Remaining human in the age of algorithms - Vatican News

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105 Live 100min (Diretta)

Programs<br>Podcast

Editorial

Pope

Magnifica humanitas

encyclical

Pope Leo XIV

artificial intelligence

Remaining human in the age of algorithms

Our Editorial Director reflects on Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical ‘Magnifica humanitas,’ in which the Pope calls for technology to advance without causing the human heart to regress.

By Andrea Tornielli

In the age of artificial intelligence, with human dignity in danger of being obscured by enormous concentrations of technological power beyond all control, and by new forms of dehumanization, Pope Leo XIV recalls us to the “urgent duty” to remain deeply human.

The Successor of Peter invites us to let technology to advance “without allowing the heart to regress,” even amid our times filled with polarization and violence, which see the expansion of a “culture of power” and war rehabilitated as an instrument of international politics.

Read also

25/05/2026

Pope Leo’s ‘Magnifica humanitas’: AI must serve humanity not concentrate power

Marking the 135th anniversary of Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIV releases his first encyclical, entitled ‘Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of ...

He invites us to accept the limits and fragility of humanity and not to consider them an error to be corrected, as technocratic ideology does. The Pope urges us to look at the world not from the viewpoint of the powerful, but from below, through the eyes of those who suffer, beginning with the least.

We must gaze upon humanity, he says, through the eyes of God, who took our weakness upon Himself and transformed it into a place of salvation, because “even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history.”

Magnifica humanitas—Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical—is not primarily an analytical text on artificial intelligence, nor does it enter into the details of processes that are constantly evolving.

Rather, it is a “summa” that applies the principles of the Social Doctrine of the Church to our time of AI, consolidating and updating the key points of the papal magisterium.

It is a text that puts an end to the misunderstanding of those who, trusting in the absolute freedom of markets and new technologies, tend to dismiss the teaching of the Popes on the need for shared human governance of AI, integral ecology, economic structures that become “structures of sin,” and the rejection of war.

Pope Leo XIV, who took his name from Pope Leo XIII, who authored Rerum novarum, invites each of us in this time of digital revolution to take on an active role. The building of the “civilization of love,” he says, is achieved through small and tenacious acts of fidelity capable of stemming dehumanization. This task concerns us all intimately, he says.

Pope Leo reminds us that “injustices do not arise solely from the wrong choices of individuals, but also from structures, mechanisms and economic and cultural systems that produce inequality,” and that “development is not truly human if it increases consumption for some while shifting costs and burdens onto others, or relegates entire regions to subordinate roles.”

Unfortunately, this is already happening today in the field of new technologies and the resources they require.

The encyclical states that the principle of private property bears “an indispensable societal role” and is upheld by the Church. “Today, among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must...