Note: With the Holy Father’s first encyclical having dropped only a few days after the last post was finalized, and given the overlap of the topics, some extra words related to artificial intelligence and the future of warfare are worth deeper consideration. This is intended as an addendum to the last post.

Instruction, clarification, and offering guidance are the first purposes of any papal encyclical. Intuitively, this instruction, clarification and guidance are oriented toward the Pope’s own flock, those 1.4 billion people who at least nominally refer to themselves as Catholic. While encyclicals are never the place where some new development in doctrine or theology is promulgated, they do reiterate, emphasize, or otherwise better illuminate aspects of the faith that the broader faithful need to consider at a given time. St. Paul VI’s Humane Vitae being published in the summer of 1968 is a perfect example: timeliness so perfect that one can only assume it was providential.

So it may be too with Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas, which has come to us in this spring of 2026. Time will tell. What is more interesting to note here, in comparison to the great Humanae Vitae, is that, although the secular world indeed took great interest in both encyclicals, the former emerged a time when there existed a palpable sense of uncertainty on the subject across Catholic lay circles. Within the Church, Vatican II had recently concluded, liturgical experimentation had just begun on a global scale, and St. Paul VI’s own Sacerdotalis Caelibatus brought about a wave of unfortunate religious wheat being revealed as chaff and departing from their vocations. Outside of the Church, the first contraceptive pill had been introduced to the public in 1960, an American cultural revolution was well underway, and various protestant sects, such as the Church of England, had gradually reduced prohibitions on contraception and, by proxy, liberalized on various aspects of sexual morality.

While Catholic doctrine hadn’t changed, there was a definite sense that the laity did require a gentle if firm reminder, whether they wanted one or not. And, considering its subject matter, it’s only natural that the secular world would take great interest in an encyclical that many expected would reverse the Church’s doctrine on sexual morality.

If one were to listen to the popular discourse on the encyclical, one might expect that Magnifica Humanitas comes at a similar time. Artificial intelligence and large language models have thoroughly inundated the developed world to such extent that one cannot easily escape their influence or presence. Large corporations and government agencies have integrated LLMs into their organization at varying levels, from assisting in R&D to automating production. Schools have yet to determine adequate means to curtail AI-assisted cheating on a massive scale, affecting the learning of students from elementary school all the way up through graduate students. Despite its inefficiencies and errors, in the brief period this technology has been publicly available, it has already transformed society in ways that remain to be totally understood—largely due to misdirected, inappropriate, or otherwise fraudulent presumptions laid upon the technology by its champions.

One would hope that much if not all of what Pope Leo addresses in this encyclical is just reiterating some very basic, general, and common sense ideas to a Catholic audience. One would expect Catholics to understand that AI machines are not ‘free thinking’ agents comparable to man, and similarly does he warn the average person against attributing to AI aspects of intelligence which it will never have. Likewise, he spends quite a bit of time reiterating social and psychological problems that can arise from overuse of digital media, particularly at young ages, and the damage certain sorts of readily available content inflict on the psyche.

When one reads the encyclical, however, one encounters something else: a warning against the use of technology to replace society by confusing the order of man toward God.

Babel, Jerusalem, and Leadership

The Holy Father begins Magnifica Humanitas with a brief meditation on Babel, that mono-cultured civilization who sought to build a tower to the heavens even as the Earth still settled from the cataclysm of Noah’s generation. For his purposes here, Pope Leo uses the Tower of Babel as a metaphor for man’s reliance on tools and technology, and that when misapplied, or used for purposes removed from any interest in God, they lead man into destruction:

It was an impressive feat: a single language, a single technology, a single direction. However, the project concealed a profound danger. It was a project conceived without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing.¹

He quickly contrasts this with the rebuilding of Jerusalem by Nehemiah:

Before taking action, he fasted, prayed and interceded for the people. He then asked the king for permission to return to Jerusalem and, upon arriving, examined the destroyed areas in silence. He did not impose solutions from above. He convened the families, assigned each of them a section of the wall to rebuild, listened to their concerns, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition. The narrative shows how the city is reborn, not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part. It is an undertaking with God at the center, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones.²

The point across these two passages, as he elaborates, is that neither civilization, common cause, nor technology are in themselves against God, but rather morally neutral objects and interests that can and must be aligned toward or with God if they are to be used for good: neither “a yes or no to technology, but rather” a “constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.”³

An important aside to make here, however, is the mention that Nehemiah did not “impose solutions from above,” as if those of Babel did. On the contrary, the words of Genesis do not indicate the Babelian Tower built by issue of fiat, and instead depicts it as a communal effort that enough of the population was on board with to spontaneously, or perhaps, democratically, elect to undertake:

And each one said to his neighbor: Come, let us make brick, and bake it with fire. And they had brick instead of stones, and slime instead of mortar. And they said: Come, let us make a city and a tower, the top whereof may reach to heaven; and let us make our name famous before we be scattered abroad into all lands. (Gen 11:3-4).

While one may argue about names lost to time, the intent behind the passage seems quite clear: an ambiguous group known as “the people,” not altogether unlike “the people” referred to frequently in the classical liberal documents of the free world, moved toward the creation of, as the Holy Father reminds us, “a city built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency.” One might say that “the people” organized themselves, and with this in mind, one can imagine the sort of city that the Lord looked upon and decided immediately upon its obliteration.

By contrast, however, Nehemiah’s organization of the families, assigning of plots to rebuild, and “coordination of their efforts,” comes across indeed as the imposition of solutions from above. The task of any good leader is indeed to lead: to ascertain the realities of given situations, discern and heed credible advice, determine appropriate action, and then to assign the right people to carry that out. Nehemiah’s example is rightly one to follow, but it seems mischaractarized in this contrast. Nehemiah did not put himself before God, but rather organized the reconstruction of Jerusalem by discerning and obeying God’s will. But the people of Jerusalem still needed Nehemiah to do this; it had not happened ‘naturally’ so to speak, and the inclusion of Nehemiah’s narrative within Scripture indicates that it would not have happened had Nehemiah undertaken that leadership role to do so.

Private Ownership of Models & Data Centers

The Holy Father begins to address artificial intelligence and its impact on society more than a third of the way into the encyclical. As mentioned before, much of what he addresses is accurate if not, one would hope, either self-evident or commonsensical to the practicing Catholic. What is of mildly troubling note, however, is the Holy Father’s call for a sort of “disarming” of AI:

Disarming AI means freeing it from the mentality of “armed” competition, which today is not limited simply to the military context, but is also an economic and cognitive phenomenon. This entails a race for ever more powerful algorithms and larger datasets, driven by the desire to secure geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity. It means freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate, therefore making it human-friendly and restoring it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life.⁴

With all respect to the Holy Father, it’s very difficult to parse what exactly “freeing technology from monopolistic control” means. This technology in particular requires a staggering investment of ingenuity, time, money, power, and infrastructure to support it. LLMs, to put it mildly, do not grow on trees, and they would not exist without the labs that have sunk years of research and labor into their development. It is possible to argue that these machines were opened to public use far too early, but the basic system of investment finance, albeit abused, meant these labs had to give investors some sort of proof that they were accomplishing something. Without such investors, the LLMs wouldn’t have existed at all. Whether or not this would have been for the better for society (which seems almost certainly the case) is not the point.

This is all to question what monopolistic control the Holy Father is warning about. Presumably, it refers to the specific people in charge of specific companies that have overseen the development of these LLMs. However, these circumstances arose as a result of the technology being discussed; Sam Altman may run OpenAI, but the ChatGPT technology has already proliferated across multiple industries. And unlike executable programs of days past, Altman can’t input a line of code here or there and completely change ChatGPT’s outputs; such an outcome requires recalibration and retraining, not simple code massaging.

What the Holy Father mentions about “opening it to discussion and debate” seems already to have happened. As AI has been deployed across society, there has been no end to the number of think pieces on the subject of treading carefully. Unfortunately, as Anthropic founder Chris Olah even mentioned at the encyclical’s presentation at the Vatican, the machine’s developers are still uncertain as to how exactly an LLM arrives at its conclusions:

I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models—what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience.

With such ambiguity from the people who have been actively involved in its development, how one may ‘tread carefully,’ so to speak, evades an obvious answer. Olah, in his same speech, surrenders this issue as one “for the humanities, for religion, for philosophy, [and] for society at large” to solve. To Pope Leo’s credit, he officially offered one such attempt. It just comes across as more than a little naive. For instance, on the topic of that monopoly, the Holy Father explains,

We cannot be satisfied with merely calling for the moralization of machines — the so-called “alignment” of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.⁵

The Holy Father seems to indicate that larger committees must be assembled in order to assure that these machines maintain proper social and ethical frameworks in the public sphere, including the idea that “a more active political involvement capable of slowing things down”⁶ is necessary to complete this task. Such committees already exist. One hopes that his implication is that a member of the religious should sit on one, such as a bishop, perhaps, or a member of one of the religious communities learned in what’s happening in tech. But these are only inferences, guesses. Hopes.

International Competition

It need not be reiterated here the precarious international tensions that assuage the nations of the world. Two of America’s biggest rivals remain steadfast in their saber rattling, and one of them even while in the midst of a catastrophic war in Ukraine. The other, China, remains an antagonist across the strait of Taiwan, which remains at present the only place in the world producing the chips necessary to run LLMs at any scale.

AI champions have for years advocated for increased security precautions and government interest specifically to ensure the labs developing AI infrastructure don’t leak, intentionally or otherwise, industry secrets to geopolitical rivals. Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness placed a great emphasis on this back in 2024, as did, more recently, Anthropic’s own 2028: Two Scenarios for Global AI Leadership. The arguments on this topic being identical, these proponents argue that it is better for the world, not just the tech sector, that America remains a unipolar superpower, as its closest rival, China, has demonstrated continually that its values stand in open adversary to our own.

