- The encyclical as a civilizational event
- From Rerum Novarum to Magnifica Humanitas: the same urgency, a century apart
- A legitimacy that transcends religious boundaries
- An anthropology challenged by transhumanism
- Man is not an improvable prototype
- The temptation of Babel, or the sin of technological self-sufficiency
- Magnifica Humanitas as a political act of the universal Church
- ✝ Biblical references
There is something striking about what has just happened in Paris. A European think tank — founded on the principles of supranational integration, secular by vocation, heir to Brussels legal positivism — has published a formal analysis of Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, ...describing it as an intervention "as revolutionary as AI itself." For those following the debate from within the Church, the surprise lies not in the papal text—long awaited, hoped for, and meticulously prepared—but in the identity of its unexpected interpreter. That a think tank claiming to be the heir of Jacques Delors, the architect of the single market, should perceive in an ecclesiastical document a "first-rate political intervention" comparable in scope to the 2018 GDPR: this is a theologically and politically significant event, deserving of careful consideration.
Because what the Jacques Delors Institute perceived — with the cold precision of the jurist and the economist — is precisely what Leo XIV had wanted to inscribe in the genes of his text: Magnifica Humanitas This is not a catechism about the dangers of the internet. It is a complete anthropological architecture, built to resist the pressure of a civilization that has not yet learned to govern itself in the age of algorithms.
The encyclical as a civilizational event
Of Rerum Novarum has Magnifica Humanitas : the same urgency, a century apart
Leo XIV signed his encyclical on May 15, 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum — a deliberate, almost liturgical gesture. In 1891, his predecessor Leo XIII spoke in a world where steam engines crushed the bodies of workers in the mills of Manchester and Lyon, where nascent industrial capitalism knew no legal or moral limits. The Church did not back down: it named, diagnosed, and proposed. Social doctrine was born in this movement of intellectual courage.
Today, machines are invisible. They process billions of data points per second, they shape opinions, they screen job applications, they guide military strikes. It is no longer bodies that are primarily in danger—it is the soul of human deliberation, humanity's capacity to exercise judgment, to resist the suggestion of algorithms, to remain the subject of its own history rather than the object of a calculation. This is precisely what the encyclical calls the magnifica humanitas — this magnificent humanity, inhabited by God, which cannot be reduced to a data profile or a utility function.
Magnifica Humanitas This is part of a tradition that goes back well beyond the 20th century. The philosopher Romano Guardini, explicitly quoted in the encyclical, had warned as early as the 1950s that technological power without wisdom engenders not progress but what he called a "desolation of being." Leo XIV takes up this insight and updates it: AI is not bad in itself—just as nuclear energy is not bad in itself—but it must be, according to the central formula of the text, "disarmed." This word— disarm — is not a gratuitous war metaphor. It is theologically charged: it refers to the conversion of the heart, to the metanoia, to this radical reversal without which no technique can serve the common good.
A legitimacy that transcends religious boundaries
What is unprecedented in the reception of Magnifica Humanitas According to the Jacques Delors Institute, the focus is on identifying three principles that the think tank describes as "operational"—that is, translatable into concrete legal standards. The first is the disarmament of AI: the neutralization of autonomous military uses, meaning the effective prohibition of lethal systems without human supervision. The second is the traceability of digital value chains: who benefits from the precarious annotators in Africa or Southeast Asia who label data to feed major language models, often in conditions that amount to what Leo XIV himself called a "new slavery"? The third is the right to disconnect—which the encyclical roots in the biblical tradition of the Sabbath: a sanctified time set aside from the logic of productivity, a form of structured resistance to the grip of constant connectivity.
But the Sabbath is not a legal invention. It is a theological institution of profound depth. When the Book of Exodus lays down the commandment of rest — « Six days you shall work, and on the seventh you shall rest »"(Exodus 34:21) — it does not legislate on labor rights: it proclaims that man is not a resource, that there is something in him irreducible to productivity, something that belongs to God before it belongs to the economy. Transposing this principle into the digital age — as proposed Magnifica Humanitas — it is to affirm that disconnection is not a luxury but a spiritual and anthropological imperative of the first order. That secular European legislators can seize upon it as an operational principle is not a political victory for the Church: it is a demonstration that anthropological truth, when well formulated, transcends confessional divides.
An anthropology challenged by transhumanism
Man is not an improvable prototype
One of the strongest theses of Magnifica Humanitas is his rejection of transhumanism—not a panicky and defensive rejection, but a reasoned one, grounded in Christology. Leo XIV affirms that human dignity is not an emergent property of biology that technology could amplify indefinitely: it is a Don, received from a personal God, inscribed in the Incarnation of the Word. This is why the encyclical, in its own way, takes up Gregory of Nyssa's thought that "being created in the image of God imprints a royal character on humanity from the very beginning." This "royal character" is not a cognitive ability that AI could surpass: it is a relationship, a calling, a vocation—what the Bernese theologian Karl Barth would have called a "determination of being.".
