knowing, loving, and serving Him, not labor for self, and only derivatively labor for pay or for another. Leo invokes the self-gift but never routes it through work, leaving §48 and Chapter Four strangely disconnected.
That omission has consequences for the encyclical’s own argument. In an age of agentic AI, universal basic/high income, and the displacement of human work, the loss of labor threatens not only economic stability but the very arena in which identity, responsibility, and solidarity are formed. This is precisely why trans- and post-humanist ideologies, which Leo rightly fears in §§115–117, gain traction: they offer counterfeit forms of belonging to a humanity no longer grounded in the dignity of labor.
Leo treats the identity crisis and the labor crisis as separate problems in separate sections, when a Christian anthropology attentive to Scripture and the Council would read the erosion of work as an erosion of identity itself. Had he made that link explicit, Chapter Four could have offered something the wage-and-employment frame cannot: a vision of work that survives the end of paid labor, namely vocation, stewardship, care, worship, and self-gift as service to God, rather than a defense of jobs that the technology he describes may be rendering obsolete. Quo vadis, humanitas? would have been a far stronger document had it answered its own question with Genesis.
[^1]: John Paul II, General Audience of 24 October 1979, “Man’s Awareness of Being a Person,” Catechesis on Human Love (Theology of the Body). https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/audiences/1979/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_19791024.html
