Reading Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas
Pope Leo XIV has released Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. It is a serious document — book-length, theologically dense, and far more careful than its critics on either side have generally allowed. It opens with a stark choice: humanity stands between building "a new Tower of Babel" and building "the city in which God and humanity dwell together" (§1). It warns that technology is never neutral, that it can divide, exclude, and generate new forms of injustice (§9), and it titles its central chapter "Technology and Dominance."
I want to be fair to it before I am critical of it, because the criticism only matters if the praise is honest.
What the encyclical gets right is considerable. It refuses to treat AI as merely one more issue to manage, naming it instead as a force that challenges our categories from within (§17). It locates the real concentration of power not in the state but in private, transnational technological actors whose reach now exceeds that of governments (§5, §71). It makes subsidiarity a cornerstone — the conviction that what families, local communities, and intermediary bodies can do should not be swallowed by higher authorities (§68–72). It explicitly disclaims any intent to assume the functions of the state (§21). It even disowns the very posture I am about to accuse it of, insisting the Church "does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth" (§25) and reaching for the image of a polyhedron in which one truth is reflected from many angles. On the practical questions — transparency, accountability, algorithmic oversight, equitable access to data — it adds a worthy voice to a chorus that already includes secular bodies and other Christian communions.
So this is not a polemic against the Pope's pastoral concerns. Many of them are real, and some of them are good. It is a polemic against a deeper structural assumption — bone-deep in Western Christendom for nearly two millennia — that the cure for a beast system is a sanctified version of the same beast. It is not. It never was. And the place where the encyclical reveals that assumption is not in any claim to coercive power, which it carefully renounces, but in a single quiet sentence about who gets to order the plurality it praises.
Pentecost Already Answered Babel
The Babel narrative is not principally about language. It is about coerced unity around a tower, a name, a center — "let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered." God scatters them not as punishment but as protection. Concentrated, unaccountable, hubristic power is the danger, then and now. The encyclical sees this clearly; it reads Babel as the idolatry of self-sufficiency that sacrifices the person for efficiency (§7, §10), and it reads Nehemiah, rightly, as a man who "did not impose solutions from above" but assigned each family its own section of the wall (§8).
That is a genuinely decentralized picture. The trouble comes in §10, where the document grants the plurality of voices and then assigns Christians "their unique role of guiding actions toward God so that... pluralism does not dissipate into disorder." There it is. The polyhedron is permitted on condition that a single interpretive center keeps it from scattering. That is Babel grammar wearing Pentecost's clothes.
Because Pentecost does not work that way. The Spirit does not give one tongue back, nor appoint a curator to keep the tongues from drifting into disorder. It gives every tongue the capacity to hear God's mighty works in its own language. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, residents of Mesopotamia and Cappadocia — they all hear, each in their own dialect, with no mediating center deciding which renderings are orderly. The scattering itself is sanctified. The cure for Babel was never a better-managed tower. It was distributed witness in plural tongues, ungoverned by any earthly see.
The entire architecture of the late-modern world — global AI governance, international ethical frameworks, transnational regulatory regimes, and yes, papal encyclicals that reserve to the Church the task of keeping plurality "from disorder" — is structurally tempted to rebuild the center even when its intentions are Pentecostal. The tower keeps getting rebuilt. Sometimes by Silicon Valley. Sometimes by Brussels. Sometimes, gently and sincerely, from a balcony in Rome.
Acts 15 and the Path for the Nations
The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 is one of the most under-read documents in Christian thought. The question was not "how do we make the nations into Israel?" It was: how do gentiles walk rightly before the God of Israel without being absorbed into Israel's particular national-covenantal life?
The answer was strikingly minimal. Abstain from idolatry, from sexual immorality, from blood, from things strangled — a recognizably Noahide shape: worship the one God, do justice, show mercy, live peaceably. This was not a watered-down Torah. It was the ancient covenant with all humanity through Noah, reaffirmed for the nations as the framework within which they could remain the nations and still walk with God.
Israel is not principally a nation-state. Israel is a relationship — those who struggle with God, as the name itself declares. Paul's olive tree in Romans 11 is exactly this: a cultivated tree onto which wild branches are grafted, sharing the root without becoming a different tree. The nations are not erased. They are also not autonomous. They are grafted into a relationship.
The Jerusalem Council in Acts 15 is one of the most under-read documents in Christian thought. The question was not "how do we make the nations into Israel?" It was: how do gentiles walk rightly before the God of Israel without being absorbed into Israel's particular national-covenantal life?
The answer was strikingly minimal. Abstain from idolatry, from sexual immorality, from blood, from things strangled — a recognizably Noahide shape: worship the one God, do justice, show mercy, live peaceably. This was not a watered-down Torah. It was the ancient covenant with all humanity through Noah, reaffirmed for the nations as the framework within which they could remain the nations and still walk with God.
