Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” has generated many headlines because of its focus on artificial intelligence. A reader coming to the document from those headlines would understandably be surprised to find that the first two chapters—out of five total—barely discuss A.I. at all.
However, I think that when “Magnifica Humanitas” is quoted and cited by theologians and future popes, as it certainly will be, those first two chapters will be referenced most often. Part of the reason is that discussions of A.I., as Leo notes himself, become “quickly outdated, given the remarkable pace at which these systems are developing.”
An even more important reason is that the first two chapters are a masterclass in how the church understands and develops its social teaching. They follow in a long tradition of social encyclicals commenting on and extending the tradition that leads up to them. In fact, there is a line of encyclicals that take their titles from marking the anniversary of “Rerum Novarum”: “Quadragesimo Anno” at the 40th anniversary, “Octogesima Adveniens” at the 80th and “Centesimus Annus” at the 100th. (I suggest pausing here for a moment of gratitude that Leo spared us the Latin for the 135th anniversary, which “Magnifica Humanitas” official signing date of May 15 commemorates.)
These first two chapters, I expect, will be assigned reading in any introductory class on Catholic social teaching. They are a gift both in being easy to read and as impressive in their synthesis of the body of teaching they present. I was reminded of Leo’s lucid outline of Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium” in his first address to the college of cardinals only a few days after his election.
Leo’s teaching is more than a summary of the history of social doctrine. Rather, he charts its development, “in order to demonstrate its dynamic character.” Pointing over and over again to the Second Vatican Council’s “Gaudium et Spes,” the pastoral constitution on the church in the modern world, Leo describes understanding history as “one of the places in which the church allows herself to be taught by the Spirit about the humanizing power of the Gospel” and “learns to develop her own teaching at the service of the dignity of every person and the good of all peoples.”
The image Leo gives us for the development of social teaching is not of the church applying timeless wisdom to the ever-changing signs of the times, but rather of the Holy Spirit acting through history to help the church enter more deeply into the Gospel. Development of doctrine, as the church has long known, is not a grudging accommodation of the tradition to present needs but an act of fidelity in which the church cooperates with God.
Leo crystallizes this insight into how teaching develops by demonstrating it, reaching not only back to “Rerum Novarum” but also to social doctrine’s roots in the Gospel, and describing it as “not a handbook of principles and norms to be applied, but a process of shared discernment” and “a theology of communion in history, a history in which the Word made flesh continues to be present through dialogue, memory and prophecy.”
If “shared discernment” sounds like language that we have also heard in reference to synodality, that is no accident. At the end of his second chapter on the principles of Catholic social teaching, Leo proposes an “examen” about how well the church itself lives out the principles of social justice that its teaching outlines, saying that for the church, “the common good takes the form of a synodal approach for mission at the service of the Kingdom.”
“Magnifica Humanitas” offers us not only a summary of the church’s social teaching, but a challenge to deepen the church’s call to understand, explore and incarnate that teaching. Its framework envisions a church that expresses confidence in its own tradition and the truth it has received from God by entering eagerly and generously into the project of developing that teaching through history.
The final three chapters of the encyclical put that approach into action. In addition to posing specific questions about the use of A.I., Leo also demonstrates a courageous willingness to advance the teaching of the church in other areas. He reflects on the church’s long toleration of slavery before its universal condemnation in the 19th century, calling the former a “wound in Christian memory.” He describes “just war” theory, “which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war,” as “outdated.”
Neither Leo’s brief reflections on slavery and just war in this encyclical nor his more expansive treatment of artificial intelligence will be the last word of the church’s engagement with these issues. Instead, they reflect, in Leo’s words, “a harmonious, though not always linear, development that is marked by different emphases, progressive insights, and, at times, changes in perspective that do not break with what came before, but allow its implications to mature.”
In “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo offers us an example of how to participate in the “process of shared discernment” that is the church’s social teaching. That challenge may well prove to be both more lasting and more rewarding than simply applying that teaching to the question of artificial intelligence.
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