Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, completes the promise of his chosen name. 135 years ago Pope Leo XIII published the groundbreaking Rerum Novarum, translating the ancient social wisdom of the church into relevant steps for the upholding of human dignity in an era of mass dehumanization and the rise of industry. Our own Pope Leo XIV has now attempted to do the same, translating the ancient wisdom of the church in order to uphold the holiness of humanity in light of oppressive political systems, warmongering states, massive wealth inequities, techno-feudalism, and the seemingly ubiquitous blanket of technological dehumanization.
To do so, our Pope Leo leans heavily on the foundational principles of Catholic Social Teaching that defined the impact of Rerum Novarum. Do you want to do Christian ethics in alignment with our Holy Father? Practice solidarity, subsidiarity, seek for the common good, protect human dignity, strive for universal rights to health care, food, safety, and shelter, and protect the environment! Easy enough!
True Christian ethics is not for the faint of heart: “We cannot condone naïve enthusiasms, nor fuel unfounded fears.” Ethics, Leo reminds us, is a hard practice of discernment that centers on “the dignity of the human person, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor, care for our common home and peace.” Ethics demands we translate these values “into practices such as responsible planning, the assessment of human and social impact, the inclusion of the most vulnerable, the promotion of digital literacy and guiding research and industry toward justice and peace.” (14)
The idea that “ethics is hard” is, of course, not new! It can be traced back to every philosophy professor through history, but even more so to the parable of the sheep and goats of Matthew 25, the pleading of Micah 6 and, undoubtedly, well beyond. Ethics is spoken easily and followed with difficulty, and it has always been so.
In order, then, to inspire a new generation of social-minded Christians, and to remind people what ethics means, Leo spends the first two chapters of the letter detailing both the ethical principles mentioned above and the lineage of such principles in Catholic encyclicals from the past century. Confused about subsidiarity? See paragraphs 68-72. Solidary? 73-78. Someone told you that social justice is a bad word? Read paragraphs 77-81. Think billionaires are God’s gift to humanity? Read about the universal destination of goods in paragraphs 65-67.
I’m starting to think of this encyclical as Pope Leo’s syllabus for a Social Ethics 101 seminar. First we cover the basic principles of social ethics, then we examine its application in society through technology, work, communication, family, and war. Like any good course, the encyclical is better at some aspects than others and leaves out as much as it includes. There are several mentions of ecology and the earth, but only a single mention of the data centers, the most pressing AI-related ecological issue this decade. There are several artists mentioned, but not even a single paragraph dedicated to the many whose work is being strip-mined for the massive datasets to train every major large language model from Anthropic to Google.
Nevertheless, this would be a good course, and perhaps many will take up the call! Build from the basics of Catholic Social Teaching, then play out its applications in the world of today. It is an encyclical that takes us all back to school in the best of ways, offering new metaphors and possibilities while not holding too tightly onto one specific theme.
But not everyone enjoyed Pope Leo’s technological treatise.
One of the reasons the letter made such waves in the press this week is because the Holy Father asked Christopher Olah, the billionaire co-founder of Anthropic, to sit alongside him and other experts when he presented the work. Timnit Gebru, the famously fired leader of Google’s Ethical AI Team who is now a global leader in AI worker’s rights, wrote: “If the Vatican had partnered with the exploited data workers fighting for their rights, the people whose water is polluted fighting data centers, or the many other victims around the world, I would have written whatever they wrote….Instead they partnered with Anthropic, like partnering with the Sackler family to discuss the harms of oxy.”
Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine and one of the leaders of the AI resistance movement, wrote this week that Anthropic “played the Pope.” The entire encyclical, which Merchant agrees is impressively written, “is undercut by Anthropic’s presence in whole affair, which in and of itself flies in the face of much of what Leo is trying to accomplish, especially since Anthropic rushed home from Italy to seal its $65 billion series G funding round and announced the news the very same week.”
Merchant “laughed out loud” when reading how Olah talked earnestly about the “global poor” in the Vatican’s own press release, despite having a personal valuation of over $7 billion. It is, without question, challenging optics. Does Anthropic pay all of its data trainers a living wage? Does it subvert capitalistic tendencies in favor of the common good? Does it practice subsidiarity and solidarity with the poor? Does it support exploitative rare mineral mining? Does it promote a society of holiness, equity, and social justice? Or, perhaps, as Olah hinted, does it really just want to make moral AGI?
On the other hand, Olah’s presence has forced Silicon Valley to take notice. Anthropic, one of the most valuable AI companies in the world, is sitting alongside a moral leader to talk about AI regulation and ethics? Olah’s presence was undoubtedly a savvy move for the company, as Merchant notes, but perhaps it was a savvy move for the Vatican as well, this curious alignment of two entities with seemingly irresolvable moral differences.
Whatever the intention behind the placement, Anthropic’s presence at the encyclical was a lightning rod in the publication of an otherwise straightforward theological treatise on humanity, God, and love. Perhaps the Vatican is savvy, and perhaps they just helped make Olah ever richer, and perhaps both are a little true. Either way, Olah’s presence forced people to pay attention to what is otherwise a course syllabus in Christian social ethics.
And in a world of constant distraction, attention may be the most valuable currency.
Views and opinions expressed by authors and editors are their own and do not necessarily reflect the view of AI and Faith or any of its leadership.
