Magnifica Humanitas

Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIV on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence (15 May 2026)

A plain-language translation of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical, rendered for a reader who is secular and technical rather than Catholic, and who may have little or no familiarity with the Bible or Christian thought. I have tried to preserve the meaning sentence by sentence, and to keep every claim the original makes — including its theological ones. Where the original reaches for the language of the Church, I have kept the claim and put it in plainer words, leaving its convictions standing as the author's stated convictions, so that you can follow the argument whether or not you share the belief. Biblical stories, figures, and images are briefly explained the first time they appear. The original's scholarly citation footnotes (references to earlier Church documents) have been dropped; named authors and works are folded into the text. The paragraph numbers are preserved so this can be read alongside the original.

Introduction

Humanity — and I mean the word in its full, almost extravagant sense, as something I believe was made by God and made magnificent — faces a hinge decision today: we can build a new Tower of Babel, or we can build the kind of city where God and human beings live together. (The Tower of Babel is an old story from the Book of Genesis: a people who all spoke one language tried to build a tower reaching to the sky in order to make a name for themselves, and ended up scattered across the earth, their single language broken into mutual incomprehension. I will come back to it; for now, take it as the image of a grand project built on pride that collapses into division.) Every generation inherits the same task: to shape its own era, to steer history toward a place where the dignity of each person is protected, justice is advanced, and a real fraternity becomes possible. And every generation runs the opposite risk — of making the world more inhuman and more unjust. Whenever humanity is in danger of defacing what it really is, those of us who are Christians look back to the God who became a human being, because we hold that it is "only in the mystery of the Word made flesh" — only in the claim that the infinite entered a single finite life — "that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear." In that one life, human grandeur becomes a road: a way, a truth, and a life, opening a path for each of us to grow toward our fullness.
Built on Christ — the living cornerstone — we experience what we take to be the work of the Holy Spirit, and we believe that every honest human effort to cooperate with that work for the good will be blessed by the Father in whom we place our hope. So we can throw ourselves, with care, into any effort that builds a more just world, and we can call others to join in advancing the full development of every human being. I want to be in dialogue with everyone alive today; we share the same events, the same questions, the same aspirations. Together with them I want to find new paths toward the common good and toward a life of dignity for all. This openness to dialogue is not optional for the Church — it is part of what she is. Constituted in Christ as "a sacrament" — a sign and an instrument — "of communion with God and of the unity of the entire human race," she reads history as the place where the Gospel challenges and directs human experience.
It was in this spirit that Pope Leo XIII published his encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, whose 135th anniversary we mark this year with deep gratitude. With that document my predecessor — whose name I have taken — set in motion the body of reflection on society, the economy, and politics that we now call the "Social Doctrine of the Church": think of it as a long, accumulating tradition of moral thinking about how we ought to live together. When critics objected that the Church should not squander its energy on worldly matters but stick to the message of eternal life, Leo XIII answered with realism and good sense — you cannot preach the Gospel while ignoring the concrete lives of actual people. Many decades have passed, and bishops, theologians, and ordinary believers have kept thinking about social questions in that same light. Today this Social Doctrine is an inheritance of practical wisdom: principles for thought, criteria for judgment, concrete guidelines for action. Grounded in scripture and tradition, and in conversation with the sciences, it helps us read the challenges of the present clearly and find honest ways to live out our convictions, with joy and in service to the world. It is not a dead set of concepts but a living body of truth that guards and interprets humanity's vocation to a full and just life. So I want to add my own voice to this living tradition, and I ask for the help of the Spirit of wisdom, who — as the Book of Proverbs has it — has been present in the world since its beginning.

The res novae of our time — the genuinely new things

Leo XIII spoke in his day of "new things" — rerum novarum — but today we cannot simply repeat his insights, however perceptive. We have to ask for the wisdom to read the great trends of our own moment, and above all the technological ones. In just the last few years it has become obvious how fast and how deeply digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics are reshaping the world. Technology is not, in itself, an enemy of humanity. On the contrary, it has been part of our story from the start — "a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man." Across the centuries, technological development has dramatically improved how people live. And at every stage that same progress has revealed the ambiguity of tools that can do harm when they are not aimed at the good. But now we face something genuinely new. The power and reach of these emerging technologies are woven into the texture of daily life; they shape how decisions get made and they work directly on the collective imagination. As Pope Francis put it, "never has humanity had such power over itself." These technologies open up directions we can imagine but cannot yet fully predict — which makes it genuinely hard to assess their long-run effects on both individual dignity and the common good.
It falls to us to face the challenges of our time with clear thinking and a sense of responsibility. We need real regulatory tools, capable of holding the line on justice and curbing the distorting effects of technological power. But the issue is not only regulation. As Francis warned, we have to ask, plainly, who actually holds this power today and how they use it: nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our own DNA, and many other capabilities "have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to use them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world." In the past it was mostly the State that steered innovation. Today the main drivers of development are private actors — often transnational — with resources and reach that exceed those of many governments. Technological power has therefore taken on an unprecedented, largely private character, which makes it even harder to understand, to govern, and to point toward the common good.
This is why we need to begin a shared process of discernment, one that gets at the spiritual and cultural roots of the transformations underway. If we fixate only on immediate contingencies, we let one emergency after another dictate our direction. We are living through a fast transition — a "change of era" — in which a few are racing to own the future of these technologies, a few are devoting themselves to thinking it through, and most people are simply watching and waiting, observing from a distance and hoping for the best. Precisely for that reason, certain questions now press on our conscience and can no longer be dodged: Where are we going? Toward what end do we want to orient ourselves? What direction should we choose, as a people and as a human community?