Israel is not principally a nation-state. Israel is a relationship — those who struggle with God, as the name itself declares. Paul's olive tree in Romans 11 is exactly this: a cultivated tree onto which wild branches are grafted, sharing the root without becoming a different tree. The nations are not erased. They are also not autonomous. They are grafted into a relationship.
The New Testament belongs inside that frame. It is not an escape manual. It is the witness of Israel's Messiah opening, for the nations, the path Acts 15 describes — a way of being human under God that does not require the abolition of difference, the centralization of authority, or submission to any earthly office that claims to mediate it. The encyclical's own instinct toward plurality (§25, §26) is closer to this than it knows; what it cannot quite do is let the plurality stand without a mediating center to order it.
And notice what it was not: not a new ethical code to be administered, not a rulebook whose fine print — which meat, whose blood — would become the whole conversation. That quarrel over food, which has so often overtaken the reading of Acts 15, is exactly the truncation the council meant to prevent. What the apostles handed the nations was not ethics but the obedience of faith — a whole life turned toward God, of which the few prohibitions were only the floor with no religious mediation except our union with Christ.
The Beast, the Religious Beast, and Their Long Marriage
The book of Revelation is not a coded prediction of helicopter gunships. It is a theological X-ray of how power works in fallen history. There are two beasts. The first is political-economic — the imperial machinery that devours, centralizes, and demands worship. The second is religious — the beast that looks like a lamb but speaks like a dragon, performing signs that authenticate the first beast and herding the nations toward its image.
The lesson Christendom has spent two thousand years not learning is that the religious beast is not the cure for the political beast. Historically, at the decisive moments, they have been partners. Rome the empire and Rome the church absorbed one another in the fourth century, and the pattern of a religious authority lending moral legitimacy to a centralizing order has recurred ever since — in Catholic and Protestant and frankly secular forms alike. I want to be precise here, because the encyclical does not reach for Caesar's sword; it disavows it (§21). The danger in a document like this is subtler. It is the assumption that what a technological age most needs is a single moral interpreter standing above the plurality to keep it ordered. Whatever its sincerity, that is an old play in a very old game.
The "synagogue of Satan" that Revelation names is not the Jewish people — it is the counterfeit assembly, those who claim covenantal authority they do not possess. That charge has, at moments, fit Rome; it has also fit Geneva, Canterbury, Constantinople, and any number of Protestant and political imitators who learned to speak like a lamb while gathering the nations under one tower. The deep error of evangelicals who keep pining for a god-king — Trump-shaped, Constantine-shaped, Cyrus-shaped — is the same error in a different costume. They have not internalized that the Lamb refuses Caesar's sword. Every time the church has reached for that sword, it has become the thing it claimed to oppose.
The book of Revelation is not a coded prediction of helicopter gunships. It is a theological X-ray of how power works in fallen history. There are two beasts. The first is political-economic — the imperial machinery that devours, centralizes, and demands worship. The second is religious — the beast that looks like a lamb but speaks like a dragon, performing signs that authenticate the first beast and herding the nations toward its image.
The lesson Christendom has spent two thousand years not learning is that the religious beast is not the cure for the political beast. Historically, at the decisive moments, they have been partners. Rome the empire and Rome the church absorbed one another in the fourth century, and the pattern of a religious authority lending moral legitimacy to a centralizing order has recurred ever since — in Catholic and Protestant and frankly secular forms alike. I want to be precise here, because the encyclical does not reach for Caesar's sword; it disavows it (§21). The danger in a document like this is subtler. It is the assumption that what a technological age most needs is a single moral interpreter standing above the plurality to keep it ordered. Whatever its sincerity, that is an old play in a very old game.
The "synagogue of Satan" that Revelation names is not the Jewish people — it is the counterfeit assembly, those who claim covenantal authority they do not possess. That charge has, at moments, fit Rome; it has also fit Geneva, Canterbury, Constantinople, and any number of Protestant and political imitators who learned to speak like a lamb while gathering the nations under one tower. The deep error of evangelicals who keep pining for a god-king — Trump-shaped, Constantine-shaped, Cyrus-shaped — is the same error in a different costume. They have not internalized that the Lamb refuses Caesar's sword. Every time the church has reached for that sword, it has become the thing it claimed to oppose.
What the Lamb Actually Does
The Lamb conquers by testimony. This is not pious decoration; it is the literal mechanic of Revelation 12: they overcame him "by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they loved not their lives unto death." The beast conquers by coercion — by force, by surveillance, by demanding you bow to its image. The Lamb conquers by witness: by people who refuse to bow, who speak truth, who do justice, love mercy, walk humbly, and suffer well when suffering comes.
This is why "AI is dangerous, therefore a central moral authority must order how the nations use it" is a tower-shaped solution to a tower-shaped problem. The danger of AI is real, and the encyclical names it well — concentration of power, manipulation, the eclipse of human judgment, autonomous weapons. But the answer is not a single interpretive center licensing which plurality counts as orderly. The answer is distributed sovereignty: many witnesses, in many tongues, building things that embody justice and mercy, refusing to bow to whichever tower happens to be tallest this decade.
