Yet Magnifica Humanitas only incidentally concerns the promise and peril of the AI revolution. A closer examination reveals that Leo’s ultimate project is nothing less than a defense of moral and political universalism — the collective struggle for “a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason,” as the pope puts it — just when universal reason is menaced on every side by various irrationalisms.

Put another way: amid the ruins of modernity’s great emancipatory universalisms — liberalism, socialism, “positive science” — Leo is reminding us that there is a much older mode of universal reason, blending revelation and classical philosophy, preserved by the Catholic Church. And that Rome, with its “dynamic approach to the Gospel,” isn’t afraid to acknowledge the achievements of exhausted modernity, nor to collaborate in its renewal today.

That collaborative element — Leo’s tipping of his mitre to the United Nations, multilateralism, abolitionist and labor movements, and the like — renders the encyclical supremely unfashionable. Not least among neo-traditionalists within the Church, for whom the document harks back to the heyday of Vatican II and the midcentury moment that saw theologians and hierarchs embrace projects like global governance.

The Christian malcontents are already tsk-tsking the document for a supposed failure to cite Aquinas (there are several citations to the Angelic Doctor, in fact). They are labeling the pope a UN-besotted “Boomer” (is there a worse epithet today?) and griping that he isn’t radically anti-modern enough.

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The pope appears to have anticipated the backlash. Blind faith in markets and technology, he suggests, is far from the only latter-day irrationalism. Others include “fundamentalist, identity-based, and nationalistic reactions” that have been stoked by the failure of capitalism and technocracy since the end of the Cold War to “generate prosperity, democracy, and stability.” It isn’t hard to imagine Leo classing ultra-trad Catholics — the type who use the latest iPhone to post online laments about such “modernist” innovations as the Luminous Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary — as one more species of insurgent fanatic.

Yet like it or not, the pope’s approach — combining a classical and Christian account of the human person with openness to modern means for social emancipation — goes back to the previous Pope Leo, Leo XIII, who inaugurated modern Catholic Social Teaching with his 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum.

For starters, Leo XIII recognized that the organization of social and economic life implicates the salvific mission of the Church and therefore the Church can’t stand neutral in relation to it. Writing in the teeth of the Industrial Revolution, that earlier Leo beheld around him “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals and the utter poverty of the masses” and a resulting “moral degeneracy.”

More fundamentally, Leo XIII saw modern market societies as characterized by a constitutive antagonism: “social antagonism [that] erupted not in spite of, but as a result of people acting rationally within the rules of the game,” as I’ve written elsewhere. Under industrial conditions, a handful of firms dominated most sectors, giving employers nearly all the bargaining power, with the result that workers didn’t enjoy the freedom promised to them on paper. 

On paper, the employee could always find a better wage or better working conditions elsewhere. In reality, most workers found themselves coerced and cornered as a result of the disparities in power generated by markets. “The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves,” Leo observed, “whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon.”

Here Leo XIII’s classical and Christian anthropology came in: workers aren’t just another production input, but human beings with rights due them as a matter of “justice.” These rights, not least the right to a family wage, must be upheld by the state and promoted by associations, the “most important” of which are “workingmen’s associations” — i.e., labor unions. 

Note: a living wage under Catholic Social Teaching is not a matter of charity or the personal virtue or feudal honour of the employer. I mention these other possibilities — charity, virtue, honour — to highlight the way in which the Leonine teaching combines classical and Christian anthropology with modern politics. 

It’s classical in its anthropology: the worker is a human being with a family to maintain and the natural imperative to participate in civil society; if he’s materially desperate, his family falls to immorality and he can’t take part in other societies like church and politics. 

It’s modern in that Leo XIII notably didn’t decry industrial production as such. He didn’t hanker for the restoration of feudal relations or a return to the land or small-producerism or other such fantasies of the Tweed Jacket Class. At some level, he accepted that there is no “going back behind” of modernity. 

