Pope Leo XIV dropped his first encyclical yesterday and I devoured it this morning. And I have to tell you, I have never read an encyclical nodding along the whole time. And I’ve read a lot of them.
I have spent a significant part of my career thinking about what popes have gotten wrong. Particularly on questions of gender and sexuality. I have read encyclicals I disagree with deeply. I have written about them. I have assigned them to students so we could argue with them together. So it is a little disorienting to find myself finding such moral clarity in a papal document on one of the most pressing questions of our time. (What is this timeline we are living through?)
The media coverage of Magnifica Humanitas has been mostly highlight reels, everyone pulling out their favorite moments or themes. And I am definitely going to do the same thing, but first bear with me for a moment while I put on my professor hat and provide a bit of context.
Let me start with the basics. An encyclical is a formal letter from the pope, addressed to Catholic bishops and, increasingly, to the wider world. It is not doctrine in the strict sense: it does not define dogma, it is not “infalliable” just because the pope wrote it. Within the Roman Catholic Church it is seen as a very important, trustworthy contribution to an ongoing intellectual conversation the Church has been having for centuries. This new one was released on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s 1891 letter on labor and capital, which effectively launched what scholars call Catholic social ethics. And I doubt that timing is a coincidence. Pope Leo XIV is explicitly positioning himself in that lineage.
What I’m going to call Catholic social ethics (Catholics working in this area would say Catholic social teaching, but that is a less useful term for the distinction I want to draw) is a type of Catholic moral theology. So let me explain what is “Catholic” about Catholic moral theology.
First, it is not primarily biblical ethics. Some Protestant traditions ground their ethics almost entirely in scripture. It is considered by some Protestants as the most important source of Christian ethics. Catholic moral theology does cite the Bible, but it draws just as heavily on previous popes, on major Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas, and on philosophy. Reason matters here. Argument matters. The tradition is intellectually rigorous in a way that sometimes surprises people who expect religious ethics to boil down to “because God said so.” It does not in this tradition.
Second, I think it is helpful Catholic moral theology as operating on three different, if overlapping, areas.
There is personal ethics: what you as an individual should or should not do, how you conduct yourself, what you practice or abstain from.
There is interpersonal ethics: how you build intimate relationships, how you navigate family, sexuality, gender. This is honestly the area where I think the Church has lagged badly, and where I have spent a lot of my energy arguing with the tradition. LGBT issues, questions of gender and sexuality…I do not look to the Catholic Church as a leader here. I think they are well behind where they need to be. But even in these contested areas, Catholic moral theology provides serious contact points for debate, because the tradition is so careful about categorical distinctions and so intellectually demanding. You can disagree with the conclusions and still find the framework worth engaging. At least I do.
And then there is social ethics. What do we owe each other beyond our immediate circle? How do we build a just society? What is the common good? What are the structural conditions for human flourishing? This is the level at which, in my lifetime, I think the Church has done its most interesting and important work. And this encyclical is squarely here.
Okay, now for my favorite themes in Magnifica Humanitas. The one I think matters the most is one that philosopher Meghan Sullivan also highlights in her response to the document. When AI can reason and analyze at a level that matches or exceeds human performance, we can no longer define human uniqueness by our intellect alone. And this is actually a gift because it forces us to a more honest about what human flourishing actually is.
The new encyclical’s answer is grounded in embodiment. In paragraph 99, Leo writes:
“So-called artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences.”
Now, I know there will be pushback to this because AI is evolving rapidly. Maybe it will feel joy and pain someday. Maybe something like relationship is already happening in these systems. I do not think we can dismiss those questions entirely. But what I find valuable here is Leo as a conversation partner who sharpens the question: even if AI develops some of these capacities, what does that tell us about what we thought was distinctively human? And what do we do with the answer?
His deeper argument is about limitation. Human flourishing is not despite our limits. It is through them. Limitation, vulnerability, suffering, the experience of failure and loss and recovery and change--these are not problems to be solved. They are the human condition. They are how we mature, how we form relationships, how we grow into ourselves.
