Editorial illustration created with the assistance of AI drawing on Creative Commons reference images of Pope Leo XIV.
Pope Leo XIV published his first social encyclical yesterday, 25 May 2026. It was signed on 15 May, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, through which Leo XIII laid the foundations of the Church’s social teaching in 1891, and the timing is deliberate. Magnifica Humanitas, The Grandeur of Humanity, places itself consciously in that tradition, and extends it to the question that has been gathering urgency for years: what does it mean to protect the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.
For those less familiar with the form, an encyclical is a formal letter from the Pope to the whole Church and, in many cases, to all people of goodwill. It carries significant authority in Catholic teaching and is written when the Church discerns that a major moral or social question requires sustained engagement. The tradition of social encyclicals reaches from Leo XIII on industrial labour, through Paul VI on development and Francis on ecology, each finding its occasion in the pressures and questions of its time. Magnifica Humanitas takes its place in that line, and the choice to sign it on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum makes the continuity of intent explicit.
The document opens with two images from Scripture that carry its central concern. The Tower of Babel: ambitious, built on self-sufficiency and the desire for dominance, ending in fragmentation. And Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem: slow, shared, attentive to the vulnerable, ordered toward the common good. Leo XIV holds these two images in tension throughout the document as a genuine question about what we are building, and for whom, and what our choices reveal about what we collectively value.
From there the document moves carefully through the principles of Catholic social teaching: human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, social justice, examining what each of them means when data is the new currency of power, when algorithmic systems make decisions affecting people’s access to work, credit, and basic services, and when a handful of private individuals hold more influence over daily life than most governments. Leo XIV is direct about the concentration of technological power and its consequences. He is equally direct about what the Church’s social tradition requires in response: engagement with how these systems are designed and governed, and who they serve.
The encyclical gives significant attention to the areas of life most affected by digital change: truth and democracy, the dignity of work, unemployment, families, and what Leo XIV names as new forms of slavery. On this last he is clear. He describes the hidden labour that sustains the digital economy — data labelling, content moderation, the dangerous extraction of raw materials our devices require — and the way criminal networks use digital platforms and AI tools in the trafficking of people, very often women and children. He situates all of this within the Church’s longer history with slavery, including an honest acknowledgement of how long it took the Church itself to condemn it, naming that delay as a wound, and drawing a clear line of responsibility forward into the present.
The document closes with a vision of what Leo XIV calls the civilisation of love: a practical commitment to building institutions, relationships, and ways of living together that take the dignity of every person seriously. The image he returns to is Nehemiah, the patient and deliberate work of rebuilding, with those most at risk kept at the centre of every decision.
This document has a broad reach and is worth reading in full, whatever your faith or profession. Its concerns — trafficking, migration, the dignity of women, the structural causes of poverty, the hidden costs of progress — are not new to our Sisters, but Magnifica Humanitas names them within the specific conditions of the current era. These questions are present in the communities where our Sisters live and work, in the ordinary ways that power and exclusion influence and shape people’s lives. This document does not resolve them. It names them carefully and at length, within a tradition of social teaching that has been developing for a hundred and thirty-five years, and points toward what fidelity to human dignity requires now.
Over the coming months we will be returning to the themes and questions it raises, as they connect to our work, the concerns that inform our mission and the communities we are part of.