ANALYSIS
VATICAN CITY (LifeSiteNews) — While Pope Leo’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas,tackles transhumanism and new technologies, it also departs from theological Tradition on issues such as human dignity and the doctrine of just war.
On May 25, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”) at 11 AM Italian time. In the lengthy document, the Pope argues that humanity today finds itself at a crossroads. We have a choice between building a new “Tower of Babel,” marked by self-sufficiency and the idolatry of profit, and rebuilding “Jerusalem,” a project of co-responsibility and communion under the gaze of God. However, the document presents problematic doctrinal elements, particularly the reaffirmation of the doctrine of infinite human dignity by Francis.
Despite its attention to Christ, the five-chapter encyclical is clearly oriented toward man and his dignity. In fact, by reaffirming Francis’ error of the infinite dignity of man, Leo XIV makes Christ and the human being — regardless of religion and state of grace — equivalent. In other words, Christ becomes the symbol of humanity:
For this reason, as a believer among believers, I invite everyone to contemplate, in the face of the Son of God, the grandeur of humanity that shines a light also on the era of AI. […] This human face is the fullness toward which history is moving. It is the mystery of “recapitulation”: the certainty that the Father has decreed to bring all things, those in heaven and those on earth, back to Christ, the one Head (cf. Eph 1:10). In this plan, nothing will be lost that is authentically human. Indeed, everything will be purified and reunited in the One, who gathers every fragment of life, every tear and every authentically human achievement, rescuing them from nothingness and delivering them, redeemed, to the Father.
The document explores the problem of artificial intelligence, but also addresses a wide range of anthropological, social, and political problems. The Pope identifies AI as an “accelerator” that places traditional social categories in crisis.
Magnifica Humanitas begins with a series of general principles from the Social Doctrine of the Church. Among these, in addition to the infinite dignity of man, are the notions of the common good and the universal destination of goods.
The first principle is the “State’s responsibility to ensure cohesion” among individuals and to “harmonize the different sectoral interests with the requirements of justice” so that society may have a “shared vision.”
The second is a guarantee to everyone of the use of natural resources and the products derived from them and also — in one of the document’s most innovative theses — “immaterial and cultural goods” such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructures, and data. In other words, the encyclical suggests that all this should be state property, or at least strongly regulated by states. It should not be individual property in an absolute sense; Magnifica Humanitas assumes that public ownership of material goods guarantees a broader diffusion of the knowledge necessary for present-day development.
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