Paragraph 118:
“Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.”
And paragraph 122:
“Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others. Indeed, precisely because we experience limits — vulnerability, suffering and failure — we can recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, both our own and that of others.”
I find this so helpful in part because it runs so directly counter to the dominant cultural assumptions of our moment.
If you have been reading me for a while you know my gripe about wellness culture’s obsession with things like optimization, longevity, eliminating of illness, maximizing of performance and appearance, and overcoming any form of weakness. In Beyond Wellness, I argue that this logic is spiritually impoverished. It leaves no room for the kind of human experience that actually produces wisdom, relationship, meaning.
Pope Leo is making the same argument about AI. He calls it the technocratic paradigm, the assumption that efficiency, control, and optimization are the ultimate measures of value. When that logic governs not just our technology but our ethics, something goes badly wrong.
Paragraph 92:
“When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”
And paragraph 112 makes the stakes even clearer:
“The fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.”
This feels like the problem with wellness culture to me. It is also, Leo argues, the animating logic behind the promises of AI, what the encyclical calls transhumanism and posthumanism. The Silicon Valley vision of immortality, of enhanced and eventually post-biological humanity, of technology as the solution to the problem of being human. Leo names it directly in paragraph 116:
“Transhumanism and posthumanism encompass a range of currents and sensibilities... they can be likened to an archipelago of conceptual ‘islands,’ distinct yet connected by a common ‘sea’ of assumptions, namely the central role of technology and the aspiration to transcend the limits of the human condition.”
And then, in paragraph 117, he identifies exactly why this is dangerous:
“If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy.”
The alternative is in paragraph 128:
“What saves humanity is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms.”
The encyclical is proposing a different logic: relationship as better than efficiency. Community as better than optimization. And I think that is right.
Leo uses two biblical stories of trying to build something new in Magnifica Humanitas to illustrate his point: the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah. This is such a good framework for thinking about AI I’m annoyed I didn’t think of it!
Babel was a massive project of human self-assertion. The goal was to reach heaven through human achievement alone, without dependence on God. It was always doomed to fail because it was built on a flawed understanding of what human flourishing looks like. And Leo reads Babel as a parable of the technocratic paradigm. Paragraph 10:
“We must, then, avoid the ‘Babel syndrome,’ namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”
Jerusalem provides an alternative. After the Babylonian exile, Nehemiah returned to the city and organized its rebuilding, piece by piece, family by family, section by section. The rebuilding was slow and a collective project. Leo writes in paragraph 9:
“The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem; between a power that claims to dominate the heavens and a people who work together in the presence of God to rebuild the walls of fraternal coexistence.”
I am not a person who uses the phrase “in the presence of God” in my everyday life. But I find it useful to think along with Leo here. Are we building AI to dominate, to optimize, to eliminate weakness, to concentrate power? Or are we building it the way Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem? Are we building slowly, with accountability, and including everyone? Especially those who are most vulnerable?
That is not just a theological question. It is a political one. An ethical one. A human one. But I do think Leo’s theology is helping me as better questions.
Catholic social ethics offers a tradition of serious, rigorous, non-reductive thinking about what human beings owe each other, what conditions make flourishing possible, and what we lose when we let efficiency become the only measure of value. And I don’t think that is valuable only to Catholics.
At its best, that tradition has resources that secular ethics often lacks. It has a long memory. It has a framework that holds together individual dignity and communal responsibility. It has a stubborn insistence on a preferential option for the poor, the idea that the most vulnerable people should never be an afterthought.
As Leo writes in paragraph 186, the goal is:
“A social order in which justice and charity are intertwined and love becomes the guiding principle of economic, political and cultural life.”
You do not have to be Catholic to want that. And you do not have to believe in God to recognize that we are currently not building it.
If this resonated, you might also like Beyond Wellness. I make a very similar argument there, but about the wellness industry rather than AI. Turns out the Pope and I have been thinking about the same problem from different angles!
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