Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Magnifica Humanitas Encyclical

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Preliminary remarks on the genre and on the author

The literary genre of the encyclical has transformed over time. Beginning with the first “littera encyclica” in the modern sense — Benedict XIV’s Ubi primum, December 3, 1740 —, this type of act addressed to the episcopate and to all the faithful has been the instrument through which the papacy has “fed” an instruction distinct from those experienced hitherto. This form of instruction and legislation would replace the “decretals,” by which questions of discipline, including theological matters, were treated and became, in effect, the corpus of the magisterium and the general norm for the Church; and the same would hold for the “bulls” promulgated to settle doctrinal questions, designate error, and enforce repression, secular as well as ecclesiastical.

The Denzinger theology

The encyclical, in fact, would be characterized by an accumulation of functions and ambitions, in the hierarchical position of magisterium that could not draw on the charisma of infallibility or the dignity of conciliar acts, but which sought to make its authority felt over a long period, during which it formed, coerced, inspired, oriented, sanctioned, recognized, and disavowed.

Yves Congar, long before the question became current, had reconstructed the weight of these documents in forming an ideological construction (“the ordinary magisterium”) and the ecclesiological function exercised by this category, within which statements often lay that could not all be reconciled with each other. They nevertheless reserved to the Pope’s successor an exclusive function that would only fall away in 2013, four dozen years after Vatican II, when the apostolic exhortation Evangelii gaudium (n. 32) recognized to the episcopates a certain “doctrinal authority” and showed what he meant by that by citing the positions of episcopal conferences in his pontifical acts and especially in his encyclicals.

This parabolic trajectory of the encyclical genre was accompanied by a double, paradoxical outcome. On the one hand, a modern ambition of durability, solid or even rigid readability. On the other hand, a return to the era of the decretals of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which only gained force when they began to be taught at the University of Bologna with a smaller ambition to be recognized in the moment and for the moment.

Starting around 1854, indeed, the highest act of reception to which an encyclical could aspire—and did aspire—was to be literally chopped into pieces (or, if you prefer, into pieces of evidence) and to see its statements enter, paragraph by paragraph, into a very famous private scholarly work: the Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum invented by Heinrich J. Denzinger (1819-1883). Faced with theories about authority and the principle of authority, a papal formula, a theological thought, a disciplinary category, a doctrinal thesis became auctoritas when it emancipated itself from its emitter and entered “the Denzinger.” This hugely successful vade-mecum, in its countless re-editions (later ensured by Fr. Alfons Schönmetzer SJ, hence the DS sigle, and most recently by Peter Hünermann, hence the DSH sigle), gathered two types of teaching. On one side, it selected and published doctrinal propositions belonging to the extraordinary defini­tory magisterium of the Church, i.e., truths to which faith and Catholic belief must be adhered. On the other, and without distinction, it placed the ordinary magisterium, which, as nineteenth-century manuals said, required “only” the religious respect of the understanding and the will.

Thus, in the nineteenth and pre-conciliar twentieth century, this demand led to thinking and writing encyclicals as doctrinal acts, completed, engaged, homogeneous, calibrated, potentially immovable: as much when they were to strike down philosophers or theologians who were condemned, as when they were to establish a chain of transmission of authentic teachings whose manuals and the Denzinger had marked out the steps.

It is therefore not the thickening or lengthening of these documents that changed their historical meaning, but the change in the relations between the papacy and the episcopate, between the Church and the Churches, between the Church and society: an evolution that coincided with the post-conciliar era and postmodernity, and that required and imposed a metamorphosis of these documents, moved from statements to performative acts: it is no longer simply a matter of saying who “teaches,” but of gestures that make speech a corollary of the attitude that marks the contours of the discourse.

The watershed line was the encyclical Humanae vitae, published July 25, 1968, by which Paul VI rejected the proposal made by a commission (whose members had all been chosen by him) to declare hormonally induced contraception morally licit and to allow Catholic couples to regulate the size of their families with “the” pill. The result was that this encyclical became precisely one that knew the massive non-application of papae dictatum of the Gregorian era: to the point of making it seem that the ancient rule of the Digest (D. 1,3,32,1: “leges non solum suffragio legislatoris, sed etiam tacito consensu omnium per desuetudinem abrogentur” — “laws are abrogated not only by the will of the legislator but also by the tacit unanimous consent when they are not observed”) had found an emblematic illustration that year. This stance seemed to have led to the suicide of the “encyclical genre,” to such an extent that Paul VI would never again write an encyclical until his death ten years and eleven days later. And when the renewed encyclicals of John Paul II (14), then those of Benedict XVI (3) and Francis (4) arrived, they were texts very different from those of the past. They were long essays, often long anthologies of carefully segmented portions pasted together with the intention other than the semi-eternal past: the aim was to indicate a theme to which the Pope gave priority and form, rather than to bind the clergy or the faithful to predetermined behaviors. And it is precisely for this reason that encyclicals began to shift from the field of durable goods to that of consumer goods: their content appeared perishable, while the force of papal gestures was etched in memory.

In effect, under John Paul II, no encyclical suffered a collapse comparable to Humanae Vitae; but none went beyond the dimension of gesture, with an internal and external function. Internally, they were long or very long encyclicals, obtained by juxtaposing sections that fulfilled the Curia of the Sovereign Pontiff’s ambition to reveal the function exercised, with increasing degrees of indiscretion (the apex was reached by an economist who, on the day Benedict XVI’s encyclical was published, boasted on RAI television that he had written a part of it). Externally, the encyclical designated a problem, not to the editors of the new Denzingers, but to public opinion, and drew attention to it—almost consciously aware that with every encyclical there would be a consensus, without prejudging the future of its linguistic, theological, or doctrinal choices.

That is so true that when an exception occurs of rare solemnity, it goes unnoticed: for indeed in an encyclical (Evangelium vitae) the papacy for the first and only time uses the charism of infallibility ratified at Vatican I; and it does so not for a lengthy portion of text, but for three words — the definition of induced abortion as a “grave moral disorder” — which do not change a position in the Church’s public discourse that had steadily hardened, not only towards abortion but especially towards the legislation that had initially decriminalized it and then treated it as a woman’s right.

This tendency to make the encyclical a gesture (and gestures a magisterium) remained intact under two very different popes, Benedict XVI and Francis, whose actions and documents, accompanied at their release by marks of deep admiration, imprint memory by a fragment, an expression, sometimes even just a title (“Fratelli tutti”) or a vague reference (“Laudato si’” “the green encyclical”) which becomes a brand in which a multi‑hand editorial effort is summarized and consumed.

The Abrogation of Haste

We do not know if Bob Prevost—who became a priest when Wojtyla was reigning for four years—ever reflected on some of these historical legacies before becoming bishop of Chiclayo, then Rome.

What is evident to anyone who observed how he began a potentially long pontificate is that the cardinals did not choose someone who “does” things differently from his predecessor, but who “is” a different figure, while registering in a substantial prolongation of the theological partition of Pope Bergoglio. The factors that should join the conclave’s consensus thus became a mandate to which the elected adhered with meticulousness—like in other moments of recent papal history.

And one can see this when Leo X showed no haste to sign his first encyclical. We do not know if this is because he regarded the rapid eclipse that had become characteristic of the encyclical genre as a done deal, or because he wanted to meditate on its contents. It is, however, a fact that, in the last century and a half of papal history, from one Leo to the next, things have changed: Pope Pius IX (Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV would sign their first encyclical in 60, 61 and 59 days respectively). Francis took 108 days, John Paul II 139. It took 232 days for Pius XII, 244 for John XXIII, 250 for Benedict XVI; the only one to take more than a year was Paul VI (412 days). Thus, with its 372 days of incubation, Leo XIII nearly held the record, achieved during the sessions of an ecumenical council…

In the 53 weeks between his election and his first encyclical, the pope of the Americas did not rush for anything. He did not react to those who argued that choosing the name Leo was a homage to “the Pope of Rerum novarum,” a question on which he has provided no indication—indeed, no one can ask him.

Again, Prevost wanted to restore the tradition that, over eleven centuries, has seen Rome’s bishops take as their regnal name one of their predecessors—an old practice interrupted by Francis, who chose the name of a very important saint, but not of another Pontiff. Going in reverse, not wanting to be either a Benedict, or a John or Paul, nor a John Paul, nor a Pius, he arrived at Leo.

The Pecci pontificate, in any case, was a figure toward which the religious family in which Father Prevost grew up felt grateful, because he had stopped the process of consumption that, after six hundred years, was eroding the Augustinians. These brothers, indeed, have no direct lineage with the holy of Hippo, whom they read rather than descend from. They were born only in 1244 when Innocent IV compelled eremites of central Italy to live in convents under a famous rule; and, after the fame gained by one of theirs—Brother Martin Luther—they maintained a muted profile that had led them into a deep crisis, until Leo XIII promoted for them a new spring, both through beatifications and canonizations (Alonso de Orozco, Clare of Montefalco, Rita of Cascia) and by entrusting to P. Antonio Pacifico Neno, a sui generis actor in Pecci’s anti-American policy.

The Rerumnovarumiste Confusion

Leo XIII—a persistent rumor stated—would have sought partnership with Leo XIII himself, because he too wanted to tackle “new things”: a rerumnovarumiste emphasis, haunted by two historical ambiguities.

The first misunderstanding, based on its incipit, was that the most famous of the 86 encyclicals of Pope Pecci showed sympathy for something “new” in the making in history: in reality, it was quite the opposite, and it is precisely the exordium of the 1891 document that declared distrust of the “rerum novarum semel excitata cupidine” (“the thirst for innovations long since aroused by greed”) with which late nineteenth‑century global‑colonial societies were inflamed.

The second misunderstanding attributed to the 1891 encyclical the function of a conscious and opportune response to the “industrial revolution”: in fact, this episode—as designated, among others, by Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui (1837) and Friedrich Engels (1845)—had already been accomplished in two successive acts: first with the advent of steam engines, 125 years earlier; second with the rise of chemistry and electricity, for at least two decades.

Thus—in Don Luigi Sturzo’s respectful account, for instance—Rerum novarum served not by what it said but by what it indicated: the worker condition, emblem of the capital–labor conflict for more than a century, and, in the end, politics as the place where the distance between the world of thrones and that of altars has become insurmountable.

Written 21 years after the birth of the German Catholic party—the Zentrum—and 28 years before the birth of the Italian Popular Party, the encyclical of Pope Pecci faced head-on socialist theories, but did not define itself as a “social doctrine.” More than that, socially (it cited the word only as an adjective: social discipline, social goods, social laws—each once). It attacked both the liberal market culture and class struggle, proposing an interclassist vision of economic problems from which political problems “flowed” (a rationibus politicis in oeconomicarum cognatum genus aliquando defluerent). It opened the door to Catholic interest in the community of destinies of states, which would form not on the sacred pen of the Roman Pontiff, but in thought and social dynamics.

In the wake of canonization

The prudent openings of this encyclical would find numerous applications, but also encounter problems precisely because it had not legitimized the consequences of what it admitted. Thus, for example, when Don Romolo Murri imagined that this document called for organizing “Christian-Democratic blocs” and presented himself in the Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy, he was excommunicated. And when, in 1919, Don Sturzo founded the Popular Party, the war had already buried Rerum novarum and forgotten that mira vis (RN 15: “powerful force”) that the encyclical called to manifest.

It took decades—four, to be precise—for another pope, Pius XI, to do what had never been done: an encyclical that celebrates the anniversary of another. It was Pius XI who invented and solemnized Rerum novarum in 1931 with Quadragesimo anno: that is, after the Wall Street crash, and while the crisis of relations between the Church and fascism was beginning to manifest. Pope Pius XI’s institutional world and its Secretary of State Pacelli saw the contradiction between the historical need to resolve the Roman question—now reduced to a fossil the liberal regime had not known how to settle—and Mussolini’s propaganda on a Conciliazione that “even Sturzo would have signed!” (De Gasperi). Leo XIII’s third way and his attempt to equip Catholics with an ideological alternative to both socialism and liberalism thus gained a new eloquence: he carried a culture of a project embryonically anti-fascist (except on corporatism), and all this poured into an encyclical shaped for the fortieth anniversary of the Leonine encyclical—hence Quadragesimo anno. Pope Pius XI’s context presented an Europe in which Keynes had seen a dramatic future, while the Pope saw only the present, offering in some points a new vocabulary: diagnosing a capitalism under which “tota oeconomia horrendum in modum dura, immitis, atrox est facta”; asserting the double character of private property; formalizing the principle of subsidiarity; rejecting both socialism and liberalism.

Rerum novarum served not by what it said but by what it indicated.

Alberto Melloni

Pie XI, contrary to what is often said, called what he proposed a portion of the Christian social doctrine: a bold designation, because it stood in opposition to the “doctrine of socialism” that fascism claimed to possess.