Two biblical images

To answer those questions, and to work out how to navigate the age of AI responsibly, I want to hold up two scenes from the Bible: the building of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11) and the rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 2–6). The Babel story sits near the origins of humanity, right after the genealogies of Noah's sons. Having settled in a plain in the land of Shinar, the people decided to build a city and a tower "with its top in the heavens." Afraid of being scattered across the earth, they wanted to guarantee themselves stability and power, and above all to "make a name" for themselves. It was an impressive feat — a single language, a single technology, a single direction. But the project hid a deep danger. It was conceived with no reference to anything beyond itself, sustained by a uniformity that erased difference and chose homogenization over communion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages get confused, and people stop understanding one another. The result is not unity but dispersion. Babel exposes the limits of any effort that — however grand — springs from self-assertion, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency, and aims to reach heaven without any blessing from beyond itself.
The Book of Nehemiah opens at a moment of acute vulnerability in the history of ancient Israel. After the Babylonian exile, part of the people had returned to Jerusalem, but the city was still in ruins, its walls collapsed, its gates burned. Nehemiah — a Jew serving the Persian king Artaxerxes — got word of the wreckage of his ancestral city. Before doing anything, he fasted, prayed, and interceded for his people. Then he asked the king for permission to return, and on arriving he inspected the ruined sections in silence. He did not impose a solution from the top down. He gathered the families, assigned each of them a stretch of wall to rebuild, listened to their worries, coordinated their work, and dealt with the opposition. The story shows a city reborn not through one man's initiative but through the shared responsibility of everyone — men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households, the young — each with a part to play. It is a project with God at the center, one that rebuilds relationships before it rebuilds with stone. And so ancient Jerusalem rediscovers a common language — not the language of uniformity, but of communion: the harmony that arises when everyone takes up their own role and recognizes that their strength comes from beyond themselves.
Held up together, these two images are how I would frame the question technology and the digital revolution put to us now. Scientific discoveries are talents entrusted to us so that they bear fruit. Technology can heal, connect, educate, and protect our shared home; it can also divide, exclude, and manufacture new kinds of injustice. In the abstract, technology is neither the solution to humanity's problems nor evil in itself. In practice, though, technology is never neutral — it takes on the character of those who design it, fund it, regulate it, and use it. So the first choice is not "yes" or "no" to technology. It is whether we are building Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem: a power that claims to dominate the heavens, or a people working together, in the presence of something larger than themselves, to rebuild the walls of a shared life.
We have to avoid what I will call the "Babel syndrome": the worship of profit that sacrifices the weak; a uniformity that flattens difference; and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of a person, into data and performance. The risk of dehumanization — of building a future that has no room for God and reduces the other person to a means — is an ancient temptation, always renewing itself, that today simply wears a technical disguise. The alternative is what I will call the "way of Nehemiah," which shows what it means to work together to make the city a safe place for people coming home. To rebuild today is to recognize that out of the plurality of voices and visions — a plurality that sometimes does feel like the confusion of Babel — a bright possibility emerges: the possibility of building together, of turning diversity into a resource, of making listening and dialogue the common ground on which justice and fraternity can grow. Within that shared task, Christians find their particular role: to orient the work toward God, so that pluralism does not dissolve into chaos but, through the practice of walking together, becomes the space in which humanity rediscovers both its foundations and its final end. At the close of the Book of Revelation — the visionary final book of the Bible — its author sees a "New Jerusalem," a perfected city, "coming down out of heaven from God" as a gift for all of humanity. That vision is an invitation to us to work together for a peaceful, just, and dignified common life inside today's "cities."

Building for the common good

Building a city on the common good means, first of all, building on a solid relationship with God. It means recognizing that the truth of his love calls us to life "in all its fullness" and into communion with him. Like Augustine, we can say: "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." I take this to mean that there is a desire for happiness written into us, one that reaches into every dimension of life — and the Church, in conversation with the people of our time, sees an urgent need to protect that desire and to guide it toward its deepest truth.
Second, building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of being human, instead of treating them as bugs to be patched. Today the human longing for a full life is at risk of being hijacked by false goals — the promise of a technology that will free us from all weakness, and models of well-being that simply abandon whole populations. Too often we pin our hopes on unlimited "upgrades," on kinds of progress that widen inequality, and on instant fixes that cannot actually heal a person's wounds. The result is that while some chase the fantasy of unlimited self-assertion, many are left without basic necessities. The Church's reminder — firm but humble — is that real fulfillment does not come from eliminating weakness; it comes through balanced growth. It is found where freedom and responsibility are bound up with mutual care and genuine solidarity, and where progress is measured by the dignity of each person and the good of all peoples.
Third, building a world where everyone can flourish takes shared responsibility and courage. No one can carry the weight of these challenges alone — and no one is so weak that they have no part to play, because (in the old line) "power is made perfect in weakness." Everyone is given their own stretch of the wall: scientists and researchers, founders and workers, teachers and legislators, civil society, grassroots movements, and faith communities. This is the logic of subsidiarity — the principle that cooperation across generations, peoples, disciplines, and cultures is the best path to stability, prosperity, and peace. We should not be spooked by tension or difference; handled with shared responsibility, they become creative forces.
Finally, building for the common good requires a certain kind of language. We have to avoid words that humiliate or antagonize, and reach instead for a clarity that throws light and a frankness that opens up possibilities. We can neither indulge naïve enthusiasm nor stoke unfounded fear. Instead, let us set standards for discernment — the dignity of the person, the idea that the world's goods are meant for everyone, a deliberate priority for the poor, care for our shared home, and peace — and then translate those standards into practices: responsible planning, honest assessment of human and social impact, the inclusion of the most vulnerable, the spread of real digital literacy, and the steering of research and industry toward justice and peace.

Remaining human

In the recent Jubilee Year of 2025 — a Holy Year, the Catholic Church's traditional season of pilgrimage and renewal, observed roughly every 25 years — we walked as "pilgrims of hope," and we received a great deal. Strengthened by that, we can move forward with some confidence into the hard tasks ahead. In the age of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is under threat from new forms of dehumanization, our pressing duty is to stay profoundly human. We have to lovingly protect the grandeur of being human that has been handed to us — a grandeur I believe is shown in full in Christ, and whose brilliance no machine will ever replace. Real progress always begins in a heart that is open to others, in an intelligence willing to listen, and in a will that looks for what unites rather than what divides.
I address this appeal, from the heart, to all Catholics, to all Christians, and to every person of good will. Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the "construction site" of our time. Like Nehemiah, let us pray, plan wisely, and work without giving up — putting God at the front of what we do and the human person at the center of what we choose. Then the "rejected stones" — the poor, the sick, migrants, the least among us — will become the cornerstone (in the old image, the stone the builders toss aside turns out to be the one that holds the whole building up), and a solid, welcoming common home will rise on the earth, where (in the words of the Psalm) "love and faithfulness will meet, and righteousness and peace will embrace." That is the blessing I am asking for. And the task in front of us is to be builders of communion rather than architects of Babel — servants of a coming Kingdom, not lords of towers that are destined to fall. With the heart of a shepherd and a father, I ask everyone to give up building yet another Tower of Babel and to join in building up the common good, so that humanity never loses its beauty, and the world once again recognizes the human heart as the place where God wants to dwell.

Chapter One — A Dynamic Approach Faithful to the Gospel

In this first chapter I want to set out, in compressed form, how the Social Doctrine of the Church — the long, accumulating tradition of moral thinking about how we ought to live together — took shape in the teaching of the recent popes and in the Second Vatican Council (the great assembly of the world's Catholic bishops that met in Rome from 1962 to 1965 to rethink the Church's relationship to the modern world). My aim is to show that this tradition is dynamic, not static. In every era the res novae, the genuinely new things, demand that the teaching take up the live questions of the day and read them in the light of what we hold to be revealed truth. Seen this way, artificial intelligence is not just one more topic to be studied or one more crisis to be managed. It is a development that challenges the categories of this tradition from the inside, and forces them to grow further — while staying faithful to the Gospel, the core Christian message of God's love made visible in the life of Jesus.
This overview would not make much sense, though, if I jumped straight to the individual popes and their major documents without first clearing up some basic points about how the Church exists in history and how she relates to the world. Skip that, and the whole tradition is easy to misread — as meddling in "worldly" affairs that are none of its business, or as a code of ethics handed down from on high and imposed on everyone from outside. It is neither. It comes from a Church that walks alongside humanity, one that recognizes that earthly things have a genuine autonomy of their own, and that the community of the Church and the community of the State are two distinct things. It is precisely for that reason — not in spite of it — that the Church tries to serve the common good.

A Church walking through human history

The Church is present in the world as a sign of the unity of the whole human family. She takes today's questions and challenges as the actual setting in which to carry out what she sees as her particular calling — to listen, to be in dialogue, to serve, and to stay attentive to everything that touches the lives of the people alive now. Being involved in people's lives helps the Church see more and more clearly that her mission has a historical reach: that she bears some responsibility for how social relationships get built. For that reason she cannot treat herself as a stranger to the forces that shape society. On the contrary — she takes an active part in the processes by which a society grows and organizes itself, and she offers her own contribution toward making it more just and more fraternal. Pope Francis put the point sharply: no one, he said, can demand that religion be confined to the private interior of a person's life, "without influence on societal and national life, without concern for the soundness of civil institutions, without a right to offer an opinion on events affecting society."
Because her vocation is to accompany humanity in the actual particulars of history, the Church comes to recognize that earthly realities have their own proper character and order. The Second Vatican Council stated this with real precision in its great document on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes ("Joy and Hope" — we marked its sixtieth anniversary with gratitude on 7 December 2025): if the autonomy of earthly affairs means that created things and human societies "enjoy their own laws and values," then, the Council said, "the demand for autonomy is perfectly in order." That affirmation carries a deeper claim — that the created world bears the mark of an original goodness, one our human outlook is meant to protect, cultivate, and bring to its fulfillment. In this spirit the Church offers herself as a help to read reality in all its depth. She backs, with what I would call a humble firmness, the choices that advance the dignity of every person, the cohesion of communities, and the good of all. She stands alongside the world without overpowering it — so that the promise of justice and peace which, as Christians believe, the work of God's Spirit keeps alive in the human heart, can bear fruit in every human undertaking.
The Second Vatican Council held that God upholds the freedom of men and women as history unfolds, and on that basis it affirmed a distinction between the community of the Church and the community of the State, insisting that each operate with its own full autonomy. The Church's presence in the world also runs through her relationship with civil society and public institutions. By engaging them, she acknowledges that social and political realities have real value, and she honors the specific responsibilities that belong to them, backing whatever advances the well-being of individuals and strengthens the social fabric. She does not try to take over the functions of the State. On the contrary, she esteems those who serve the common good, and she frankly acknowledges the responsibility that civil institutions carry within society. At the same time, the mission entrusted to her moves her to address the real suffering of the people of our time. This closeness is not an attempt to replace civil institutions, still less a veiled criticism of their work. It comes instead from what the tradition calls evangelical charity — the love at the center of the Gospel — which drives the Church to draw near to the wounds of humanity wherever they break open most severely. When she does step in, she does it on the model of the Good Samaritan (the figure in one of Jesus's parables who, unlike the respectable passersby, stops to bind up the wounds of a stranger left half-dead on the road) — with discretion and closeness, and with the awareness that what arises out of urgent necessity must not harden into the norm, nor displace the responsibilities that properly belong to the civil community.
Starting from this double acknowledgment — that earthly realities have their own autonomy, and that the spheres of competence of Church and State are distinct — makes it easier to see the direction the Second Vatican Council set for the Church's relationship with the world. Gaudium et Spes reminds us that it falls "to the whole People of God, particularly of its pastors and theologians, to listen to and distinguish the many voices of our times and to interpret them in the light of God's word," so that revealed truth may be more deeply grasped, better understood, and more fittingly presented. Listening to those "many voices" is not just a sociological exercise; it calls for spiritual discernment. Guided by what they take to be God's Spirit, the people of the Church learn to recognize, in cultural and social change, both the signs of Christ — who, they believe, comes and guides history toward its fulfillment — and the distortions that obscure his face. Done this way, the essential core of revealed truth is not altered but made explicit, and then taken up as a living standard for guiding concrete choices: it inspires paths of personal and communal change, drives structural reform, and sustains new ways of bearing witness to the Gospel in public life. History, then, is one of the places where the Church lets herself be taught by the Spirit about the humanizing power of the Gospel — and where she learns to develop her own teaching in the service of the dignity of every person and the good of all peoples.

The wisdom of scripture in dialogue with the human sciences

The Church regards everyone who sincerely seeks "truth, goodness and beauty" as a companion on the road, and counts them as "precious allies" in defending the dignity of every person and caring for the created world. Taking up the pastoral approach of the Second Vatican Council — which calls us to listen, to discern, and to interpret the signs of the times — and drawing on the wisdom of scripture, the Church is not afraid to meet human knowledge head-on. The word of God, she holds, gives reliable standards for charting paths of justice and opening roads to reconciliation and peace among peoples. But applying those standards to the tangled situations of our own time takes more: the contributions of philosophy and of the human and social sciences are essential, because those disciplines help us understand and analyze the cultural, economic, and political forces at work far more deeply. Saint John Paul II noted that the Church welcomes what the social sciences offer precisely "to draw from them concrete insights that help her carry out" her teaching office. A dialogue with that kind of knowledge does not weaken the Gospel. On the contrary — it lets us see more clearly what genuinely sustains the lives of individuals and communities. In the same vein, Pope Francis stressed that on many specific questions the Church does not claim to deliver "a definitive opinion." She recognizes instead how important it is to listen to scientific research, to encourage a serious and honest debate among experts, and to welcome a range of views.
Fed by this fruitful exchange between the Gospel and human knowledge, the Church has built up her Social Doctrine over time, cultivating across history a body of wisdom marked by a coherence — theological and anthropological — that is rooted in the Christian understanding of the human person. And precisely because this inheritance grows out of faith and a corresponding picture of reality, it is not a catalogue of technical fixes, nor an economic or political model to set against rival models. It belongs to a different order entirely: the order of principles that guide how we interpret events, and that sustain a reading of historical processes — and of the choices they force on us — in the light of the Gospel. This is the proper job of Social Doctrine. It does not claim to take over the responsibilities of politics or of institutions; it offers itself instead as a foundation for collective discernment, a help in recognizing and promoting whatever serves the dignity of persons, the vitality of communities, and the common good.

Social Doctrine as a shared discernment

Once you understand that truth is a gift to be shared and not a possession to be hoarded, the Church is freed from the temptation to seek a presence in the world built on power. To recover the Gospel's own way of proclaiming truth — gently, never by force — Saint John Paul II asked us to face honestly the times when the Church gave in to "intolerance and even the use of violence in the service of truth." In that same spirit, I have said myself that the Church "does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth," because truth is not a territory to be defended but a good to be shared. Pope Francis caught the same idea in a striking line: "time is greater than space." What matters most is not occupying positions of power or defending cultural strongholds, but starting good processes and letting them mature. The truth of the Gospel, on this view, is not imposed from above; it grows over time, woven into the actual fabric of lives, communities, and cultures. It is a truth that does not fear difference but welcomes and guides it — that does not abolish conflicts but transforms them, drawing back together what history tends to scatter. Francis liked to picture this as a many-sided polyhedron, in which the single truth of the Gospel is reflected back from different angles at once.
This openness to a truth that is at once one and many says something deep about the catholicity of the Church — the word means "universal," her reach toward the entire human family — even as she stays immersed in the concrete situations of particular peoples and cultures. The Second Vatican Council reminds us that, exactly because of this universality, "each part contributes its own gifts to other parts and to the entire Church." That is how the Church grows, both as a whole and in her individual communities: through mutual exchange and through shared effort toward an ever-fuller communion. The people of the Church, in other words, are not just gathered from many nations; they are interwoven across different roles, callings, cultures, and traditions, each one called to support and enrich the rest. From this angle Saint Paul VI made a candid admission: given the sheer variety of historical situations, it is unrealistic to expect the Church's Social Doctrine to hand down a single answer valid in every context. So he asked each Christian community to read the reality of its own country with clarity and responsibility. The fruitful tension between the universal scope of the Church's mission and her local roots is built into her life: she takes in the whole world, while addressing the specific problems of each setting as the real ground on which the Gospel takes shape.
In light of all this, the Church's Social Doctrine comes into clearer focus. It is not a handbook of principles and rules to be applied. It is a process of shared discernment. It is born from the meeting between the Gospel's enduring truth and the questions history keeps throwing up; it lets itself be challenged by the signs of the times; and it draws nourishment from science, culture, and human experience. So when the dignity of our fellow human beings is violated, when politics fails to face the tragedies in front of it, when the economy turns against the person, or when science oversteps the limits of its own competence, the Church — together with other Christian denominations and believers of other religions — has to make her voice heard. Not to dominate, but to promote communion. Understood this way, Social Doctrine becomes a kind of theology of communion within history — a history in which, as Christians hold, the infinite that entered a single human life remains present, through dialogue, memory, and prophecy.

How Social Doctrine developed, from Leo XIII to now

Having sketched how the Church is present in history and how she enters into dialogue with the world, I want now to trace how this Social Doctrine actually developed in the teaching of the popes, as it responded to the great social upheavals from the nineteenth century to the present. I cannot, of course, do justice to the full richness of this teaching — its basic principles are laid out in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church and have been worked over further by recent teaching. Nor can I systematically explore everything my predecessors developed in their encyclicals, especially Laudato Si' and Fratelli Tutti. But I will pull out some essential points, to show how the present text stands in continuity with that tradition. And I want to underline how, within it, the unchanging core of what we hold to be revealed truth about the human person and society is constantly interwoven with a renewed capacity to listen to historical situations and to answer the questions of the day. Let me now walk through some of the significant stages of this development, starting with the era opened by the encyclical Rerum Novarum.

The first stages of the Church's Social Doctrine

What we now call the "Social Doctrine of the Church" did not appear spontaneously in the modern age. It is the fruit of receiving and giving structure to a long tradition of the Church's reflection on life in society — one rooted in scripture, in the early Christian writers known as the Church Fathers, and in the theological and legal work of the Middle Ages and the early modern period. The phrase itself was only coined by Pius XII in 1950, but its content first began to take shape as an organized body of social teaching with Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum ("Of New Things"). Confronted with the "new things" of his day — the conflict between capital and labor, the worker question, the upheavals of economic and social change — Leo XIII did not stop at noting the unrest. He saw these situations as terrain for the Church's pastoral mission, subjected them to rigorous discernment, and tried to read their causes and possible solutions in the light of the Gospel and of an integral view of the human person, created, as the tradition holds, in the image of God. Saint John Paul II called this approach a "lasting paradigm" of Social Doctrine: an exemplary practice in which the Church, faced with historical change, exercises her right and duty to examine social realities, speak about them, and point toward just solutions. In this way the perennial content of the faith, and an ancient store of ecclesial wisdom, found expression in a living doctrine — faithful to the Gospel, yet growing in response to the "new things" of every era.
Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum is a milestone in the development of the Church's social teaching. The document puts the dignity of work and of workers at the center; affirms the right to a fair wage, enough to support oneself and one's family; recognizes that the person has a fundamental value taking precedence over capital and profit; defends private property along with its indispensable social role; values workers' associations; and proposes cooperation among the different parts of society as an alternative to the mindset of class struggle. No surprise, then, that Pius XI called it the "Magna Carta" of Christian social action. In Rerum Novarum, the Church's old wisdom about the person and about life in society took on a new form, one able to answer the industrial age — and laid down the first major systematic framework for the Social Doctrine that the following decades would develop further. Many of the historical conditions Leo XIII described have since changed, but at least two of his insights stay sharply relevant. One is the primacy of human labor over any outlook fixated on finance or productivity alone — and the corresponding attention to the people and families most exposed to exploitation. The other is the inseparable link between proclaiming the Gospel and pursuing a more just social order. Rerum Novarum still reminds us that there is no authentic evangelization that does not also reach into the structures of human society.
Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno appeared in 1931, on the fortieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, at the height of a major global economic crisis, and it marked a further step. Rather than confining itself to the "worker question," it widened the lens to the whole structure of the economic and political order. It denounces the concentration of economic power in a few hands; criticizes both unrestrained competition and collectivist schemes that crush the freedom and responsibility of the individual; strongly affirms workers' right to organize; and insists again that wages be set in proportion not only to performance but to the needs of workers and their families. Within this framework Pius XI gave systematic shape to the principle of subsidiarity — which would become one of the cornerstones of Social Doctrine, and which holds that whatever can be done by individuals, families, intermediary organizations, and local communities should not be taken over by higher authorities. Alongside this, in various other interventions — from the encyclicals Non Abbiamo Bisogno and Mit Brennender Sorge to Divini Redemptoris — he reaffirmed the social role of private property and denounced the forms of totalitarianism that degrade the dignity of the person, choke off life in society, exalt the State beyond its just value, and discriminate by race. At least three of his insights remain especially relevant now: the awareness that injustice is not only a matter of individual behavior but of economic and institutional structures; the importance of subsidiarity, which asks us to strengthen the web of associations and communities while resisting any further centralization of power; and the tie between the dignity of work, fair pay, and the genuine ability of families to live a dignified life.
In the tragic setting of the Second World War and the reconstruction that followed, the teaching of Pius XII made a significant contribution — above all in his Christmas radio messages, where he sketched the outline of an international order built on justice, peace, and the recognition of human dignity. In those messages the Pope proposed a dialogue with society grounded in an appeal to natural law: a set of objective principles that come before the interests of individuals or States, and that ought to govern both the internal life of nations and their dealings with one another. He gave a decisive role to professional associations, labor unions, and the various intermediary bodies in the economic and social order, treating these organized forms of society as an essential safeguard for civil balance and the common good. He affirmed the need for a sound rule of law to guard against the abuse of power, and recognized democracy as a means of ensuring authority is exercised properly. At the same time, he warned against any attempt to ground law in utility or in force, pointing out that an international order run on the advantage of the strongest exposes weaker peoples to oppression and corrodes trust between nations at the root. Finally, he identified deep economic imbalances between countries as one of the things that feed conflict. Three of his guidelines stay particularly significant for our own moment — marked as it is by new forms of global power and widening inequality: that law must take precedence over interests; that economic disparities are a breeding ground for tension and violence; and that we need a network of associations able to mediate between the individual and the State. These continue to give Social Doctrine criteria for reading the dynamics of globalization and pushing toward a more just and peaceful international order.

