Pope Leo XIV, Peter Thiel, and the Future of Humanity: The New Pope’s First Encyclical and Its Political Significance

Martina Bär is professor of fundamental theology at the University of Graz (Austria).

This post is a part of our series on Magnifica Humanitas.

“The Pope is working for the Chinese Communists.” With this provocative statement, US tech billionaire Peter Thiel made international headlines just weeks after Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical. According to Thiel, the West risks losing the race for artificial intelligence (AI) to China—not least because moral authorities such as the Vatican are slowing technological progress. While authoritarian states continue to develop AI without restraint, democratic societies, he argues, place unnecessary constraints on themselves by worrying about ethics. Behind this criticism lies a worldview that regards technological superiority as the decisive factor in global geopolitical power.

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Magnifica Humanitas and the Organic Evolution of Catholic Social Teaching on Online Exploitation

Yuriy Tykhovlis, PhD, is a an antitrafficking lawyer and writer.

This post is a part of our series on Magnifica Humanitas.

Introduction

Magnifica Humanitas (MH) represents an organic evolution of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) that applies the perennial principles of human dignity, the common good, solidarity, and subsidiarity to the novel threats of the digital frontier, including online human trafficking and digital exploitation. In this post, I posit that the encyclical’s unprecedented attention to digital exploitation, evidenced by the substantial focus on these concepts, signals their elevation from peripheral concerns to central structural threats to human dignity.

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