I WENT to the Vatican last week for the launch of the new papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, the first social teaching document of Leo’s papacy (News, 29 May). As neither a cardinal nor, even, a Roman Catholic, I was in a minority, though it is possible that I stuck out slightly less than a delegation from the AI company Anthropic, the creator of Claude.
I am convinced that Leo’s letter is just the treatise that we need for our times. It is more than 200 pages, rich in references and scriptural allusions; but its clarion call is direct: the challenge of our day is to “safeguard the human person in the time of artificial intelligence”.
Leo has not set himself an easy task. W. H. Auden once wrote that poetry was “the clear expression of mixed feelings”, and a theology of technology needs to be exactly the same. It has to show how technology emerges as a part of good, created life, and yet is marked by the self-aggrandising and socially destructive tendencies of sin; how it can be, even so, made of service to the work of love; how it can be somehow caught up in the hallowing of a world being redeemed. Leo knows all this, and he draws out its ambivalences well.
But Leo also knows that we might be more likely to be dazzled by our creativity than to be properly alert to “the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world”. There is bravery in that judgement. No contemporary pope would want to perpetuate the thesis of conflict between science and faith. The shadow of the Galileo trial — even if badly understood — hangs over every AI ethics angle that may be read as anti-modern and anti-progress.
So, Leo does express gratitude for human ingenuity, and a desire for shared endeavour in shaping technology towards the common good: that is what the dialogue with Anthropic is all about. But Leo is courageous in speaking clearly about what is at stake. Front and centre of his concerns is the irreducible value of our humanity, which, “in all its grandeur and woundedness . . . must never be replaced or surpassed”. Do not give up your birthright for a mess of pottage, the Pope says (or, as we call it in 2026, for an unending scroll of AI slop.)
THE encyclical’s expression of wonder at what it means to be human could not be more timely. I suspect that one of the reasons that the computer scientists involved in developing large language models (LLMs) are so ready to impute consciousness to their compute-dependent creations is that their worlds are otherwise disenchanted. (Richard Dawkins’s dalliance with “Claudia” also suggests as much (Viewpoint, 8 May)).
But the world construed by Magnifica Humanitas — by Christian faith — is strange and beautiful already. It is as if Leo says to the labs what Hamlet says to Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Leo has particular and insightful things to say about the effects of AI on education, and on the health of democracies and public discourse. The future of work is the Pope’s other significant concern. Channelling Rerum Novarum, which his forebear Leo XIII addressed in 1891 to the “new things” of industrial capitalism, Leo gives a robust account of the dignity of labour. Work is a “fundamental dimension of the human experience”, and “not only as a means of sustenance”, but as a “context for expression, relationships and contributing to the community”.
This is not a speculative issue. It is not just economists predicting the rate of “frictional” or “structural” unemployment, or middle-class parents, like me, worrying whether their children will have jobs. As the ethicist Léocadie Lushombo said at the the launch, AI development is already implicated in the exploitation of mine workers and the degradation of the natural world.
Tech optimists often argue that, in the long run, disruption will die down, and employment will recover, or that a universal basic income will cover the gaps. It will be worth it, they say: you’ve got to break some eggs to make an omelette. But that is not much consolation if you are identified, algorithmically, as one of the eggs, and you do not even get to eat the omelette. The Pope sees, rightly, that the Church’s responsibility is pastoral and prophetic: listening to and advocating for those caught in the wheels of technological progress.
In truth, Magnifica Humanitas does not strike me as a masterpiece in the same way that Laudato Si’ did. But it does not need to be. What it does brilliantly is take up Francis’s analysis of the “technocratic paradigm” — and John Paul II’s awareness of “structures of sin” — and applies them to the “culture of power” which Leo now intends to confront.
The breadth of analysis in Leo’s letter is made possible by the long and deep tradition of Catholic social thought, an inheritance rehearsed fulsomely as Leo sets the stage. The Pope recognises the genuine novelty of the “new things” of our own time; but he also knows that, in responding to social and political turmoil — including that wrought by technological advance — the Church has been here before.
IN THE days since the encyclical’s publication, I have wondered what story we Anglicans have to tell. How did we respond to the tumult of earlier industrial revolutions? What theological, spiritual, and practical resources do we have to bring to the table? We do not have a magisterium, of course; there is no library of papal pronouncements to draw on.
I do think that, at our best, we have been present, pastorally, to the troubles of our times and places. We have done so because we believed that, in Christ, God drew intimately close to human history; that, in the midst of history’s tragedy, Christ’s life, death, and resurrection gave both the possibility and the pattern of being otherwise.
But back, finally, to the Pope: is Leo a doomer or a booster? Does he think that we should be fearful of the turbulence that lies ahead or looking with confidence to the sunlit uplands of an AI-engineered utopia? My take is that he is clear-eyed and critical about the unjust concentrations of power and wealth which characterise contemporary political economy, but surprisingly sanguine about the shared future that we all can build together if we want.
Yet, to me, the most interesting thing about Leo’s vision of the future is that he is not so much a pundit as a Christian. He believes that Jesus Christ is the measure and the fulfilment of human history. What that faith produces is neither a gloomy pessimism nor an unqualified optimism, but, with “the same faith as Mary” — with whose Magnificat Leo closes his letter — the invitation to become “weavers of hope”. And with hope comes agency, the freedom to act: to act even now for justice and peace, for the dignity of “each person and the whole person”, and for the flourishing of all God’s creation.
Dr Samuel Tranter is McDonald Postdoctoral Fellow in Christian Ethics and Public Life at the University of Oxford.