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(One note before we begin, Encyclical day is like my Christmas. I hope my passion for the pope and his prophetic words on one of the premier issues of our time comes through in the coming days.)
“Don’t let ChatGPT read it for you.” That was Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, writing last week in America Magazine about Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which the Vatican releases tomorrow morning.
“The words of the pope,” Flores added, “should not be reduced to a program of dogmatic definitions and generated summaries.”
Flores is absolutely right.
This preview was put together by working the phones for the past week and through the holiday weekend, and talking to people who know this document intimately.
They spoke to me in hopes of building anticipation for this text among the faithful and the curious, especially during the long holiday here in the United States.
And more than anything else, I hope it’ll encourage you to read the document itself.
The text will be made public for all of us during its presentation in the Synod Hall on Memorial Day.
What follows is a very rough sketch of the terrain — we will post the document the moment it is publicly released.
At the outset, Pope Leo XIV frames the moment as a choice. He writes that humanity stands today at a fork in the road: “to erect a new Tower of Babel or to build the holy city, where God and humanity dwell together.”
The pope pushes past the simpler question of whether artificial intelligence is good or bad and asks what kind of civilization the human race intends to become as the tools of intelligence pass into the hands that have never before held such power.
The timing of the release now makes more sense to me. Tomorrow is the day after Pentecost — the feast that undoes Babel, when the Holy Spirit descends on the apostles and unites them across every tongue.
The image is Augustinian to the bone.
Augustine wrote De Civitate Dei as Rome collapsed, to map the divide between a civilization ordered by love and one ruled by domination — and the “holy city” Leo invokes is that City of God.
As the first Augustinian pope in the history of the Church, Leo XIV reads the present hour through that lens.
The encyclical opens with Babel as the image of what humanity must not become, and lands the morning after the Church celebrates the moment that very scattering was reversed.
The argument unfolds with patience. Leo XIV situates his teaching within the tradition of Catholic social thought that begins with Rerum Novarum in 1891, insisting that the same responsibility the Church once shouldered in the face of industrialization, mass democracy, and the nuclear threshold now belongs to the present hour.
He insists that the Church’s social teaching is no static rulebook but a living tradition meant to respond dynamically to the questions of each age.
He moves to the bedrock claim: the ontological dignity of every human being, given by God in the act of creation and confirmed by the Incarnation.
Around this anchor, he gathers the classical principles of Catholic social thought — the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, the universal destination of goods — and applies each to digital life, intangible property, and algorithmic governance.
Then the encyclical turns sharper.
Leo XIV names a technocratic paradigm that treats the measurable as the whole of reality and challenges transhumanist movements that treat human limitation as a defect to be engineered away.
He makes clear that artificial intelligence does not experience life and cannot truly understand what it means to be human — the lived human experience stands above any tool.
As Leo alluded to on Friday, a machine cannot suffer or love, has no body through which the world is felt, and stands outside the responsibility that consequential decisions require.
Vulnerability, the pope answers — the very thing the transhumanists want to engineer away — is what makes care, communion, and love possible in the first place.
He carries this anthropology into the concrete questions of our moment, where he spends real time on the practical consequences of this age.
Truth has become fragile in an information environment shaped by synthetic media and the incentives of attention markets.
On labor, Leo writes that workers are often forced to catch up to the speed of machines rather than machines being designed to assist workers — a line many expect to land hard in this hour.
The point lands hard right now. Just last month, Meta installed tracking software on its employees’ desktops — capturing mouse movements, clicks, and screenshots — to train the very AI models that are now beginning to replace those same workers.
Freedom in the digital age depends on public rules and shared responsibility, because the architecture of choice has become a political reality.
This week, Donald Trump backed away from signing an executive order that would have established a voluntary federal review of frontier AI models before public release — exactly the kind of public discipline the encyclical seems built to invite, and which tech-industry lobbying persuaded the White House to set aside.
The encyclical’s final movement turns prophetic. Leo XIV confronts the merger of artificial intelligence with the machinery of war and refuses to bless it, warning against the moral evasion that comes when killing is delegated to autonomous systems.
Against this culture of power, he proposes a civilization of love, built on justice, dialogue, and the perspective of the victims of history.
I have learned more about the ending of this encyclical than I feel comfortable sharing — but I suspect it will stand as one of the more profound papal texts of our lifetime on what it means to be a child of God through the lens of the Church, Christ, and Mary.
Tomorrow I will spend much of the holiday breaking down the document in a way I hope is fair to both the text and the issues of our time.
Most of all, once again, I hope it encourages you to read the text in full.
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Pope Leo XIV as he builds the community of love and defends the magnificent dignity of the human person, made in the image and likeness of God.
Pope Leo XIV is acting as humanity’s defender and guardian in this age of new things, and what he is about to give the world is arguably the most important papal social encyclical in 135 years.
In an era poisoned by cruelty and cynicism, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to flinch before injustice or bow to the idols of fear and authoritarianism.
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