Magnified, Not Optimized

Magnifica Humanitas and the Question Machines Cannot Answer

Pope Leo presents the encyclical at the Vatican (@Vatican Media)

The title of Pope Leo XIV’s first social encyclical is also its argument. Magnifica Humanitas - the grandeur of humanity - sounds at first like a humanism of self-assertion, a banner one might expect to find planted on the brow of the very technological optimism the document means to examine.

It is the opposite.

The grandeur Leo has in mind is not the grandeur Babel sought, the name made for oneself by reaching heaven without God.¹ It is the grandeur of a soul that proclaims the greatness of the Lord rather than its own - the grandeur of the Magnificat, on which the letter finally rests. Humanity is magnified here the way Mary is magnified: by grace received, not by capacity seized.

Babel or Jerusalem

Leo sets two scriptural scenes against each other and tells us we are standing between them.

There is Babel, with its single language and its project “conceived without reference to God,”² which prizes uniformity over communion and aspires to reach heaven without being invited. And there is Nehemiah rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem - who fasts and prays before he surveys the ruins, then assigns each family its section of the wall, listens to their concerns, coordinates the work - so that the city is reborn not through one man’s initiative but through the shared labor of all. An undertaking, in the Pope’s words, that “rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones.”³

The choice between them is not a choice between embracing or refusing technology. Technology is “a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man,”⁴ capable of healing and connecting and protecting our common home. But it “is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”⁵

The primary choice, Leo insists, is “not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem”⁶ - which is to say, in the end, between Augustine’s two loves and the two cities they build.⁷

A Living Tradition, Not a Handbook

The encyclical situates itself carefully within the tradition it is extending. Leo retraces the line from Rerum Novarum at one hundred thirty-five years through Quadragesimo Anno, Pacem in Terris, Gaudium et Spes, and Populorum Progressio - with its definition of authentic development as movement from less human to more human conditions, concerning “each person and the whole person”⁸ - through Laborem Exercens, Caritas in Veritate, Laudato Si’, and Fratelli Tutti.

Leo is demonstrating by the very architecture of his argument the claim he makes explicitly: that the Church’s social doctrine is “not a handbook of principles and norms to be applied, but a process of shared discernment,”⁹ a living corpus in which the unchanging core of revealed truth is “constantly intertwined with a renewed capacity for listening to historical situations.”¹⁰

Artificial intelligence, he argues, is not merely one more topic to be added to the list. It is “a development that challenges the categories of Social Doctrine from within, calling for their further development in fidelity to the Gospel.”¹¹

Three New Moves

Within that continuity, Leo makes three moves that are genuinely new.

The first is the extension of the universal destination of goods into the immaterial. The principle is ancient - that the goods of creation are given by God for all, and that private property, real and legitimate as it is, remains subordinate to that universal purpose, a subordination John Paul II called “the first principle of the whole ethical and social order.”¹²

Leo insists that this destination now applies “not only to material goods, but also to immaterial and cultural goods,”¹³ and then specifies them to include “patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data.”¹⁴ When these are concentrated in a few hands without adequate sharing, “a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods.”¹⁵ He names data a common good, the “product of many contributors” that “cannot be left solely in private hands.”¹⁶ This is a real doctrinal extension, with sharp practical edges in a world where the wealth of nations increasingly resides in precisely such intangibles.

The second move sharpens the non-neutrality of technology from a claim about use into a claim about design. It is one thing - by now a commonplace - to say that any tool can be used well or badly. Leo presses further.

Because every technical system “embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations,”¹⁷ 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.”¹⁸

A system that treats some lives as less worthy “is not merely a tool ‘to be used well’” - “it has already introduced criteria that contradict the inalienable dignity of the human person.”¹⁹ Hence Leo’s direct appeal to developers, whom he addresses with unusual gravity: technological innovation “can represent human participation in the divine act of creation,” and so developers “bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity.”²⁰

The third move is the key, because it engages the technical discourse rather than gesturing at it. Leo takes up the language of “alignment” - the project of conforming artificial intelligence to human values - and refuses to be satisfied by it.

“We cannot be satisfied,” he writes, “with merely calling for the moralization of machines... 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.”²¹

The point is quietly devastating. A perfectly aligned system aligned to the wrong vision of a handful of powerful actors does not solve the moral problem; it entrenches it and hides it from view.

