An American Encyclical

"Magnifica Humanitas" is a declaration of independence from the Overlords of AI, and it offers our faltering liberalism a much-needed gift.

How can you not like this guy?

That’s Pope Leo XIV (Father Bob Prevost at the time), of course, at the 2005 World Series, won by his beloved Chicago White Sox.

Now, I’m a Cubs fan and am supposed to hold all Sox fans in bitter contempt. But here’s the thing: My dad was from the South Side of Chicago, and he was a lifelong White Sox fan. My mom was from the North Side, and she was a stalwart Cubs fan. It was a mixed marriage, Chicago-style. Their ten kids each rooted for whichever team was good when they were little. So the Sox have a claim on my heart by kinship, and I can forgive the Pope for this error in judgment.

His Holiness, however, is not so tolerant. Last year, during an appearance at the Vatican, someone in the crowd yelled, “Go Cubs!” This, after the North Siders had made the playoffs for the first time in five years, but then lost to the Milwaukee Brewers in the Division Series. It was sad. But Leo cheerfully taunted the man. In two languages. This I cannot forgive.

Leo’s American-ness doesn’t stop with baseball. He’s a guy who walks the walk.

The pope has, by dint of circumstances and by his own lifelong faith commitment, become the major voice in opposition to a populist movement that has arisen across the globe—a movement marked in many ways by rabid racism, gleeful cruelty, and weaponized Christianity.

Donald Trump is the world leader of this movement, and Trump v. Leo XIV is the great moral contest of public life in our time.

Now Leo has sounded a cry of moral opposition to artificial intelligence, at a moment that Trump and MAGA might be reachable, might be able to hear it.

We are all astonished by AI. You can’t not be. It is a promethean tool. And a weapon that can turn itself against us.

We are all worried by AI. You can’t not be. The people who invented it acknowledge without exaggeration that there is a non-zero possibility the technology will end human life or become the dominant power on our planet.

The Biden administration understood this. Top officials from the president on down saw the dangers, and understood that significant regulation was necessary to keep our country, and our world, safe. It was a technology so dangerous, like nuclear power, that the private sector could not be counted on to develop it alone.

That was the moment all the previously “woke” tech bros went MAGA. Because they don’t believe in anything except their own power and fortunes.

Trump changed all that. Let it rip, was his administration’s attitude (though they may be having a change of heart.)

Enter Pope Leo.

On Monday, the first American pope released his first encyclical. Magnifica Humanitas—Magnificent Humanity.

It is about safeguarding the human person—each one of us as we are made and meant to be by nature. And it is an unmistakably American argument.

Technology is never neutral, Leo writes. He rejects the idea that AI—its voracious collecting of all human intellectual productions; its rapacious need for energy and water and other resources; its financial incentives to eliminate workers; its creators’ hubris and inhumanity—is just another business venture, just a new set of platforms we that we can choose how to deploy and use.

“Technological power,” the pope declares, “takes on an unprecedented, predominantly ‘private’ aspect…We must, then, avoid the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak.”

We are one human family, he is saying. And I say: If you don’t like that—move to Mars.

But the pope goes deeper than righteous condemnation. And here is where you sense the American in him.

The key word of the whole thing, the controlling verb of this pope’s call to action on AI is: Building. Leo wants each one of us out on the work site of our AI age, hands dirty, doing the heavy lifting.

Papal documents usually talk about social issues in the abstract metaphysical mode and lingo of the Curia. But Leo writes in the register of the parish hall after Mass, the union meeting during tough times, maybe even the ballpark during a lull in the game. His is the American Catholicism built on this continent by bricklayers and pipefitters, by men and women who organized garment workers and steelworkers and farmworkers, by a Church that produced Father John Ryan and Dorothy Day and the the 1986 American bishops’ letter Economic Justice for All.

American Catholicism has been plagued by many abuses—there is no denying this. But, at its best, it has drawn on the genius of the workshop and the picket line, dignified by sacrament and reasoned by St. Thomas Aquinas. Pope Leo—born in Chicago, formed as a missionary in Peru—writes in that tradition.

Which brings me to what I take to be the deepest gift this encyclical offers our American moment.

Our liberalism is in trouble. It has been in trouble for some time.

The procedures and rights remain, the analyses and policies, but the soul seems to have thinned in it.

American liberalism cannot quite explain anymore why the individual human person is and must be the focus of moral concern, why dignity—not just assistance—is owed to the weakest among us, why a citizen is more than a consumer or a data point with material needs.

Liberalism used to do this naturally. FDR’s oratory is laced with encouragement and American fellowship grounded in solidarity. Other great liberals reached out to us this way, too. Robert Kennedy (SENIOR). Martin Luther King Jr. Barack Obama at his best.

They all drew on inheritances—biblical, classical, republican—that gave liberal ideas and commitments depth and durability. Without those resources, without that language of love and faith that seems to embarrass some liberals today, the entire project has become brittle. The technocratic right and the nihilistic right have both noticed. They sense the weakness in an arid and over-intellectualized liberalism, and they sell the people MAGA fantasies and unbounded libertarianism for their AI empires.

But Pope Leo offers, in his encyclical about machines, the inheritance our liberalism most needs: a deep, spiritual account of the human person. Not a bundle of preferences. Not an optimization problem. Not a quantity to be perfected or surpassed. Not a negotiation among groups. Something irreducible, owed reverence. He reminds us we are made for communion with one another and with all creation. We are a mystery, in the end, that no language, digital or otherwise, can finally translate.

That is a gift. American liberalism has always borrowed quietly from American faith without quite admitting it. Leo, an American pope, is offering to lend the inheritance back to us in broad daylight. Let us listen.

—Terry