The years of the Second Vatican Council

A new phase began with Saint John XXIII, who put more weight on the global dimension of social problems and on the language of rights. In Mater et Magistra ("Mother and Teacher") he presented the Christian faith as a light able to join heaven and earth. The Church's first mission, he recalled, is to make people holy and to proclaim eternal goods — but she does not neglect the concrete needs of daily life, and she cares about every authentic human good. On the basis of this unified view of the human being, John XXIII stressed that social life needs a balance: between the initiative of citizens and groups, who are meant to organize themselves and work together, and the action of the State, which should coordinate and support without smothering individual freedom and responsibility. So he drew attention to fair pay, worker participation, and the growing gaps between countries. A few years later, in Pacem in Terris ("Peace on Earth"), he addressed, for the first time, not only the faithful but all people of good will — tying the dignity of the person organically to a set of fundamental rights and duties, and proposing a direction for society, internationally too, founded on truth, justice, love, and freedom. In our own day, marked by widespread conflict and new forms of global interdependence, several aspects of his thought stay especially significant: the universal reach of his appeal; his use of human rights as a shared framework; and his conviction that lasting peace requires institutions, and relations among peoples, inspired by the dignity of every person.
The Second Vatican Council was a turning point in how the Church understands herself in the contemporary world. In Gaudium et Spes, the Council presented the image of a Church close to humanity, engaged with the world, committed to reflecting on the concrete reality of historical situations rather than on abstractions. The text takes up the big questions — marriage and family, economic and social life, the political community, war and peace — and insists that economic and institutional structures are just only to the degree that they serve the integral development of the person and foster the responsible participation of everyone. The importance of this document lies not only in the horizons it opened for reflection, but in its method: a discernment that asks us to interpret historical change guided both by the Gospel and by human expertise. That approach shows that dialogue with the world is not a tactic for the Church but a concrete expression of her mission — because the Gospel, like leaven (the small amount of yeast that quietly works through and raises a whole batch of dough), can transform the structures of society from within and open paths toward a fuller humanity. The Declaration Dignitatis Humanae ("Of Human Dignity") belongs in the same context: here the Council recognized religious freedom as a fundamental right, grounded in human dignity and to be guaranteed by law, so that no one is forced to act against their conscience or prevented from seeking and professing the truth, privately or in public. This principle is highly relevant today, and it keeps giving Social Doctrine decisive criteria for protecting individuals and for building pluralistic, peaceful societies.
Under Saint Paul VI an understanding of peace emerged that was not just the absence of war, but something that takes shape within integral human development. In Populorum Progressio ("The Development of Peoples") he described development as a passage from less human to more human conditions of life, and understood it as a process that concerns "each person and the whole person" — every dimension of the individual, and every person without exception. That is why he could call development, understood this way, "the new name for peace": because it aims to pull up the roots of injustice and conflict and to open the chance of a more dignified life for all. The founding of the Pontifical Commission Iustitia et Pax ("Justice and Peace") should be read in the same light — an attempt to give this insight a stable form at the level of the Church and of international affairs, while keeping in view the widening gap between rich and poor countries and the need for policies that genuinely make life more humane for everyone.
In Octogesima Adveniens ("The Coming Eightieth Year"), written for the eightieth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Paul VI applied this perspective to post-industrial society — a world of urbanization, new forms of poverty, and rapid cultural change that called the future of individuals and communities into question. Even though the Gospel was proclaimed, written, and lived out in a historical and cultural setting very different from ours, Paul VI argued, its message is not "outdated." It still offers a vision of the human person, of relationships, of authority, and of the common good that can guide economic, political, and cultural choices today. The Gospel stays relevant, in other words, because it supplies criteria for telling, in ever-changing situations, what humanizes from what dehumanizes, what liberates from what oppresses. For Social Doctrine, Paul VI's most demanding legacy is exactly this: as long as there are people in the world shut out from the development that befits human dignity, the Christian community cannot rest content with a theoretical proclamation of peace. Starting from the places where people are pushed to the margins, it has to let the Gospel pass judgment on those economic and political structures which — as John Paul II would later put it — can harden into genuine "structures of sin": systems that entrench evil, not just bad individual choices. The point is that no person and no people should ever be treated as expendable in the processes of development.

The recent popes

The rich social teaching of Saint John Paul II sits at the crossroads of two things: the collapse of the great twentieth-century ideological systems, and the onset of economic globalization. His encyclical Laborem Exercens ("Through Work"), written ninety years after Rerum Novarum, opened a new line of reflection on work. It presents fair wages as the concrete test of whether the whole socioeconomic system is just — because pay reveals whether the worker is treated as a person or merely as a cost of production. Work, on his account, is not just a problem to manage or a way to earn income; it is a fundamental good for the person, a principle of economic activity, and the key to the entire social question. Through work, human beings put their freedom, creativity, and capacity for cooperation into play, and so contribute to lifting society morally and culturally. Read in that light, the various kinds of job insecurity, fragmented careers, and automation must not be judged on efficiency alone, but in relation to the dignity of the worker, the right to sufficient pay, and the genuine chance to take part in society.
In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis ("On Social Concern"), marking the twentieth anniversary of Populorum Progressio, John Paul II returned to the scourge of underdevelopment. He acknowledged how many attempts to speed the economic development of poor peoples, and to help them industrialize, had failed — noting the persistent and in fact widening gap between the world's North and South. He denounced the economic, financial, and commercial mechanisms that, run by the strongest economies, structurally favor their own interests while strangling weaker ones, and he asked that these be subjected to serious ethical scrutiny, not just technical. In this setting he understood solidarity as a concrete, shared responsibility among individuals, peoples, and nations — a kind of social friendship, or political charity, oriented toward the "civilization of love" that Paul VI had proposed.
On the centenary of Rerum Novarum, the encyclical Centesimus Annus ("The Hundredth Year") reflected on the collapse of the Soviet system and the rise of democracy and the market economy. Saint John Paul II restated Pius XII's message that the Church values democracy insofar as it guarantees the real participation of citizens, lets them choose and peacefully replace their leaders, and keeps power from being monopolized by small elites driven by particular or ideological interests. In the same way, the Church recognizes the positive potential of the market and of private initiative — but only if they stay subordinate to the moral law and are guided by solidarity, without sacrificing the most vulnerable to the logic of profit. This adds a particularly relevant legacy to Social Doctrine. The link John Paul II drew between the dignity of work, solidarity among peoples, and a critical assessment of both democracy and the market economy still gives us criteria for judging new forms of exploitation, exclusion, and the crises in political representation we now face.
In his social encyclical Caritas in Veritate ("Charity in Truth"), Pope Benedict XVI set out to reassess and broaden the idea of development from Populorum Progressio, reading it in light of globalization. Development, he held, should translate into "real growth, of benefit to everyone and genuinely sustainable" — economic progress that is truly inclusive and respects the limits of the created world. But he also insisted that, even in wealthy countries, new kinds of poverty and unprecedented forms of exclusion were emerging, while in poorer regions small minorities lived in consumerist affluence right beside dehumanizing poverty. And he observed that the new global economic and financial system, with its vast mobility of capital and means of production, had cut into the political power of States and their ability to shape economic processes. For that reason Benedict reaffirmed that economic activity cannot pretend to solve social problems simply by spreading a commercial mentality; it has to be ordered toward the common good — for which the political community carries its own irreplaceable responsibility.
Benedict XVI put charity at the center of his analysis, saying that it "is at the heart of the Church's Social Doctrine" — provided it is always joined to truth. He also noted, with concern, a tendency to deny that moral considerations have any real bearing precisely within the social, legal, political, and economic fields. The originality of his contribution is in showing that development, justice, institutions, and the market are not neutral realities but spaces where charity-in-truth has to find historical expression. This is especially relevant now, amid growing inequality, pressure in the financial markets, the environmental crisis, and a collapse of trust in politics. It amounts to an invitation: to judge every model of development by whether it can be inclusive and sustainable, to rebuild the relationship between economics and politics on the common good, and to recognize the critical and generative role that charity plays in public life.
Pope Francis's social teaching develops along the lines of Gaudium et Spes, which invites us to view history through the lens of human hopes and human vulnerabilities, and to bring them into dialogue with the Gospel. This comes through with particular clarity in Evangelii Gaudium ("The Joy of the Gospel"), where he states that the Christian message has an intrinsic social dimension and calls for a Church able to listen to the cry of the poor, of migrants, and of the victims of new forms of slavery. His insistence on a "synodal" Church — a Church that "walks together," that tries to read the signs of the times in the light of the Gospel and lets herself be evangelized by the poor with whom she shares history — belongs to the same vision. ("Synodal" comes from a Greek word for walking a road together; the idea is a Church that decides by listening and journeying in common rather than by command from the top.)
In Laudato Si' ("Praise Be to You"), Francis gave the first significant systematic treatment of the environmental crisis in a social encyclical, showing that it is not an isolated issue but the ecological face of the wider socioeconomic crisis of our time. His proposal for an integral ecology joined care for our common home to a deliberate priority for the poor, and stated firmly that "the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor" cannot be pulled apart. In that light he brought to the front the conviction that the goods of the world are meant for everyone; a critique of the technocratic paradigm that wants to reduce everything to an object to be dominated; a defense of human labor under threat from a throwaway mentality; and the need for justice across generations. Finally, he argued for a genuine dialogue between those working in politics and those working in finance, so that neither would close in on itself.
Facing the unraveling of the social fabric — a "world war being fought piecemeal," an individualistic globalization, the strain the pandemic put on the bonds of community — Francis, in Fratelli Tutti ("Brothers All"), set out to revive the dream of a humanity that chooses social friendship and universal fraternity. He proposed a culture of encounter, a "better politics" capable of seeking the common good, paths of reconciliation, and a world that secures "land, housing and work for all." Finally, in Dilexit Nos ("He Loved Us"), he showed that these large social efforts cannot be separated from a personal relationship with Christ. Turning to scripture, he reminded us that the truest answer to the love at the heart of Jesus is concrete love for our brothers and sisters — and that "there is no greater way for us to return love for love."

