‘Magnificent Humanity’: Humanist Principles In A Papal Encyclical? — Human Dignity, AI, And Cooperation

When the Catholic Church publishes a papal encyclical about ‘Magnificent Humanity’, a document warning against the Tower of Babel and calling for the patient, collective rebuilding of a just world, as humanists we might pause mid-scroll and think: that’s our argument.

When I, a former Catholic church historian, computer scientist, and leadership professor, turned humanist chaplaincy candidate, read about the core value of human dignity in the context of AI, I suspect a common message.

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (May 2026), addresses artificial intelligence with unusual directness: it names algorithmic discrimination, surveillance capitalism, autonomous weapons, and technological unemployment as genuine moral crises, and insists that the response must be collective and democratic, it has to be centred on human dignity and the most vulnerable. Its social analysis is largely sound. Its ethical principles — dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good, the priority of the vulnerable — map closely onto the core commitments of the humanist tradition.

This article takes that convergence seriously. It argues that the encyclical’s strongest claims do not depend on theological foundations to stand — they depend on reason, evidence, and the accumulated moral experience of our species. A humanist rewriting of the document, retaining every substantive argument while replacing every load-bearing theological claim, produces not a curiosity but a genuinely useful and more universally accessible moral framework for AI governance.

The article then turns the exercise into a challenge. If humanists and the Catholic Church arrive at the same practical conclusions about AI — that technology must serve persons, that power must be accountable, that democratic governance is non-negotiable — humanists need to ask honestly whether they are making that case with sufficient urgency and clarity. Drawing on the encyclical’s central parable of Nehemiah’s wall — rebuilt not by a single authority but by all the people together, each tending their own section — the article proposes five concrete priorities for a humanist AI ethics and argues for a more collaborative, coalition-minded approach to the governance challenge ahead.

The conclusion is neither ecumenical capitulation nor sectarian point-scoring. It is an invitation: to take a good argument seriously wherever it appears, to make it better, and to make it louder.

On 25 May 2026, the Vatican released Magnifica Humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity” — the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV. Its subject is artificial intelligence and the future of human dignity. Its argument, stripped of its theological wrapper, is one that any committed humanist would recognise: technology is never neutral; power must be held accountable; the most vulnerable must be centred; and no amount of algorithmic efficiency can substitute for the irreducible worth of every human being.

That is a remarkable document for the Catholic Church to produce. It is, in places, a sharper critique of Big Tech and concentrated power than anything most secular progressive organisations have managed to publish. It names the risks of AI — discriminatory algorithms, surveillance, disinformation, autonomous weapons, the displacement of workers — with unusual clarity and without hedging. And it insists, over and over, that the response must be collective, democratic, and rooted in a set of shared ethical principles that belong to no single tradition.

For humanists, this creates an interesting and productive challenge. The encyclical’s social analysis is largely sound. Its ethical principles — human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, the common good, the preferential option for the vulnerable — map closely onto the core commitments of humanist ethics. And yet the document grounds all of these in theology: in the image of God, in the Gospel, in the Church’s magisterial authority. For a humanist, that grounding is both unnecessary and, for many audiences, actively counterproductive.

So, what happens if you take the document seriously enough to rewrite it? If you keep every argument about power, dignity, labour, truth, and justice, but re-ground them in shared human reason and solidarity rather than divine revelation? The result turns out to be not merely a curiosity but a genuinely useful exercise — one that clarifies what humanists actually believe, sharpens the case for those beliefs, and points toward something that the humanist movement has often struggled with: a compelling, accessible, positive vision of what we are for.

The encyclical opens with two ancient narratives: the Tower of Babel and the Book of Nehemiah. Whatever one’s view of their historical or theological status, they function as extraordinarily apt parables for the age of AI.

Babel is the story of a project built on self-aggrandizement: a single language, a single technology, a single direction, all in the service of making a name for the builders rather than building something genuinely shared. The result is not unity but fragmentation. Hubris produces the very dispersal it sought to prevent. It is a story about what happens when power is concentrated without accountability, when efficiency becomes the only value, when diversity is treated as a problem to be solved rather than a resource to be cultivated.