Evidence of this is that in 1932, the 14th volume of the Enciclopedia italiana published a famous entry “fascism,” signed by the Duce with the collaboration of Arturo Marpicati, Gioacchino Volpe and Giovanni Gentile himself, whose second part outlined “La doctrine politique et sociale du fascisme” and largely written by Benito Mussolini. This “doctrine of socialism” of the regime rejected either Marxism or liberalism and proposed a third “fascist” way (establishing once and for all that anyone who declares themselves neither right nor left is indeed right-wing.).

This conceptual architecture crystallized by Treccani, however, prevented the papacy from defining its own effort in those terms: and the “doctrine sociale” (now without the “chrétienne”) would be the definition of the magisterial chain from Rerum novarum to Quadragesimo anno, used by Pius XII. The Pope Pacelli, unlike his predecessor and successors, would not devote to theLeonine “commemorative encyclical” the way of times 1941 or 1951. But in his Pentecost radio-message of June 1, 1941, he recalled and commented the encyclical, “a fertile sprout, from which grew a Catholic social doctrine that offered the Church’s sons, both priests and laypeople, arrangements and means for a socially fruitful reconstruction”.

The “commemorative” encyclical would return as a genre for the 70th anniversary: this would be Mater et magistra by John XXIII, which nevertheless opens in 1963, with his last encyclical, the cycle of a doctrine of peace. Paul VI would also do something similar: after Populorum progressio of 1967, which continues an inquiry into the conditions of peace, he published in 1971 Octogesima adveniens. Thus continues a tradition to be followed by John Paul II with Laborem exercens in 1981 and Centesimus annus in 1991. With the 21st century, it seemed that this metric of Rerum novarum had been revisited, freeing popes from the anniversary metric (Caritas in veritate is 2009 and closes a trilogy; Laudato si’ is 2015, Fratelli tutti 2020).

Seeds and fields

Up to Leo XIII, precisely. For the 135th anniversary of the publication of the predecessor’s document, the Chicago-born pope resumed the cycle of anniversaries of Rerum novarum, without having a solemn one at hand. And he wanted to sign the encyclical Magnifica humanitas on May 15, as Pope Pecci did—the first time outside the canonical decades used by Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II.

As was both evident and predictable, the general rapture around the encyclical soon waned. The encyclical, after touring the world, began, precisely for the reasons set out so far, to give way to an oblivion that could either doom it to share the fate of others or save it (I will return to this at the end) — but not because of the “relevance” of its themes, for relevance ages quickly. Nothing, moreover, suggests Leo XIV began his ministry with a “doctrine social” act to align with four of his seven predecessors or to benefit from the aura of their consensus.

The pope “born in the USA,” indeed, does not seem to be seeking a fertile ground for his own seeds or for a Catholic narrative: but, if one can say, he aims to be—he and the Church of Rome—a fertile ground for seeds of justice seeking places of development, offering what the Catholic family sometimes wants to propose: a large space, a field hospital, disarmed, contemplative. For it is not necessary to look out the windows of the Apostolic Palace to see that, in the post-global world — scourged by the plague of war, exhausted by neocolonial exploitation, battered by a propaganda of fear, worn down by what sociologists call “superdiversity”—, one only needs eyes and ears to see and hear broad swaths of humanity seeking a more unitary understanding of reality, a global vision, a set of criteria deriving from essential principles rather than from values that rise and fall frenetically on political convenience, or worse.

These criteria may also be read as indications of a reticent morality (present in the encyclical in the two occurrences of the “unfortunately” that the Holy See likes not to hear), but also as indications that arise from a radical and universal question (as Romano Prodi says) and which, therefore, imposes a universal and radical response.

A doctrinal vision

To give voice and fecundity to a fundamental social and political need that traverses, unsatisfied and therefore famished, the life of the world: does it have a name? In itself, a name exists, or at least once did.

If one wanted to employ the ancient language of Count Destutt de Tracy, one would call it the “science of ideas” and, consequently, as he wrote in 1796, “ideology.” But this term has been rendered difficult by Karl Marx’s critique of ideology as metaphysical thought and as an expression of the autonomous world of commodities in capitalist society. And to use it non-naïvely, one would need to engage with Antonio Gramsci and ideologies as cement for social blocs (see, in this regard, Marie Lucas, “Religion and Heresy in Gramsci”); then trace back to Mannheim and that floating intellectual layer (freischwebende) able to provide relative syntheses of all truth elements present in the different spiritual and political positions of an era; and further to Horkheimer (“The term ‘ideology’ should be reserved, as opposed to ‘truth,’ for knowledge that is not conscious of its own dependence but can be historically penetrated, the opinion now debased to the rank of appearance in relation to more advanced knowledge”). One would also discuss its lexical plausibility by debating with the theorists of its end (David Riesman or Helmut Schelsky). That is not all: for an encyclical, one would discuss Marie-Dominique Chenu’s 1977 thesis, according to which the “social doctrine” was an ideology competing with other ideologies, socialist and liberal, that seemed to march, invincibly, toward complete antagonism.

Perhaps the term ideology is neither recoverable nor redefinable; some alternatives are excessively ambiguous (the papacy tried “integral human development,” with a Maritain-inflected flavor; Cardinal Zuppi, the title Fratelli tutti as a social program). But the substance to which it is difficult to give a name, die Sache (the thing), is clear: there exist constructs of thought that do not solve a problem one by one by giving each segment of questions a segment of answers, but confront them as a whole and offer broader or global interpretive frames. A Weltanschauung that does not answer, I repeat, to a scale of values (on which Carl Schmitt wrote a memorable essay), but applies a device of principles (that was the title of La Pira’s journal, somewhat forgotten).

Leo XIV had his first encyclical enter the scene with this rhythm of non-urgency, which, as I noted and as everyone knows, marks the papal Prevost’s way of being and governing, and distinguishes him from the taste of “surprise” that John Paul II and Francis had, in different ways, and from the old trick of the dilata (or the more prosaic “we’ll see”) by which the Roman curia has learned for centuries to “stifle and lull” by postponement, deferment, deliberate neglect.

The Pace of the Encyclical

Leo XIV simply waited, then, on May 15, 2026, he signed Magnifica humanitas.

He waited for symbol decipherers and geopo­litical mapmakers in the nutty way to theorize the conclave’s unfolding, rumor mongers to discover how it really happened (rumors are apparently agreed on one point: Father Prevost was elected), and for chancelleries to remember that there was not much to expect or fear from the Pope, his preaching essentially predictable. He waited without anxiety, because those are sterilized by his life as a brother and as a man who knows that—if no technocrat cuts the engines of the plane mid-flight and if God grants him life and will—he will reign until the middle of the century: he has no reason to unsettle those who think they understand him, nor to orient the disoriented: he does.

And even if many said he would issue an encyclical on AI, he produced an encyclical (apparently) on AI: confirming a desire to be predictable, which constitutes the main change from his predecessor. And if the title Magnifica humanitas filtered through, it did not cause any harm, but entered a genuine teaser campaign, with its hype.

Leo “the times of cholera”

To qualify the first encyclical of Leo XIV not on the level of marketing, but on the level of the history of doctrines, is not as simple as it seems. Magnifica humanitas, indeed, though placed at the beginning of the pontificate, in a position where one expects a “programmatic” act, does not seem to intentionally have that bearing. In any case, it has nothing to do with the “first encyclical” of Pius XI, Pius XII, Paul VI or John Paul II, or even with the real first act of Francis published by resorting to the genre of the apostolic exhortation, in homage to Pope Montini.

But, in saying this, one should emphasize “apparently” and “intentionally.”

The Trump Effect

Because, in reality, and beyond any author’s intention, Magnifica humanitas was placed at the center of public debate by an external and unforeseen event: Donald Trump’s decision to insult the first American pope with crude and disorderly expressions, ipso facto placing the newly elected pope on an unusually high pedestal, even for a pope.

Trump was indeed the third “sovereign” (autocrat?) to weigh on the course of a conclave between the 20th and 21st centuries: the first was the Austrian emperor in 1903, who vetoed Cardinal Rampolla and, by excluding the great diplomat, favored the election of Pope Sarto, whose personal sanctity and obsession with infiltrating dangerous “modernists” in the Church marked the first half of the century; the second was Leonid Brezhnev, who, by letting the Warsaw Pact subjects depart, allowed the election of Karol Wojtyła—who did not want to see the end of communism and did not claim merits (it was obvious and necessary for him because of the anthropological error that inhabited atheistic Bolshevism), but had a decisive function in preventing the twilight of the socialist empire from becoming a bloodbath we saw, on a small scale, in the disintegration of the Yugoslav, etc. The third was Trump, and what Trump represents.

The vice president that Peter Thiel gave him—J.D. Vance—actually became the protagonist of a first approach to the papacy in the very last hours of Francis’s life. A visit with a “neo-Carolingian” content: offering Rome a recognition in exchange for certification of the translatio of Old Nice Europe toward the America Great Again, of a role different from the purely patronal role exercised in the previous century. Then there was the president himself, who attended Francis’s funeral with a certain ceremonial and verbal arrogance: which, however, guaranteed to all that, on a man like Prevost, American from Michigan and Peruvian, the belligerent occupant of the White House would have no leverage. And thus the informal rule emerged that, after World War II, a cardinal from the United States could never be a plausible candidate.

If, ex parte papæ, the question was resolved this way, on the American president’s side Prevost’s election had consequences: because this new Carolingian pact sketched by Vance changed its sign. The emergence, alongside Vance, of two other Catholics with different profiles—Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio—among possible Republican candidates showed that the Evangelical Protestant backbone of the Maga movement could be challenged: rather than absorbing Catholicism into a Catholic‑evangelical dough shaped by white‑supremacist fundamentalism, it could be replaced, with catastrophic consequences for the flock of televangelists who have guided, motivated, and protected Trumpism until now. They therefore demanded—or obtained, without even asking—a distance from the President, which manifested in many ways, including a series of insulting text and visual messages directed at the reigning pope.

In this way, however, a president who feels chosen by God and whom his vestals—e.g., Paula White—celebrate as such gave the Roman pope the occasion to say very simple things, but which made Prevost the anti-Trump and Trump the anti-pope.

A clash that could not possibly affect the encyclical’s content. Behind it lie months of office work, theologians, dicasteries that did not take into account the immediate conjuncture but were charged with a meaning they already had and which risked going unnoticed: because if the Trump administration cannot bomb the pope as it did with other political‑religious leaders, nor abduct him as it did with other heads of state, then the Pope becomes the “other voice,” which is strong not because it has divisions (as Stalin’s sarcasm wanted) but because it creates unity; and what he says carries a weight and an objective value.

Thus the encyclical has taken on a function whose echo it has exalted, but which has diverted attention from its specific contributions, from the positions it takes, from the problems it faces with a particular approach compared to its predecessors.

To avoid remaining victims of the noise that made the encyclical’s release so thunderous and which will fade away in a few months, I would like to attempt, for those who have already studied it, a few reading keys: i) I will describe in a very analytical way the external characteristics of Magnifica humanitas; ii) I would offer a catalog of its tensions and, more briefly, iii) its least anticipated original features: a careful and slow course, at the end of which I will attempt to draw some consequences or conclusions.

External characteristics of the encyclical

To begin, I would seek to situate the material characteristics of an encyclical that, even with this first series of notes, shows something of itself and of the way it was constructed, in a Bergoglian curia, for a pope different.

The measures

Let us start with measurements: Magnifica humanitas is a long encyclical. An introduction and five chapters: 245 paragraphs, 36,000 words (Rerum novarum had 42 paragraphs and 11,500 words), 224 notes (chapter II alone contains a third of them, chapter III less than a tenth).

The introduction weighs 7% of the length; the other chapters 15.7%, 18%, 15.6%, 19.9%, and the conclusion 7.8%. A first part (nn. 1-89: Introduction; Chapter I: A dynamic thought faithful to the Gospel; Chapter II: Foundations and principles of the Social Doctrine) is substantively a recap; the second part (nn. 90-228: Chapter III: Technique and mastery; Chapter IV: Preserving humanity in transformation; Chapter V: The culture of power and the civilization of love) takes positions on economic and technological problems through AI; the Conclusion has a spiritual tone and ends, as is customary, with the Mariological paragraph.

The auctoritates reflect the typical look of the early pontificate, when the minutanti responsible for footnote citations fill the reign’s magisterium with self-citations (“in my opinion, which I also share,” a former substitute used to describe this mala consuetudo), and when the ones handed over to the successor are cited in his speeches or writings, confirming the continuity of thought in the Word’s bearers. It is therefore natural and predictable that there are 42 citations of Pope Francis, 29 of John Paul II, 14 of Paul VI, 12 of Benedict XVI, 7 of Leo XIII himself, 4 of Pius XI, 3 of Pius XII, 2 of John XXIII and of Leo XIII; Vatican II is cited 9 times, Augustine 4, Thomas 1.

