Pope Leo’s First Encyclical Is a Game Changer

Something that has been oddly overlooked about Pope Leo XIV in digesting his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, is that he is the head of the Roman Catholic Church. The volume of takes on artificial intelligence flooding the public sphere in the last few years has been so torrential that it is tempting to think of Leo as simply one more thought leader throwing his hat into the discursive ring. And secular readers will reasonably default to bracketing everything theological in the encyclical and focusing on the parts that can speak to their own concerns in an idiom they recognize.

But Magnifica humanitas, published on May 25, is not just one AI treatise among others, nor is it merely a reflection on AI from an irreducibly theological standpoint, although it is both of those things. It is also—and foremost, in my view—a pastoral statement to the church that Leo leads, the most robust articulation to date of his vision for his pontificate, and an act of position-taking in the debates that have riven Catholicism since the mid-20th century and which have threatened, since the election of Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis, to tear the church apart. Understanding Magnifica humanitas as a fundamentally ecclesiological document is necessary not only to interpret the text correctly, but, counterintuitively, to grasp its most important lessons for the secular left.

The reforms ushered in by the Second Vatican Council, which unfolded from 1962 to 1965, reshaped the trajectory of Catholicism more profoundly than anything since the church’s definitive response to the Reformation at the 16th-century Council of Trent. Most visibly to ordinary churchgoers, Vatican II kicked off a process that led to the radical transformation of the structure of the Mass at the end of the 1960s. But the council also produced a range of official documents that, taken together, signaled the church’s decision to seek a rapprochement with modernity after generations as arguably its most powerful institutional opponent. The liturgical and doctrinal changes effected by Vatican II empowered laypeople to participate more fully in the life of the church and committed the Catholic hierarchy to taking seriously the need to learn from those outside its ranks.

From the beginning, Vatican II appalled Catholic traditionalists who felt that the church’s identity was inextricably antimodern, and that one of its most urgent tasks was to defend the principle of hierarchical authority from the leveling impulses of the modern world. The most radical traditionalists broke formally with the church, willingly or unwillingly, in the decades after Vatican II, but many council critics remained faithful, working patiently within the church hierarchy to slow or roll back the process of reform. Pope John Paul II (who presided from 1978 to 2005) brokered a détente of sorts between reformists and traditionalists, but by the early 21st century the conflict had heated up again, fueled by the exposure of pervasive sexual abuse within the church, alarm at declining Mass attendance in the Global North, and the growing political salience of the church’s conservative positions on key culture-war issues like abortion and homosexuality. Pope Benedict XVI (2005–13) made a series of controversial conciliatory gestures to traditionalists, while Francis (2013–25) drew their ire for his strident efforts to revive the reform spirit of Vatican II—coincident with the increasing prominence of traditionalist Catholicism on the “post-liberal right” in Europe and North America.

Enter Leo XIV. The first American pontiff’s ability to secure widespread cross-factional support at last year’s conclave—as well as his decision to honor the late-19th-century Pope Leo XIII, a forceful critic of the ills of industrial capitalism who also opposed efforts to “modernize” the church—led many observers to suspect that he intended to downplay questions about the church’s internal affairs in favor of a renewed focus on Catholic social teaching. Magnifica humanitas, however, leaves no question that Leo recognizes that even if such a compromise were theoretically desirable, it would not be practically feasible. The encyclical argues that forcefully that a church capable of addressing the world amid the turmoil for which the rise of AI serves in the text as a synecdoche must also be a church in which all its people, not only its hierarchs, take an active role in shaping its destiny. “Social Doctrine is not merely a message addressed to society,” Leo writes. “it is also an examination of conscience for the Church.”

Magnifica humanitas begins with an introduction laying out the encyclical’s core motif: the contrast between the biblical images of the building of the tower of Babel and the reconstruction of the city of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile. Leo argues that AI restages this choice for us today, and his suggestion that AI risks serving as a modern tower of Babel is what has drawn the most attention since the encyclical’s publication. But before he gives his full examination of AI, the pope devotes two long chapters to an account of the development of the church’s social doctrine and its most important principles. This account is significant both for what it emphasizes and what it downplays.

