Magnifica Humanitas

Léon XIV published Magnifica Humanitas on 15 May 2026, dating it to the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum: 245 paragraphs, five chapters, on the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. Two biblical images organise it. Babel is technological uniformity without God, an absolutisation of the human; Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem is responsibility taken stone by stone. At n. 9 the first choice is posed as building Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.

The definition at n. 98-99 speaks directly to engineers: these systems are more cultivated than built, developers creating an architecture on which the AI develops, and even those who design them know little about how they work. Léon XIV turns that into a political objection at n. 107: a more moral AI is worth nothing if that morality is decided by a handful of people. Without democratic debate on the ethical code, whoever controls AI makes their own moral vision the invisible infrastructure of the systems. At n. 110 he asks to disarm AI, pulling it out of a competition logic that is now economic and cognitive as well as military.

Léon XIV names the bodies behind the compute at n. 173: data labellers, content moderators, children extracting rare earths. The chapter on work reprises Antiqua et nova on deskilling and automated surveillance of workers. Three months later, Bill Gates wrote that no one is preparing the transition and that power concentrates among those who already hold it. The older question, taken from Jean-Paul II, stands: does AI make human life more human?