The markers are very conspicuous: human occurs 310 times, the anthropological barycenter of the text; the hapax (unlemmatized) are 3188, in the average of Italian journalistic prose.

The background

Magnifica humanitas, however, has behind it something original: three texts with varying degrees of authority and formality, but all coming from the Vatican’s documentary workshop and all concerned with AI.

The first is Francis’s Message for the LVIIth World Peace Day, “Artificial Intelligence and Peace” (dated December 8, 2023, for January 1, 2024); the second, a Note from the dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith entitled Antiqua et nova. Note on the relations between artificial intelligence and human intelligence, dated January 28, 2025; and, lastly, a document by the International Theological Commission titled Quo vadis, humanitas? Think­ing about the Christian anthropology in light of some scenarios for the future of humanity, published March 4, 2026.

A president who feels chosen by God and whom his vestals celebrate as such gave the Pope of Rome the opportunity to say things very simple, but which made Prevost the anti-Trump and Trump the anti-pope.

Alberto Melloni

Three texts which, of course, claim their perfect harmony and filiation, including hierarchical (the Message is signed by Francis, Antiqua et nova was approved ex audientia SS.mi i.e., with a specific permission; Quo vadis, humanitas? is an act of the Commission but its publication is authorized by the head of the dicastery, after approval by the new pope), but which express in reality positions that contrast with one another: a contrast that reveals how the discussion around the papal throne evolved between the end of the Bergoglian era and the beginning of Prevost’s ministry. I limit myself to a few examples.

The Francis Message moves within a purely moral frame: man is made in the image of God by his intellect, and the technique, a fruit of the Creator’s gift, must be used for fraternity and peace. The dominant category is ethical responsibility. Antiqua et nova, by contrast, poses a chain of distinctions (ratio and intellectus; person and function; soul and body; intellect and conscience; rationality and freedom; knowledge and wisdom), marking a shift of the morality’s barycenter toward metaphysics.

Antiqua et nova refers, in its note 7, to the refusal of the analogy man–machine: “The terms used in this document to describe the results or procedures of AI are used figuratively to explain its actions and do not intend to attribute to it human qualities” (Antiqua et nova, note 7) , and condemns the fact that “this distinction is often obscured by the language used by practitioners, who tend to anthropomorphize AI and thus blur the line between what is human and what is artificial” (Antiqua et nova, n. 59). Quo vadis, humanitas attributes aims and dangers to agentive systems: “Thus AI could decide, in fact, what it is permissible to know, relegating other questions to the subjective domain or to matters of taste” (Quo vadis, humanitas?, n. 46, and cf. n. 38) .

The distance is radical: the Bergoglian era’s frame is anthropological (truth crisis in the public forum, nature of intelligence: Antiqua et nova, nn. 3, 10-12); Leo’s era is socio‑economic (social doctrine, work, in the genealogy of Rerum novarum). From this, where Antiqua et nova stresses the instrumental register (“it must be considered for what it is: a tool and not a person,” Antiqua et nova, n. 59; but also: “AI should be used only as a supplementary tool to human intelligence and should not replace its richness,” n. 112; and n. 48: “it must be guided by human intelligence”), Quo vadis, humanitas declares this ontology of the tool outdated and adopts — to reject its ethics — the lexicon popularized by a sociologist like Luciano Floridi: “Digital technology is no longer merely a tool, but a real living environment (that is an intuitive observation by Luciano Floridi), with its own way of structuring human activity and relationships” (Quo vadis, humanitas?, n. 33), and it sees “a circularity that implies mutual conditioning” (Quo vadis, humanitas?, n. 32).

This sweeps away the premise of human morality in Antiqua et nova, n. 39 (“Between a machine and a human being, only the latter is truly a moral agent” ; Antiqua et nova, n. 39; cf. nn. 40-46): because an environment is not “used,” it is inhabited, and it conditions the one who inhabits it before any choice — which opens the way to Magnifica humanitas’s bold thesis on morality.

If Antiqua et nova continues to think of AI intelligence as a tool (“Nevertheless, even in the case where a future IAG proves truly intelligent, it would remain functional in nature”, Antiqua et nova, note 10), Quo vadis, humanitas sees it as “a future technology, invasive, capable of replacing all computation and operational aspects of human intelligence through very high-speed calculation, made available by future development of quantum processors” (Quo vadis, humanitas?, n. 38) — and it states the ontological threat.

Another contrast: the understanding of man as an imago Dei. For Antiqua et nova, following Augustine and Thomistic exegesis, the difference between man and animal is given by the intellect, whereas Quo vadis, humanitas (n. 19) “recognizes that human life is incomprehensible and unsustainable without other creatures,” in an ecological and relational syntax that goes so far as to indicate that “filial identity is the ultimate and radical determination of our identity, and the one marked in the heart by the Holy Spirit finds in this filial identity the reference point for all other aspects of identity” (Quo vadis, humanitas?, n. 115).

While Antiqua et nova sticks to the anima forma corporis of the Vienna Council and to Thomas’s dictum (ST I, q. 76, a. 1), Quo vadis, humanitas borrows from de Lubac (The Theology of History, I) the patristic tripartite body-soul-spirit model as a complementary model.

Antiqua et nova sees in AI latent idolatry (“AI can be even more seductive than traditional idols: whereas they ‘have a mouth and do not speak’ (Ps 115, 5-6), AI can ‘speak’ or at least give the impression of speaking” Antiqua et nova, n. 105); Quo vadis, humanitas instead values “the desire to go beyond, to surpass oneself and to go beyond the present condition to be fully human,” which “represents a constitutive tension of human nature” (Quo vadis, humanitas, n. 23), and would be the meaning of Dante’s “transhumanar” in the Dantean paradise (Quo vadis, humanitas, n. 24), because “there can be no ‘trans’ or ‘post’ except that the novelty of Christ has already integrated it in advance” (Quo vadis, humanitas, n. 150), and integrated in the fact that “the Christian proclamation identifies the appropriate way to go beyond (trans) the limits of human experience with divinization (thèosis)” (Quo vadis, humanitas, n. 161).

In short, Antiqua et nova sees risks and opportunities, while Quo vadis, humanitas asserts that “the human family faces questions so radical that they threaten even the existence of the form of life we have known so far” (Quo vadis, humanitas, n. 159) and evokes the pandemic as the moment that would “redimensioned trust in unlimited technological progress” (n. 63): transhumanism, marginal to Antiqua et nova, becomes the core of Quo vadis, humanitas.

Against this backdrop, Magnifica humanitas makes three choices:

• on the theological foundation of anthropology, it sides with Quo vadis, humanitas? and with the interpretation of Gaudium et spes 22, which becomes the interpretive key to the entire encyclical: technology can only be read within a christological anthropology (obviously Chalcedonian);
• on the relationship between technique and person, the encyclical sides with Antiqua et nova and its metaphysics of the person, which the encyclical then embeds in a theology of history;
• on historical discernment, Leo aligns with the 2024 peace message: in particular, in the first chapter, he repeatedly emphasizes the living character of the social magisterium, the discernment of the “signs of the times,” dialogue with the sciences, and the non-static nature (which Magnifica humanitas ultimately proclaims…) of the social doctrine.

Expected and unexpected

That the encyclical signed on May 15 asserts its belonging to the social doctrine, even providing a synthesis that asserts a linearity but not the continuity of this type of magisterium, was to be expected.

Among the least original things, the reminder of the “technocratic paradigm,” an expression not of Romano Guardini but of the author of n. 108 of Laudato si’: Francis appealed there to the study by Italian‑Austrian theologian Das Ende der Neuzeit, 1950 — which, however, does not speak of a technocratic paradigm but of technique (as with other things), and sees as the fundamental problem of the end of modernity the fact that humanity has acquired enormous power over nature’s forces, but not the power over that power.

The center of this vision-laden book was that technique absorbs everything and that “the man who bears it knows that, in technique, ultimately, it is neither about utility nor about well-being, but about domination; a domination in the extreme sense of the word” [“der Mensch, der sie trägt, weiß, dass es in der Technik letztlich weder um Nutzen noch um Wohlfahrt geht, sondern um Herrschaft; um eine Herrschaft im äußersten Sinn des Wortes”] This Leo cites through the title given by the encyclical to it as “the green Laudato si’,” and launches a warning that, in an uncontrolled flood of predictive technology, the awareness of human dignity must not be “hidden under the pressure of new ideologies or very powerful interests in today’s world” (n. 51).

Despite the long incubation (Paul VI took roughly the same time to publish Ecclesiam suam, but opened a new council in the meantime, traveled outside Italy for the first time, and blessed Moro’s center-left), little was done to attenuate the differences in style, linguistic imprints, divergent visions of parts written by different authors: so coexist a clear rejection of the theory of the “just war” (n. 192) and the recommendation that lethal force be handled by a human hand rather than by an artificial moral agent (n. 200).

The writers

There is nothing unusual in the encyclical being born from the work of many hands: almost always—and archival documents begin to document procedures and nuances—the text of an encyclical, at a certain moment in its preparation, circulates among Rome’s curial leaders or among circles of theologians and experts; but the base text does not always arise by sticking sections entrusted to different experts, as was likely for Magnifica humanitas.

An ear attuned to linguistic habits and precedents can clearly sense tonal shifts, the different ways of using citations and linguistic registers, the absence of a Latin text (sic!) that deprived it of the homogeneous veil ensured by the formalization of an “official” version, of which others are formally only translations. We do not know what the final wording was on which a polyglot pope like Leo XIV—native English speaker, fully fluent in Italian and Spanish, and with high fluency in Italian—worked, but a very early approach to the text in the mother tongue of some editors (for example Fr. Paolo Benanti and Cardinal Michael Czerny) suggests that the people involved in drafting the various sections went well beyond these two figures who, by competence and role (Benanti is the moral theologian who first took an interest in AI ethics; Czerny is the cardinal prefect of the dicastery for the development of integral human progress), could only have been actors in it.

Computational linguistics allows profiling hands: different authors that computation identifies because the traits that characterize them always lie above average, are detected by content-independent markers (connectors, deontic modality, expressive punctuation, sentence length) and carry recognizable linguistic tics, even to AI….

One can thus hypothesize five hands at work (though fragments requested by such or such dicastery head to his acquaintances will remain impossible to identify), and one subject (an individual or a team) who performs the role of final editor. For brevity, I limit myself to the analysis of the Italian version of the encyclical, which allows me to identify a few figures to whom I do not try to attach names, but a profile:

Editor C: a chronicler of the magisterium, dominating nn. 17-46. His hand is recognizable because he writes medium-length sentences of 41.3 words on average, vs. 28–31 in all other sections, and makes extraordinary use of subordinate clauses. He does not quote the Bible in thirty paragraphs (nn. 17-46): he favors émerge as a historiographical judgment verb (7.0), frequently uses à la lumière de, and proclaims his Jesuit formation with 14 discerniment. He never uses deontics (no “it is necessary,” “it is required,” “one must”); no questions, no exclamatives.

Editor M: perhaps the same as C, but M is a manuals expert. He is responsible for the condensed compendium of social doctrine: he has precise stylistic markers unique to him: c’est‑à‑dire appears only twice; he likes c’est‑à‑dire or in Italian cioè (6 of 12), concret/concrète (11.5 + 8.2), uses integral (13.2), human person (16.5—almost absent elsewhere, where being human prevails), and common good (46.1). He quotes a lot, and the highest concentration of quotation marks—30% of all the note apparatus—is in the chapter that defines the “principles of”: it returns to him.

Editor A: the hand of the algorithmic ethics (the thesis of the necessity of an algorithmic ethics) in Rome, the one that marks nn. 90-111 and 131-147: it has the highest TTR (type/token ratio) in the document (0.544 and 0.447). In Italian, it retains Anglicisms (accountability, n. 105; privacy, n. 102) and, in the notes, relies mainly on Antiqua et nova (notes 123-127). Its rhetorical signature is the anaphora: “To speak of… means” (n. 109, four occurrences), a turn that recurs at n. 137 with “on the side of…,” evidence of the link between its sections.

Editor D: the fact that he dominates Chapter IV starting at n. 131 could indicate a mix; his mark is however deontic: the one who writes explains what must (12.4) or what is necessary (11.0—maxima absoluta), knows what defies (6.9), uses the computer technolect of data (nn. données, systèmes, numérique). The theological vocabulary disappears (zero nomina sacra, love at minimum); he favors the nominal–thematic attack typical of government and intergovernmental position papers: The truth…, The school…, and eleven phrases in La…! The statistical and stylistic imprint is clear (zero first person, zero Scripture, zero rhetorical questions across twenty-two paragraphs): at n. 159, the Italian passport of the author is on display (which English struggles to translate): “The development of supplementary parameters and metrics to GDP is decisive to improve the basic data used to conduct analyses, make policy decisions and set regional, national and international priorities”; nominal chains found in an Italian economic report on ‘Well-being’ (Bes).