The answer for Leo XIII, rather, lay in just wages enforced by the state and in labor organizations mounting what he called “united action” (what we now call “collective action”). In this way, Leo XIII, decades before Vatican II, brought the Catholic Church into conversation and collaboration with modern universalist emancipatory movements: the US New Deal, the British Labour party, and social and Christian democracy in continental Europe all bear his imprint.

His later successor Benedict XVI, often inaccurately framed as an arch-conservative, would bring this synthesis of the classical and the modern to its culmination with his famous 2006 assertion that “in many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness.”

Leo XIV is perhaps more cautious. Nevertheless, the same general pattern — an insistence on the human person as possessed of divine dignity; a willingness to engage with modernity in protecting that dignity — is easily discernible in Magnifica Humanitas. 

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Citing Leo XIII, the American pope begins with the insistence that “the proclamation of the Gospel cannot overlook the concrete lives of people.” While there is an “autonomy of worldly affairs” and two distinct communities — the secular and the ecclesiastical — nevertheless the people of God are called to “promote structural reforms.” Why? Because the Church can’t extricate her activities from “social relations,” nor “consider herself a stranger to the forces shaping society.” In short: “There is no authentic evangelisation that does not also affect the structures of human society.”

Scanning the social horizon of the 21st century, Leo XIV doesn’t see only horror and decline. He doesn’t think that ours is a uniquely accursed age: “I am convinced that the concrete way of living out social relationships in the light of the Gospel is not established once and for all, but remains a task entrusted, from generation to generation, to the Christian community. . .  For this reason, I encourage all members of the Church not to be afraid of the present challenges.”

The present challenges, to his mind, are AI and what he calls the “normalization of war” (a geopolitical phenomenon he worries might be exacerbated by AI and other developments in so-called defence-tech). AI, he warns, could lead to the logics of efficiency and profit crowding out all others — a radical acceleration of the “technocratic paradigm.” The symptoms include screen addiction, the potential for mass joblessness, and the imposition of tech bosses’ worldview on the masses under the facade of “objective” information.

At the deepest level, he fears, AI could strengthen an “anti-human vision.” Meaning one in which “the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty, and exerting total control.” The problem with this is that weakness, uncertainty, and finitude are central to what makes us human. They are a source of creativity and of empathy for the vulnerable other (who is finally vulnerable, as we ourselves are).

“A technology that merely classifies and optimizes what already exists can … become an obstacle to change and growth,” he notes in my favourite passage. “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.”

In the face of these threats, however, you won’t find any calls for a general ban against AI in this encyclical, no fatwas launching a Butlerian Jihad. On the contrary, Magnifica Humanitas is full of praise for AI’s potential to eliminate “arduous, repetitive or dangerous tasks and to provide intelligent support for human activity.” In this, Leo XIV follows Pope Francis, who in one of his final statements as pontiff, was hopeful that AI might “introduce important innovations in agriculture, education, and culture, an improved level of life for entire nations and peoples, and the growth of human fraternity and social friendship.”  

As with manufacturing in Leo XIII’s time, the question is how to orient these “new things” to the dignity of the human person and the common good of the whole. Here, just as Leo XIII didn’t rest content with the virtue of the factory owners, so our Leo insists that a few men in California can’t have unchallenged say-so. Rather, Leo XIV envisions a role for the states as well as the “transnational institutions” that took shape in the wake of the last century’s horrors. The Catholic principles of subsidiarity holds that when a problem is too large for national authorities, it must be addressed at a higher level by some sort of “world authority,” as Saint John XXIII envisioned it in his Cold War encyclical Pacem in Terris.

Such a problem, Leo XIV feels, is AI. Hence, the new encyclical’s unfashionable emphasis on transnational governance and political universalism. Contrary to his critics on the American Catholic Right, neither is a quaint relic of the pope’s Boomer generation. Both, rather, go to the heart of his Catholic political rationality. This is the Church, as Augustine described her: tam antiquam, tam nova!

