CONCEPT
Magnifica Humanitas
Pope Leo XIV's 2026 encyclical on artificial intelligence—the Catholic Church's first systematic moral teaching on AI—arguing that technology carries the character of those who build and use it, that human dignity is infinite and irreducible to data, and that the universal destination of goods now extends to algorithms, platforms, and data.
Magnifica Humanitas, signed on 15 May 2026 and released in eight modern languages, is the forty-two-thousand-word document in which the Catholic Church brought its full social-teaching tradition to bear on artificial intelligence. The title translates as 'Magnificent Humanity,' and the document's opening move is to refuse the frame in which most AI debate is conducted: instead of asking whether the technology is good or bad, it asks which kind of city humanity is currently building with it. Drawing on Genesis 11 and the book of Nehemiah, the encyclical names two construction projects—Babel, built by people seeking to make a name for themselves, and Jerusalem, rebuilt by distributed communities in the presence of something larger than themselves—and argues that the same bricks can serve either project. The hinge sentence of the whole document is: 'Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those
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