The New Things, The New Batch!
In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.
So Pope Leo XIV told the College of Cardinals in his first official address as pope. Many of us reading the words at the time wondered how, and how soon, the new pope would make good on them. The answer, it turns out, was: soon, and at length. His first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, has now arrived.
The choice of regnal name continues to serve as a hermeneutical key to the papacy of Leo XIV. Leo XIII looked out at the smokestacks of the late nineteenth century and gave the Church a moral analysis of the building blocks of economic analysis — land, labor, capital — to meet the first industrial revolution without surrendering to either social Darwinism or state socialism. Rerum Novarum did not solve the new things of that age, but it did equip the faithful to think with the Church about them. Our Augustinian mathematician-pope, facing not the smokestack but the server farm, now offers Magnifica Humanitas in much the same spirit.
This week on Acton Line, I sat down with my colleagues Dylan Pahman and Caleb Whitmer for a roundtable discussion on what the Holy Father is saying, and not saying, about Catholic social teaching and artificial intelligence.
A few of the threads we pulled on:
Catholicism’s developing social teaching. The encyclical lays great stress on the need for development in the Church’s social teaching with the Pope stating, “I would also like to stress how, within this tradition, the unchanging core of revealed truths regarding the human person and society is constantly intertwined with a renewed capacity for listening to historical situations and for responding to contemporary issues.” We get into historical presidents for such development and it’s necessity in the coming age of AI.
Babel vs. Jerusalem. Leo XIV reaches past the modern frame for a far older one. Are we using our new tools to build a Tower of Babel, an engineered top-down uniformity imposed by the technologically dominant, or a New Jerusalem of free cooperation, mutual aid, and shared responsibility for the common good? The biblical typology is the encyclical’s diagnostic key, but what about Pentacost?
The shift in addressee. Catholic social teaching since Rerum Novarum has, on the whole, addressed the State. Magnifica Humanitas turns much of its attention to transnational technology corporations whose decisions now shape labor markets, public discourse, and the texture of ordinary life more decisively than many governments. That shift opens fresh debates on subsidiarity, intellectual property, and the universal destination of goods.
Algorithms and just war. Among the encyclical’s most urgent passages is its warning on automated weapons. Can the venerable just-war tradition of proportionality, discrimination, legitimate authority, and last resort survive the migration of life-and-death decisions to autonomous systems? Leo XIV’s answer is unambiguous: a human person, not a program, must bear the moral weight of taking a human life.
Work, markets, and the metrics of flourishing. Magnifica Humanitas is no baptism of techno-utopianism, but neither is it a romantic rejection of the modern economy. There is a pointed jab at the “invisible hand”, and a sharper one of how GDP treated as the measure of a society’s health. Whether technological innovation, profit motives, and human dignity can be harmonized, and on what terms, is a question we kick around at some length.
Lord Acton once described the work of a faithful Catholic magazine as a fight on two fronts: against those who, for the sake of religion, fear science, and against those who, for the sake of science, despise religion. Magnifica Humanitas is, among many other things, an attempt to refuse both temptations at once. Whether it succeeds is for readers to weigh. That the attempt is worth our serious attention is not in doubt.
Listen to the full roundtable on Acton Line:
▶️ YouTube: