Pope Leo XIV published Magnifica Humanitas. His first encyclical is more than 42,000 words on artificial intelligence and human dignity. Signed on 15 May 2026, 135 years to the day after Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, this new document echoes and amplifies concerns raised during the height of the first industrial revolution about the concentration of power and the dignity of human labor.

Specifically, §104 reads as follows.

From this follows a simple but compelling consequence: we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral. In reality, every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations. If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as less worthy, or excludes them without the possibility of appeal, then it is not merely a tool “to be used well,” since it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person. For this reason, ethical discernment cannot be limited to asking whether we are using a system for good or bad purposes; it must also examine how that system is designed and what vision of the human person and society is embedded in the data and models that guide it.

Every tool bears the stamp of its maker. The cotton gin, the mechanical loom, the atomic bomb, and the smartphone.

This is not metaphor. The cotton gin did not create plantation slavery. It compounded the profits of slavery enough to extend it another seventy years. The mechanical loom did not invent the factory system. It concentrated production, broke cottage industry, and handed industrial capitalists their first monopoly on output. The atomic bomb was built by physicists who believed they were racing fascism. It ended the war by demonstrating that militarized American industry could vaporize a city. Every technology embeds the ambitions of whoever funded it. The money is written into the project’s DNA.

Nietzsche’s Warning

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” When Friedrich Nietzsche wrote these words in 1882, he was not celebrating atheism. He was warning about the consequences of humanity’s loss of meaning and purpose in life. Nietzsche feared that as society advanced, society would have only two choices: lose all sources of meaning and become nihilists; or create new gods to fill the void.

The West built its moral architecture on the foundations of the Church. Humanity’s loss of faith strips away that foundation, but changes nothing about people. We will still seek meaning, purpose, and power. We are wired for worship. If not god, then something else. In Nietzsche’s time, the new threat was nationalism. The state was the new god, and politicians were its priesthood.

God, Nation, Algorithm

Every new god follows the same template. A creation myth. A priesthood. The authority to silence heretics. Salvation. Each of these requires faith. Each turns a blind eye to the atrocities committed in service of the project. Each comforts, saying the ends justify the means. Each demands that doubt be silenced.

The nationalist chapter gave us two world wars, the Holocaust, the Gulag, Jim Crow, wars disguised as police actions, the militarization of police, mass detention, forced labor, and the PATRIOT Act authorizing mass surveillance. The state as moral authority, with courts as its inquisitors, justified all of it.

If you disagree, you’re a heretic unpatriotic. If you openly question the project, you’re a heretic a threat to national security. If you criticize the project, you’re a heretic a traitor.

The techno-religion hasn’t had its war yet. But it has its theology and ethos. Effective altruism becomes moral laundering. Instead of the rapture, we have the promise of AGI. Instead of Fingermen, we have Flock cameras and Stingrays.

Same structures. Different gods. New language.

Monsters Recognize Monsters

In 1452, Dum Diversas authorized Portugal’s perpetual slavery of pagans and unbelievers. Three years later, Romanus Pontifex extended that permission to all lands and peoples Portugal would later discover. The Vatican didn’t just permit the slave trade; it endorsed it.

The institution did not stop with authorizing slavery. Rome built American Catholicism on the labor of enslaved people. The Society of Jesus bought, owned, and sold enslaved men, women, and children from the colonial era through the Civil War. Their schools were paid for with the revenue generated by plantations worked by enslaved people.

In July 1933, just six months after Hitler was appointed chancellor, Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who would later become Pope Pius XII, signed the Reich Concordat with Germany. The treaty gave the Nazis their first major international legitimacy. The Concordat also prohibited Catholic clergy from political activity, which handed the institution a formal mechanism for looking away.

From December 1940, Berlin ordered clergy from camps across the Reich consolidated into dedicated barracks at Dachau. More than 2,700 clergy were imprisoned there. 94% of them were Catholic. The Nazis used the priests for medical experiments.

In December 1942, a German Jesuit wrote to Pius XII’s personal secretary. The letter reported the exact number of priests imprisoned at Dachau. The same letter reported that 6,000 Jews and Poles were being murdered every day at Belzec.

The Church knew. Selective intervention is proof of knowledge. What you intervene for reveals what you are protecting.

Written in 1937, Mit brennender Sorge condemned Nazi ideology and the violation of the Concordat. It did not name Jews, Roma, homosexuals, or political opponents.

In June 1938, three Jesuits drafted a new encyclical, Humani Generis Unitas, specifically to condemn racism and antisemitism. Pope Pius XI died in February 1939, before it could be released. His successor, Pius XII, shelved it. The three authors were bound by a vow of silence.

The man who signed the Concordat with Hitler in 1933 was the same man who buried the explicit anti-racism document in 1939.

Nostra Aetate formally repudiated the entrenched belief in the collective Jewish guilt for the death of Christ. That was 1965. Twenty years after the Holocaust, and centuries after the Church’s active role in fomenting antisemitism.

Elie Wiesel spent years opposing the Vatican’s beatification of Pius XII. He spoke the following words during his Nobel acceptance speech.

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.

Pope Leo XIV is not warning us about concentrated power because the Church became good. He is warning us because the Church knows exactly what concentrated, unaccountable power does.

Monsters recognize monsters.

Restructuring Power

The Church did not become good. The Church lost power. This is no longer the institution that crowned kings.

Crowning kings worked in both directions. Rome conferred divine legitimacy on the monarch. The monarch enforced the tithe, protected Church lands, and suppressed heresy. The system allowed both rent and devotion to be extracted from the peasant, God’s will be done. They were not competing institutions. They were cooperative ones, each serving the other’s interests while insisting they served the people’s.

The Church’s moral position tracks its economic position. When Rome was the center of imperial power, the Church served Rome. When European monarchs funded cathedrals, the Church endorsed their wars. Dum Diversas was not drafted because the College of Cardinals was uniquely wicked. It appeared because Portugal’s colonial expansion required papal authorization, and the Church held the contract. You do not authorize slavery as a matter of principle, or even a lack of principle. You authorize it because the institution funding your institution requires it. The Church has always been a tool, serving whoever held the capital, even if that meant serving itself. Now the capital has moved to Silicon Valley. The Church no longer holds it. That is why Leo XIV can afford to tell the truth about what concentrated, unaccountable power does. He no longer holds a stake in protecting it.

Do you believe the Church would be so critical if Bezos, Zuckerberg, Musk, and Altman were to prostrate themselves, kiss the papal ring, and swear obeisance to the Holy See?

But don’t take my word for it. After all, we are wired for worship. One of the cardinals of this new clergy told us about his new cathedral.

“The most successful founders do not set out to create companies. They are on a mission to create something closer to a religion, and at some point it turns out that forming a company is the easiest way to do so.”

— Sam Altman, 2013

Now it is on us, the laity, to subscribe.

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