Editor P: the diplomat-pacifist preacher dominates Chapter V and loves exclamations, which in the encyclical appear only here and in the Conclusion; the community exhortation we must (the opposite of the impersonal it is necessary earlier) is conjugated with the conclusive therefore. The pair “war/peace” and the logic of power appear. In nn. 182-228, he hints at his technical competence in arms control (Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons of 2021, with signatories, n. 194; the problem of attribution in cyber attacks, n. 225); the institution’s self-reference “the Holy See” (nn. 197, 226-227, with note 183 referring to an official intervention); the standard charge of Italian Catholic diplomacy (Pius XII, 1939; La Pira) suggests P is a diplomat of multilateral bodies or of the informal diplomacy of Catholic movements, who picks up “disarm the words” from Leo XIII’s lexicon.

Editor K: assuming, without conceding it, that the final part is not the Pope’s own hand and that he did not reserve this role for himself, there are signs of a hand that read everything and inserted its own linguistic tics: the performative first-person “I desire,” the inclusive “we,” “our/ours,” the standard‑bearer verb custodire (to preserve, to guard), which peaks in the conclusion, and emphatic temporal deixis today; this is K, or for him, who executes the inclusio of nn. 1 and 245 with the title.

The biblical misstep

We do not know precisely to whom the two biblical images opening the encyclical belong—the Babel tower from Genesis and Nehemiah’s wall reconstruction. But it is certain that many of those invited to give their opinion on the text saw them and—and fruit of biblical illiteracy and scriptural inattention dominating—did not grasp the critical points that the Jesuits’ New York America review pointed out in a stern short take of June 15, 2026. Cathleen Kavita Chopra‑McGowan—a biblicist and archaeologist known for work on Jerusalem’s destructions—has noted with ruthless precision how the encyclical badly understood two biblical images, using them “ironically,” as if they were a mere literary fragment providing inert metaphors and allusions, without perceiving their thickness, which might have been more useful to its purpose.

Babel in the Bible, indeed, is not a risk: as the American exegete explains, it is a state of fact (ambivalent in Genesis) to which the plurality of languages provides a remedy (ultimately positive, because capable of creating radical diversity).

The encyclical treats Genesis 11 as a story of humanity forgetting the true source of its power. But in the biblical text, the danger is not that humans wrongly believe themselves powerful. The danger is that they truly are. “It is one people, with one language for all,” God says in Genesis 11, 6, “and this is only the beginning of what they will do. Nothing they propose will be impossible for them.” In the broader arc of Genesis, the narrative belongs to a recurrent pattern where human capacities are progressively reduced. Just as immortality, in Genesis 3 (the Adam and Eve story), is reserved for the divine sphere, so the ununified language appears in Genesis 11 as a form of power God does not want humanity to hold. God disperses humanity and confounds its language not only to punish hubris, but to prevent humans from concentrating too much power. This intuition is perhaps even more pertinent to artificial intelligence than the encyclical suggests. The true danger of uniformity is not only that communication degrades. It is that communication becomes totalizing. A world reduced to a single language is not merely unified: it is governable. Humans become easier to coordinate, monitor, predict, manipulate, and control when all information flows through the same systems and the same structures. In this sense, Babel reads less as a warning about the collapse of communication—what Leo describes as a world where “languages merge and humans no longer understand each other”—than as a warning against the concentration of human power in a single technological order. This is the encyclical’s most insidious promise, one it rightly recognizes: “the pretension of a single language—also digital—capable of translating everything, even the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”

And Nehemiah cited by the encyclical is not the predecessor of participatory processes but (besides being the most invoked figure by evangelical fundamentalism as an example of the good sovereign who, with one hand, builds and with the other, kills enemies who hinder Jerusalem’s reconstruction) the bearer of an idea of purity that is not simple. Exegesis shows Chopra‑McGowan’s radical incongruity:

The second biblical paradigm of the encyclical, the story of Nehemiah, raises a set of questions that are different but equally difficult. Leo presents Nehemiah as a figure of community reconstruction and moral leadership: “He did not impose top-down solutions. He summoned families, assigned each a stretch of wall to rebuild, listened to fears, coordinated efforts, confronted opposition.” Certainly, the biblical text depicts Nehemiah as the restorer of Jerusalem after a catastrophe. But the book of Nehemiah also presents a restoration vision inseparable from concerns of borders, purity and social control. In Nehemiah 13, Nehemiah boasts of striking down the Jews who had married non‑Jews: “I struck them and pulled out their hair.” His reforms are inseparable from exclusionary projects and purity policies. Despite the encyclical’s characterization of Nehemiah as a prophet of solidarity, the biblical text presents him as an administrator who manages imperial resources, organizes work, imposes obedience, and consolidates authority. These traits do not invalidate the papacy’s use of Nehemiah, but they complicate it. In an era when many fear AI will intensify surveillance, bureaucratic management, and centralized control, the neglected dimensions of Nehemiah’s history might be as important as those the encyclical emphasizes. The imagery of rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls carries political dangers the encyclical does not fully address. Leo interprets these walls metaphorically as moral guardrails and ethical limits set on technological power. But walls divide as much as they protect. The same structure that secures a community also determines who remains outside. In contemporary politics, images of walls are already saturated with language of exclusion, securitization, and defensive nationalism. The same is true of Nehemiah’s story in the Bible. The envisioned restoration is inseparable from its emphasis on border control. Choosing Nehemiah as a paradigm without complication, therefore, inadvertently evokes precisely this form of centralized control against which the encyclical warns. This choice sits ill with the vision of shared human flourishing the Leo encyclical seeks to promote.

That is why these images (Babel was the title and cover image of Paolo Benanti’s 2024 book) did not serve as vectors of originality but, if you will, as its veil.

The (ex)tensions of a magisterium

Beyond the hands or the incongruity of the biblical figures used, Magnifica humanitas has a very precise center of gravity: as I will try to show, the text accumulates numerous explicit and implicit references, it evokes sometimes disparate theological and ethical questions, it offers its reperta and its deviations, but, at its core, it revisits the question of Redemptor hominis 15, reformulated at n. 138: the Pope, the papacy, the Church, the Churches ask not about AI, nor life with AI, nor AI as a life milieu—but about what makes human life more “worthy of man.”

To do this, Leo XIV reduces the weight of the ethical paradigm of regulation and increases the political paradigm of drama.

He does this through doctrinal extension and through one of the few limiting lists: five goods for universal destination (n. 67): “patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructures, data.” What, in late 20th‑century magisterium (e.g., Laborem exercens 19, cited in note 66), had been tangible goods (land, capital, means of production), are joined by information/knowledge flows and goods of infrastructure.

The true danger of uniformity is not only that communication degrades. It is that communication becomes totalizing. A world reduced to a single language is not simply unified: it is governable.

Alberto Melloni

The consequence is the crucial and powerful relativization of the moral paradigm at n. 107: “a more moral AI is useless if that morality is decided by a handful of people.” From there, the inscription of technology in the governance of the common home (n. 110) and the use of the Bergoglian category of “disarm” (passim, and finally the letter to Luciano Fontana of March 14, 2025), which Leo XIV made his banner from the very first message, given from the loggia of the blessings, right after his election as bishop of Rome.

Prevost (rectius: the encyclical of Pope Prevost) does not regard “technique” as an instrument, but as the epistemic‑infrastructural power generated by AI, which becomes a constitutive trait of the global society. To express this passage, the Pope must appropriate the lexicon of Dario Amodei on (non)interpretability of models (AI that are more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built’, n. 98) and acknowledge an opacity that is constitutive of science (could one call it epistemic realism?).

Around this nucleus diverge the elencated issues, not always resolved, either theoretically or politically: but their mere enumeration indicates what a special observer such as the Pope sees from his window on the Apostolic Palace. I cite a few: the work–citizenship link (n. 154), which admits a disjunction between dignity, income and employment that Laborem exercens had excluded; neo-sub­sidiarity (n. 71), which does not protect the individual from the state’s overreach, but the human from a private becoming “totipotent” by hiding behind the myth of the “only invisible hand of the market” (in polemic with Adam Smith, not cited).

The traditional pillar of social doctrine as a Catholic political philosophy with a papal thread—the universal destination of goods as the primary principle and private property as a subordinate means—thus develops in proposing to extend the category of universal goods to informational goods (n. 67) and in qualifying data as common or collective goods (n. 108).

The play of silent sources

As I mentioned, the encyclical establishes a dialogue, sometimes explicit, sometimes hidden, with authors, sources, currents of thought.

Some examples, quite general, are signaled by references so different that they seem bold: with all due respect to Tolkien, he is not Plato, and vice versa… Others seem to be illustrations added in haste, risking the banality of magazines, which can do nothing to alter Beethoven’s Ninth nor Picasso’s Guernica, but which, by definition, ignore their depths.

Other references, fairly precise—in studying a lot, one could understand why—are left unsaid. They spread across a constellation cohered by a social Christian personalism that is politically transversal, where liberal, ordoliberal, radical critique, and community aims coexist.

I would not place Paolo Benanti’s name here: omitting him could be a sign of his wish to vanish behind the Pope’s signature, or an indicator of the desire not to identify the “doctrinal” posture with the algorhetic category—a term that never appears in the encyclical, nor is there any reference to Benanti’s essays that developed it, nor to the Rome Call for AI Ethics which, in 2020, made it his own. I think of other names, which I try to detail without claiming exhaustiveness:

• Dario Amodei is never explicitly cited, and one can understand why; yet it is to his essay The Adolescence of Technology that the key AI phrase “grown, not built” is drawn, which engenders the “epistemic, economic and political asymmetry” (n. 109) — which perhaps explains the “privilege” seen by the observer during the encyclical’s presentation, where Chris Olah—young, thirty-year-old billionaire, former protégé of Thiel, passed through OpenAI, and now in the 548 Market Street company—was invited to Rome;
• in the same passage (n. 109) is heard the thesis from a cult classic for insiders like Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias’s Data Grab. The New Colonialism of Big Tech and how to Fight Back, and the critique of data colonialism;
• Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri’s Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass provides the dramatization of the extractive logic weighing on “marked bodies, mutilated, worn out so that the flow of computation does not stop” (n. 173);
• on technological fasting (n. 140), the Pope resumes one of his Lent messages, which spoke of Hans Schnitzler’s theses, A Little Philosophy of Digital Abstinence, on digital detox;
• for critique of the “new digital colonialism” and data extraction from communities to transform them into predictive assets, the source is the lexicon of information asymmetry and the economic analysis of Shoshana Zuboff;
• the passage against credit scoring algorithms rests on the theoretical basis of the Italian school of the civil economy of Luigino Bruni and Stefano Zamagni;
• Jürgen Habermas is the ethical underlay of the crucial n. 107 (subjecting the ethical code to the criteria of shared social justice) and n. 132 (truth built through trust and shared practices, in honest confrontation);
• the critique of “technocratic rationality” because it empties ethics is the legacy of the critique of the Enlightenment and of the “instrumental reason” characteristic of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, then of Jürgen Habermas (depending on Hans Jonas) on the public sphere colonized by technology;
• the startling thesis of considering macro data not as private property of Big Tech nor as exclusive property of the State, but as “commons for humanity,” has a precise source: applying part of the commons economy by the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, which Charlotte Hess had already extended to knowledge goods in Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice (MIT Press, 2007), and which had Wojtyla‑like uses. Data and knowledge are treated as common resources exposed to enclosure: the providential assertion of Centesimus annus 40, and especially 31‑32, resolves part of the problems and strengthens the reminder of invisible work that produces them (nn. 109, 173), which gives the data commons a foundation of distributive justice absent in Ostrom;
• the notion that data are “the fruit of the contribution of many” (n. 108) is a thesis that can be reinforced or inspired by a broad literature ranging from Carol Rose (The Comedy of the Commons, 1986) to The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler (2006);
• the primacy of the right and procedural justice of nn. 107 and 109 (“a prerequisite to practice in their design itself”) converges with John Rawls’s veil of ignorance thesis, which pushes one who does not know his role in an imaginary society to make rules fair and liberal: a form Magnifica humanitas applies to AI design;
• to Hannah Arendt, one owes not only what the note pointing to Origin of Totalitarianism indicates, but the “truth of fact” of Truth and Politics and of the Condition of the Modern Man (in the watermark of nn. 148-154 on work);
• the information sphere notion was original when Luciano Floridi forged it, and it is used at n. 110 (“AI is already the environment in which we are immersed” is the paraphrase of Floridi’s lemma) and at n. 76 (“digital ecosystem”);
• Hans Jonas’s principle of intergenerational responsibility extended to digital heritage (nn. 65, 76, 84), albeit mediated by Caritas in veritate 48;
• the South Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han, professor in Germany, who theorized the fatigue society and the attention economy, seems referred to in several places (nn. 100, 141, 170) where one fears a topology of violence implicit in models that “prosper on human weakness”;
• Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, is the ancestor of the concern for delegating decision-making (nn. 102-103);
• Amartya Sen’s capabilities theme: n. 109, on “universal access to technologies and training”;
• after Francis made the definition of “Wasted Lives” his own, his return in Magnifica humanitas might well be a replication of the predecessor’s lexicon, while the philosopher of the liquid society remains the one who identified a culture of waste;
• Charles Taylor’s notion of the social imaginary returns in the barely varied form of the “collective imaginary” of nn. 115 and 135-136.

