Magnifica Humanitas
Pope Leo XIV tackles the AI revolution
By Bernard Brandon Scott
Editorial Disclaimer
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and are presented for educational and discussion purposes. They do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of the organization. This essay is a speculative reflection on how a papal encyclical addresses issues related to artificial intelligence and society.
Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, the first of his papacy, tackles the AI revolution. The tech bros in Silicon Valley are not going to be pleased. The pope is more focused on the problems, less so on the benefits. He fears that we are building a new tower of Babel. Some in Washington also will not be pleased. He thinks governments have a responsibility to regulate AI and that final military decisions should not be turned over to AI. Life and death decisions are too important to turn over to a machine.
The media coverage for the most part has dealt with the encyclical’s main points. Since The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as other media outlets, have provided good coverage, I am not going to summarize the pope’s main points. What interests me is how Pope Leo has made his argument.
Papal encyclicals have a definite form. Each pope must demonstrate that he is following in the footsteps of his predecessors, bringing the ancient truth to new situations. Because of this form, there is a lot of “pope quoting.” The vast majority of footnotes in Magnifica Humanitas refer to papal encyclicals or papal documents. This is very much intra-Catholic, an intra-papal discussion. The scriptures are quoted much less than popes. This is unfortunate because Pope Leo has some very valuable things to say to others than Catholics.
Magnifica Humanitas[1] is well informed about AI, although it does not footnote this. Since the encyclical is interested in engaging the larger society, not noting where the pope is getting his information is a loss. This is not a briefing document, although at times it reads like one. The pope’s interests are not in explaining AI but in ethical and societal implications. The first sentence expresses this: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together” (1). He addresses humanity as a group, not just Catholics. He draws upon two biblical metaphors: the tower of Babel or the New City of God. His chief concern is that we, the whole of humanity, have a choice before us. By implication, “we”—all of humanity—should make the choice, not the owners of the technology. This sentence contains the whole of Leo’s argument.
Leo makes his argument with two primary principles: the common good and the worth of the individual.
Common Good
The notion of the common good has a deep history in Catholic moral teaching, going back to Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). Aquinas followed Aristotle’s understanding of the human being as a “political animal.” “Political” derives from the Greek word polis meaning city. For Aristotle, humans were meant to live in cities; by nature they are social beings who are at their best in communities. Aquinas elaborated Aristotle’s insight into a theory of the common good (bonum commune) and integrates it into Christian theology and ethics. The common good involves all acting together for the good of the group. Living in community leads to virtue as the individual seeks what is best for the whole. The community is of the highest value, not the individual. By participating in community, the individual finds true humanity. For Aquinas, tyrannical law is not really law at all because it does not seek the common good. The common good operates at the level of the family, the political unit, and ultimately the divine level since God is the universal common good.
Rerum Novarum[2] (1891, “Of New Things”) marks a major shift away from Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors (1864),[3] a strongly reactionary condemnation of the liberalism and modernism sweeping through modern Europe. Syllabus of Errors’ reactionary attitude is summed up in its final article 80. It condemns as false the statement that “The Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization.” Rerum Novarum takes up precisely these “new things.” But one pope cannot reject the statements of a former pope, especially his predecessor. One moves on, ignores the problem. When you claim infallibility, it’s hard to say you made a mistake.
Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum, drawing heavily on Thomas Aquinas’ theory of the common good, set the mold for papal as well as Vatican II documents on social justice. Aquinas’ common good is a chief strength of Catholic Social Teaching. When Robert Francis Prevost took the name of Leo when elected pope, he clearly signaled he was following the footsteps of Leo XIII, and his first encyclical, issued on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, clearly is in that mode.
In drawing upon Aquinas’ notion of the common good, Leo XIII also took the side of the workers. This marked a major transition on the part of the papacy. Pius IX took the side of the kings who were being deposed by the rising tide of liberalism. He identified the church, the papacy, with kings because he was a king, the ruler of a state, although a dispossessed ruler of the papal states.
Leo XIII’s taking up the workers’ cause, moving the church to the side of the workers, initiated a move followed by other popes throughout the twentieth century toward the marginalized, outcast, and a “preferential option for the poor.”
The common good is Leo XIV’s primary analytical tool for examining AI. He makes this clear from the very beginning. “Technological power thus takes on an unprecedented, predominantly ‘private’ aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good” (5). The encyclical poses “private” interests against the common good, decisively rejecting the notion so common in the United States that the private good triumphs over the public.