There is, of course, much variation across the board. The Irish Fine Gael party has long been associated with Christian Democracy, but is hardly conservative on moral issues, as demonstrated by their leader, Leo Varadkar, who vigourously championed liberalising Ireland’s abortion laws. But whatever their particular policy commitments, whether more liberal or more conservative, many have lost sight of the reason they associated themselves with Christianity in the first place.

In 1878, the Catholic Bishop Vincenzo Pecci was elected Pope and took the name Leo. Already aged 67, many expected his was to be a quiet Papacy. But not a bit of it. His regular tipple was a cocaine-infused tonic called Vin Mariana and he lived to 93, full of energy, with a particular concern for the condition of the poor.

In 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the ground breaking encyclical Rerum Novarum – the first time a Pope had intervened directly, not on a churchy issue, but on the subject of economics and labour relations. Rerum Novarum means New Things, and the news things the church was responding to was industrialisation, the rise of the factory system, and the increasing mobilisation of the working class.

In Rerum Novarum, the Pope set out the broad outlines of Catholic Social Teaching with respect to economics – emphatically neither socialism nor free-market capitalism, about which he was especially scathing. Those who think that the present Pope’s lefty prognostications make him an exception among Popes ought to read a few lines from Rerum Novarum:

“Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.”

This could almost be from the pen of Karl Marx himself. Except, Pope Leo had little good to say about socialism either. Whereas laissez-faire capitalism promotes the freedom of the individual to make as much money as he or she likes, and often to the detriment of others, socialism seeks to redress that injustice by giving too much power to the state to intervene in our lives.

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In order to protect human beings from an overly intrusive state, Rerum Novarum insists upon the importance of private property. The home was to be the safe space for the family, protected from rapacious capitalism and interfering socialism alike (both, of course, equally products of the Enlightenment).

Among the several interesting features of Rerum Novarum, one is its nostalgia for the medieval guilds as models for new forms of associations – or unions – for working people. This is important because it sets the tone for a fundamental principle of Catholic social teaching, that the basic unit of social and political concern should not be the atomised, free individual, nor big business, nor the over mighty state – but rather the small human collective, somewhere in scale between the family and the village.

This is, of course, a value judgment – that the proper site of human flourishing is the family and the local community. And part of the reason Catholic social teaching was so suspicious of industrialisation is that it disrupted and destroyed the basic building blocks of community life: living in one place over a sustained period of time alongside others doing the same; job security; and the communal trust that this security brings.

A number of theologians picked up on the themes of Rerum Novarum. In England, G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc developed a version of Catholic social teaching that came to be called Distributism, a rather ugly word that none of its advocates were especially happy with. They celebrated the political scale of co-operatives and friendly societies, insisted on the right of all people to have a home of their own, and railed against the large-scale forces of alienation, whether of the Left of the Right.

Rerum Novarum also set the tone for a number of Papal letters that built on its insights. In 1931, Quadragesimo anno developed very similar ideas, introducing what were to become the two central themes of Catholic Social teaching: solidarity and subsidiarity. Both ideas came to exert a strong influence over later twentieth century politics.

Solidarity is a belief in the importance of thick, strong and stable communities. It is a belief in what we have come to call social capital – the sort of capital that is built up over time, in which people come to trust and support each other. It is typically in such communities that the elderly and vulnerable are looked after. And it is such communities that can readily organise themselves to resist the dehumanising forces of political tyranny.

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It was this sense of solidarity that the Polish workers of the Gdansk shipyards appealed to in naming themselves Solidarnosc (Solidarity). Gate 2 of the shipyard, a symbol of the struggle against communist oppression, came to be decorated with flowers and a portrait of Pope John Paul II and the Black Madonna of Czestochowa. Solidarnosc was as much a theological and a political movement as a labour union. And a direct outgrowth of Rerum Novarum.

Subsidiarity is a term that has come to be associated with the European Union, introduced by the Treaty of Maastricht and now enshrined in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union. But it began life as theological term, to describe a presumption of the moral priority of the small and the local over the large, the national and the transnational. In the EU, it becomes the idea that actions should only be taken at EU level that cannot be effectively taken at a lower level.