More delicate are the resonances with Karl Polanyi (the critique of the fictitious commodity resonates in Magnifica humanitas’s thesis that data cannot be sold as any commodity) and with Isaiah Berlin’s pluralism of values, which could be assumed by nn. 10 and 110 (“by returning it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life”), just as the truth–democracy tension (“community discernment process non delegable”) of n. 134 could constitute a form of opposition to its theses.

Internal tensions within the text

In such a deliberately composite text, there are undulations: tensions and internal contradictions, register nuances, and distancing from configurations of magisterium prior, gaps and realignments—no one can claim, as AI can, to reach a hermeneutic median by stochastic means. Rather, it is precisely their presence that helps identify, by subtraction, the deepest doctrinal and political originalities.

Listing them is therefore, in my view, essential—not so much to document the limits of a writing machine surely less rigid and less sophisticated than in the past, but to understand the knots of a doctrinal development that will be the agenda of the Church and of a pontificate likely to be long.

Contradictions

I will enumerate a few internal contradictions of the text, then a few conceptual aporias, and finally debts and distances to certain positions that the encyclical does not cite, but with which it measures itself.

Meanings of the common good

A contradiction emerges by following the predicate “the common good,” which recurs 67 times in 56 paragraphs, distributed across each section of the encyclical (12 in the introduction and Chapter I, 25 in Chapter II with maximum density in nn. 59-64; 8 in Chapter III, 10 in Chapter IV, 12 between Chapter V and the Conclusion, nn. 182-238).

It is used in very different senses:

• there is a Thomist (and Maritainian) type of common good: “this set of social conditions that allows, for groups and for each of their members, to reach their perfection in a more complete and easier way” (n. 60, with a reference to GS 26) — the definitional foundation;
• the common good is also understood, in a personalist sense, as “the social form of dignity recognized in each person” (n. 59), which constitutes, save for error, a fairly original contribution with potential for interesting development;
• there is a common good understood as the fruit and foundation of interdependence (n. 61), in a quasi Bergoglian sense: “The common good is a plus, the result of interaction and reciprocal influence”;there is then a common good that is the fruit of a critical demystification: it asserts itself “by unmasking the new asymmetry” and “naming the new monopolies of AI” (n. 109), up to n. 137’s formula: “truth is a common good and not the property of those who hold power or visibility”;
• there is finally a common good understood as expression of social pluralism: thus the good of the human family (nn. 64, 187, 201, 226), which is extended rather bluntly to the Church as a “synodal style” (n. 86).

A multiplication of meanings that strips away discriminating capacity: the Maritainian problem of the common good as what is valuable for those inside as for those outside the walls is not addressed, and in the end everything resolves in the eschatological reversal of Jerusalem in Revelation, whose gates are open and whose walls are the jewels of the Bride.

From healthy to authentic

Social doctrine, formal and informal, has often been the place where the papacy resorted to the adjective “healthy” and to the adjective “true” to designate principles whose use by modernity it deplored as misapplied: this was not a linguistic trick, but a way of admitting, in a refined form, what, as such, had been condemned: hence the “healthy secularism,” the “true democracy,” etc.

Magnifica humanitas does not completely purge this language, but disturbs it and extends it in new directions. An analytic tally of occurrences and co-occurrences shows this.

If “healthy” in normative function appears only in the syntagm “healthy realism” (n. 213 = 218), “true”/“truly” which recurs 45 times, exercises a classical normative function only in a few syntagms: “true progress” (nn. 15, 84), “true good” (n. 60), “true peace” (n. 215), “true common good” (n. 226), “truer more than human” (n. 126), “true hygiene of attention” (n. 146); alongside them appear the five uses of “false”: descriptive in nn. 132 and 134; normative: “false realism” (nn. 188, 205), “false pragmatism” (n. 204).

The editor’s preference is to use “authentic,” which recurs 23 times and constitutes the dominant classic operator: the Pope speaks of an “authentic multilateralism” (n. 201), an “authentic realism” (n. 218), an “authentic progress social and moral” (n. 94), an “authentic culture of negotiation” (n. 221). And against authentic stand the three “so‑called”s: “so‑called political realism” (the subheading preceding n. 204), “so‑called optimization of the species” (n. 117), “so‑called surpassing of any limit” (n. 120). “Degraded” is used only once (n. 218).

The binary schema healthy–true/false is thus concentrated (or confined) in the chapter on peace, and revolves around a single semantic field: the realism of nn. 204-205 and 218. Here the structure is triangular: at the top, “authentic realism”/“healthy realism” (n. 218); at the sides, two symmetrical degenerations: the “idealist who selects the facts” and the “degraded realism which substitutes observation with resignation: since force prevails, it concludes that it must prevail” (n. 218).

The “degraded” is not the polar opposite of healthy (that would be idealism): it is an internal corruption by excess, in accordance with an Aristotelian theory of vice as a drift of the same disposition. The Pope does not grant the term “realism” to the opponent; he claims it for himself (“what is truly irresponsible is Realpolitik,” n. 205; the authentic realism “begins by clearly seeing interests, fears, constraints and power relations, precisely to calculate what is possible to obtain,” n. 218).

Magnifica humanitas, however, presents seven other couples that qualify the acceptable and unacceptable sides of processes, theories, procedures: measure/excess (an ecosystem operator, n. 113); having/being (a personalist operator, nn. 93-94); oriented/non‑neutral (an operator of inherent value, nn. 9 and 104); cultivated/constructed (an organicist operator, n. 98); habitable-hospital/armed/monopolized (a spatial-relational operator, n. 110); simulated/real (an appearance operator, n. 100); ecological/toxic (an environmental operator, nn. 137-138).

They say that the encyclical attempts or begins a stratified lexical transition: the normative lexicon of the past (authentic/false/so‑called, with the sole survivor “healthy”) remains around the war issue, in Chapter V, and has its adversary not modernity or irreligiosity, but Realpolitik; the new operators occupy Chapter III on AI (inheriting from CTI the question of what it means to be human in relation to AI), where the object is not a position but a milieu and a power, that the dichotomy purity/corruption cannot describe.

Individual and community

The encyclical seeks a balance between the enormous responsibility of the individual who cares for collective destinies and the function of community—which is sometimes a spontaneous subject, sometimes a political society that expresses itself in institutions—because it continually plays on three levels of the responsible subject: the individual (“no one is without responsibility. Each has his own field of action,” n. 212; “the construction of Babel or that of Jerusalem begins in each of us,” n. 130) ; the spontaneous community (the families of Nehemiah, n. 8; the intermediate bodies and the tertiary sector, n. 70; the communities that must “have a voice and contribute to discernment,” n. 72) ; the institutionalized political society (the State as guarantor of “cohesion, unity and just organization,” n. 63; the “politics that does not abdicate,” n. 106; the international institutions, nn. 226-227).

Rhetorically, the keystone is the subsidiarity–solidarity seam of n. 73: “When subsidiarity is not accompanied by solidarity, it ends up transforming into simple defense of particular interests; when solidarity is not supported by subsidiarity, it degenerates into welfare that does not foster responsibility.”

This seam is made across a responsibility “personal in conscience, communal in ties, political in institutions, global in common rules.” Yet it does not hold, because Magnifica humanitas sees the regulator subject oscillating: at times AI must be regulated at macro-institutional level (nn. 106-107, 163, 226); at other times the micro-level of “small and tenacious fidelities” (n. 213, with Tolkien—the author whose myth has been studied by Bradley Birzer and whose Holy See knows was dear first to the hippie movement, then to Led Zeppelin, and now to Italy’s Council President, besides J.D. Vance, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel).

A double unresolved register, perhaps insoluble, also spills into the ambivalence of the category of “community,” sometimes a spontaneous subject (n. 13: popular movements; n. 70), at other times a political subject (nn. 21, 63)—remaining thus within the historical operational indeterminacy of subsidiarity.

The risk of this contradiction is to saddle the individual with a rhetorical overload: attributing to him universal moral responsibility (n. 212) in face of powers described as almost overwhelming (nn. 5, 95, 133) creates a mismatch between attribution and real power, which ends up being resolved (or, with a long delay, the opposite of what was understood) in a substitution of asceticism for political intelligence. The n. 212 mitigates this risk by distinguishing domains and naming clearly the temptation on the contrary (“to think that problems are too big and we too small… is a refined form of capitulation, often disguised as realism”), but the tension is not resolved.

History as drama

The encyclical leaves open the dialectic between a dramatic conception of history as a struggle between two loves that generate two cities at war (in the Augustinian sense of the work that finishes in 426 and which even the Pope did not cite) and trust in a rationality that—with the assumption that it rejects the modern man’s “claim to be the only author of itself,” with Benedict XVI’s citation, note 140—knows how to find the precautions to which one should submit.

A certain confidence is shown where law appears as a precipitate of moral reason, and the history of political doctrines as a history of moral conquests that almost always bears the face of a long and arduous path, marked by stops: for example at nn. 123-125, where the writer (a nuncio in a multilateral seat?) provides a list of institutional conquests (Red Cross 1863, abolition of slavery, UN 1945, Universal Declaration 1948, Refugee Convention 1951) as “proof that humans know how to generate institutions capable of protecting communal life” (n. 123). Likewise, the critique of nn. 204-207 against intertwining religious extremisms with irrational economism presupposes the existence of a rational model to emulate in order not to fall into a “new spiritual and cultural blindness” (n. 204).

Conversely, the passages where distrust of the self-sufficiency of reason becomes distrust of rationality are numerous. There are expressions of suspicion toward instrumental reason that closes in on itself (the intellect, if absolutized, “ends up obscuring other essential dimensions,” n. 113, and the technical power unopposed “makes us lonelier,” n. 128); there is the awareness of the structural opacity of AI, by virtue of which (n. 98) “we all know little about how they actually work,” the observation of an irrational economism.

Thus the encyclical handles—without closing—this dialectic dominated by structural pessimism rather than anthropological: it is not that humans are incapable of truth, but that infrastructures can steer incentives contrary to them (n. 132). The Magnifica humanitas distrust is neither anti-modern nor anti-Enlightenment, but targeted against Zweckrationalität, instrumental-calcualting rationality, struggling until the end of history, in an eschatological vision that gives the “root of distrust” that the question sought: the certainty that no technico‑institutional configuration coincides with God’s city (as atheism is not by itself a bearer of humanism).

Apories

The aporias of a text so composite are not surprising: the times of the single author (Fr. Sebastian Tromp in Pacelli’s era, Mgr. Pietro Pavan in Roncalli’s) are gone, and probably many editors defended their paragraph rather than detecting oscillations, formal aporias, contradictions, and deciding which were necessary and which not.

Judgment on technology

The most obvious concerns the oscillation of judgment on technology: n. 9 states that technology “is not, in itself, a solution… nor a evil; but concretely, it is not neutral” ; but in n. 104, regarding AI, the formulation hardens: “we cannot regard AI as morally neutral,” because “every technical artefact carries choices and priorities.” The suspicion toward automation is so automatic that technology is no longer seen as an ambiguous instrument to guide, but as a panoptic system inherently corrupt. It is not a logical contradiction (the encyclical distinguishes abstract/concrete and instrument/incorporation of choices), but a contradiction between registers that use the category of “neutral” in different ways.

Judgment on progress and on work

The encyclical oscillates between the optimism inherited from Centesimus annus (n. 39, the “positive potential of the market”) and the Montinian pessimism of Populorum progressio/Octogesima, repeated in nn. 94 and 117 (“progress… turns against man”): in some sections (nn. 30-44), progress is a heritage to preserve, and in diagnostic sections on AI (nn. 90-117), it is mainly a threat. How much work should be alleviated to satisfy n. 152 (which asks that “technology relieve man of particularly arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks”), without falling into the anthropological regression feared in nn. 149 and 154 if one loses the sense that work is an “innate requirement of human condition”? This is not stated. n. 152 is truncated right where one would expect qualification: and this is an internal tension at the heart of the argument.

