The publication of a Pope’s first encyclical is always surrounded by anticipation, both inside and outside the Church. Will it take a stand on divisive issues – migration, rights, synodality, pre-conciliar liturgy?
Will it be pastorally usable or too difficult? But above all, from the first encyclical one expects a “vision”: what vision of the Church does this Pope have? What is his program?
It should be remembered that a pontiff’s first encyclical is not always programmatic: Francis’s Lumen Fidei was written by Benedict XVI, the real program was Evangelii Gaudium. Also Dilexi te (October 2025) was a text by Francis completed by Leo.
Magnifica Humanitas, however – by date and structure – is a program.
AI AND THE SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH
The day the document was signed, May 15, is a reference to the date of the encyclical Rerum Novarum promulgated by Leo XIII in 1891, the foundational document of the Social Doctrine of the Church.
The message is clear: just as in Rerum Novarum Leo XIII addressed the social question at the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of the first great industrial revolution, so today Leo XIV feels the urgency to address the social question again because there is another revolution underway, that of artificial intelligence.
It was known that the topic was at the center of the Pope’s concerns. Since May 2025 Leo XIV has returned to AI dozens of times and already in his first address to the College of Cardinals he linked the choice of his name to it.
The novelty of the encyclical is that it connects the issue of AI organically to the Social Doctrine of the Church.
AI and its applications are the res novae to be read in the light of the history of Social Doctrine (chap. 1) and its principles (chap. 2), but they are also what puts Social Doctrine itself to the test.
Paragraph 17 says this, with a formulation worth quoting in full: artificial intelligence “must be understood not as a thematic appendix, or as an emergency to be managed, but as a transformation that challenges from within the categories of Social Doctrine and demands further development.”
THE HUMAN AND THE INHUMANE
In reality, therefore, speaking of an encyclical on AI is not correct. The subtitle clarifies the theme: it is “the custody of the human in the context of AI.” Magnifica Humanitas is concerned with establishing the framework of the Catholic discourse on AI.
The approach is, in some ways, the same that Francis used with the ecological question: the ecological crisis is not only a pollution problem nor a standalone problem, but one of the serious manifestations of a general crisis of the human, which appears in different forms and requires an integral ecology.
The discourse on AI is also brought back to the crisis of the human and considered an accelerator both for good and for ill.
The Pope says: Christians are interested in defending the human, because this is the risk, to dehumanize ourselves. The diagnosis may seem pessimistic or alarmist, but certainly avoids the two extremes that sometimes appear in the debate on artificial intelligence, the apocalyptic and the messianic, the announcement of an impending tragedy and the promise of a solution to all humanity’s problems.
Both readings, mirror images of each other, fuel the spotlight on AI at a time of enormous investments without economic return, and – here lies one of the points of the encyclical – distract attention from the present, hiding what are the concrete and already fully current problems of AI: from ecological impact to cognitive biases, from oligopoly to delegation of responsibility, up to fully automated weapons.
While in the abstract technology is neutral, in practice it “is not neutral, because it takes on the face of those who design it, finance it, regulate it, use it” (MH 9).
Instead of fueling the hype on AI with apocalyptic or messianic future prospects, the Pope chooses the ground of a call to discernment and responsibility.
AI – it reads – must be “disarmed” (now a key term of the pontificate), preventing it from dominating the human: “This means removing it from monopolies, making it debatable, contestable, and therefore inhabitable, restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and forms of life” (MH 110).
But the guiding image of the document is another: that of building, that is, a fully human activity, which has a project and employs many people.
The Pope’s appeal is: “let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty in the construction site of our time” (MH 16); “I encourage everyone, especially the lay faithful, not to be afraid to let themselves be challenged by reality, to listen to one another, and to firmly assume their responsibility in building a more human and fraternal society” (MH 91).
TWO BIBLICAL ICONS AND SAINT AUGUSTINE
The image of building is developed according to two biblical icons presented in the introduction, both taken from the Old Testament: the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9) and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah (Ne 2-6). The first is a project of imperialist, uniforming domination, which dehumanizes.
The second is a craft work of shared responsibility: Jerusalem is in ruins and the people returned from exile set to work to rebuild its walls, under the guidance of Governor Nehemiah, who assigns each family a stretch of wall.
The two images serve to pose the crucial question: what are we working on? How are we building? Is the project for humanity or against it?
This seems to me somewhat the signature of an Augustinian Pope. In the encyclical there is not much Saint Augustine in terms of quantity of citations, but he appears in some key points: in the introduction (MH 11) about the restless heart, at the end of the third chapter, roughly in the middle of the text (MH 130), in the fifth chapter about peace (MH 215) and in the conclusion, about the Eucharist (MH 234).
The most important citation is the central one, which Leo uses to close the chapter on AI and the human person, quoting a famous phrase from book XIV of De civitate Dei: “Two loves made two cities: the earthly city from the love of self to the contempt of God, the heavenly city from the love of God to the contempt of self.”
There is a recognizable architecture in the encyclical: Babel and Jerusalem in the introduction, the Augustinian “two cities” in chapter 3, the “culture of power” against the “civilization of love” in chapter 5.
The digital revolution is read within the oldest Christian philosophy of history: history is the place of coexistence and conflict between two ways of living, which build two opposing cultures (the Augustinian duae civitates), and every man and every society are called to choose which side to be on: with the human and for the human, or against it.
THE CHURCH-AS-CONSTRUCTION SITE
In this general framework, what vision of the Church does Leo XIV propose? The first impression, a fresh impression, is that it is a “construction site of humanity” Church.
