Faith & Mission
On May 15th, exactly 135 years to the day after Pope Leo XIII released Rerum Novarum, humanity witnessed another seismic moment in the history of Catholic Social Teaching. In 1891, Rerum Novarum served as the Church's definitive response to the Industrial Revolution, stepping forward to protect workers from the sudden, destabilising forces of unregulated capitalism and machines. Today, history is repeating itself. Our current Pope, Pope Leo XIV, drawing on his unique background holding a Bachelor of Science with a focus on mathematics, has issued a massive 42,000-word encyclical titled Magnifica Humanitas. Just as his predecessor sought to get ahead of the steam engine and the factory floor, this pontiff is moving aggressively to get ahead of the AI revolution, addressing how this rapid technological surge impacts poverty, war, labor, the environment and the very definition of what it means to be a person.
The historical weight of the moment was palpable when the Pope sat on stage to deliver this message, warning the world that we face a critical civilizational choice. We are either constructing the Tower of Babel again, driven by pride and a blind human ambition to be god-like, or we are rebuilding Jerusalem, which symbolizes the restoration of divine order after a period of breakdown and ruin. While the document is cautiously hopeful about the creative possibilities of AI, it offers a sharp, unyielding reality check about the forces driving it. These systems are motivated by profit, they are money-making vehicles, not morality machines. Even if a tech company boasts a pristine internal ethics document, a more moral AI is not truly moral if that morality is dictated by only a few in a closed room. The discussion must be vast, open, and bigger than the boardrooms where these tools are built.
This technological shift strikes at the absolute core of human dignity and daily life, particularly in how we view labor. Echoing the core tenants of Rerum Novarum, the Pope emphasises that a job isn't just a mechanism to make money; it is a vital pathway to maturity, personal development, and fulfillment. When AI-driven layoffs occur, taking someone's job doesn't just strip away a paycheck, it destroys their community, their livelihood, and their daily routine. The encyclical fiercely condemns a future where more and more people are simply sucked into the AI machine and discarded for efficiency. The Pope links this loss of human empathy directly to the modern theatre of war, completely rejecting the idea that we should be focused on making weapons more streamlined or precise. Making killing efficient does not make it acceptable. Allowing an autonomous drone to select its own target removes the last thing standing between a human being and their morality, accelerating a violent culture of power where peace is treated merely as a fragile interval between conflicts rather than a shared responsibility. Because of these dark technological realities, the Pope takes the historic step of declaring that the traditional "just war" theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of conflict, is now entirely outdated. Humanity now possesses far more effective tools for promoting life and resolving conflict, such as dialogue, diplomacy and forgiveness.
To anchor these promises for a more just future, the Pope begins the document by firmly accounting for the past, specifically issuing a written apology for the Vatican's historical complicity in slavery. By confronting this historical blindness, he grounds the Church's modern moral authority, ensuring the community is moored by these new promises to protect human dignity.
For the everyday person, sitting with a document this massive can feel overwhelming, but the text actively pushes back against the paralyzing feeling that AI is simply too big or powerful for us to do anything about. The Pope beautifully frames our duty not as a demand to fix the entire global apparatus, but to care deeply for our immediate space, even highlighting this truth by quoting Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule."
Ultimately, Magnifica Humanitas reminds us that we are not called to save the world with a single, sweeping gesture. Instead, the civilisation of love will arise from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanisation. It is a call to do what we can, right where we are, to keep the human spirit alive in a rapidly accelerating age.
Ms Hannah Hale
Director of Faith & Mission