It was the first encyclical in history signed by an American Pope. The first one fired by Leo XIV. But these are not returnable elements Magnificent humanity so powerful and interesting. If anything, it is the language that the Pontiff uses that makes it special and, above all, it is the contents: a reflection onArtificial intelligence and on technology which, with essentially simple and very direct sentences, surpasses all the tomes that have questioned the topic in recent years. Almost all analysts have concentrated, when examining the encyclical, on the themes of AI and war, which in fact Leo deals with decisively, with the clear objective of impacting today’s international politics. But there is also much, much more that is worth exploring further.
This pastoral letter offers a vision of the world, a fundamental cultural tool for reading modernity. “This is truly an important text,” he says Giovanni Maria Vianprofessor at Sapienza University and former director of the Osservatore Romano. «There is the novelty of the Pope who comes from the United States, the Pope of Chicago, who also has a mathematical background and this seems to me to be an important fact. All this contributes to making this text a new way of communicating on the part of the Church of Rome. It is a much more accessible language, less distant from the classical pontifical texts.” An accessible but pregnant text. Which speaks of current events but always keeps Christ radically at the centre.
A linguistic turning point to read technological modernity
«The magnificent humanity celebrated by the encyclical is actually the humanity assumed by Christ, therefore by God himself who became incarnate, this is central to the document. Reading the papal words one grasps the strong religious breath… One could almost say that, in a nutshell, it is the De civitate Dei written by Augustine after the sack of Rome. For the first time, Rome falls into the hands of the barbarians and Augustine, this African bishop, reflects on all of history and it is in this line that the encyclical is placed, which recalls at the beginning all the precedents of similar documents, starting from the most important, the Rerum novarum of Leo XIII, of 1891. The latter”, continues Vian, “we could say that it is a bit like the manifesto of the Communist Party, or Marx’s Capital. The comparison is not mine, but it was coined by an important Italian politician, who was also an important religious man, a deputy of the Constituent Assembly, Iginio Giordani, who described the importance of Rerum novarum in this way.”
That of Prevost’s beloved predecessor was a fundamental encyclical, which the current Pope refers to precisely in his desire to face “the new things” that arrive. It’s not unusual. Other Popes confronted modernity. «At the time of the collapse of Wall Street, Pius «So there is a strong continuity, but in my opinion the novelty here is important, the language is truly new: it manages to keep together the Bible and digital culture, which the Pope correctly defines as the fourth industrial revolution».
And here we are at the heart of the problem. The first image of enormous strength that Leone uses is that of Tower of Babelsymbol of the assault on heaven, an attempt to unify humanity which hides a terrifying homologation and which results in an even deeper division and misunderstanding between men. In practice, it is the model of current technological globalization.
Biblical parallelism against the homologation of the world
“It’s exactly like this,” Monsignor tells us Antonio Suettabishop of Sanremo-Ventimiglia. «The Pope truly guessed this incipit by juxtaposing two biblical icons, on one side – precisely – the Tower of Babel and on the other the reconstruction of the wall of the city of Jerusalem under Nehemiah. It must be said that the Tower of Babel is one of the oldest tales of Bibleis part of a series of dictates that follow that of original sin and wants to demonstrate one thing: how disobedience to God and distancing from him, which is the heart of sin, generates an evil that affects many aspects. The words that the Pope uses to comment on the story of the Tower of Babel”, claims Suetta, “also bring to mind cultural references closer to us, I am thinking of the Orwellian vision of the standardized world, which lies under a dictatorship. Dictatorships can be military in nature and exercise physical violence, but they can also be ideological. For example, as Benedict XVI said, there can be the dictatorship of relativism. The reference to Orwell seems quite fitting to me, as does the one to Solov’ev’s Antichrist, where we find a character – the Antichrist – who presents himself as a universal peacemaker, with a vision of peace all his own, which however unfortunately is the one that dominates today”.
According to Suetta, today «when we talk about peace, inclusion, dialogue, unfortunately we allude to, or concretely produce, a uniformity which is not freedom, which is not valorization of the person, of the genius of each one, but which is instead a true form of dictatorship even if it is sometimes hidden under a claim of exasperated freedom. The Pope points the finger at this form of domination of the world but even before of consciences, and it seems to me that in the background there is that beautiful concept that Saint Augustine expresses in the famous work De civitate Dei, where he says that the love of God is contempt for oneself to the point of supreme exaltation of God, vice versa, sin is contempt for God to the point of supreme exaltation of oneself. Here, this is the great misunderstanding, the great sin that is described in the episode of the Tower of Babel and this trap, let’s call it that, is unfortunately always within reach for man of all times.”
The papal text is, first of all, an extraordinary manifesto against standardization, against leveling globalization and the cancellation of different thinking, the elimination of criticism. This is what can be read against the light in the pages dedicated to the technique and its power which is thought to be divine.
The trap of transhumanism and the limits of technology
«One of the themes that runs through Pope Leo’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas», continues Suetta, «is individualism. He highlights how our contemporary civilization is wounded, undermined and polluted by individualism. Often the responses to this individualism, far from representing a solution, only make it more acute. The Pope sees, for example, in transhumanism a terrible danger that he wants to avoid and which he seriously condemns. All these situations of fraying and destructuring of man and society have ancient roots. They have roots in that modernity which was favored by three thinkers indicated by Jacques Maritain: Descartes for philosophy, Luther for theology, Rousseau for anthropology. They are three examples of the action of modernity which, more or less consciously, more or less voluntarily, wanted to separate itself from God. Which brings us back to the Tower of Babel which, in some way, represents the risk of human presumption that the Pope sees as possible even in the advent of artificial intelligence. Not because it is harmful or in itself an evil, but because – in some way – it could also facilitate and increase this false conception of man.”
The point, therefore, is the false idea according to which man can become like God thanks to technology. «I believe that we can and must say about technology what is said about all tools: that they are excellent servants but they are terrible masters and the risk that the Pope sees is precisely that of technology being the master of man’s life, of his intelligence and above all of his conscience», says Suetta again. «I also see in this text a very delicate and at the same time very clear way of addressing what are important wounds for contemporary man today. When he distances himself from God, he loses hope and takes refuge in false or temporary securities, surrogates. Sometimes these certainties are exasperated and develop the individual’s presumption of being self-sufficient. It is no coincidence that the Pope mentions abortion and euthanasia. Unfortunately, modern man tends to have a predatory attitude towards life, that is, to snatch it from the hands of the one who gives it to him: he wants to make himself the absolute master of it. This impoverishes man and plunges him into those tragedies that unfortunately we see everywhere: loneliness, war, violence.”
This is the meaning: without God, humanity cannot be magnificent.