If Francis saw a Church as a “field hospital,” a Church “going forth,” engaged in proclaiming the Gospel, Leo sees and wants a Church present and active in the construction site of the world: Christians working together with all those who build a human world, and who fight against dehumanization.
Quoting Paul VI, Leo invokes the project of a “civilization of love”: “the construction site already appears underway, especially thanks to many living stones firmly united to Christ, the cornerstone (cf. 1 Pt 2:4-6).
In this work we are called to take an active role, without retreating into spiritualism or our small worlds: we must be faithful to the truth, invest in education, care for relationships, love justice and peace” (MH 236).
The reformulation of the classic principles of Social Doctrine in the second chapter – common good, universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, social justice (while human dignity is not among the principles, but the foundation of everything) – serves as a compass to evaluate and govern technological developments and their applications, which are transforming the world we live in.
But at the end of the chapter (MH 86-89) the encyclical turns to the Church itself to use the same principles for an internal review: subsidiarity as “criterion of governance and pastoral life,” the participation of the baptized “through real, not nominal participation bodies,” transparency, accountability, “regular forms of evaluation of the exercise of ministerial responsibilities,” listening to victims of “spiritual, economic, institutional, sexual, power, conscience abuses.”
The Church engaged in the construction site of the world is first of all a construction site in itself. It is also, it seems to me, the moment in which Leo XIV closes more clearly the possible reading of his pontificate as a retreat on synodality: paragraph 89 is in strong continuity with the synodal path.
THE LEADERSHIP OF NEHEMIAH
To indicate the style of the construction site, Leo insists on the image of Nehemiah, who also returns in the conclusion, where it is read that he was chosen “as companion and guiding figure.” The choice seems very interesting to me: the example of Nehemiah has traditionally been used by American pastors to exhort rulers, because he is a strong, devoted, resilient leader, full of zeal for the divine Law.
Towards the end of the last century, some American Republicans took Nehemiah as an ideal for the reconstruction of a healthy society, against the destructive liberal and progressive ideology. The image of the walls to be rebuilt evoked the need for security and stability.
Some years ago, the Texan pastor Robert Jeffress publicly called Trump “the new American Nehemiah,” destined to rebuild the USA: for all these people Nehemiah is the biblical icon of Make America Great Again.
BUT WHO IS NEHEMIAH FOR LEO XIV?
He is one who “does not impose solutions from above. He convenes families, entrusts each with a stretch of wall to rebuild, listens to fears, coordinates efforts, faces opposition” (MH 8). He is a leader in the sense of one who knows how to empower the whole people. He is not a nationalist, but the guardian of a weak and lost people.
The Pope explains: “In him I recognize a luminous parable of our vocation to be, in the time of digital transformation, not resigned spectators of social and cultural fractures, not mere commentators on ruins, but women and men who enter the construction sites of history – research laboratories, technological enterprises, schools, media, institutions, local communities – to raise up what has fallen and protect what is exposed” (MH 241).
The Pope repeated this reading of Nehemiah also in his speech during the presentation, almost to reaffirm that he wants to reclaim a biblical figure to remove it from inadequate interpretations.
THE DIALOGUE WITH ANTHROPIC
I would like to close these first impressions by talking about an element external to the text of Magnifica Humanitas: the presence, at the official presentation table in the Vatican, of Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic (also mentioned by the Pope in his speech).
Olah is responsible for research on interpretability, the discipline that investigates what happens inside an artificial intelligence system when it works.
The choice to invite Anthropic attracted attention. It seems to me that it has some merits and potential risks.
The first merit is realism. Right at the beginning of the encyclical the Pope recognizes that if one wants to understand AI one must take into account its “private” character: “Once it was mainly States that guided and directed innovation. Today, however, the main drivers of development are private actors, often transnational, endowed with resources and intervention capabilities superior to those of many governments. Technological power thus takes on a new face, predominantly ‘private,’ and for this reason even more difficult to discern, govern and orient towards the common good” (MH 5).
Inviting Olah to the panel is a sign that, with Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope really wants to dialogue with those who develop AI.
The second merit is recognition. Anthropic has an evident ethical commitment that other competing companies lack and contacts with the Christian world are already a reality. Olah himself has sought, since January 2026, a series of Christian interlocutors.
Moreover, among the major companies in the sector, Anthropic is the only one to have publicly refused – at the cost of contracts – the use of its models for autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. Dario Amodei, its CEO, proposed in Machines of Loving Grace (2024) an “entente strategy” among democracies against the risk that AI structurally favors authoritarian regimes. Positions not overlapping with the magisterium, but compatible with it.
If one wants to dialogue with one of the AI majors, the choice is understandable.
But some risks remain. First of all, hosting a frontier company at the panel of an encyclical legitimizes it: if Anthropic backtracks with the Pentagon, the invitation will appear rash.
There is also an asymmetry at the table, well balanced on the theological side (Czerny, Fernández, Lushombo, Rowlands) but with a single voice from the technological world, no independent critic, no policymaker. Finally, for Anthropic it is also a market positioning: it is the most dialoguing major because it needs legitimacy, and the risk for the Holy See is to lend itself to a marketing operation.
The encyclical closes on four voices that outline a program of Christian life for the time of AI: faith, charity, hope, prayer (MH 243). This will be the subject of a second article.
For now, it is enough to note that in the most traditional shell possible of Christian spirituality – the three theological virtues plus prayer – Leo XIV has decided to place the challenge he considers most current for Catholics, that of a private, transnational, unelected technological power, which is changing the face of human coexistence.
(Excerpt from Stefano Feltri’s Notes)