Judgment on political dialogue

The tension between the State that sketches “adequate legal frameworks, independent oversight… a policy that does not abdicate” (n. 106) and subsidiarity which demands that intermediate bodies (nn. 31, 108, 109) not be “reduced to decision recipients made elsewhere” is classic and remains where it was. The base consensus built through nn. 2 and 62 via the “dialogue with all” runs up against the promise to engage in “unmasking asymmetry,” “naming new monopolies,” “questioning the geographies of power”—as if it were possible to apply pre-numeric and personalist categories to a post-human, hyper-technological reality without a theological fundament of clarification.

Judgment on calculation

The encyclical’s philosophical backbone rests on a sharp dichotomy between the machine’s blind calculation and human sapiential judgment; hence it stigmatizes instrumental rationality and algorithmic quantification as extractive and alienating; but for policy and economic solutions (the management of macro‑data as commons, resource redistribution, digital antitrust), the encyclical must rely on the same computational tools it critiques.

Data governance

An additional aporia concerns AI governance and the fact that it is not currently possible to govern, fragment, or redistribute the world’s AI infrastructure without using equally complex mathematical and predictive models. The encyclical thus falls into a performative paradox: it criticizes reducing reality to data, yet, to liberate humanity, it must propose a public and supra‑national bureaucracy that acts only through the management (socialist?) of data.

Market and distributism

Another unresolved issue concerns the use of German ordoliberalism, which works because it accepts market laws and competition while limiting them by the State. Magnifica humanitas, however, empties the digital market’s presuppositions: it rejects monetization of data, rejects predictive optimization systems (the economic engine of AI) and calls for collective or nationalized ownership of computation means. The encyclical proposes a hybrid economic model that is neither regulated capitalism nor state socialism, but a medieval‑digital distributism of sorts. It demands that Big Tech renounce their extractive business model, without explaining who should finance and bear the costs of computation and energy transition of servers—amounting to billions—except a centralized state: which would resurrect the specter of authoritarian collectivism it condemns, and in which the Chinese model (alluded to and never cited) is perfectly legible or even admired sub conditione.

Debts and distances

There is another level of reading of the encyclical that I think useful and perhaps necessary to articulate. Precisely because of its continuity frame in which it situates itself and what the 1931–2001 anniversary tradition has produced, Magnifica humanitas has no interest in declaring the mind shifts that support it. They exist, however, and I think they can be represented in topological terms.

The encyclical moves away from and toward reservoirs of thought important both for the man who signs it and for the object that gave it to him.

Leo XIV, indeed, is the first pope born, raised and educated inside a liberal democracy: not in the papal state or the Kingdom of Savoy, not in Nazi Germany, nor in Poland or Peronist Argentina. He was born in Eisenhower’s America, grew up in Kennedy and Johnson’s, became a priest after Watergate, and, as we know, actively participated in voting by registering as a Republican elector. An existential heritage that, on a subject like the encyclical’s, implies and carries a degree of diversity in approaching immediate predecessors— which does not mean polemic or disapproval, but a simple difference.

Objectively, then, the Catholic Church’s position on the international stage is no longer what it was a few years ago, not by choice or will. Around it, five great powers (the United States, Russia, China, India, and Turkey) claim a status higher than others to be great (again) and also claim an exemption from these principle of rights that are a moral achievement of humanity.

The Augustine matrix

No one will be surprised that the ideological and anthropological framework of Magnifica humanitas reveals a deep Augustine matrix: it is the author dearest to Leo, and it is natural that the pontiff’s collaborators, once the lexicon of Germanic theology and Ignatian spirituality has been archived, think today of serving the Pope by invoking Augustinian figures and thoughts in a broad sense.

Thus, when the encyclical describes today’s man besieged by the algorithm, it does not draw on Thomas’s optimistic natural reason capable of ordering the world, but rather shelters in Augustine’s dramatic, introspective, “anxious” anthropology (not in the Balthasarian Christology, which remains largely ignored).

The text evokes, explicitly and implicitly, three Augustinean anthropological elements to dismantle the illusion of technological perfection:

• the encyclical opposes the cor inquietum (the restlessness) to the algorithmic optimization and asserts that the attempt to eliminate the unexpected, doubt, boredom or failure through pre-digested AI responses returns to sterilize the human heart. Augustine’s restlessness is not a functioning flaw to be corrected, but the ontological wound that makes man capable of God. A perfectly optimized and “pacified” society by calculation is, for the encyclical papal, an anthropologically dead society;
• Leo describes in his pages the tension between libertas as grace and the liberum arbitrium of choice. Augustine distinguishes the simple free will (the psychological capacity to choose between option A and B) and true freedom (inner liberation from sin and alienation, possible only by grace). Magnifica humanitas follows him with a hard critique of the illusion of freedom offered by digital platforms and AI interfaces (the user thinks he is free because he has an infinite array of consumer choices, responses and path‑tracking). But the answer to this form of psychological and cognitive enslavement (an aggiornamento of the libido dominandi) passes through a capacity to withdraw from automated reactivity, which requires a awakening of conscience that the encyclical compares to the action of grace and which (as in De civitate Dei) passes through memory recovery, intelligence and will (the Augustinian triad of the soul in the image of the Trinity) against their outsourcing to Big Tech servers;
• finally, Magnifica humanitas carries out an intentional operation: it abandons the idea that technology is merely a “prosthesis of reason” and treats it as a threat to the soul, in Augustine’s dramatic anthropology, but without a trajectory as in Augustine.

Usages and divergences from Thomism

More serious and deeper is the problem of the relation between the encyclical’s framework and Thomism: not only because the previous Leo, Leo XIII, invented a neo‑Thomism; the conviction the Pope received from Fr. Joseph Kleutgen and others was that Catholicism needed a rigid thought structure, which could be obtained by compressing Aquinas’s wealth into a non-historical system of perennial philosophy, and that this correctible intellectual corset would train militants capable of answering an anti-religious philosophy that frightened Rome. The outcome—that is, in a word, a long and well-studied history—was paradoxical: neo‑Thomism became a standard that produced essentialist dogmatic simplifications, yet at the same time trained reforming Catholic figures, Dominican or not, who would bring about Vatican II. Today’s Leo does not show signs of Thomistic or Neo‑Thomistic passion; but it is indeed aligned with a Thomist knot on power and ethics—though in one sense only, and across several planes.

Magnifica humanitas indeed converges with Thomistic conceptions of public power and ethics, but it falls into an insoluble theological contradiction on rationality and its function.

For Thomas, public power is not a malign necessity born of original sin (as Augustine thought), but a natural institution, because man is a political and social animal. Public law is defined as ordinatio ratiois ad bonum commune (an order of reason oriented toward the common good); it is promulgated by the one who bears responsibility for the community, and he takes care of it.

Thus, when Magnifica humanitas assigns to state power the task of being the “guardian of the ultimate human instance” and to impose by law the place of the human (human-in-the-loop), it applies exactly a Thomist logic; the coercive intervention desired by the State on the Big Tech (which nonetheless dominates them and exceeds their financial dimensions) expresses the moral duty to order society according to reason.

Another deep resonance concerns the very substance of the ethical dimension. For Thomas, ethics is founded on virtues, and the queen virtue of politics is prudentia (recta ratio agibilium — right reason applied to action). Prudence unfolds in three acts (the counsel that seeks, the judgment that decides, the command that executes). According to Magnifica humanitas, AI can interrupt this Thomist circuit: by substituting itself for man in counsel and judgment, the machine causes atrophy of virtue. The man who delegates decisions to an algorithm can no longer become “prudent” in the Thomist sense, because he no longer exercises his essential function. There is thus a reality that Thomas could not foresee: the birth of a “substitute for reason” that relieves the human of ethical exercise, rendering the development of natural virtues impossible—and here, it is not clear whether the response is the ascetic re-educating oneself to use one’s own faculties, or the action of others, or a combination of both.

There is, however, one point where Magnifica humanitas is clearly in speculative rupture with the Thomist tradition. For Thomas Aquinas, human intellect is the mirror of the divine Intellect; even the capacity to calculate, to measure, to mechanize and to accumulate scientific knowledge participates in a rationality that cannot but understand the moral law as well. Technical progress (Thomas would not call it progress, naturally), if it follows the laws of logic and nature, is inherently rational and good; and if it is not good, it is because it does not follow the laws of nature and the rationality that inform it.

Magnifica humanitas does not state that AI violates or can violate these two laws: it does more. It breaks the unity of reason. It argues that the hyper‑rationality of algorithmic calculation is separate from human wisdom and can only be what it is. The extractive technology of AI (which must extract materials, data, energy) produces a different, blind, destructive rationality. Where a Thomist would see in mathematical algorithms a higher and legitimate exercise of human rationality, Leo XIV discern a principle of alienation threatening conscience, and doubts—one might say—denies—that AI’s technological progress is a natural evolution of human rationality: he treats it as an hypertrophied deviation of calculation that suffocates intelligence and must be guarded against.

Distance from Marx

Amid Trump’s insults to the Pope (likely unaware of the infallibility of the proverb “chi mangia papa crepa” — “tribe who eats the Pope dies”), one would have missed an aspect of Magnifica humanitas’s lexicon: the traditional terms of what in the XXth century constituted the notitia criminis of social doctrine (socialism, communism, Marxism) do not appear there. The original polemical targets of the magisterium genre, to which Leo XIV places his encyclical, are not explicit in their historical formulation. But the opposition to these political and cultural proposals is re‑woven within the clash between the human and technocratic paradigms: with a condemnation of technology’s transformation of totalitarian collectivism, behind which one can easily see China’s model of society and AI. That does not prevent the encyclical from adopting—critically—some Marxist analytical instruments to dismantle the power of new algorithmic monopolies—using a procedure that was the theology of liberation in Peru by Gustavo Gutiérrez.

The encyclical implicitly evokes real 20th‑century communism when it analyzes the risk of total planning of human life by the State through new technologies, and it looks at the model of automated social control of what is called “data communism.” If real socialism destroyed freedom of man, AI’s totalitarian techno‑capitalist hybrid threatens to collectivize inner life (thoughts, desires, ethical choices) and erase the person’s value.

A society perfectly optimized and “pacified” by computation is, for this papal encyclical, a society anthropologically dead.

Alberto Melloni

At the same time, Silicon Valley capitalism’s functioning is analyzed with Marxian categories of primitive accumulation: in Capital, the capitalist dispossesses the worker of the surplus value generated by his material labor; Magnifica humanitas sees the great LLMs as systems that extract a “cognitive raw material” (data, interactions, online creativity expressed by billions of people) without returning value. And where, instead of class conflict between workers and capital, a hyper‑capital seeks an enemy (and one sees what enemy the Pope points toward).

There is more: Leo XIV explicitly asserts that true social injustice lies today in the monopoly of means of super‑computing and the computational infrastructures. In face of this structural injustice, the encyclical does not call for a revolution, but for norms. Norms on the “universal destination” of digital goods and for collective governance of AI infrastructures, which the Papacy asks States to weigh in on control of means of production, with trust in antitrust rules (which failed in the EU in the era of the first browsers).

Thus, without borrowing too heavily from Marx, the encyclical shows that this is no longer a matter of defending liberal capitalism against communism, but of defending the human being against a new hybrid totalitarianism, which has the extractive efficiency of the worst capitalism and the penetrative control of the worst state collectivism.

Divergences

There are three figures with whom the encyclical would not engage—already mentioned—but toward whom it makes diverging positions; in the pure Prevost style, not conducted polemically, yet not without clarity.

Adversus Thiel

Not the most important perhaps, Magnifica humanitas did encounter Peter Thiel, PayPal and Palantir founder—at least, he wanted to meet with it.

Thiel went to Rome in April 2026 to give privately circulated lessons, in which he sprinkled a unique theological position on the Antichrist (which would be a universalist thought aiming to slow technological development) and on the Katêchon, a figure of apocalyptic Jewish tradition entered into Second Thessalonians, interpreted by the technocrat philosopher according to his own categories. As is known, Thiel built an eclectic system where he blends René Girard, Solovyov and himself to justify philosophically his own logic and industrial strategies; but he is also the mentor of leading political figures (one among many: J.D. Vance) and industrial figures (precisely Olah who, now that he has broken with Thiel and moved to Anthropic’s court, has been invited by the Pope to explain the encyclical). If the aim of these Thiel lectures was to make the encyclical, then in incubation, respond to him, the result was not attained—not that the encyclical, then largely written, dodged the confrontation with the future trillionaire Thiel, but because it located the problem of human freedom in a radically and originally opposite way.

The expression of freedom is, without a doubt, Thiel and Prevost’s declared and convergent aim.