There is also a striking epistemic humility here. Leo acknowledges that current systems are “more ‘cultivated’ than ‘built,’” that their developers “do not directly design every detail” but “create a framework within which the intelligence ‘grows,’” with the consequence that fundamental aspects of their functioning “remain, at present, unknown.”²² This is not a man frightened of something he does not understand. It is a man who understands it well enough to know the limits of anyone’s understanding of it and to call us to proper attention and caution.

From Inside the Room

I spent the better part of two decades inside the industry this encyclical describes - in analytics, consulting, and enterprise technology - before discerning my way out of it toward work more fully aligned with my family and diaconal vocations. I mention it not as biography but as a word of testimony.

Leo’s account of work that “de-skills” the worker, subjects him to “automated surveillance,” and leaves him with tasks so rigid and repetitive that “the very need to keep pace with the machine can erode workers’ sense of agency and stifle the innovative abilities they are expected to bring to their work”²³ - is a movement I could feel but never quite name while I was there.

The principle that should have governed those rooms was already given in Laborem Exercens: that work is not first a means of generating income but “a fundamental good for the person,”²⁴ a path of maturation through which, created in the image of the Creator, “our own work in some way continues his.”²⁵

Leo adds the recognition that a system optimized for output alone will quietly dissolve that good even while celebrating its own efficiency - that the “new ways” of working are “not necessarily better,”²⁶ and that the protection of human work and “the irreplaceable role of the individual must remain the general rule.”²⁷

The Deepest Stratum: Anthropological

The deepest stratum of the letter is anthropological, and here Leo is thoroughly Thomist and Augustinian at once.

The architecture rests on the conviction that the human person, made in the image of the Triune God who is “love itself in relationship,”²⁸ possesses a dignity that is neither acquired nor earned - an “ontological dignity” belonging to every human being “simply by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God,”²⁹ which “no sin, failure, humiliation or exclusion can diminish.”³⁰

Against this stands what Leo names as particularly insidious: the ideology “that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective.”³¹

The machine that measures the person by output is the practical instrument of the belief that the person is his output. These are not two problems. They are one error wearing two faces.

More Than Human

It is against the transhumanist promise that Leo brings his most sustained theological force. The dream of a “more than human” achieved by transcending the limits of our nature - through enhancement, hybridization, the engineering away of weakness and suffering - is met not with a refusal of transcendence but with a truer account of it.

“The expression ‘more than human,’” Leo writes, “is not an exclusive domain of technological promise.”³² The Christian tradition has always held that the human person is “called to self-transcendence, not through an escape from reality or a contempt for their limitations, but through their fulfillment in love.”³³

And this elevation is not seized but received. It is, as Aquinas teaches, a work of grace that “surpasses every capability of created nature,”³⁴ bridging the infinite disproportion between our finite nature and the life of God that only God himself can overcome.³⁵

His immediate predecessor said it plainly, and Leo cites him: “We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being.”³⁶ The radical departure from every Promethean dream lies exactly there. What saves humanity “is not enhanced self-sufficiency, but a relationship that liberates, a communion that transforms.”³⁷

An Error = A Catalyst

From this flows what I find the most unforgettable line in the document.

For an algorithm, Leo observes, “an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change. A person’s future is not calculable, but depends on one’s freedom - elevated by the inexhaustible grace of God - and on the relationships cultivated.”³⁸

A technology that “merely classifies and optimizes what already exists can, however unintentionally, become an obstacle to change and growth,”³⁹ precisely because it cannot comprehend conversion. It cannot grasp that the failure it would optimize away might be the very door through which grace enters.

This is why the limit, the weakness, the suffering that the machine would correct out of existence are not defects but the ground on which our humanity matures. Humanity, Leo writes, “flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them,”⁴⁰ and “to eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well.”⁴¹

A being without limits would be a being incapable of compassion, of generosity in the darkness of life, of the worship and meaningful sacrifice that arise precisely when we discover we are not God.

The Oldest Question at New Scale

Which returns us to the title, and to the two loves.

The age of artificial intelligence does not pose a fundamentally new question so much as it poses the oldest one at a new and unprecedented scale and speed: the love of self even to contempt of God, or the love of God even to contempt of self.⁴²

The reference to the Tower of Babel rewinds us to one of the earliest stories from the origins of humanity and one of the two competing loves and visions.

