Magnifica Humanitas: The Encyclical the World Is Reading

Project Syndicate has published, within two days of each other, two substantial engagements with Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. The first, by Antara Haldar, argues that the Chicago-born pope has issued a direct challenge to Chicago School economics by insisting that markets alone cannot govern the technological future. The second, by Peter Singer writing from Melbourne, credits Leo for addressing AI at all — calling the world dangerously unprepared for its consequences — but argues that the encyclical's moral framework is too narrowly human-centred, and should be extended to every sentient being. These are not frivolous positions. They represent two serious lines of critique, and the fact that both are being made in the same week, in the same international forum, tells us something about the reach of what has been written inside Vatican City.

Haldar's argument is the more immediately political. She reads Magnifica Humanitas as a rejection of the proposition that price signals and profit incentives are sufficient guides for decisions about technology that reshape labour, knowledge, and human agency. In her reading, Leo is not merely offering pastoral comfort; he is intervening in an economic debate. We find this reading persuasive. The encyclical's invocation of the Tower of Babel — a parable about the hubris of unified ambition — is not incidental. It suggests that the danger of AI lies not in the technology itself but in the concentration of power and the absence of accountability that surrounds its development. That is an argument about governance, not only about souls.

Singer's critique operates on different ground. He does not dispute Leo's diagnosis of techno-utopianism; he extends it. If the concern is that AI will be deployed without regard for the interests of those who cannot advocate for themselves, then the circle of moral consideration should not stop at the human. We are not required to accept Singer's full philosophical position to recognise that it sharpens a genuine question the encyclical leaves open: whose flourishing counts, and who decides. That question will not be answered by theology alone.

For this newspaper, the significance of Magnifica Humanitas is partly geographical. The Vatican sits within Rome, and the Holy See's interventions in global debates have always carried a particular weight in the country that surrounds it — a weight that is felt even by those who do not share its faith. But the more durable significance may be this: in a moment when the governance of artificial intelligence is being shaped by a small number of corporations and a handful of governments, an institution with a billion-person audience has said, in formal doctrinal language, that the question is too important to be left to the market. Whatever one thinks of the answer, the intervention itself is not nothing.