The principle of subsidiarity is a means of resisting the centralisation of power and harks back to the preference Rerum Novarum has for small guilds and workers’ unions. Subsidiarity is, for example, the central principle that animates a great writer and ecologist like Wendell Berry when he complains that the “locally understood interdependence of local people, local culture, local economy, and local nature” built up over time and sustained by the bonds of affection, is “being destroyed by the desires and ambitions of both private and public life.”

Europe’s Christian Democrats were supposed to have been founded on the back of Catholic social teaching. But very little about the current ambitions of the European superstate, and its Christian Democrat backers, conforms to the vision of mid-scale social politics expressed in Rerum Novarum and its successors.

Indeed, the more convincing argument is surely that of the exponents of Brexit, calling for a repatriation of power to the local – they have understood more clearly the basic Catholic principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. It is the Christian Democrats who must rediscover their founding principles. Small is beautiful.

He’s been thinking about the future of capitalism (and whether it has one). Interviewed for Vox by Sean Illing, his words are worth reading:

“It seems to me that the greatest danger is that the truly rich, I’m talking nine and 10 figures rich, are increasingly separated from the lives of the rest of us so that they become largely insensitive to the concerns of those who still earn by the hour. As such, they will probably not anticipate many of the changes, and we will see the beginning stirrings of revolution as the cost for this insensitivity.”

That said, Weinstein believes the billionaires have woken up to the danger:

“There was a quiet shift several years ago where the smoke-filled rooms stopped laughing about inequality concerns and started taking them on as their own even in private…

“I think it’s a combination of both embarrassment and enlightened self-interest that this class — several rungs above my own — is trying to make sure it does not sow the seeds of a highly destructive societal collapse, and I believe I have seen an actual personal transformation in many of the leading thinkers among the technologists, where they have come to care deeply about the effects of their work. Few of them want to be remembered as job killers who destroyed the gains that have accumulated since the Industrial Revolution.”

That’s encouraging, but what sort of solution does Weinstein envisage?

“…some kind of hybridization of hypercapitalism and hypersocialism must enter the discussion.”

Personally, I’d prefer a much more modest form of capitalism combined with no socialism, but never mind – let’s see what he means by “hypercapitalism”:

“I believe capitalism will need to be much more unfettered. Certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation in order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, as they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based.”

Letting the tech lords do whatever the heck they like, then. But what about the “hypersocialism”?

“…we have to understand that our population is not a collection of workers to be input to the machine of capitalism, but rather a nation of souls whose dignity, well-being, and health must be considered on independent, humanitarian terms.”

Now you’re talking, Eric! Except that’s not socialism, hyper or otherwise, but the moral philosophy at the heart of Catholic social teaching (and comparable ethical systems).

As for specific policies, Weinstein provides a hint as to the tech lords’ thinking:

“…in terms of wanting to leave a socially positive legacy, many of them are motivated to innovate through concepts like universal basic income, finding that Washington is as bereft of new ideas in social terms as it is of new technological ones.”

The thing about universal basic income (UBI) is that it requires money – lots and lots of money. Ideally, one would tax the super-productive robot workers of the future so that we humans could live a life of leisure and/or spiritual fulfilment; but, unfortunately, the era of super-abundance has yet to arrive. Indeed, as Weinstein tells us, economic growth is slowing down:

“…The real problem, which our society has yet to face up to, is that sometime around 1970, we ended several periods of legitimate exponential growth in science, technology, and economics. Since that time, we have struggled with the fact that almost all of our institutions that thrived during the post-World War II period of growth have embedded growth hypotheses into their very foundation.”

All too true, but to pin your hopes on universal basic income is the ultimate embedded growth hypothesis. After all, who is going to pay for it? Not, one presumes, the lightly-taxed, cash-hoarding tech giants.

We should be grateful that they’re at least thinking about the crisis of capitalism, but they need to think again. The hypersocialism of free money for everyone is not consistent with the hypercapitalism of corporate tax avoidance.