Pope Leo XIV published magnifica humanitas on Monday, May 25, making artificial intelligence the subject of his first encyclical and placing human dignity at the center of the Church’s response to it. The document, signed on May 15, says technology must be ordered to the common good and warns that power can gather around those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.
Pope Leo XIV and AI
The encyclical is titled Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Pope Leo XIV opens with the line: “Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.”
He writes that technology is not “a force antagonistic to humanity” and is not “inherently evil,” but says technology is never neutral because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. Pope Leo XIV also appeals to people to build “for the common good” and to “remain human.”
Five Chapters, One Tradition
The encyclical is divided into five chapters and places artificial intelligence within the Catholic Church’s broader social doctrine. The first chapter, A Dynamic Approach Faithful to the Gospel, traces the Social Doctrine of the Church in recent magisterium and the Second Vatican Council, and describes the Church’s social teaching as “a theology of communion in history.”
Pope Leo XIV also recalls Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum of 1891 and says it “constitutes a milestone in the development of the Church’s social teaching.” He signed Magnifica humanitas on May 15, the 135th anniversary of the promulgation of Rerum novarum, linking the new text directly to that earlier document.
Human Dignity and Rights
In the second chapter, Foundations and Principles of the Social Doctrine of the Church, Pope Leo XIV says the dignity of the person is created in the image and likeness of God. The encyclical says pressure from “the pressure of new ideologies or certain highly powerful interests” can reduce the human person to “a resource to be used and exploited,” and adds that “the fundamental dignity of each person…is neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified.”
The text identifies “the first inviolable human right” as the right to life “from conception to its natural end,” and describes induced abortion, the killing of the innocent, and euthanasia as “choices that the Church considers gravely wrong.” It also says the third foundation is the recognition of the rights of minorities, with particular attention to women, and calls for “concrete decisions” on that point.
May 25 and What Follows
For readers watching how the Catholic Church will address AI, Magnifica humanitas gives a direct answer: the issue is no longer treated as a technical debate alone. Pope Leo XIV has now tied it to rights, labor, solidarity, subsidiarity, care for creation, peace, and fraternity, using the authority of an encyclical to make that framework public on May 25.
The next step now belongs to bishops, Catholic institutions, and policymakers who will have to decide whether to treat the pope’s language as a moral warning or as a governing standard for their own rules on artificial intelligence.