“Two loves have built two cities,” Augustine wrote, and Leo makes the citation the hinge of his entire reflection, adding that “the construction of Babel or the rebuilding of Jerusalem begins within each one of us.”⁴³ This is the proper humbling of all our debates about governance and alignment and regulation - every one of which matters, and none of which reaches the root.

The machine can imitate nearly everything we do. It can simulate our language, our analysis, even our empathy and our love.⁴⁴ It cannot imitate the one thing that finally defines us: the restless heart that, in Augustine’s words, was made for God and finds no rest until it rests in him.⁴⁵

That restlessness is not a bug in our design to be patched in some future version. It is the image of God in us - the very thing the technocratic paradigm cannot see and the transhumanist would abolish. Humanity is not optimized into its grandeur. It is magnified into it, as Mary was, and only by Another.

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A note on the encyclical’s theological lineage

I’m always fascinated by what is cited in an encyclical (a quirk I picked up from one of my Theology professors in formation.) The citation pattern of Magnifica Humanitas is itself a window into Leo’s mind.

The philosophical architecture is broadly Augustinian-Thomistic - the two loves from De civitate Dei, the imago Dei from ST I, q. 93, the theology of grace from I-II, q. 112. But the social doctrine citations follow a deliberate arc: from the labor tradition of Leo XIII and John Paul II, through the conciliar humanism of Gaudium et Spes, to the integral ecology of Francis.

What is striking is that Leo XIV reads his predecessors not as a collection of binding positions to be cited for authority, but as a developing conversation in which each voice advances the argument. He cites broadly, using Populorum Progressio for its definition of authentic human development; Laborem Exercens for the primacy of the person in work; Caritas in Veritate for the embeddedness of charity in truth as the motor of social doctrine; and Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti for the planetary and fraternal frame within which the AI question must be asked.

The Francis citations cluster in the anthropological and transcendence sections - the quote about becoming fully human by becoming more than human is Francis’s, cited by Leo with evident relish. This suggests that perhaps Leo sees himself not as correcting his predecessor but as developing him: taking the integral human development of Laudato Si’ and pressing it into the specific condition of the algorithmic age.

The result is a document that is less a papal pronouncement than a papal argument - one that trusts its readers enough to show its work, and that will repay the re-reading that serious arguments require.

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Deacon Michael Halbrook is husband to Suzanne, father of four sons, and a permanent deacon of the Diocese of Springfield in Illinois. He serves at St. Elizabeth Parish in Granite City. He is the founder of Domus Formation, a collection of Catholic prayer and formation resources for every stage of life, and he writes at DeaconMichael.net.

1. Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (2026), no. 7.

2. Ibid., no. 7.

3. Ibid., no. 8.

4. Ibid., no. 4.

5. Ibid., no. 9.

6. Ibid., no. 9.

7. Cf. Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIV.28; Magnifica Humanitas, no. 130.

8. Paul VI, Populorum Progressio (1967), no. 14; cited at Magnifica Humanitas, no. 35.

9. Magnifica Humanitas, no. 27.

10. Ibid., no. 28.

11. Ibid., no. 17.

12. John Paul II, cited at Magnifica Humanitas, no. 66.

13. Ibid., no. 65.

14. Ibid., no. 67.

15. Ibid., no. 67.

16. Ibid., no. 108.

17. Ibid., no. 104.

18. Ibid., no. 104.

19. Ibid., no. 104.

20. Ibid., no. 111.

21. Ibid., no. 107.

22. Ibid., no. 98.

23. Ibid., no. 150.

24. Ibid., no. 148; cf. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (1981), no. 9.

25. Ibid., no. 148.

26. Ibid., no. 150.

27. Ibid., no. 152.

28. Ibid., no. 48.

29. Ibid., no. 53.

30. Ibid., no. 53.

31. Ibid., no. 51.

32. Ibid., no. 127.

33. Ibid., no. 127.

34. Ibid., no. 127; cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 112, a. 1.

35. Ibid., no. 127.

36. Francis, cited at Magnifica Humanitas, no. 128.

37. Ibid., no. 128.

38. Ibid., no. 128.

39. Ibid., no. 128.

40. Ibid., no. 118.

41. Ibid., no. 120.

42. Augustine, De civitate Dei, XIV.28.

43. Magnifica Humanitas, no. 130.

44. Cf. ibid., no. 99.

45. Augustine, Confessions, I.1.