Nehemiah is the story of rebuilding: not by a single hero imposing a solution from above, but by all the people — men, women, artisans, families, young and old — each taking responsibility for their own section of the wall, listening to one another, addressing problems as they arise, and drawing their strength not from hierarchy but from mutual recognition. It is a story about what collective, democratic, subsidiarity-respecting repair looks like in practice.

You do not need to believe these are historical events, or that they carry divine authority, to find them clarifying. The question they together pose — are we building Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem? — is precisely the question facing any society deciding how to govern artificial intelligence. And the humanist answer is the same as the encyclical’s, once you strip away the theology: we must choose the way of Nehemiah. Not a technocratic elite imposing solution. Not a market racing to the bottom. But a genuine, plural, democratic process in which every affected person has a voice, and in which the most vulnerable are centred rather than forgotten.

Here is where the exercise of rewriting the encyclical becomes most revealing. Because there is something the humanist version of this argument can do that the original cannot: it can be given to everyone.

The original encyclical is addressed primarily to Catholics. Its authority derives from the Church’s magisterium. Its grounding is in Scripture and Tradition. For the roughly eight billion people on earth who are not Catholic — and for the many Catholics who are sceptical of institutional authority — this is a significant limitation. The argument may be right, but its form puts it out of reach for much of the audience that most needs to hear it.

A humanist version of the same argument has a different character. Its grounding is in shared human reason, in the accumulated moral experience of our species, in the philosophical traditions that have developed — across cultures, across centuries, across disciplines — the concepts of dignity, rights, justice, and solidarity. These are not the property of any single institution or tradition. They belong, in a meaningful sense, to all of us. And that means the argument can be made to anyone: to secular governments, to corporations, to civil society organisations, to individuals who have never opened a religious text in their lives.

This matters practically. The governance of AI is not going to be determined by the Catholic Church, however wise its encyclicals. It is going to be determined by democratic politics, by international agreements, by the choices of corporations, and ultimately by the collective preferences of citizens. If humanists want those choices to be shaped by the right values — dignity, accountability, solidarity, the priority of the most vulnerable — they need to be able to make the case in language that is accessible to all of those actors. The encyclical points toward the argument. Humanism can make it universal.

One of the most striking things about reading the encyclical carefully is how closely its ethical principles map onto the core commitments of the humanist tradition. The common good. The universal destination of goods — the idea that the fruits of the earth and of human creativity belong, in some fundamental sense, to all of us, not only to those who happen to control them at any given moment. Subsidiarity — the principle that decisions should be made at the lowest level capable of making them effectively, that power should flow toward those affected by it rather than away from them. Solidarity —  the priority of the most vulnerable.

These are not distinctively Catholic ideas. They are the products of centuries of moral and political philosophy, of labour movements and democratic theory, of international human rights law and the long, painful struggle for justice across every cultural tradition. The Church has a particular version of them; humanism has its own; and there are dozens of other versions across the world’s philosophical and ethical traditions. What they share is more important than what divides them.

But — and this is the challenge the encyclical puts to humanists directly — do we actually use them? Do we speak clearly and publicly about human dignity as an absolute constraint on the design and deployment of AI? Do we make the case, in language that ordinary citizens can engage with, that the benefits of artificial intelligence must be distributed widely and its risks borne equitably? Do we name the concentration of technological power as a threat to democracy and human freedom, and propose concrete institutional responses?

The honest answer, for much of the organised humanist movement, is: not consistently enough, and not with sufficient urgency. The encyclical — whatever its theological limitations — models something important: the willingness to speak plainly about power, to name injustice by name, and to insist that the arrangements of the economy and of technology are not natural laws but human choices that can and must be made differently.

The encyclical’s most practically important insight is also its most structurally significant: the rebuilding of the wall of Jerusalem was not done by a single actor, however wise. It was done by all the people together, each attending to their own section, each sustained by the knowledge that they were part of a shared enterprise. This is the logic of subsidiarity applied to social change — and it is a logic that the humanist movement needs to take seriously.