The practical consequence of this anthropological position is radical. If human dignity is relational and not functional, then no artificial intelligence system, however sophisticated, can claim to replace human moral judgment—much less delegate lethal decisions to it. This is where Magnifica Humanitas unexpectedly aligns with certain secular jurists who advocate for an "irreducible human responsibility" in autonomous systems. The encyclical expresses theologically what the law seeks to state normatively: there are acts that cannot be reduced to mere calculation. Paragraph 99 of the text is strikingly clear on this point:« These artificial intelligence systems have no moral conscience. »
The temptation of Babel, or the sin of technological self-sufficiency
The recurring image in Magnifica Humanitas —and one of his most beautiful biblical insights—is that of Babel. Leo XIV saw in it the paradigm of any civilization that confuses technological power with human fulfillment. The Tower of Babel is not a naive allegory: it is the description of a profound anthropological mechanism, that by which humankind, intoxicated by its capacity to produce, forgets that communication— dialogues — is a reciprocal gift before it is a transfer of information. The passage from the book of Genesis (11:1-9) on the confusion of tongues is, in this reading, disturbingly relevant today: the major language models generate an appearance of universal communication which often masks a real disorientation, a proliferation of content without truth, a "digital Babel" where everyone speaks and no one listens.
In contrast to Babel, the encyclical opposes Jerusalem—not as a geographical location but as an eschatological horizon: a reconciled humanity, capable of fraternity, animated not by calculation but by self-giving. It is here that Christology becomes a political program. If the Incarnation is, in the words of Leo XIV, the «ultimate criterion» by which to measure all human progress, then the question posed to AI designers, legislators, and investors is not merely:« Is this system effective? »" but : "« Does this system serve human fraternity or does it undermine it? »"This shift in the question is perhaps the most original contribution of the encyclical to the global debate on the regulation of AI.
Saint Paul's letter to the Corinthians sheds striking light on what the encyclical seeks to say:« Knowledge puffs up, but it is charity that builds up »"(1 Corinthians 8:1). This verse, rarely cited in debates about technology, is actually at the heart of the problem. The accumulation of data, computing power, the sophistication of algorithms—all of this is on the order of the awareness. But the question of how these capacities serve or destroy human relationships: that is the question of the charity. And charity, as Paul reminds us with unparalleled force, cannot be algorithmically controlled.
Magnifica Humanitas as a political act of the universal Church
Beyond the GDPR: what the law cannot do alone
The Jacques Delors Institute is right to compare the encyclical to the GDPR, but this comparison must be understood in its precise scope—and its limitations. The General Data Protection Regulation, adopted in 2018 by the European Union, constituted a considerable legal advance: it imposed on the entire world standards of privacy protection that no one had dared to formulate in positive law. But the GDPR, by its very nature, can only address identifiable, measurable, and contentious violations. It cannot answer the question of why privacy deserves to be protected. It cannot base law on anthropology.
That is precisely where Magnifica Humanitas goes further. By proposing an anthropology of the human person—created, loved, called, irreducible to their given characteristics—the encyclical provides the foundation that the law presupposes without being able to produce it. It is not the Church that places itself at the service of legislators: it is the Church that reminds legislators of what they fundamentally know—that every just law rests on a vision of humanity. And this vision, in the deepest European tradition, is of Christian inspiration, whether one acknowledges it or not. Jacques Maritain, who had theorized the possibility of a natural law shared between believers and non-believers, would undoubtedly have recognized in this secular reception of the encyclical the confirmation of his thesis on the «natural rights of the human person.».
A pontificate that chooses its battle
Leo XIV was an Augustinian. This is not a trivial biographical detail. Augustine of Hippo understood, in the 5th century, that the City of God and the City of Men were intertwined without being confused, that Christians were called to inhabit the world fully while not dissolving into it. Magnifica Humanitas is an Augustinian act: she fully inhabits the global debate on AI — she knows the actors, the issues, the power dynamics — without reducing Christianity to an NGO of good digital governance.
This is why the encyclical concludes not with a political recommendation, but with an invitation to contemplation. Leo XIV calls on believers to "inhabit new technologies in the light of the Gospel"—which means: to use them without being imprisoned by them, to use them without serving them, to remain free subjects in a world increasingly shaped by logics that elude any individual subject. And he points to the contemplation of the Incarnate Word as a way out of the "eclipse of the meaning of what it means to be human.".
This conclusion may seem mystical to those expecting a normative roadmap. In reality, it is profoundly realistic. For if the crisis facing digital civilization is, at its core, a crisis of anthropology—a loss of the conviction that humankind is more than a node in a network—then no legal standard, however well-conceived, can resolve it alone. It requires men and women who know that which they are. And that science does not come from an algorithm.
Jeremiah's prophecy takes on a disturbing significance here:« I engrave my law deep within their being, I inscribe it in their hearts »"(Jeremiah 31:33). That is exactly what Magnifica Humanitas advocates for discernment in the age of AI: not a list of rules to memorize, but a training of conscience — a law inscribed in the heart — that allows each person to judge, case by case, what serves life and what undermines it. That this vision is now recognized by European secular think tanks as an irreplaceable contribution to the political debate: this is, perhaps, the most unexpected — and most encouraging — sign that the Church still speaks, and that it is still heard.
✝ Biblical references
3 passages · 3 books
If I do not have love, I am nothing. (1 Corinthians 13:2)
Unity of the Church, ethical problems and a hymn to charity for the Corinthian community.
→ Explore the Codex 1 Corinthians
I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. (Exodus 20:2)
The liberation of Israel from Egyptian slavery and the giving of the Law at Sinai.
→ Explore the Exodus Codex
I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel. (Jeremiah 31:31)
Prophet of the destruction of Jerusalem and of the new covenant of the heart.
→ Explore the Codex Jeremiah
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