ORGANIZATION
The Vatican
The oldest continuous institution in the Western world—speaking for the first time on artificial intelligence in its 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas—insists that humanity faces not a technical choice but a moral one: Babel or Jerusalem, self-glorifying power or shared, dignity-centered building.
When Pope Leo XIV signed
Magnifica Humanitas in May 2026—released in eight modern languages with no Latin version, a deliberate first—the Catholic Church brought two thousand years of accumulated reflection on the human person to bear on a technology barely a decade old. The encyclical refuses both the triumphalism and the apocalypticism that dominate AI discourse, insisting instead that the technology is never neutral because it takes on the character of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it. From the opening pages, the document frames the stakes not as a question about what the machines can do but about which city humanity is building: the self-aggrandizing tower of Babel, or the patient, communal reconstruction of Jerusalem under Nehemiah. The Church positions itself not as a regulator issuing decrees but as a voice on a shared construction site, drawing on the tradition of
subsidiarity and the principle of the
universal destination of goods—now