On the day of the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope brings order to the tasks of the universal Church.
«Evangelization requires continuing to be the fundamental motivation for every action of the universal Church and local communities». In his speech addressed yesterday to the participants in the plenary session of the Dicastery for Evangelization, Pope Leo XIV he recalled the main road of the Church, something that in its own way resonates as a fundamental and timely reminder.
The pontiff’s indication comes in recent days close to the publication of his first encyclical, Magnificent Humanitas. The document, dedicated to the social doctrine and to the emergence at various levels ofArtificial intelligencehas sparked a wide debate even in non-believing circles. Often a debate interested in industrial or political issues, in a plot that the encyclical itself tries to “disarm”, as the Pope wrote. However, we often witness a misunderstanding on the part of the secularist world, which ends up exploiting the social magisterium by reducing it to a sort of simple moral exhortation, an instruction manual for “using the things of the world or new technologies well”, only to then continue with its own agenda.
The true meaning of Magnifica Humanitas beyond the secularist misunderstanding
Yesterday’s clarification from the Pope restores order: even when it deals with social issues, the Church does not do so as a corporate ethics committee or to give a sort of checklist of good practices, but does so with the sole motivation of evangelizing and bringing men to Christ, the only one capable of “restoring fullness of meaning and value to people’s lives”.
In this perspective, ecclesial action is stripped of any political or sociological marketing logic. Another crucial passage of the speech to the Dicastery for Evangelization strikes at the heart of the progressive temptations of a certain contemporary debate within the Church itself, such as that which emerged in some of the pushes of the German synodal path: «It is certainly not by watering down the contents and softening the demands», the Pope said yesterday, «that Christianity can be made attractive, but by bearing witness with humility and courage to “the way, the truth and the life”».
Against the spirit of the time and the temptations of the synodal path
To paraphrase Saint Paul, the Church is called to faithfully transmit what it has received. The deposit of faith is not a museum to be kept under display cases, but a living reality in which every doctrinal development must be organic and coherent, without ever contradicting the past. No updates aimed at chasing the spirit of the time, zeitgeist the Germans would say, or to please cultural fashions, can be the way. As the Holy Father recalled yesterday, “evangelization does not rely on the efficiency of structures or on social relevance, nor on the consensus that can be received at any moment”.
At the heart of the speech, Leo XIV inserted a dense quote from Pope Benedict XVI to reiterate that the announcement comes only through credible witnesses: «We need men whose intellect is illuminated by the light of God and whose hearts God opens, so that their intellect can speak to the intellect of others and their hearts can open the hearts of othersthe”. The sanctity of life is therefore “the most convincing form of the beauty of the Christian faith”, the main path that precedes every reform and every structure.
Leo XIV’s response to the crisis of faith in the West
The ears of the world – interested in the Church only when it is committed to geopolitical peace, when it seems to be open to the so-called “new rights”, when it discusses whether to let priests marry or when it takes sides in some political game – will perhaps find these words foreign, if not anachronistic. Yet this is precisely the Pope’s recipe for dealing with the crisis of faith which affects Western countries, where “the search for meaning” risks dying out under the weight of a hypermedia and consumerist culture. Not by chasing the world, but by converting it, the Church rediscovers its mission.