But Thiel, adopting an aging science‑of‑science philosophy, holds that all thought is driven by the desire for knowledge and that all science, in the Baconian sense, seeks to explain the universe; after that, differences in knowledge and explanations begin. For the encyclical, thought and science are from the outset marked by risk that conditions outcomes and calls for emancipation (or, in Augustinian terms, purification) of desire and will.

Magnifica humanitas asks and hopes that scientific progress (medical progress is a casus exemplary, because it alleviates suffering in the human condition) may bring humans closer to an ideal of perfection where humanist, scientific, and theological disciplines live in harmony. Thiel instead argues that, since 1945 (with the atomic bomb), science has inaugurated a new era inherently apocalyptic, where progress can master these forces, and stagnation of technology where deception resides.

For the Pope, education means giving tools to read reality as such and to deconstruct dystopias. For Thiel, knowledge must come out of the “universities,” which have become sterile due to hyper‑specialization and cowardly refusal of a worldview.

In uncertainty, Magnifica humanitas defends a cosmopolitan humanism that looks toward global governance, international cooperation and peace as the summit of humanity’s civil progress. Thiel sees in a world government’s processes the maximal existential risk and the sedative deception that, for him, coincides with the biblical number of the Antichrist’s reign.

Thiel harshly criticizes contemporary intellectuals and activists (such as Nick Bostrom or Eliezer Yudkowsky) who, frightened by AI risks or climate change, invoke preventive action that is, in his view, global totalitarianism seeking to stop science. For the Pope, inhabiting the planet’s suffering signs and those afflicted by climate change is an unavoidable call to inhabit the common home as sons.

Thiel sees in a near Joachimite succession of ages: after the most just war (World War II) and an unjust war (the Cold War), he foresees an unjust peace (identified with the Western world’s economic and moral submission to totalitarian China, provided the social state remains). According to him, the fear of nuclear apocalypse (the biblical Armageddon read in a fundamentalist way) drives humanity to seek “peace and security” at all costs, accepting the assimilation and tyranny of the Antichrist — against which a genuine Christian and liberal humanity must refuse the compromise and fight the “low mimicry” and restore mankind’s vitality, worn down by inward retreat into spaces where a passive humanity cloys, sterile and vulnerable to totalitarian ecological control, etc.

Conversely, Magnifica humanitas sees reason and human institutions as the path to self‑realization on Earth: not in the name of dystopian truths, but in a search for truth that does not erase human freedom but engages it, in a context where two loves always compete and will always do so.

Adversus Ratzinger

Abandoning thomistic trust in the rationality of progress and asking the State to use law to protect citizens’ souls from a machine that simulations reason to empty consciousness, on a scale beyond the state’s control, opens the field to a clear divergence from Ratzinger’s thought.

Leo XIV cites Caritas in veritate, Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical; but he takes a divergent theological path. Ratzinger’s theology of Logos, in the famous Ratisbonne 2006 lecture, is structurally contradicted in its epistemological presuppositions.

While Ratzinger sees in scientific-technological rationality an expression of the divine Logos, albeit requiring purification that still comes from the Logos itself, Magnifica humanitas institutes a dramatic separation that pushes technological calculation beyond the horizon of wisdom. The contradiction centers on three irreconcilable logical points.

The encyclical shows that this is no longer about defending liberal capitalism against communism, but about defending the human being against a new hybrid totalitarianism.

Alberto Melloni

The Ratzinger Logos makes possible and necessary the alliance between faith and reason. The Logos is one, and it can be abused or loved. The encyclical of Leo XIV instead performs a drastic epistemic split: on one side, there is the rationality of calculation (mathematical efficiency, algorithmic logic, quantification); on the other, a rationality that formulates sapiential judgment (reserved to human relational conscience).

In Caritas in veritate (chapter VI), Benedict XVI directly confronts technological development with rigorous theological optimism: “Technology — it must be stressed — is a deeply human reality, tied to the autonomy and freedom of man. It expresses and asserts with force the mastery of the mind over matter. … Technology then fits into the mandate to ‘cultivate and keep the earth’ (cf. Gn 2, 15) that God entrusted to man” (Caritas in veritate, n. 69) .

Magnifica humanitas employs a different palette of concepts: technology is no longer described as the locus where the “mastery of the mind over matter” is confirmed (as Guardini did) but as the milieu in which algorithmic matter exercises a coercive mastery over the mind.

If Ratzinger sees in technique a vocation that humans can orient, through grace, with charity, Magnifica humanitas—somewhat with Augustine, somewhat with the Frankfurt School—analyzes it as an instrumentally extractive and alienating device, designed to control cognition. From Ratzinger’s ambiguous stance we move to an ontological suspicion.

Finally, the divergence on relativism. In the face of the crisis of contemporary anthropology, Benedict XVI proposed an enlargement of reason (“Weitung der Vernunft,” as he put it in Ratisbonne’s lecture). Against a scientistic positivism that reduces truth to what can be verified in a laboratory, Ratzinger does not ask for retreat but for an addition of rationality that reaches metaphysics and ethics. In contrast, facing the hyper‑rationalism of algorithmic calculation, Leo XIV does not call for widening reason but for a defensive strategy—digital fasting that restores the human cognitive structure: strategic retreat into the corporality and the legal limitation of delegated decision‑making. The response to the super‑development of artificial logos is not its theological synthesis but its coercive delimitation by the State.

Where Benedict XVI wanted to show reason that faith itself is Logos, Leo XIV declares algorithmic rationality at war with Christian anthropology. It is the victory of Augustine’s dramatis in over the cosmic confidence of the ratzingerian logos.

Adversus Bergoglium

Magnifica humanitas, like all of Francis’s papal preaching and discourse, draws heavily from Bergoglian vocabulary, even if not always with the same resonance: the throwaway culture, the commitment to disarm, the cry of the poor and the Earth, etc., are categoricals of Francis, and when Leo XIV makes them his own, it is through a quiet borrowing.

There is, however, at least one point where Magnifica humanitas does something different, and it concerns the category of “social friendship,” inherited directly from Fratelli tutti by Francis: on this point, the 2026 encyclical makes a precise semantic shift that goes in the opposite direction to Francis’s Bergoglian sense of the expression.

In Francis’s use, social friendship linked interpersonal to political universality: Fratelli tutti, n. 94, defines it thus: “Love that extends beyond borders is based on what we call ‘social friendship’ in each city or country.” For the Argentinian Pope, amistad social is “a condition of real universal openness,” a notion already voiced by Bergoglio during the Te Deum on May 25, 2006, which proclaimed an expression present in the bishops’ magisterium since the 1990s, then in his preaching during the 2001 crisis, and more broadly in the work of Argentine theologians Alberto Methol Ferré and Juan Carlos Scannone.

In Leo XIV’s encyclical, social friendship becomes a moral and anthropological category: it is the instrument for recognizing the dignity of the person and the fundamental antidote to reducing society to a set of nodes in a neural network that deprives man of responsibility and erodes humanity. In Magnifica humanitas, social friendship expresses relational proximity against contactless connection. While predictive systems and social networks tend to group people according to similarity algorithms (echo chambers), intensifying polarization and hatred of an imagined enemy filtered through virtual unreality, social friendship is humanity’s capacity to inhabit conflict and to welcome real diversity. While optimization algorithms tend structurally to erase effective differences in order to maximize profit, social friendship requires encounters between bodies and stories.

While Bergoglio’s social friendship’s backdrop included the theology of the people unifying itself, Magnifica humanitas takes a different approach and directly attacks the idea that a person should continually “earn or justify his own value” according to performance and productivity criteria, amplified by AI, to the point of justifying the throwaway of those who are not “optimizable” (the sick, the elderly, those who lose their jobs to automation).

Social friendship becomes a defense of gratuitousness for the one who practices it, and the pivot of a “rebuilding of ties” that, instead of atomizing humanity or organizing it according to statistical classification criteria, places, as a spiritual requirement, the giving back of the other’s face and unique uncalculable personhood.

Original knots of Magnifica humanitas

In his papacy, Benedict XVI had, about Vatican II’s hermeneutics, posed a complex distinction between two binary pairs: continuity–reform and discontinuity–rupture. His supporters did not grasp the unresolved tension he posed from the late council’s work, and reduced it in the church’s polemical climate to a crude antagonism between continuity and discontinuity, ignoring the broader debate on the development of dogma that runs through John Henry Newman and many others.

Leo too—though within the small compass of social doctrine—decides to measure himself against a similar problem: indeed, the choice to insert a summary of the compendium of social doctrines from the last 125 years required a description that is presented (n. 45) as marked by “harmonious development, but not always linear,” with “changes in perspective that do not cut with what precedes, but bring out their implications.”

A fairly elegant solution to a problem that remains tense and underpins real turning points the encyclical suggests, including the “just war,” the falsifiability of magisterium, the proposal of a digital ordoliberalism and democracy.

The “overcoming” of just war

Magnifica humanitas adopts a “style” of Fratelli tutti and conceals a disruptive teaching inside a document that, in itself, resembles a moral doctrine on the wise use of AI technologies.

Leo XIV, indeed, marks, in a way to be considered definitive, the overcoming of just war. It is a overcoming the American Pope says must simply be “reaffirmed” (n. 192), but which in fact constitutes a radical and decisive statement. It is true that Pacem in terris contained a passage that on the atomic era declares that it is alienum a ratione to think that war can produce justice; but this thesis was repudiated by Paul VI who, at the UN, invoked the famous “never again war,” yet re‑admitted it in a world marked by sin; it is true that this position did not become conciliar magisterium, precisely because of the opposition of American bishops who did not want to disarm against the Soviet enemy; and one knows that John Paul II’s huge commitment to stopping conflicts that punctuated his long reign did not prevent the Catechism of the Catholic Church from placing war within its framework. The encyclical in Francis’s line, however, did make a decisive step toward an extension beyond Pacem in terris, by denying morally legitimate possession of atomic weapons. In 2026 Leo XIV takes a position that is “more a development than a repetition”: “Today more than ever, it is important to reaffirm the overcoming of the theory of ‘just war’ too often invoked to justify any war, subject to the right of legitimate defense in its strict sense.”

Note 182 would seek to justify the use of the verb “reaffirm” (“reaffirm” in English), and it explains instead the difference: it is a true dogmatic development, in Newman’s sense, with respect to Gaudium et spes 79 and—with no comparison to a council and a catechism—respect to formulation, though modest, of the Church’s Catechism 2309, which— to give an example—caused controversy in American media when Catholic bishops went on TV shows to explain that neither in Venezuela nor in Iran did the Trump administration adhere to criteria that would render its interventions “morally licit” from a Catholic theory that, from Augustine to Vatican II, has indeed been reaffirmed many times over.

The falsifiability of social doctrine

Another original and important aspect of the encyclical concerns precisely the status of social doctrine and, indirectly, of ordinary magisterium, whose falsifiability Magnifica humanitas makes explicit through the case of slavery.

The encyclical’s structure—as noted—devotes a full section to the chain of the social doctrines of different pontificates. A typical representation of continuity that, in its polemical logic, should serve as a denigrating argument against Protestantism and its theological multiplicity, while internally it should give the papacy a growing aura, with the end of temporal power and the dematerialization of the papal office’s function. The pace would discourage the simple “progression” narrative that the papacy had built around it, and thus would invite a more nuanced historical reading.

Where Benedict XVI wanted to show reason that faith itself is Logos, Leo XIV declares algorithmic rationality at war with Christian anthropology.

Alberto Melloni

That is why the long digression on slavery is interesting: logistically unnecessary, concentrated in a single precise point, and ultimately necessary to explain that slavery was not condemned in time (n. 176); written by a historian who knows the nineteenth-century pontificate very well (but ignores Paul III’s 1537 bull Veritas ipsa…), it articulates according to truth the slow movement from the rejection of a practice to the fixation of a formal, absolute and universal condemnation, which arrives with Leo XIII—therefore late, very late.

It is a frank acknowledgment that serves to say that there exists and has existed a “growth in understanding, on the Church’s part, of enduring truths,” which required eighteen centuries to come to fruition—that which could also be said about anti-Semitism, for example—thus manifesting a metadoctrinal turn, which fissures the rhetoric of mere “maturation of implications.”

The function of public power

Magnifica humanitas is not the first encyclical to exalt the function of public power in the economy; but it does so at a moment when political science has, in fact, lost the meaning of the State, and, confronted with technocratic behemoths, it recalls very strongly the function of public power (n. 63), public intervention (n. 69), public oversight (nn. 80 and 95), public support for public education (n. 144). Against the comical anti‑Christ of the apprentice theologian Peter Thiel, the Pope of Rome opposes—to borrow the term—a twin tradition of German economic thought now forgotten.

