Greg Marcar is the senior researcher at the Nathaniel Centre for Bioethics—Te Kupenga (New Zealand). This post is a part of our series on Magnifica Humanitas. Introduction: On “Builders of Communion” On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo…
Montserrat Gas-Aixendri is a full professor of law and religion at Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (Barcelona, Spain).
This post is a part of our series on Magnifica Humanitas.
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (MH), offers a broad reflection on the challenges that artificial intelligence poses to human dignity, social life, and the future of human coexistence. The document begins from a fundamental premise: the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of peoples and the new forms of injustice that affect human beings. Leo XIII had already demonstrated this in Rerum Novarum, inaugurating a tradition of Christian social thought attentive to the transformations of its time. If that Pope identified the workers’ question as the great social challenge of the first industrial revolution, Leo XIV regards artificial intelligence as one of the great res novaeof the twenty-first century, demanding appropriate moral and legal discernment (MH, para. 17).
Francisca Pérez-Madrid is Professor of Law and Religion at the University of Barcelona.[1]
Pope Francis once described clericalism as “one of the greatest deformations” in the life of the Catholic Church. It is a strong diagnosis. What is striking, then, is how resistant that clericalism has proven to reform—even after Praedicate Evangelium, the most ambitious overhaul of the Roman Curia in decades.