Vatican City – Leo XIV is working on a wide-ranging text addressing the new anthropological challenges and artificial intelligence. He is dedicating himself to it despite the intense pace, and several Dicasteries are involved in supporting this effort. The title will likely be Magnifica Humanitas. Not a rhetorical flourish, but a thesis: the dignity of man remains “magnificent” even when technical power tends to compress it.
To grasp the scope of such a document, an interpretive key is useful: the Pope has repeatedly explained that he chose the name “Leone” with Leone XIII and the Rerum Novarum in mind. If the analogy is not merely symbolic, Magnifica Humanitas could emerge as a Rerum Novarum of the Third Millennium.
The Rerum Novarum (1891) intervened on a historical fracture: the workers’ question. Leo XIII described a world reshaped by “remarkable progress in the arts and new methods of industry,” with concentrated wealth, widespread poverty, monopolies, and usury; and he indicated principles to reconcile the conflict between capital and labor: the right to property as a natural principle, just wages, rest on feast days, protection of the weak, the subsidiary role of the State, and the value of associations and charity. It was not a nostalgic return to the past: it was the demand that technology be measured against human dignity.
Today, the fracture no longer lies only in factories, but within digital ecosystems. Where are the new monopolies? In the accumulation of data and the platforms that govern them. Those who control the “machines” are not only those who own warehouses, but those who manage models, algorithms, cloud infrastructures, standards, and interfaces. Subordination is not only salaried: often it is informational, when the user’s identity is profiled and commodified. This is not about demonizing technology. The question is another: what kind of man does AI presuppose, and what kind of man does it produce?
To say that this first encyclical of Leo XIV stands in the lineage of Leo XIII is not a matter of image. It is a method. Then, as now, one does not begin with an apology of innovation nor with its rejection, but with moral realism: recognizing both the goods that technology brings and the disorders it triggers. The gaze is prudential: it asks for institutions capable of limiting excesses, protecting the fragile, and orienting power toward the common good.
It is plausible that the Pope will underline the primacy of conscience and personal responsibility: faced with opaque systems, the Christian is called to practice truth, transparency, social justice, and to reject every instrumentalization of the human.
d.I.A.
Silere non possum