One is the long legacy of Kathedersozialismus (the socialists of the chair) of Gustav von Schmoller, Adolf Wagner (the one behind the law of expanding public activities), Lujo Brentano, who founded the Verein für Socialpolitik in 1873 and carries with it a thinking that today would be outdated on the state’s pedagogical function and rejects Manchester liberalism that influenced Pecci through Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler’s Catholic social thought and the Freiburger Vereinigung. What the encyclical rejects, is the idea that AI should self‑regulate (the supposed ethical guidelines of Big Tech themselves). Just as the Kathedersozialisten demanded that it be the State’s law that imposes social justice in industrial factories, Leo XIV calls for strong state intervention to nationalize or civilize computation infrastructures, placing the common good above the private profit of new “algorithm barons.”

The other is ordoliberalism from the Freiburg school: Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, and sociological neoliberals such as Alexander Rüstow and Wilhelm Röpke’s Civitas humana—their idea that the State does not conduct Prozesspolitik in economics but sets the framework through an Ordnungspolitik, to prevent threats to freedom and state overreach. This logic is the thrust of nn. 106-109. In this logic, social harmony excludes revolution and sabotage, because the State knows how to take charge of protecting persons.

Magnifica humanitas dreams of an Ordnungspolitik for AI, with a formative educational component akin to Kathedersozialismus and Sen’s capabilities approach—true freedom depending on training and real access—that presupposes an order of justice open to redistributive correction (n. 162: progressive taxation). Yes, but with a caution: the ordoliberal framework presupposes a territorial State, whereas digital ordoliberalism, multilateral and international, remains to be built: whereas Eucken had West Germany’s Republic, Leo XIV contends with a “disordered and conflict‑ridden multipolarity” (n. 201).

Democracy’s question

But one of the encyclical’s most original knots is the assertion of a link between democracy and truth (nn. 132-134), which it states without fear and which opens many questions about both.

From Pius XII’s 1944 radio message to Centesimus annus 46, the papacy had held a line of instrumental appreciation of democracy: a conditional and limited recognition (“to the extent that,” as n. 40 states). What is affirmed in n. 134 is the opposite: to say that “the search for truth is an essential element of democracy” and that indifference to the truth “gradually but inexorably leads toward totalitarianism” (with Hannah Arendt’s citation in note 143) indicates, as a locus to guard, a truth that is not the revealed truth but that of the common ecology. Instead of being a morally conditioned instrument, democracy becomes an epistemic ecosystem vulnerable to an open truth, linked to Francis’s easy quotation on truth not as a territory to defend but as a space to inhabit.

The encyclical nonetheless does not shy away from mentioning, in n. 133, the knowledge–power link (“pure power divorced from truth, which imposes what it wants others to consider true”) and it draws the opposite conclusion to Foucault’s thesis—that truth invoked as a common good is itself an effect of power and presupposes regimes of truth: it is precisely because knowledge equals power that public truths must be practiced.

The Pope does not measure himself with classical antagonists. I mention only a few arch‑obvious names and positions: for Hans Kelsen’s Vom Wesen und Wert der Demokratie, democracy lives from value relativism, and the one who believes he possesses absolute truth leans toward autocracy: is it enough to say truth is not a territory, by citing Francis? Joseph Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy) makes democracy a competitive method of selecting elites, indifferent to truth but not to justice: is the common good enough? For Richard Rorty, liberal democracy lives by solidarity and conversation: and here, where is the locus of that dialogue? And to finish with Karl Popper, whose open society is built against anyone who claims to know the truth about history: how to align that with Augustine’s schema?

Yet it does measure itself to Thiel and platform sovereignty ideologues: the encyclical regards truth as a common good, against the idea of truth as the title to govern; that is why the “equivalence between technical power and the right to govern” cited in n. 110 is precisely what the Pope declares he wants to break.

To do this, one had to definitively surpass the XXth‑century papal logic, which regarded democracy as a system devoid of own content (the distortion of Böckenförde’s dictum about the liberal state that does not possess the grounds on which it rests by Ratzinger’s point) and fuse it with a different idea of truth. A complex operation: because it is precisely the idea of truth as a unique holder of rights that had been the heart of state theory—where the state must be confessional where Catholicism is majority, and defend religious liberty where Catholicism is minority. This structure had been dismantled by Pacem in terris, which had fixed the person, and not truth, as holder of fundamental rights. In order not to give even the impression of wanting to rebuild the democratic state on truth understood as essence, and not on truth seen as method, one had to work the category truth itself. And Magnifica humanitas handles this with the Bergoglian formula that “truth is not a territory to defend, but a good to share” (n. 25).

Identifying what threatens democracy is no less important than the definition offered: to understand what “cognitive democracy” is, Magnifica humanitas defines its antagonists: populism, authoritarianism and totalitarianism. If in Fratelli tutti populism was the instrumentalization of the “people” by leaders who tear societies apart to amass economic and political power, Magnifica humanitas denounces populism embedded in social networks’ architecture and the algorithmic exaggeration of immediate emotional responses. Where democracy asks for time, patience and acceptance of complexity (dialogue), technological populism destroys the democratic space, because it lives on Pavlovian reactions triggered by profiled data flows. As for authoritarianism, there is an extra leap: from Quadragesimo anno to Centesimus annus, the papacy thunders against the concentration of state power that stifles subsidiarity and the intermediate bodies; for Leo XIV there is the danger of a “soft authoritarianism” or technocratic one, that occurs when big monopolies (above the State) use AI for a predictive system of citizenship, justice, and social credit. In the background, the “invisible totalitarianism,” which is not the totalitarianism of real socialism that rejects transcendental truth about man, but one that operates by colonizing the imagination and cognitive processes leading to the “disarmament of conscience.”

In conclusion

At the end of World War II, at Professor Padovani’s, a small group of young “professorini” from the Catholic University gathered to discuss the world order that would emerge from fascism’s defeat. Within the scholarly circle of Father Gemelli, who had been socialist and a Golgi student, before becoming a sincere and frankly antisemitic fascist, they learned not those horrors but an immeasurable confidence in the rational work of understanding things.

Convinced that understanding reality was already changing it, they applied themselves with the few instruments that the regime’s intellectual self-sufficiency and clerical‑fascist climate had not reduced to nothing; and, perhaps with almost Catholic instinct, they sought from the Pope’s radio messages hints, tacit indications, invisible roads that would liberate the day after the horror into which the present had plunged. And before undertaking resistance routes, political struggles or constitutional engagement, they undertook a totally singular deciphering of the Pope’s “social magisterium.”

Because they found in the lines and sublines of Pius XII and his predecessors things that objectively were not there (La Pira, for instance, was convinced that condemning those who hold capital “by continually increasing it to the grave detriment of others” was a rejection of capitalism—which perhaps was not the aim of that condemnatory document); yet, in so doing, they properly interpreted a papal intention: to exercise a constant orientation function, which was more important to him than deciphering the sensus loquentis.

For Prevost’s encyclical, technology is simply the milieu in which algorithmic matter exerts coercive mastery over the mind.

Alberto Melloni

If one tries to apply Padovani’s method to Magnifica humanitas, one faces two problems: a subjective one, and an objective one.

The first is that—since the energy that defined 1942–1944 is no longer part of the emitter’s culture nor of the receivers’—one ends up in the most obtuse papism: praising the obvious, scanning the footwear, deciphering Curie’s rumors, and “situating” acts that arrived slowly, but not matured and completed, in grand tableaux where, in the end, everything reconstitutes by enchantment.

The second is that if, really, as Mauro Magatti states, AI presents itself as the pharmakon of the liquid age—an antidote that returns to a stochastic unity the vertigo of options—scrutinizing it as Leo XIV does will not arouse interest in aspiring practitioners who are masters of humanity, who see in the ongoing technological leap a lever to increase equality and inequality, justice and injustice, advantages and disadvantages.

What this introduces is an element reminiscent of Magritte’s famous pipe, painted above the inscription ceci n’est pas une pipe.

is an encyclical programmatically non-programmatic. It does not set the pontificate’s agenda as did Pius XII or Paul VI. It does not draw the architrave theology from which the new Pope’s framework would be drawn, as did Wojtyła or Bergoglio (who preferred the apostolic exhortation genre). It asserts the Church’s right and duty to welcome the time’s and history’s challenges in faith, and it does so on topics to which certain Bergoglian political figures—Cardinal Michael Czerny and Fr. Paolo Benanti, the Franciscan theologian whose standing at the UN, in the government of Meloni, at LUISS University, gave him the authority of a precursor—have contributed a great deal, though with varying results as shown above.

And yet, Padovani’s house method, so to speak, yields a fundamental question that can be condensed in crucial n. 107.

There the Pope of the Rome Church says that he does not (and thus does not give) an ethics of principles applied to the machine, but a question that requires a “theory” of who decides, on the basis of a logic of structural obligation. This puts out of play the standard catalogues on the five pillars of AI ethics (beneficence, non‑maleficence, autonomy, justice, plus explaina­bility), which pretend to have solved the problem that n. 107 declares open.

Open, and not today: and which, today, cannot be closed. If we want to appeal to a very distant and ecclesiastical‑worldly reference to be sure not to fall into commentators’ reveries about each pontifical sigh, we could take as an Ockham’s razor the distinction in Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty (1958).

For the encyclical, what the 20th-century thinker would have called “negative freedoms” (the right not to be prevented) is, in AI user, total: but also sovereignly illusory. For beneath non‑coercion, there is no deployment of ratzingerian rationality, but the psychologically invisible and ontologically “inhuman” conditioning of algorithms. Conversely, reclaiming the positive freedom born from conscience’s judgment—expressed by slower verbs such as preserve, educate, protect—raises the question of who can guarantee it, so that humanity is truly protected and truly free.

But, to stay within Berlin’s scheme, what is the “public power” that can guarantee nothing less than human anthropological identity, without risking a return to paternalistic pre‑authoritarian governance? Or, to put it differently: is Magnifica humanitas the manifesto of a radical social democracy, where the State is neither a neutral arbiter of liberal thinkers nor a guardian with hundred eyes of sapiential balances defined by an unknown consensus, and which would elicit indulgence from (Chinese) devotees of harmony (the Chinese He)?

This dilemma intertwines with a reading of AI that deserves to be acknowledged: that the Pope’s reflection cannot be only provisional, given AI’s rapid development, given the vast private investments fueling it, and given the thinness of thought with which the problems are approached that, if they are fundamental, must have a historical‑theological dimension—and if they do not, are but bar talk about AI.

Should one conclude that Magnifica humanitas will share the same ephemeral fate as recent encyclicals that preceded it in the last half‑century? For those who would study social doctrine at this XXIth‑century turning, will it become, like “War and Peace” in Woody Allen’s quip—“I took a speed‑reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia”—and we say of it: “Magnifica humanitas? It involves AI.”

To view things realistically, the risk exists. But if a less ephemeral fate were reserved, it would not depend on whether it treated a “modern” theme or on whether it examined the “new things” that are cited, propter ignorantiam, to connect, through mawkish flights, Pope XIII and Pope XIV. If it remains, if it marks, it will not be because the force of certain passages makes minor writing pettiness insignificant (such as removing—all but one of the United States bishops’ citations—from the record the Francis wanted to show collegiality in action, or the vulgarity of citing the Council through the Acta Apostolica Sedis, as if Vatican II belonged to the papacy and as if the papacy did not choose to include itself in the conciliar process by signing “una cum Patribus”). If it weighs tomorrow, it will not also be because it adds a hundred pages to “social doctrine”: for whoever reads it without the intention of turning it into a compendium that serves nothing, or an object of praise that the Highest Authority does not need, will agree with Pope Prevost that the brief path of social doctrine from Pecci to today is not linear, and that it is not valuable because it remained identical, but for the opposite reason.

Magnifica humanitas may endure if someone—Christian or not, agnostic or not—learns how to avoid naïve enthusiasms and sterile fears (n. 14); if one learns from this thoughtful brother not to indulge slogans about “another world is possible,” but to understand with whom to build it—since the Pope says not to start with recipes. As Francis, Leo XIV is also harsh on market dynamics, as he sees how “historic capitalism” (center of where the papacy saw private property) has become “prehistoric” relative to the system that concentrates money and power so as to condition institutions and laws, to overstep power, to condition the design and practice of State life: but, in the end, it is the State that must invent instruments of constraint and guarantee, through a thought entirely his own—even more than Benedict XVI and Bergoglio, it is not enough to appeal to logos or pueblo.

If Magnifica humanitas remains, it will be because, at bottom, it acknowledges that a theology of humanity does not suffice either: for—one can simply look at the encyclical’s notes, full of self-citations and references to a “Doctrine” and a “Magisterium” whose Congar and Chenu, from on high, would smile at seeing the capitals—theology does not exist and must be built in daily thought and virtue, study and asceticism, rigor and listening, that no one today asks anyone to supply. This is an act of programmatic intent. Just as the Magritte pipe remains a pipe.