From Dignitatis Humanae to Magnifica Humanitas: Disarming AI to Protect Freedom of Conscience

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).

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Women and Church Governance: What Pope Francis’s Reform Changed—and What it Left Open

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.

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Voicing Sharp Religious Opposition to the War in Iran: A Case Study from the Roman Catholic Community

Thomas Massaro, S.J., is McGinley Endowed Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University

As this essay is being written, it has been more than a month since the February 28 outbreak of hostilities between Israel and the U.S. (on one hand) and Iran (on the other hand). Public criticism of the war has been widespread. Political opponents (and even some normally supportive voices) have complained about the evident lack of planning, unclear objectives, and seeming disregard for the consequences of launching this “war of choice.” The shifting justifications for launching the war (including incoherent gestures toward the urgency of regime change and terminating Iran’s looming nuclear capability) have proven broadly unconvincing. The April 1 White House address of President Trump, broadcast in prime TV time, added little clarity.

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