Sovereignty through the slow accumulation of small acts of right ordering, in code, in community, in commerce, in worship — is precisely the Pentecost-shaped answer. It is plural. It is local. It is non-coercive. It grows like leaven and like a mustard seed, not like an empire and not like a synod of the great and the good.
The Heavenly Jerusalem Comes Down
Notice the direction. The New Jerusalem in Revelation 21 comes down. It is not built up by human towers. The encyclical itself sees this — it cites the city descending from God as a gift for all humanity (§10) — and then, having seen it, turns immediately to "work together" language that quietly re-centers the building project on a guided, ordered plurality. But the city is not constructed by encyclicals or AI labs or governance regimes. It descends because God has formed, over long centuries of patience, a faithful people who bear witness, practice justice, suffer well, and embody mercy until heaven and earth finally meet.
This is the actual telos of the gospel. It is not a ticket out of the world. It is God's gracious method of teaching humanity how to become human again — to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly, and live peaceably under Messiah's reign, which begins inside each person who consents to it and ripples outward. The full messianic age is not legislated into existence, and it is not curated by a magisterium. It is grown.
By any honest reading of the signs, we are in the long, sharpening contest the Scriptures picture as Gog and Magog — not because a particular war is about to break out, but because the contest between the beast's coercion and the Lamb's testimony is reaching its most exposed point. The technologies of the age are simply the latest theatre. AI is neither salvation nor damnation. It is a mirror and a multiplier. It will magnify whatever character the people building and using it actually have.
Notice the direction. The New Jerusalem in Revelation 21 comes down. It is not built up by human towers. The encyclical itself sees this — it cites the city descending from God as a gift for all humanity (§10) — and then, having seen it, turns immediately to "work together" language that quietly re-centers the building project on a guided, ordered plurality. But the city is not constructed by encyclicals or AI labs or governance regimes. It descends because God has formed, over long centuries of patience, a faithful people who bear witness, practice justice, suffer well, and embody mercy until heaven and earth finally meet.
This is the actual telos of the gospel. It is not a ticket out of the world. It is God's gracious method of teaching humanity how to become human again — to do justice, love mercy, walk humbly, and live peaceably under Messiah's reign, which begins inside each person who consents to it and ripples outward. The full messianic age is not legislated into existence, and it is not curated by a magisterium. It is grown.
By any honest reading of the signs, we are in the long, sharpening contest the Scriptures picture as Gog and Magog — not because a particular war is about to break out, but because the contest between the beast's coercion and the Lamb's testimony is reaching its most exposed point. The technologies of the age are simply the latest theatre. AI is neither salvation nor damnation. It is a mirror and a multiplier. It will magnify whatever character the people building and using it actually have.
The Pastoral Conclusion
No earthly god-king is coming to save you. Not the Pope, however well-intentioned his encyclical — and Magnifica Humanitas is, in its pastoral concern, often well-intentioned. Not the president, however much his supporters baptize him. Not the AI lab, however carefully aligned. Not the United Nations, not the Vatican, not Davos, not any global synod of the good and the great.
What is coming — what is already here, growing quietly — is a people. Plural in tongue. Distributed in geography. Grafted into the cultivated olive tree through the revelation of Jesus Christ and His cross. Walking the Acts 15 path. Refusing to bow. Building, with whatever tools the age provides, the kind of life that makes the descent of the heavenly city legible to the world.
The evangelical project is wrecked in our time because so many of its people still crave god-kings and cults of personality — and those who give up the strongmen too often trade the obedience of faith for therapeutic and ethical systems, religion as management rather than transformation.
The Lamb is still in the middle of the throne. The testimony is still the weapon. The witnesses are still the strategy. The kingdom still comes down, not up.
Keep your tongue. Tell the truth. Build well. Suffer when you must. Do not bow.
No earthly god-king is coming to save you. Not the Pope, however well-intentioned his encyclical — and Magnifica Humanitas is, in its pastoral concern, often well-intentioned. Not the president, however much his supporters baptize him. Not the AI lab, however carefully aligned. Not the United Nations, not the Vatican, not Davos, not any global synod of the good and the great.
What is coming — what is already here, growing quietly — is a people. Plural in tongue. Distributed in geography. Grafted into the cultivated olive tree through the revelation of Jesus Christ and His cross. Walking the Acts 15 path. Refusing to bow. Building, with whatever tools the age provides, the kind of life that makes the descent of the heavenly city legible to the world.
The evangelical project is wrecked in our time because so many of its people still crave god-kings and cults of personality — and those who give up the strongmen too often trade the obedience of faith for therapeutic and ethical systems, religion as management rather than transformation.
The Lamb is still in the middle of the throne. The testimony is still the weapon. The witnesses are still the strategy. The kingdom still comes down, not up.
Keep your tongue. Tell the truth. Build well. Suffer when you must. Do not bow.
Quotations and section references are to the official English text of Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026); paragraph numbers in parentheses.
