Jerusalem Over Babel: A Catholic Lawyer’s Response to Magnifica Humanitas
A small confession before we begin: when news broke that the Vatican had released a major encyclical on artificial intelligence, I had to set down my coffee and just sit with it for a moment. As a Catholic and a fractional GC whose practice sits squarely at the intersection of AI governance, privacy, and commercial law, this felt less like a news item and more like a calling card — a theological framework arriving precisely when practitioners like me most need one.
One clarification before diving in: the encyclical is the work of Pope Leo XIV. Leo XIV, the first American pope, has inherited and dramatically extended that tradition with his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Signed on 15 May 2026 and released to the world on 25 May 2026, it is already one of the most consequential documents on AI to emerge from any institution — religious, governmental, or otherwise.
What Is Magnifica Humanitas?
Running to approximately 42,300 words, Magnifica Humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity” — is the Catholic Church’s first systematic engagement with artificial intelligence as a governance challenge. It is theological, yes, but it is also intensely practical. The document calls on governments to regulate AI, corporations to design with dignity in mind, educators to teach critical engagement with technology, and individuals to resist what it calls a “purely technical form of salvation.”
Pope Leo XIV deliberately drew a parallel to Rerum Novarum — Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical on workers’ rights during the Industrial Revolution. That document transformed labor law and social policy for generations. The new encyclical makes the same aspirational claim about our moment: that the AI revolution requires the same depth of moral and legal response that the industrial revolution demanded.
Notably, the encyclical’s formal release was co-presented with Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic — a symbolic gesture that the Church is not retreating from technology but engaging it directly, demanding that its developers meet moral obligations.
Key Themes
1. Technology Is Never Neutral
This is the encyclical’s most foundational and, for lawyers, most practically important claim. The document states plainly: “technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate, and use it.” Every tool — including AI systems — “embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations.”
For those of us doing AI governance work, this is not novel. But hearing it stated as a moral principle by an institution with 1.4 billion adherents gives the argument a different kind of weight. It forecloses the common corporate defense that an algorithm is “objective.” The Pope says: no, it is not. Someone chose what to optimize. Someone chose whose data to train on. Those choices carry moral freight.
2. Babel vs. Jerusalem: The Central Metaphor
The encyclical organizes its argument around one of the Bible’s most evocative contrasts: the Tower of Babel — a city built on pride, self-sufficiency, and the severing of human community — versus the rebuilding of Jerusalem, a place of fraternal coexistence in the presence of God.
Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. — Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas.¶1
The choice, the Pope argues, is ours: to build AI that consolidates power, breeds opacity, and fragments community, or to build AI that dignifies labour, promotes truth, and strengthens the bonds of civic life. The metaphor is theologically rich but also legally useful — it articulates why governance matters in human terms, not just compliance terms.
3. Human Dignity and the Future of Work
Pope Leo XIV devotes considerable space to what rapid automation means for workers. He warns that AI could leave many in “forced inactivity,” undermining both human dignity and social stability. The document insists that job insecurity and fragmented career paths “must not be evaluated solely in terms of efficiency, but in relation to the dignity of the worker, the right to sufficient remuneration and the genuine possibility of participating in society.”
For commercial lawyers advising on workforce restructuring, outsourcing, or AI-enabled service delivery, this framing carries genuine moral weight. It also anticipates the direction that employment and labour regulation is heading in multiple jurisdictions.
4. The Call for Robust Legal Frameworks
The encyclical is unusually specific about what “good” AI governance looks like. It states: “It is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract; robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required.”
This is the language of a regulatory lawyer, not a theologian. The Pope is explicitly calling for law, not merely ethical aspiration. He calls on governments to regulate private AI companies, protect workers affected by automation, safeguard children against harmful AI-generated content, and ensure humans remain responsible for weapons decisions.
