(RNS) — Like the encyclicals of his predecessors across the last 135 years, Pope Leo XIV’s “Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” addresses the Roman Catholic Church to a present crisis facing all of humanity. Leo reminds us that the church “walks alongside humanity” and so the church cannot be “a stranger to the forces shaping society.” For these reasons, Magnifica Humanitas comes not just as a message for Catholics but, just as popes before him have offered their encyclicals, as a reflection for “all men and women of goodwill.”

For Catholics, an encyclical letter is an official teaching document. An encyclical defines doctrine, the things that Catholics believe. Popes have been writing them for centuries. Initially, encyclicals were letters directed only to bishops and they were intended to bind the whole Catholic Church together under a coherent, shared teaching. Often, the teaching related to internal theological matters such as the duties of bishops or the interpretation of Scripture. With Pope Leo XIII in 1891, the church began to address important social questions with encyclicals.

Encyclicals have become a way the Catholic Church presents its moral vision to the whole world, less with hope to convert anyone to Catholicism than as a ministry to the human family. In this way, Magnifica Humanitas joins a long and distinguished line of social encyclicals proclaiming, in Leo XIV’s words, that “social justice is a concrete way of following Jesus and remaining faithful to the Gospel.” The Catholic Church wants to pursue that vision of justice for and with all people.

Thinking about justice in 2026, Pope Leo has written a document that names “Artificial Intelligence” as the center of a crisis. Really, Magnifica Humanitas says much more than that. Pope Leo touches on the treatment of migrants and he addresses the evolving and metastasizing reality of war in our time. He also condemns abortion and euthanasia.

But the heart of the document is not any of those things, and even AI is here in the text only at the service of Pope Leo’s larger concern — the “equal dignity of all human beings.” The situation of humanity is always the subject of a social encyclical, especially in the face of evolving developments and challenges that arise from economics and technology. Leo writes that we must remember constantly that these things exist to be “at the service of the human person,” they must not “become a form of control” or exploitation. The church teaches that the common good of all people is the purpose of social life, “building a world in which everyone can flourish.” Like his predecessors before him, Leo’s attention is on what frustrates human flourishing.

We begin to understand what holds Magnifica Humanitas and all of Catholic social teaching together where Pope Leo refers to the “Promethean dreams” of those who profit from technology today in our world. Prometheus was the figure in Greek myth who stole fire from the gods of Olympus. Fire was the possession of the gods, it gives heat and light and it is useful for forging tools. In Aeschylus’s tragedy, Prometheus confesses he stole fire so mortals would “learn much craft and skill.” In this way, mortal women and men could become like the gods. This is what “Promethean” usually refers to, the hope to escape from the limitations of our human lives and become like gods. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was subtitled “The Modern Prometheus” as her character Victor Frankenstein gives life as God gives life. And coincidentally, in the month before Magnifica Humanitaswas published journalist Karen Hao published her book, “Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination,” where she describes the Silicon Valley search for “artificial general intelligence,” a “superintelligence [that] could replicate, and then surpass, human intelligence.” The Promethean quest goes on.

What comes into focus as we read Magnifica Humanitas is that our contemporary problems may not be as old as Aeschylus, but they are not new either. First industrialization, then the nuclear age, then the explosion of “the financial intermediation sector” and the rise of “finance for its own sake” — these all pre-dated artificial intelligence. They all have worked to reduce a human being to an exploitable factor in production for profit or to make us into helpless hostages to the geopolitics of an arms race. Economic and technological developments have raged across the last two centuries more quickly than we have been able to find what Leo calls “an overall vision” for how those developments serve the common good of humanity. We have faced a “danger of humanity becoming a victim of its own achievements” throughout the modern period. The church has been responding with documents like Magnifica Humanitas, but now with AI the pace of those developments is accelerating. The alarming and gathering danger is real.

The sense of danger in Magnifica Humanitas is palpable, especially in its recurring theme of the inadequacy of governments in the face of these threats. Leo writes that “the main drivers of [technological] development are private … parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments.” I might be more tempted to say “most governments” because, as Leo observes, “AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data.” Technological and economic developments have made the rich richer, the powerful more powerful. Throughout history, in the best of cases, governments have been those institutions that could speak for the voiceless and challenge the power of great wealth. Pointing to the political theorist Hannah Arendt, Leo laments how technology has threatened “the distinction between true and false” that makes politics possible. Our institutions are not up to the challenge we face as the world contemplates its first trillionaire. 

Pope Francis condemned what he called “the technocratic paradigm that seeks to reduce everything to an object to be dominated.” Pope Leo agrees. What dehumanizes us ultimately results from a misguided relationship to technology and economics — a “tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic life.” Technology and economics themselves are not bad things so long as we remember that they are at the service of all people, not the few. Leo is clear that we ought “neither to demonize nor idolize” the tools of technology or economics, but see them for what they must be — instruments of the common good for all.

In a 1995 encyclical, Pope John Paul II famously opposed a “culture of life” to a “culture of death.” With Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo issues a stern warning that the world is becoming overwhelmed by a “culture of power,” characterized by the technocratic paradigm as well as our increasing tendency to embrace polarization and violence. The needs not just of the most vulnerable people but of all people are being sacrificed for the good of a very few and even governments are not up to the task of defending us.

For these reasons, the moral voice of the Catholic Church and other faith communities never has mattered more. Now in the second year of his papacy, Leo’s voice is clear and consistent. The crisis now is impossible to ignore. And, with Magnifica Humanitas, the world has a valuable instrument to reflect on and call us all to action.

(Steven P. Millies is the author of “Joseph Bernardin: Seeking Common Ground” and “A Consistent Ethic of Life: Navigating Catholic Engagement With U.S. Politics.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)