There have been papal encyclicals on labor, on war, on the family, on the environment. The one published on May 25 is the first on artificial intelligence. Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas — Magnificent Humanity — centers on the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. He signed it on May 15, precisely 135 years to the day after his namesake Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, the document that defined the Church’s response to the first industrial revolution.
The symmetry is deliberate. So is the ambition. Addressing the College of Cardinals after his election, the new pope said he chose the name Leo XIV precisely because Leo XIII had addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution — and that the Church now faced another. Whether one reads the document as theology, philosophy, or simply as the most widely distributed statement on AI ethics issued this year, its arrival marks a cultural moment of genuine weight. A billion-person institution has formally entered the conversation.
The question it raises — what remains distinctly human when machines can approximate almost everything else — is one every thoughtful man will be answering for the rest of his working life.