On Monday, Pope Leo XIV released a 42,300-word document about artificial intelligence. The English text runs ninety pages, named it Magnifica Humanitas. He picked the date of signature for May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, which is the 1891 encyclical on labor, capital, and the industrial revolution.
I find it INCREDIBLY interesting that AI has now reached a point where religious figures feel the need to weigh in. The Pope is worried about AI in warfare, and he is, and the final chapter is direct enough about it that the just-war tradition gets explicitly retired. But I read the document (so you don't have to? but you should?) and that is a small fraction of what I took away.
Specifically, the 1891 problem, for lack of a better term, is back, the Catholic Church has had a hundred and thirty-five years to think about that problem, and the answer it landed on then is the same shape as the answer it would land on now.
What 1891 was actually about
Rerum Novarum was published into a world where electrical power and steam-driven manufacturing had centralized the means of production in a way that was new in human history. A worker who used to own his tools and the seasonal value of his labor was now showing up to a factory floor where someone else owned the boilers, the looms, the dynamo, and the building that contained all three. The 1891 question was not "is technology good" since the concept of technology barely existed - it was all just "stuff" that let you "work faster." The 1891 question was who gets to own the dynamo, and what the rest of society owes to the people whose labor is now mediated by an asset they will never personally afford.
Leo XIII's answer was specific and, for the time, contrarian. He defended private property against the socialists, defended workers' associations against the laissez-faire crowd, and insisted the state had a role to play that neither side wanted to admit. He also insisted that the family and the parish and the local trade group all had functions that should not be absorbed upward into the corporation or downward into the atomized individual. That tradition is called subsidiarity. The idea is that decisions get made at the smallest competent unit, and authority only moves upward when the smaller unit cannot do the job.
Not to turn everything into computer science, but subsidiarity is, accidentally, a load-balancing principle, that is core to how a working distributed system gets built. The decision should happen where the data is, where the context is, and where the people affected by the decision actually live. Authority that gets bumped up a layer when it should have stayed local tends to ossify into something nobody asked for, and once it is up there, you cannot get it back down without breaking something.
I want to be careful here, because it is easy to make a Pope into a mascot for whatever position you already held. The encyclical is not a Distributed Thoughts blog post; it is a moral and theological document with an institutional purpose, written for 1.3 billion Catholics, and the parts of it that talk about transhumanism and embryonic dignity are not the parts I am qualified to summarize.
The part I am qualified to summarize is the part that maps to the architecture conversation, and the encyclical itself invites that mapping. Pope Leo XIV does not write about "agents." He does write about subsidiarity in the algorithmic age. He does not use the words "data sovereignty." He does spend about ten thousand words arguing that the asymmetry between the people who own AI infrastructure and the people whose labor is increasingly mediated by that infrastructure produces the same structural problem Leo XIII identified in 1891. He concludes that it does, and goes on for a while about why.
Who showed up to the launch
The presentation on May 25 was attended by, among other people, Chris Olah, who runs interpretability research at Anthropic, is one of the company's co-founders, and gave remarks at the press conference. The remarks said, more or less, that the labs operate inside incentives and constraints that can conflict with doing the right thing, and that people outside those incentives need to pay close attention and be willing to be honest critics. He thanked the Pope for being one of those critics. He used the word "unsettling" about what his own team is finding inside frontier models.
Sit with that for a second. Anthropic flew its head of interpretability to Rome to stand next to the Pope and say "we need outside oversight because we cannot reliably oversee ourselves." Whatever else you think about that, it is the most theologically literate move any of the labs has made in three years. The other labs noticed. The Washington Post coverage framed Anthropic's appearance as a deliberate alignment away from the White House and toward the Vatican, which, regardless of intent, is now the cleanest description of where the moral high ground of this debate actually lives.
The 1891 prescription, in 2026
The labs are very willing to talk about safety. They are very unwilling to talk about who owns the dynamo. The Pope just wrote ninety pages saying the second question is the question, and that the first question, on its own, gets you nothing useful. You can build the safest possible model and still hand it to eleven counterparties under a Glasswing-class contract the rest of the market cannot sign, and you will not have addressed any of the questions a serious moral framework would have asked you to address. You will have addressed about half of one of them.
I do not agree with everything in Magnifica Humanitas. I do not need to. The point is that the institutional response to a wave of centralized infrastructure is forming, the framework that is going to do the most coherent intellectual work over the next decade was just published by a 70-year-old Augustinian, and the people responsible for the centralization have, with one notable exception, not read it.
They should. The diagnosis is good. The diagnosis was already good in 1891. The prescription is the same as it was then, which is that authority not held locally tends to ossify into something nobody asked for and nobody can leave. The labs have built infrastructure of exactly that shape. The grid bills are going up. The data center moratoriums are spreading. The people whose work is increasingly mediated by the model cannot vote on it, cannot leave it, and increasingly cannot afford the electricity it draws.
Push the decisions down. Push the compute down. Keep the dynamo close enough that the parish can see it.
That is what 1891 actually figured out. The Pope is the one who remembered.
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Originally published at The Pope and the Dynamo.