Human Worth
The second major element in the pope’s toolbox is the worth of the human being. Leo rejects the capitalist notion that worth depends on achievements or production but instead opts for “rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them” (51). This, of course, is an Enlightenment value, represented in the American Declaration of Independence that called for the overthrow of the English king: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Like the American Declaration of Independence, the pope also ties this right to the creator; “This is the dignity that belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God” (52).
New Age of Slavery
At the heart of his ethical analysis Leo warns against a new form of slavery. He calls out “a technocratic and post-humanist mentality” that only regards “the human person as an object to be manipulated or a resource to be optimized, removing all safeguards against the unchecked pursuit of profit. What prevails is efficiency, rather than respect for freedom and human dignity” (172).
Leo identifies slavery with colonialism and sees its long chain supporting AI subordination, colonialism, and enslavement.
A significant part of the digital economy’s functioning relies on the silent work of millions of people engaged in essential yet largely unseen activities. . . . In many cases, these workers are young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages. Added to this invisible labor is the even harsher work of extracting the resources required for the production of the devices and microprocessors on which AI depends. In some regions of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the materials from which rare earth elements are extracted. The bodies of these people are scarred, injured and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterruptedly. (173)
The pope draws a strong conclusion: “It is not enough to invoke efficiency, nor to celebrate the benefits of innovation, if they are built on a chain of exploitation that remains deliberately hidden. If technology promises emancipation, yet produces new forms of global subordination, it stands in contradiction to the fundamental principle of human dignity” (173).
Conclusion: AI promises a new age of slavery!
The charge of slavery is particularly poignant in Leo’s argument because the church for so long had failed in its discernment of slavery as an evil. Only under Leo XIII in the nineteenth century did the Roman Catholic Church finally condemn slavery. “It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow when contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many in stark contrast to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by the Lord. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon” (176).
This is as close as you will get to a pope saying, “We got it wrong on an important moral question. Now learn from our mistake!” (Leo XIV needs to make an equally repentant confession on the church’s allowing priests to sexually abuse youths and covering it up for such a long time.)
Leo diagnoses the problem with AI. As currently set up, it is leading to a new form of slavery, an offense against human dignity. The pope also proposes a solution: the common good, not private interest. He had announced his conclusion in the encyclical’s beginning: ”let us establish standards for discernment—the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, care for our common home and peace—and let us translate these standards into practices such as responsible planning, the assessment of human and social impact, the inclusion of the most vulnerable, the promotion of digital literacy and guiding research and industry toward justice and peace” (14).
Make no mistake. Leo, in line with many of the modern popes, is mounting a major critique of capitalism as practiced in much of the West.
Common Ground
This encyclical is addressed to the Catholic faithful throughout the world. But Leo’s argument is not fundamentally confessional or even theological. His basic argument is philosophical. The theory of the common good derives from Aristotle and is elaborated by Aquinas as a political ethic. There is nothing specifically Catholic or even Christian about this notion. It’s a matter of reason. Likewise, the intrinsic worth of each human person is an Enlightenment value. Leo is proposing a dialogue based on common human values about what the future should be. He stated this clearly in the encyclical’s first paragraph. “Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world” (1).
How far is Pope Leo willing to push his program? Is he willing to make it a priority of the American bishops? American Catholic parishes? Catholic social teaching was a major influence on the New Deal in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Is Leo willing to push that hard?
The title Magnifica Humanitas does not translate well—Magnificent Humanity does not make much sense. Leo concludes his encyclical with a reference to Mary’s Magnificat in Luke’s Gospel. I suspect he imagines a wordplay which poses the question, are we going to magnify humanity as God’s creation or enslave those who stand in the way?
A piece of trivia: this is, as far as I can tell, the first encyclical not in Latin. How times have changed since the Syllabus of Errors.
[1] The text of the encyclical is available here.
[2] Rerum Novarum is an encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891. It is available here.
This is one of the more helpful synopses/commentaries on Magnifica Humanitas that I have seen. Thank you! And a second “Thank you!” for including the English text of the original document.
Leo XIV’s argument is fundamentally anthropological: it’s a claim about what human beings are, and what no machine can reduce them to. This argument, reminiscent of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa in fourth-century Cappadocia, carries significant policy implications without being merely a policy statement. Looking forward to the discussion.