5. Data Governance, Transparency & Accountability
The encyclical directly addresses the opacity of AI systems:
For AI to respect human dignity and truly serve the common good, responsibility must be clearly defined at every stage: from those who design and develop these systems to those who use them... In many cases, however, the internal processes leading to a result remain opaque, making it harder to assign responsibility and correct errors. — Magnifica Humanitas, ¶105
This is a near-perfect articulation of the explainability and accountability requirements embedded in frameworks like the EU AI Act, the UK AI White Paper, and emerging US federal guidance. The encyclical also invokes the “universal destination of goods” — the Catholic social teaching principle that the earth’s goods are meant for all — as a critique of data monopolies. That framing has real traction in privacy and competition law.
6. Autonomous Weapons and the End of Just War
One of the encyclical’s most striking claims is that Catholic just war theory has become “outdated” in the age of AI-enabled warfare. Pope Leo XIV argues that reduced human control of weaponry — through autonomous systems — lowers the threshold for beginning wars and removes the moral accountability that just war doctrine assumes. The implications for international humanitarian law and autonomous weapons regulation are significant.
7. Critique of Transhumanism
The encyclical takes direct aim at transhumanist and posthumanist ideologies that frame AI progress as the overcoming of human limitations. Against this, the Pope argues that human limitation is not a bug to be fixed but “a constitutive dimension of the human person.” This has direct bearing on debates about cognitive enhancement, AI-augmented decision-making, and the ethics of AI-in-the-loop for high-stakes decisions.
My Reflections: A Practitioner’s Perspective
Reading Magnifica Humanitas as both a Catholic and a practitioner in AI governance, privacy, and commercial law, I find myself returning to a few ideas that I think deserve attention from the legal profession specifically.
The “never neutral” principle should be a compliance touchstone. In my work with clients building or deploying AI systems, the greatest governance failures I see stem not from bad intent but from unexamined design assumptions. The Pope’s framing gives us a simple, communicable test: who designed this, who funded it, and what did they optimise for? Those questions belong in every AI risk assessment and every procurement due diligence exercise.
Ethics without law is not enough — and the encyclical agrees. We have watched AI ethics commitments proliferate in corporate policies while substantive accountability has lagged. The encyclical is unambiguous: abstract ethics is insufficient. This should embolden in-house counsel and external advisors to push clients harder on legal compliance frameworks, not just voluntary principles. The Pope has given you a theological mandate to insist on the hard stuff.
The dignity of work framing is underused in commercial AI negotiations. When clients ask me to review AI deployment agreements, workforce restructuring plans, or vendor contracts involving automation, the conversation almost never opens with human dignity. It should. Especially as we see labour laws evolving rapidly to address algorithmic management, this framing will become increasingly legally relevant — and it is morally right.
The data monopoly critique matters for privacy practitioners. The invocation of the “universal destination of goods” as a lens on data concentration is genuinely novel and powerful. We tend to analyse data governance through the lens of individual rights (GDPR, CCPA) or competition law. The encyclical suggests a third frame: data as a common resource, the concentration of which undermines the common good. I think this will appear in policy debates more and more.
As a person of faith, this document moves me. I want to say plainly: the encyclical is not primarily a policy document. It is a moral and spiritual one. It calls us — all of us, not just Catholics — to recognize the grandeur of humanity and resist the reduction of persons to data points, economic inputs, or optimization targets. In the middle of contract negotiations and compliance audits, that call is worth hearing.
Building Jerusalem
Magnifica Humanitas will not resolve the global AI governance crisis on its own. But it does something vital: it gives us language, moral architecture, and a concrete checklist of what “good” looks like. Law follows culture. Culture follows moral authority. The Catholic Church — with its 1.4 billion members, its deep intellectual tradition, and its long history of shaping the ethics of political economy — has now placed a clear marker.
The choice, as the Pope frames it, is between Babel and Jerusalem: between technology that consolidates power in the hands of a self-styled technocratic elite, and technology that serves the dignity of every person and strengthens the fabric of community.
For those of us in law who care about that choice — and I believe most of us do — this encyclical is not background reading. It is a brief.
