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With Magnificent Humanitythe first encyclical of Leo
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Its central geopolitical thesis: war, boosted by AI, is being “trivialized”, technological power has moved from states to transnational private actors, and only a “civilization of love” based on justice can do it. obstacle.
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Beyond its spiritual dimension, Magnificent Humanity reads like a contribution to the debate on the global governance of technology — less a text on machines than a text on the state, the market and war in the algorithmic age.
With Magnificent HumanityLeo XIV’s first encyclical devoted to artificial intelligence, the pope places the technological challenge at the heart of the Church’s social doctrine.
Find the text of the encyclical
The text takes up the tradition of the Church on social doctrine, the modern era of which is marked by the encyclical of Leo XIII. It is based on the reading of the Bible and the theological experience of the Church.
Its central geopolitical thesis: war, boosted by AI, is being “trivialized”, and only a “civilization of love” based on justice can prevent it.
Published on May 15, 2026, birthday of New thingsthe encyclical Magnificent Humanity of Leo XIV bears a programmatic subtitle: “on the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence”. If the document opens with a long reminder of the social doctrine of the Church, chapters 3, 4 and 5 constitute a real analysis of contemporary technological power and its consequences on work, public truth and peace. It is on these that we concentrate, without omitting the beginning of the encyclical, where Leo XIV recapitulates the history of the social doctrine of the Church since Leo XIII. The common thread is a double biblical image: the Tower of Babel, “a work designed without reference to God”, and the reconstruction of the walls of Jerusalem by Nehemiah, “a work of shared responsibility”: “The magnificent humanity created by God now faces a decisive choice: erect a new Tower of Babel or build the city where God and humanity dwell together.” expresses the first sentence of the encyclical.
A technological power that has become private
The encyclical’s clearest geopolitical diagnosis concerns the shift in power. Leo XIV notes that innovation is no longer driven by states. “In the past, it was mainly states that guided and directed innovation. Today, on the other hand, the main drivers of development are private actors, often transnational, with resources and intervention capacities greater than those of many governments. HAS” Chapter 3 develops this intuition: control of platforms, infrastructures, data and computing power belongs to major economic players who set “the conditions of access, the rules of visibility and the possibilities of participation”.
The Pope insists on an unprecedented structural opacity. AI systems, he writes, are “more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built’: their designers themselves know little about how they actually work. From this asymmetry of knowledge arises an asymmetry of power. Leo to their advantage.”
“Disarming AI means removing it from the logic of armed competition which today is no longer just military, but also economic and cognitive. HAS”
The proposed response can be summed up in one word, which the Pope claims: “disarm”. “Disarming AI means removing it from the logic of armed competition which today is no longer just military, but also economic and cognitive. HAS” The text explicitly targets the race “for the most efficient algorithm and the largest data bank with the aim of consolidating a geopolitical or commercial advantage”.
Leo be regulated. HAS”
Work, truth, freedom: the fractures of the digital transition
Chapter 4 examines the concrete repercussions of this transformation.
On work, the encyclical rejects spontaneous optimism. Far from being necessarily better, “new ways” of working can “paradoxically deskill workers, subject them to automated surveillance and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks”. The Pope fears, in the “fourth industrial revolution”, “a significant and rapid contraction of available jobs” and a widening of wage inequalities.
“It is certainly desirable that technology relieves humans of certain particularly arduous, repetitive or dangerous work and that it provides intelligent support for human activity, but the general rule must remain the protection of jobs and the irreplaceable role of the person.” thus writes Leo XIV. Economic history has clearly shown that new technologies enable productivity gains which create new professions, less arduous and more rewarding, but which require professional transitions which can sometimes be complex. What Leo XIV expresses very well: “At the same time we must recognize that every real transition occurs in fits and starts: it is uneven, fragmentary, sometimes conflicting. There is therefore no single model of change or global solution: there are territories and histories that require different responses. HAS”
The analysis has an explicit geographical dimension. Leo reservoirs of precarious labor and sources of instability and forced migration.”
The text goes further by evoking a “colonialism” of a new type, based on the extraction of data rather than on the domination of bodies: health flows, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps and demographic data constitute, in the Pope’s words, “the news”. rare earths “of power”. The encyclical also highlights invisible work: data labeling, content moderation, mining of materials, on which the digital economy is based, and human trafficking facilitated by digital tools.
On the truth, finally, the encyclical links disinformation and democratic fragility. Disinformation, the Pope recalls, “was not born with AI, but today it finds in it a powerful multiplier.” And to quote Hannah Arendt on the ideal subject of totalitarianism, for whom the distinction between fact and fiction fades. Leo
The trivialization of war
It is in chapter 5 that the encyclical delivers its most directly geopolitical analysis. Leo Sixty years after Paul VI’s “never again war” at the UN, the pope believes that the ethical criteria which governed the use of force “are gradually being eroded”.
Several factors converge in this diagnosis: the weight of the arms industry, which creates an “armed nation” where “the arms market becomes an autonomous engine of warlike choices”; the return of the nuclear threat and the “miniaturization” of devices; the end of the state monopoly on force, with the emergence of “jihadist groups, private militias, criminal networks”; and a “worrying loss of historical memory” as witnesses to world wars disappear.
“There is no algorithm capable of making war morally acceptable. HAS”
— Leo XIV, Magnificent Humanity
Military AI occupies a central place in this reflection. The Pope sums up the risk in a striking formula: “There is no algorithm capable of making war morally acceptable. HAS” AI, he writes, “can only […] give back [le conflit] faster and impersonal, by lowering the threshold for resorting to violence and transforming defense into operational forecasting, victims being reduced to simple data.” Hence a firm requirement: the decision to use lethal force “must remain under effective, conscious and responsible human control”.
Leo The “force of international law”, he continues, is “replaced by the so-called ‘right of the strongest'”.
Against Realpolitik, a “healthy realism”
The encyclical devotes dense pages to what it calls a “so-called political realism.” The Pope rejects the idea that war is “inevitably part of human nature” and describes Realpolitik as “realism” which “sows in consciences as well as in culture resignation in the face of an inevitable war.”
To this degraded realism, Leo The distinction is subtle and undoubtedly constitutes the most original contribution of the chapter: the pope does not plead for a disembodied irenicism, but for a lucidity which “seeks practicable paths”: credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiations.
It is in this context that he calls for a move from a “culture of power” to a “culture of negotiation”, using a phrase from Giorgio La Pira. He also cites the words spoken at the start of his pontificate: a call to those in power to “meet, dialogue, negotiate”, and the affirmation that “war is never inevitable”.
The encyclical finally reaffirms “the overcoming of the theory of ‘just war’ too often invoked to justify any war, subject to the right to self-defense in its strictest sense.”
A geopolitical encyclical
Beyond its spiritual dimension, Magnificent Humanity reads as a contribution to the debate on global technology governance. Leo The answer, the Pope suggests, will depend less on the technique itself than on the power relations that shape it. In this sense, the encyclical is less a text on machines than a text on the state, the market and war in the algorithmic age.
