Pope Leo’s First Encyclical Is a Game Changer

June 10, 2026

Yes, it’s a warning about the dangers of AI. But that’s the tip of the iceberg.

Pope Leo XIV attends the presentation of his first encyclical at the Synod Hall on May 25, 2026, in Vatican City.

(Alessia Giuliani / Getty)

Something that has been oddly overlooked about Pope Leo XIV in digesting his first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas , is that he is the head of the Roman Catholic Church. The volume of takes on artificial intelligence flooding the public sphere in the last few years has been so torrential that it is tempting to think of Leo as simply one more thought leader throwing his hat into the discursive ring. And secular readers will reasonably default to bracketing everything theological in the encyclical and focusing on the parts that can speak to their own concerns in an idiom they recognize.

But Magnifica humanitas , published on May 25, is not just one AI treatise among others, nor is it merely a reflection on AI from an irreducibly theological standpoint, although it is both of those things. It is also—and foremost, in my view—a pastoral statement to the church that Leo leads, the most robust articulation to date of his vision for his pontificate, and an act of position-taking in the debates that have riven Catholicism since the mid-20th century and which have threatened, since the election of Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis, to tear the church apart. Understanding Magnifica humanitas as a fundamentally ecclesiological document is necessary not only to interpret the text correctly, but, counterintuitively, to grasp its most important lessons for the secular left.

The reforms ushered in by the Second Vatican Council, which unfolded from 1962 to 1965, reshaped the trajectory of Catholicism more profoundly than anything since the church’s definitive response to the Reformation at the 16th-century Council of Trent. Most visibly to ordinary churchgoers, Vatican II kicked off a process that led to the radical transformation of the structure of the Mass at the end of the 1960s. But the council also produced a range of official documents that, taken together, signaled the church’s decision to seek a rapprochement with modernity after generations as arguably its most powerful institutional opponent. The liturgical and doctrinal changes effected by Vatican II empowered laypeople to participate more fully in the life of the church and committed the Catholic hierarchy to taking seriously the need to learn from those outside its ranks.

From the beginning, Vatican II appalled Catholic traditionalists who felt that the church’s identity was inextricably antimodern, and that one of its most urgent tasks was to defend the principle of hierarchical authority from the leveling impulses of the modern world. The most radical traditionalists broke formally with the church, willingly or unwillingly, in the decades after Vatican II, but many council critics remained faithful, working patiently within the church hierarchy to slow or roll back the process of reform. Pope John Paul II (who presided from 1978 to 2005) brokered a détente of sorts between reformists and traditionalists, but by the early 21st century the conflict had heated up again, fueled by the exposure of pervasive sexual abuse within the church, alarm at declining Mass attendance in the Global North, and the growing political salience of the church’s conservative positions on key culture-war issues like abortion and homosexuality. Pope Benedict XVI (2005–13) made a series of controversial conciliatory gestures to traditionalists, while Francis (2013–25) drew their ire for his strident efforts to revive the reform spirit of Vatican II—coincident with the increasing prominence of traditionalist Catholicism on the “post-liberal right” in Europe and North America.

Enter Leo XIV. The first American pontiff’s ability to secure widespread cross-factional support at last year’s conclave—as well as his decision to honor the late-19th-century Pope Leo XIII, a forceful critic of the ills of industrial capitalism who also opposed efforts to “modernize” the church—led many observers to suspect that he intended to downplay questions about the church’s internal affairs in favor of a renewed focus on Catholic social teaching. Magnifica humanitas , however, leaves no question that Leo recognizes that even if such a compromise were theoretically desirable, it would not be practically feasible. The encyclical argues that forcefully that a church capable of addressing the world amid the turmoil for which the rise of AI serves in the text as a synecdoche must also be a church in which all its people, not only its hierarchs, take an active role in shaping its destiny. “Social Doctrine is not merely a message addressed to society,” Leo writes. “it is also an examination of conscience for the Church.”

Magnifica humanitas begins with an introduction laying out the encyclical’s core motif: the contrast between the biblical images of the building of the tower o…