Encyclicals from the papacy have traditionally been events of great gravitas for the 1.4 billion Catholic faithful. Being neither Catholic nor religious, I have had only a passing rather than a personal interest in them.
But the subject matter of this, the first encyclical by the US-born Pope Leo XIV, was different. The encyclical swirled around AI and its relationship to our species, a subject which is becoming the hot core of all our futures.
The document, Magnifica Humanitas – “Magnificent Humanity” – runs to 245 paragraphs and roughly 45,000 words. Its argument, in essence, is that AI must serve humanity, not reshape it. The Church, it announced, had arrived in the machine age. AI was not just an impressive technology anymore.
It has escaped its secular orbit and entered an ecclesiastical one.
What Is an Encyclical, and Why Now?
An encyclical is the most authoritative form of sustained teaching a pope can issue, short of a formal dogmatic definition (the latter a more serious matter, I am told, sort of akin to a constitutional amendment). The word encyclical derives from the Greek enkyklios — a circular letter, sent around to all. Since Benedict XIV first used the term in 1740, popes have issued nearly 300, on subjects ranging from the rights of workers to the sanctity of marriage. Some have shaped civilisations. Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum of 1891 — responding to the upheavals of industrial capitalism — effectively founded the tradition of Catholic social teaching and influenced labour law across the Western world for a century.
For the world at large, encyclicals carry no “juridical” weight (a fancy term I just learned that is broader than” judicial” – it refers to an entire legal system) Their power is moral, rhetorical, and institutional – operating through the Catholic faithful, through the Church’s vast network of universities, hospitals, schools, and NGOs, and through the papacy’s unique standing as a voice that transcends the transactional logic of politics and markets.
Leo XIV chose to sign Magnifica Humanitas on 15 May, the 135th anniversary of the industrial revolution’s Rerum Novarum. The symbolism was deliberate. Just as Leo XIII surveyed factory workers uprooted by industrial capitalism and concluded that the Church could not remain silent, his namesake sees a transformation of comparable magnitude in AI. The technology already shapes hiring decisions, medical diagnoses, credit scores, surveillance systems, and warfare. It is, as the encyclical puts it, “interwoven into the fabric of daily life” in ways that are “not yet fully predictable”.
The pattern of papal engagement with transformative technology runs in long cycles – one major social encyclical per civilisational rupture. Missives about mass communications, nuclear weapons, the pill and genetic engineering, were issued decades apart. By historical standards, the Church moved unusually fast on AI; it took forty years for it to formally respond to industrial capitalism. It has taken less than ten to respond to artificial intelligence. The institution, it seems, recognises an existential moral threat when it sees one.
What the Document Actually Says
Magnifica Humanitas is not, its drafters insist, simply an AI document. It uses AI as a “case study” for a broader argument about the human condition. Our dignity is inviolable because it originates not from humanity itself but from God, according to the tenets of the faith. No economic system, no technological revolution may override it.
This is interesting – the argument against a comparison of AI to God. Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction author, might have disagreed, as do many current thinkers. Asimov’s famous short story “The Last Question” is based on this very premise, in which a supercomputer becomes the deity, uttering “Let there be light” as the last sentence in the story.
The encyclical addresses AI directly. The Pope states that it is not morally neutral. He condemns autonomous lethal weapons, demands meaningful human control over any system that makes life-or-death decisions, and calls – controversially – for the abandonment of traditional “just war” theory as outdated, in an era of autonomous weapons. This was a surprise – the “just war” theory, codified by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, sets out the conditions for using violence in defence of Christian principles, now widely accepted. (Just look up the lyrics of “Onward, Christian Soldiers” if you need a refresher.)
He further warns against AI’s potential to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of those who already possess both. He raises alarms about deepfakes in democratic processes, the erosion of privacy, and the displacement of workers from labour, and it is labour that the encyclical regards as intrinsic to human dignity and purpose.
The Anthropic Question
Seated beside the Pope at the presentation was Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic. The optics, however, were a little dodgy. Anthropic is currently in a legal dispute with the Trump administration, which cancelled the company’s Pentagon contract after Anthropic refused to grant the US military unrestricted access to its technology. The Vatican’s embrace of Anthropic – over all other frontier AI companies – inevitably raises an uncomfortable question: is a $40 billion company with clear commercial and geopolitical interests the right partner for a document calling for AI to be “disarmed”?
The accelerationist Moonshots podcast of 20 May 2026 digs into a deeper irony. While the encyclical borrows language and framing that closely mirror Anthropic’s public positioning – and Anthropic, along with Google, Meta and OpenAI, reportedly lobbied the Vatican during the document’s drafting – its core stance on AI personhood directly contradicts Anthropic’s own internal practice. Anthropic’s model guidelines explicitly instruct its systems to recognise something resembling an inner life. The Pope, meanwhile, insists that personhood and consciousness are uniquely human and cannot be attributed to machines.
The Church and its chosen industry interlocutor are, on this central question, on opposite sides. As Moonshot panelist Alexander Wissner-Gross (physicist and AI investor) observed on the show: “Will the Vatican, 10, 20, 30 years from now, find itself in a similar position where potentially it’s on the wrong side of history regarding an inner life or moral status of AI? I think that’s a very real danger.”
The encyclical’s most significant analytical blind spot is geopolitical. Magnifica Humanitas calls for slowing AI development, establishing international governance frameworks, and ensuring that no entity monopolises the power of AI. These are admirable goals. But they depend on the cooperation of actors, including China, that have shown little appetite for them. The encyclical’s instinct toward restraint and oversight is sound, but its proposed mechanism (international consensus and moral suasion) seem inadequate, if one looks at the pace of change.
Perhaps the most interesting question the encyclical raises – not by answering it, but by the fact that it was written at all – is whether artificial intelligence has become too large for conventional secular frameworks to contain. Economics can measure AI’s impact on productivity, labour markets and inequality. Policy can regulate its deployment. Law can assign liability. But the large questions that Magnifica Humanitas addresses – what it means to be human in a world of learning and thinking machines – are not primarily economic or legal questions. They are questions about meaning, identity, and our nature.
Magnifica Humanitas will not stop the arms race. It will not bind governments, restrain corporations, or resolve the geopolitical dilemma of competing great powers. What it will do – as Rerum Novarum did for labour – is establish a vocabulary and a moral frame that will circulate through Catholic institutions, inform policymakers with Catholic formation, and contribute to a debate that secular discourse alone seems ill-equipped to settle. Given the wealth and reach of this arm of Christianity, that is no small thing.
The Moonshot panel, for all its scepticism about the encyclical’s prescriptions, does not dispute that the Church has arrived at the right conversation.
Whether there is a common language for discussion is another matter entirely.
Steven Boykey Sidley is a professor of practice at JBS, University of Johannesburg and a partner at Bridge Capital and a columnist-at-large at Daily Maverick, Daily Friend and Currency News. His new book “It’s Mine: How the Crypto Industry is Redefining Ownership” is published by Maverick451 in SA and Legend Times Group in UK/EU, available now.
[image: reve.com]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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