The challenges posed by AI — discriminatory algorithms, platform monopolies, the erosion of epistemic commons, technological unemployment, autonomous weapons — are not challenges that any single organisation can address alone. They require scientists and researchers, policymakers and lawyers, educators and journalists, labour organisers and civil society advocates, ethicists and technologists, all working on their own section of the wall, all coordinating without any single actor claiming authority over the whole.

For humanist organisations, this suggests a specific kind of ambition: not to become the sole voice of secular ethics in the AI governance debate, but to contribute clearly and distinctively to a broader coalition. To bring what humanism does best — rigorous ethical reasoning, commitment to evidence, willingness to engage with difficult questions without the comfort of dogma — to a conversation that desperately needs all of those things.

It also suggests something about internal culture. The humanist movement has sometimes been better at disagreement than at solidarity; better at criticizing religious institutions than at building its own. The Nehemiah model challenges this. The wall gets rebuilt when people show up for their section, do the work, trust their neighbours to do theirs, and resist the temptation to abandon the project because it is harder than expected or because they disagree with someone else’s approach.

What would it actually mean for the humanist movement to engage seriously with the agenda set out — however inadvertently — by Magnifica Humanitas? The rewritten humanist version of the encyclical suggests five concrete priorities.

First, insist on the extension of human rights to the digital domain. Every person affected by an automated decision has a right to meaningful explanation of how that decision was made, and to mechanisms for challenge and redress. Every person has a right to protection against discriminatory algorithms, to data sovereignty, and to participation in the governance of the technologies that shape their life. These are not new rights; they are applications of the principle of dignity — which humanists have defended for centuries — to new circumstances.

Second, make the case for democratic AI governance, loudly and specifically. The governance of AI cannot be left to the market or to the voluntary commitments of corporations. It requires robust public institutions, international agreements, and democratic oversight mechanisms. Humanists should be advocates for these institutions, not merely critics of their absence. The Babel narrative warns us what happens when powerful technologies are governed only by those who control them: fragmentation, inequality, and the loss of the very things that make human life worth living.

Third, defend the dignity of work and the humanity of workers. Technological unemployment is not merely an economic problem. When work disappears, so does the social recognition, the structure, and the sense of purpose that work provides. Humanists — who have always insisted on the value of human agency and creativity — should be among the most vocal advocates for policies that ensure the transition to AI-enabled economies serves all workers, not only those at the top of the distribution.

Fourth, defend truth as a common good. The epistemic commons on which democratic self-governance depends is under assault. An information environment dominated by algorithmically curated outrage and AI-generated disinformation is one that degrades the moral and civic capacities of persons. Humanists — with our commitment to reason, evidence, and honest inquiry — have a particular responsibility to advocate for the institutions and norms that maintain the health of public discourse.

Fifth, speak the language of hope. The encyclical closes — in both its original and its humanist rewriting — with an insistence that the aspiration toward justice is not naive but necessary. Not the hope of a technological utopia in which all problems are solved by better algorithms, but the hope of a world in which human beings — in all their magnificent, difficult, irreducible humanity — remain at the centre of the story. That is a humanist hope. It does not require a god to underwrite it. It requires only the conviction that a better world is possible, and the willingness to act as if it is — because without that action, it will not come to be.

There is a particular kind of intellectual confidence required to read a document you disagree with on foundational grounds, recognise that its substantive argument is largely right, and engage with it seriously enough to rewrite it in your own terms. That is what the exercise of producing a humanist version of Magnifica Humanitas demands — and what it rewards.

The encyclical’s authors would presumably not endorse the rewrite. They believe, and say clearly, that the grounding of human dignity in the image of god is not incidental but essential. A humanist disagrees, and the disagreement is real and important.

But the disagreement about foundations does not prevent agreement about consequences. Both traditions arrive at the same place: technology must serve persons, not the reverse; power must be accountable to those it affects; the most vulnerable must be centred; and the response to the challenge of AI must be collective, democratic, and guided by values that transcend market logic.

Humanism has been making this argument, in various forms, for a very long time. What the encyclical offers — and what humanists should take seriously — is a reminder that the argument needs to be made more urgently, more publicly, and more collaboratively than it currently is. Each person, each organisation, each community of conscience has their own section of the wall to rebuild. The question is whether we will show up for it.