The predictable ritual has already begun around Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas.
A newly issued papal encyclical now apparently requires an immediate firing squad of digital theologians, who read the headline, skimmed three posts, absorbed one irritated thread, and then rushed to announce that the Holy Father has neglected Christology, slipped into socialism, flirted with modernism, or somehow forgotten that his actual job involves teaching the Faith.
Once we read Magnifica Humanitas with care, we see that Leo grounds social doctrine in “the mystery of the living God, revealed in Jesus Christ,” then adds that its “most concrete expression” is found in “the face of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word.” The document is Christological at its root, because it treats the human person through the Word made flesh rather than through a secular theory of political management.
The complaint that the pope should simply teach the faith and leave modern questions alone rests on a strange misunderstanding of the Faith. Revelation has never functioned that way: Adam’s fall damaged the whole human condition rather than merely the private devotional corner of human existence. Therefore, any redemption that claims the whole man must necessarily speak to all things, including work, family, law, economy, speech, technology, culture, power, and every other arena where fallen man either receives grace or organizes rebellion with excellent branding.
When God rescued Israel from Egypt, he gave his people commands concerning worship, land, debt, labor, family, courts, strangers, property, marriage, kingship, and sacrifice. The covenant was never isolated to pietistic life. Our Lord has placed his hand over every aspect of Israel’s common existence and thereby taught the nations that divine worship and public justice belong together under his sovereign rule.
In the New Testament, Paul announces that Christ is the one through whom “all things were created” and in whom “all things hold together” (Col. 1:16-17). He also commands that whatever we do “in word or deed” must be done “in the name of the Lord Jesus” (3:17), which leaves precious little room for the modern fantasy that Christ reigns over church buildings but not markets, laboratories, weapons systems, or universities.
St. Thomas Aquinas gives the Church a conceptual grammar that our age desperately needs. He writes in the Summa Theologiae that sacred doctrine treats God principally and treats creatures “so far as they are referred to God” (ST I, q. 1, a. 7). Theology has competence over every created thing under its highest aspect, because everything that exists comes from God, and then returns to God, resists God, or becomes healed through his grace.
Aquinas also explains that sacred doctrine is nobler than the other sciences because it draws from divine revelation and directs human reason toward eternal beatitude. The other sciences may rightly serve it as “handmaidens” (ST I, q. 1, a. 5, ad 2). Theology is called the queen of the sciences: it judges the final end and purpose of all physics, medicine, economics, law, and political prudence.
Consequently, no earthly office has a more urgent moral responsibility to speak across the whole field of human affairs than the papacy. The pope comments on AI, economics, war, labor, or culture not because he has decided to become a political pundit in vestments. He speaks on these matters because the vicar of Christ must guard the human person wherever the image of God is threatened, especially when technical power begins to shape human life faster than ordinary moral reflection can catch up.
Of course, when the Holy Father comments on narrow scientific findings, technical projections, policy details, NGO statistics, or engineering probabilities, he does so according to the ordinary limits of his own personal prudential judgment. We can prudentially discern those statements. With this encyclical, however, Leo’s application of moral principles belongs squarely within his official teaching responsibility.
Leo himself acknowledges this distinction with admirable restraint when he says that he does not intend to offer a comprehensive treatment of artificial intelligence, although he recalls essential elements for moral and social discernment that safeguard the primacy of the human person. The pope clearly knows the difference between a technical manual and a moral encyclical.
The charge of socialism or communism needs far more evidence from Leo’s critics. Just because we might have nervous dislike for phrases such as common good, solidarity, universal destination of goods, and social justice, that doesn’t make the Holy Father a socialist. Those are Catholic principles with deep roots in Scripture, the Fathers, Scholastic theology, and modern social teaching. Leo carefully names these as the criteria for judging the power of AI.
If a Catholic hears the phrase common good and immediately reaches for a Cold War air horn, perhaps the problem lies less in the pope’s alleged socialism and more in our impoverished catechetical imagination, trained by political media and social media, such that we confuse Catholic social doctrine with whatever ideological team currently appeals to us.
We need to be cognizant of the sociological issue underneath these hot takes. Many Catholics now encounter the papacy through reaction engines that reward outrage and suspicion. Many of us function on social media like children: we jump to a final judgment before finishing even the table of contents.
This habit is spiritually dangerous because it produces a Catholic temperament devoid of filial receptivity. We react with instant suspicion because the “likes” engines reward that posture. Yet the ordinary posture of a faithful Catholic to the Holy Father ought to be like a child before a father: one of reverent, prayerful attention and patient study before we engage.
The faithful Catholic has the clearest concept for examining human affairs because he is the only person with the fullest view of reality. Benedict XVI wrote in Caritas in Veritate that “charity is at the heart of the Church’s social doctrine,” and truth frees charity from “an emotivism that deprives it of relational and social content” (2-3).
The pope occupies this place in a supreme manner because he is the visible principle of unity for the Church, the successor of Peter, and the Holy Father, who must strengthen his children when global powers begin to remake the conditions under which human beings think and even conceive of themselves.
Therefore, when Pope Leo warns that artificial intelligence touches many areas of life and shapes human coexistence, he is doing exactly what Leo XIII did before him with the industrial question. The Church spoke then because factory workers and families were being crushed by new industrial powers. The Church speaks now because the digital age has produced new forms of vulnerability against human dignity.
So perhaps we could attempt a daring experiment in Catholic maturity by reading the whole document, considering what Leo is actually saying, asking why he is saying it, and receiving his paternal exhortation with the docility due to a prudent shepherd who has written a careful text for our confused age.
The Church’s position is wonderfully simple here: Christ is Lord over all creation, culture must be judged by the dignity of the person redeemed by Christ, and every new power must be brought under the obedience of faith. This means the faithful must listen to Peter with filial care when he speaks prudentially on the morality and faith of a matter like AI. Frankly, that would be a far better hot take than most of what has been posted so far.