Leo frames the development of Catholic social teaching as the fruit of the church’s willingness to approach the world open-mindedly and to listen to a diversity of voices. “The truth of the Gospel is not imposed from above, but grows over time within the concrete interweaving of lives, communities and cultures,” he writes. Historians may fairly question the extent to which the original elaboration of Catholic social teaching under Leo XIII and his successors embodied this ethos, but what Leo describes is unquestionably the spirit of Vatican II, as he emphasizes: In the conciliar documents, Leo writes, history is understood as a dynamic setting in which the church “learns to develop her own teaching at the service of the dignity of every person and the good of all peoples.” This is also the spirit of Pope Francis. Leo unequivocally affirms the value of “synodality,” church jargon for collective discernment and participatory reform, which was one of the most important themes of Francis’s papacy—and one aspect of Francis’s leadership particularly despised by traditionalists. In Magnifica humanitas, Leo explicitly advocates “the adoption of a synodal style,” which entails “a culture of transparency, accountability and evaluation.”

In this light, it is striking what plays little role in Leo’s presentation of the church’s social doctrine: its conservative teachings on gender and sexuality. He does describe “induced abortion, killing of the innocent and euthanasia” as “choices that the Church considers gravely wrong” and writes that the family is “founded on the enduring union between a man and a woman.” But this whole field of moral theology—one that many conservative Catholics consider the heart of their political philosophy—is clearly peripheral to his social vision. His encyclopedic recounting of the development of Catholic social teaching entirely omits Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae and its further elaboration in John Paul II’s “theology of the body” lectures, which together helped codify a traditionalist interpretation of the church’s teachings on marriage and the sanctity of life (including, most controversially, a total proscription of artificial contraception). Even Pope Francis, in his landmark social encyclical Laudato si’, included a passage warning against an attitude that “would seek ‘to cancel out sexual difference because it no longer knows how to confront it.’” Despite the specious connection that some other Christian critics of technology such as Paul Kingsnorth have drawn between Silicon Valley transhumanism and the concept of transgender identity, Leo does not include any such chastisement in Magnifica humanitas.

That is not to imply that Leo secretly disagrees with any of what the church teaches about gender and sexuality. What I think Magnifica humanitas does allow us to glean, in connection with other recent statements from Leo and the Vatican, is that the pontiff recognizes that there is intense disagreement among faithful Catholics on this issue and that the church has historically failed to entertain dissenting views in a spirit of synodality. That was the more or less explicit conclusion of a blockbuster Vatican report released in May, in which a committee convened to study controversial issues that surfaced through Francis’s synodality initiatives acknowledged the church’s role in perpetuating “the solitude, anguish, and stigma that accompany persons with same-sex attractions and their families” and admitted harmful effects of conversion therapies promoted by Catholic groups. For his part, Leo has remarked that “we have to change attitudes before we even think about changing what the church says about any given question”—falling far short of endorsing doctrinal change but leaving the possibility tantalizingly open.

Magnifica humanitas builds on these gestures by including some of the most striking acknowledgments in the history of the papacy of the church’s capacity to get important questions gravely wrong. The encyclical is the first to acknowledge the problem of sexual violence perpetrated in the church; in it, the pontiff endorses his predecessor’s remarks to journalists: “I also thank you for what you tell us about what goes wrong in the Church, for helping us not to sweep it under the carpet, and for the voice you have given to the victims of abuse.” The first pope descended from enslaved Africans also issues an unprecedented apology on behalf of the church for its “past complicity and blindness in the face of the injustice of slavery.” The institution’s inexcusably protracted approach to the total condemnation of slavery is, for Leo, a paradigmatic example of “the Church’s growth in understanding the perennial truths of Revelation that she safeguards.” The human beings who make up the church, in his view, always risk failing to properly understand what God is trying to tell them.