On May 24, we witnessed a new world record. The Greek swimmer Kristian Gkolomeev rocketed to victory in the men’s 50-meter freestyle, and the clock flashed his time—20.81 seconds—to thunderous applause from the packed arena. One problem: His record wouldn’t count under World Aquatics guidelines because he was pumped full of performance-enhancing drugs and he wore a banned polyurethane wetsuit. But most of the other swimmers were also juiced to the gills. That was the whole point.

The Enhanced Games took place on the Las Vegas strip (of course) on May 24, where athletes competed in track and field, swimming and weightlifting. Think of it as the Olympics with steroids, where all regulations are lifted on P.E.D.s and body modifications, and what might be called techno-human hybrids compete for a prize pool of $25 million.

Despite the hype, only Gkolomeev (unofficially) broke a world record. Olympic bronze medalist Fred Kerley actually got slower in the 100-meter dash, and all the doped-up swimmers failed to beat non-enhanced Hunter Armstrong in the 50-meter backstroke. Olympic gold medalist James Magnussen, who bragged about his P.E.D.s, finished last in the 50-meter and 100-meter freestyle.

Enhanced, the company that organized the event, claims the games garnered four million live views across all platforms, and just about every major news outlet covered them. According to its website, the company’s goal is “transforming human potential into superhumanity.” From my Catholic perspective, however, the event is symptomatic of a much wider problem. In his encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas,” Pope Leo XIV identifies a rapidly growing ideology, called transhumanism, that threatens human dignity, defining it as “currents of thought that interpret progress as surpassing the human condition” (No. 115). 

The more I learned about the Enhanced Games, the more I realized it is not a sporting organization at all, but rather a P.E.D. company. Upon visiting its website, I was immediately directed to an online store with things like sermorelin and testosterone. The company meets federal guidelines by including in very small print at the bottom of the product pages: “Available by prescription only, if medically appropriate.”

Enhanced was born in 2023 with a $10 million round of investment from venture capitalists, including several million from a group led by Donald Trump Jr. and an undisclosed amount from the billionaire Peter Thiel. Enhanced went public on May 8 and quickly reached a valuation of $1.2 billion. This is a highly unusual way to run a sporting organization; most groups, like the  Olympics, are nonprofit.

Enhanced was founded by Aron D’Souza, who has said that he is “on a mission to build a new superhumanity.” He says the idea for the Enhanced Games came to him at the gym, when he noticed how many people around him seemed to be using P.E.D.s. He figured it would be more honest to create a space where everyone could use them openly. 

However, this is about more than honesty or fairness in sports. D’Souza’s thinking is directly at odds with Catholic teaching. And when you start to look for it, you see it all over our culture, as in the “looksmaxxing” movement, in which young men use drugs and dangerous procedures to alter their appearances. Looksmaxxers use artificial means to “ascend,” their term for becoming more desirable. They refer to un-enhanced individuals as “subhuman,” setting up a hierarchy in which a person’s worth hinges on their external appearance and their ability to afford such enhancements.

I also see this thinking in the skyrocketing popularity of cosmetic procedures, which according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery increased by 40 percent worldwide from 2020 to 2024. And I see it in the tech company founder Bryan Johnson, who co-hosted the Enhanced Games and claims that he will be able to achieve “immortality” by the year 2039. Other tech executives have made similar claims about uploading their minds onto a computer to live forever, even speculating about a new species of artificial-intelligence-powered beings that will replace humanity.

Pope Leo delivers several strong critiques of this transhumanist ideology in “Magnifica Humanitas,” saying, for example, that “if the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy” (No. 117).

Not all physical enhancements are transhumanist. In the Paralympics, athletes use prosthetics and wheelchairs to participate in skiing, curling and snowboarding. But here the purpose of technology is to restore lost function they would have otherwise possessed, not to gain new functions that no human has. Other technologies like antibiotics and vaccines have also extended lifespans to great effect, but here the goal is to preserve natural health rather than radically outgrow biological limits.

As Leo states, “It is one thing to integrate technology within a human-centered, relational vision; it is quite another to be guided by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of ‘salvation’” (No. 117).

Perhaps many find this false “salvation” appealing because it helps them cope with the feeling of malaise and lost progress that characterizes 21st-century America. Right-wing billionaires like Peter Thiel often lament that bureaucrats and regulators (and anti-doping agencies, for that matter) stifle progress, while left-wing figures like Bernie Sanders blame corporations and billionaires. But whether you lean right or left, it can be tempting to search for a solution to this feeling of powerlessness and find it in technology. 

For hundreds of years, Western societies have watched rising living standards and could believe they would always rise. But this assumption no longer seems to hold true, and the varying ways people respond to this development has implications for our politics and social institutions.

From the myth of Prometheus to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and modern science fiction, we have been taught that wise people accept their limits and find meaning in them. Technology can do a lot, but it cannot save your soul. Only love can do that.

[Read next: “Clavicular and Catholicism: The anxious, aesthetic faith of the new religious right.”]

[And read more of America’s coverage of “Magnifica Humanitas” here.]

Ryan Byrnes is a book editor in New York City and the author of Royal Beauty Bright and My Dear Antonio. His work has appeared in the National Catholic Reporter, Premier Christianity, Literary Hub and other publications.