VATICAN ‘Magnifica Humanitas’: protecting humanity by ‘disarming’ artificial intelligence
VATICAN ‘Magnifica Humanitas’: protecting humanity by ‘disarming’ artificial intelligence
Publish Date: 2026-05-25 17:28:00
Source Domain: www.asianews.it
Milan (AsiaNews) – Right after his election, Pope Leo XIV said he chose his name after Leo XIII because of today’s Rerum novarum, “new things” that the Church and society must reckon with, namely the transformations that artificial intelligence (AI) is introducing into our lives and into relationships between individuals and peoples.
A year later, Leo offers his overall perspective on the matter with his first encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, which was released today: some 105 pages of reflections focused not on technical issues, nor even a vague reminder of the need to establish rules in the face of the overwhelming power of algorithms.
As the document’s subtitle explains, much more is at stake today, namely the challenge to “remain human” and safeguard that fundamental principle of the dignity of every person, which the astonishing power of the new data science is increasingly calling into question.
“The power and prevalence of emerging technologies are interwoven into the fabric of daily life,” writes Leo XIV at the start of Magnifica Humanitas, “shaping decision-making processes and deeply affecting the collective imagination”.
This is a process whose “main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments.”
The face of this technological power is “predominantly ‘private’”; for this reason, it is “even more challenging to discern, govern and direct such power toward the common good.”
Precisely for this reason, the Church has a duty today to help the world face this challenge, look at it, guided by the foundations and principles that it has developed in its social teaching over the course of the journey begun in 1891 with Rerum Novarum: human rights founded on the inviolable dignity of every person, the common good, justice, solidarity, the method of subsidiarity…
What does this perspective say…
