I almost didn't do this episode.
Breaking format always feels like a risk — you have a rhythm, listeners expect it, and inserting a detour can feel self-indulgent. But when Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical this week, Magnifica Humanitas, I couldn't move on without talking about it. And I'm glad I didn't, because this document is not what I expected. It's wise in ways that caught me off guard, and I think it deserves more attention than it's getting outside of Catholic and theological circles.
So this week I want to walk you through what Leo actually says — the argument he's making, why it matters right now, and what I personally take from it as someone who holds faith and tries to think clearly about the world at the same time.
Who Actually Holds the Power Behind AI?
Leo opens with a biblical image that sets the tone for everything that follows: the Tower of Babel. Humanity reaching for the sky, losing its ability to even speak to itself in the process. Division. Confusion. Ambition without wisdom.
He's not using this to condemn technology. He's careful to say that technology has always been woven into human history — it's part of our creativity, our freedom, part of what it means to be made in the image of a God who makes things. What he's asking is a more pointed question: who holds this power now, and what are they using it for?
In every previous industrial revolution, it was largely governments that shaped the rules — setting limits, distributing benefits, managing the disruption. Today, the main drivers of AI development are private companies, often transnational, with resources that exceed many governments. And there's no democratic accountability for that. Nobody voted for the people shaping these systems.
I think a lot of people feel this unease without quite knowing how to name it. Leo names it plainly, and it lands.
What Must Not Be Lost
The section that hit hardest for me is where Leo takes on two philosophies that have quietly embedded themselves in how Silicon Valley talks about the future: transhumanism and posthumanism.
Transhumanism — the idea that we can and should transcend our biological limits through technology. Live longer, think faster, upgrade the body. Posthumanism goes further, suggesting the very category of "human" is something we might move beyond.
Leo doesn't dismiss these with a wave. He engages them seriously. And what he says is that the things that make us irreducibly human — the capacity to love, to grieve alongside another person, to seek meaning, to receive grace — these aren't limitations to be engineered away. They're the whole point.
He uses a phrase I haven't been able to stop thinking about: the authentic more than human. In Christian understanding, becoming more than human has never meant augmentation. It's always meant becoming more fully yourself — through relationship with God, through community, through love. Not replacing humanity with something post-human, but deepening it.
Whether or not you share the theological framework, I think the underlying challenge is one worth sitting with. AI culture does carry an implicit theology: that intelligence is the supreme value, that consciousness can be replicated, that death is an engineering problem. Leo is asking us to examine whether that's actually what we believe, or whether we've simply absorbed it without noticing.
The Dignity of Work in the Age of AI
Leo draws an explicit parallel with Rerum Novarum — the landmark 1891 encyclical in which his namesake Leo XIII responded to the industrial revolution by insisting that workers are not machines, that a wage must reflect not just productivity but human dignity.
He's saying the same reckoning is upon us now. Automation and AI are reshaping what kinds of work exist, who gets paid, and which communities bear the cost of disruption. He talks about families and young people and what he calls "the social conditions for hope" — and that phrase stuck with me. What does a young person need to believe their future is worth building toward? Work that has meaning. A life that can be imagined. When entire categories of skill are devalued overnight by a technology they had no say in, that hope quietly erodes.
This isn't Luddism. Leo isn't saying stop the machines. He's saying the gains have to be shared, and the disruption cannot be offloaded entirely onto the most vulnerable.
A Civilization of Love, Not Power
The final chapter is where Leo is most explicitly theological — and most personal. He draws a contrast between what he calls the "culture of power" and the "civilization of love."
The culture of power is what happens when dominance becomes the only currency. When surveillance, manipulation, and the ability to shape collective imagination become ends in themselves. He addresses AI weapons directly, and the normalization of war — technology without ethics doesn't make conflict rarer, he argues, just more efficient.
Against that, he holds up a different vision. Not a sentimental one — not "just be nice to each other." A structural one. A society built on solidarity, on subsidiarity (decisions made as close as possible to the people they affect), on the common good rather than concentrated power.
He closes with the Magnificat — Mary's song from Luke's Gospel. He has lifted up the humble. He has sent the rich away empty. Leo is saying: that's still the calling. That's still what faith looks like when it's actually working.
I don't think you need to be Catholic to find something here worth arguing for. You just need to care about what kind of world we're building — and to want more voices in that conversation than the ones who stand to profit from the answer.
The full text of Magnifica Humanitas is on the Vatican's website — I'll link it in the show notes. It's long, but even the introduction and Chapter Three alone will give you something to think about.