When one reads Magnifica Humanitas, one recognizes certain strains of liberal-democratic thought throughout the encyclical that understandably correlates to those represented, albeit loosely and not without ample failures, by American liberal democracy. While the resemblance is not perfect and America’s behavior both internationally and domestically holds plenty of room for critique, it’s much easier to reconcile the Pope’s words with American policy than with China’s.

It is with this in mind that, if AI is as great a military threat as has been envisioned and articulated even by this encyclical, America continues to make AI research a matter and priority of national defense. The notion that America and China might reach some preemptive armistice on AI specifically, in this sector, strains the imagination. AI doesn’t come with it the spectacle of nuclear annihilation despite posing a comparable threat, and as such, is much harder to argue for anti-proliferation or ‘disarmament’ treaties the way international powers did with nuclear weaponry last century. One can hope, certainly, and one must pray, too. Yet the Holy Father’s words nonetheless seem to desire a nuanced third way between two (or more) nuclear- and AI-empowered militaries in an increasingly zero-sum game.

If this is the same sort of use of the word ‘disarm’ that the Holy Father refers to in Mangifica Humanitas, then this isn’t immediately obvious by the text. Nuclear disarmament did not take the form of widening ease of access or relegating the use of nuclear weapons to larger committees. It came in the form of open prohibitions, international agreements on stockpile reductions, and decisions by specific world leaders to discontinue production. And while the powers that agreed to these terms, for the most part, stuck to their agreements, those powers who didn’t were and remain under no obligation to follow along. The only reason they do is the threat, unfortunately, of force, or perhaps economic sanction, which is merely force by some other means.

The Holy Father argues, as one would expect, against a politic of power, that might makes right. The Church has always maintained this stance. The problem is that, similar to his critique of the people in charge of developing these technologies, he seems to be arguing into the void. While it may not be the express purpose of an encyclical to lay out calls to action or concrete plans for change, the gulf between how the world functions today and the direction this encyclical points Catholics to follow is so great, and the recommendations so vague, that one worries it will be dismissed entirely out of hand by the people who need to hear it the most.

On this topic, one can only rest assured that history is long and is on the Church’s side, so perhaps these complaints are passing things caught up in the stream of the times. Still, one can’t help but believe that such complaints are necessary to spur on those who may be capable implementing the Holy Father’s ideas in their most optimistic meanings.

Conclusion

Again, the purpose of an encyclical is to teach, not necessarily to fix. It would be a misreading of the form to accuse Magnifica Humanitas as introducing a problem and refusing to offer concrete solutions; that is for the Church body to figure out in the wake of such an encyclical. However, an encyclical’s purpose does include laying out a broad view for the Church’s orientation regarding specific subjects going forward. In this case, although it touches on digital technology more broadly, its focus on AI indeed cannot be ignored.

It is with great hope that Magnifica Humanitas is Pope Leo’s first step in a role emulating that of Nehemiah, as he referenced him. While observant in its dissection of the social dimensions of artificial intelligence, both the encyclical’s criticisms and recommendations of its use come across as either self-evident or too vague. The fear here is that, like many encyclicals, Catholics (hopefully) will heed his warnings and take his advice, but the rest of the world, and particularly those in power, will ignore it. One may insist that AI not be used for target acclimation and weapons deployment at the same time, but if the Pentagon goes ahead and implements such a ghastly system, who is going to stop them? Sternly-worded condemnations from the Holy See carry only so far in the halls of both Washington and Silicon Valley. One hopes this changes.

This is precisely where the leadership of the Pope, following that of Nehemiah, will be tantamount, and why it is with hope that one must consider Magnifica Humanitas the starting point of a larger social program.

Post-Script

The day this piece finished, Anthropic published an article on recursive self-improving AI models. If they’re to believed, the terminology refers to models every bit as dangerous as it sounds. In it, the writers mention that “more than 80% of the code we merge into Antrhopic’s codebase was authored by Claude,” and that “in the second quarter of 2026, the typical engineer was merging 8x as much code per day as they were in 2024.” Perhaps Anthropic is merely trying to puff up their product as they push toward their IPO. On the other hand, perhaps they aren’t exaggerating as much as one might hope.

Meanwhile, they end with hauntingly similar conclusions as presented in this piece:

A meaningful slowdown or pause would require multiple well-resourced labs at or near the frontier, in multiple countries, agreeing to stop under the same conditions. It would also require that each can verify that the others have actually stopped. Due to the unique characteristics of AI systems, the detectability (a lower standard than verifiability) element of this arms control problem is much more challenging than with other technologies. Training runs are far easier to conceal than missile silos, their inputs are general-purpose, and the incentive to defect quietly is enormous, because whoever continues while others pause could inherit the lead. A credible pause also has to specify what triggers it, what lifts it, and who adjudicates.

None of this is necessarily impossible in principle—the world has built verification regimes for other complex technologies (e.g., the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty)—but those regimes took decades to build both the infrastructure and the trust. We don’t have that long. A unilateral pause by one lab, by contrast, is achievable immediately, but accomplishes much less: it would change who the front-runner is, but it would not create the wider deliberative process that is currently missing.

1Para 7.

2Para 8.

3Para 9.

4Para 110.

5Para 107.

6Ibid.

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