Reading history in the light of faith

Looking back over this historical overview, one thing is clear: the Church's Social Doctrine is not a project worked out at a desk. It is the product of a patient process, in which each pope — together with the Second Vatican Council — made a distinct contribution in light of the "new things" of his own era. Answering the challenges of their time, each one read historical change through the Gospel, drawing out different facets of a single inheritance: the dignity of the person, the value of work, the conviction that the world's goods are meant for everyone, solidarity and subsidiarity, care for the created world, and the centrality of peace and fraternity. What you get is a development that is harmonious, though not always linear — marked by shifting emphases, progressive insights, and, at times, changes in perspective that do not break with what came before but let its implications mature. If we can speak today of a shared body of principles and criteria, it is because this faith-based reading of history was never interrupted, and stayed open the whole way through to the challenges each new generation raised. It is to those great principles of Social Doctrine — the ones that guide how believers discern their way in personal and public life — that I now want to turn, so that we can grasp more fully their internal coherence and their capacity to guide our own times.

Chapter Two — Foundations and Principles of the Church's Social Doctrine

The Social Doctrine of the Church — that long, accumulating tradition of moral thinking about how we ought to live together — is a living thing, in conversation with history, with cultures, and with the sciences. And yet at its core it holds a set of unchanging truths. For that reason I think it can be treated as a form of wisdom, one still capable of guiding the lives of believers, both private and shared, today. In this second chapter I want to set out some of those foundations and principles, because they are the lens through which we can read the "new things" of our own moment — and read them, above all, in light of the inherent dignity of the human person. To protect that person in the age of artificial intelligence, I am convinced we have to think again, and carefully, about the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice. And I am equally convinced that these principles only work in harmony — that they have to be held together as a set, so that you can see how each one relates to and completes the others.
In offering these reflections, my first hope is a practical one: to help ordinary lay believers and people of goodwill rediscover that putting these principles into practice is their job — in daily life, in their families, at work, in how they show up in society. That is how a person lets the love of God take concrete form in the actual events of a life. At the same time, I want to push academic institutions and universities to take these principles up again with fresh energy, and to apply them in ways that are genuinely relevant and effective for the digital revolution we are living through. If they do, theological and philosophical inquiry can deepen and support the Church's work on the ground, and contribute to the larger task of the Church's teaching office — what the tradition calls the Magisterium — which is to enlighten people's consciences and guide their efforts to make our shared life more just and more brotherly.

The foundations of Social Doctrine

The human person: image of the Triune God

The Church's Social Doctrine takes us straight to the center of what we believe: the mystery of the living God, made known in Jesus Christ — a God who, as a communion of three Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, what the tradition calls the Trinity, or the Triune God: not three gods but one God whose very being is a relationship of love), is love itself, love-in-relationship, expressed in the mutual gift of self and in the sharing of that love with the world. As the Second Vatican Council put it, human beings are made for communion with God and "can fully discover their true selves only in sincere self-giving." Our deepest calling, on this view, is to be drawn into that same dynamic — love received, and love given away.
If the mystery of God-as-Love is the source of Social Doctrine, then its most concrete expression is the face of Jesus Christ, what Christians call the Incarnate Word — the claim that the infinite entered a single finite human life. By becoming a human being, the Son of God steps into our history and takes on a human body, carrying with him the love that binds him to the Father and the Holy Spirit. In him, as the Council says, "the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear" — because his humanity is utterly free, open to others, capable of building healthy and beautiful relationships, and given over completely as a gift. Those who believe in him take up the great work of renewal that began with his suffering, death, and resurrection, and they help to build what the tradition calls the Kingdom of God — God's reign of justice and peace, breaking into history — learning to treat every man and woman as a brother or sister, children of one Father. In this way both the message of the Gospel and the Christian life itself, moved by what we take to be the work of God's Spirit, tend to spill over into social consequences in the world.
At the heart of the Christian understanding of the person lies a great biblical claim: that men and women are created in the image and likeness of the Triune God. (The line comes from the opening of the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, where God makes humanity "in his own image.") Made for relationship, every person is planned and willed by God to enter into communion — with him, with others, and with the created world. And here is the crucial move: human dignity does not depend on a person's abilities, wealth, or station, nor on whether their choices have been right or wrong. It is a gift that comes before each person and runs deeper than each person, given by God as an expression of a love that does not fail. This is why the human person always remains, in an old phrase, "the way for the Church" — and the heart of any honest path of what the tradition calls integral human development, a phrase I will return to.

The equal dignity of all human beings

John Paul II said that "this heightened sense of the dignity of the human person and of his or her uniqueness, and of the respect due to the journey of conscience, certainly represents one of the positive achievements of modern culture." He was following a line already laid down by the Second Vatican Council, which had noticed a growing recognition of the sublime dignity of every person, of their priority over mere things, and of their universal and inviolable rights and duties. We have to make sure that this hard-won appreciation of human dignity is not quietly eroded by new ideologies or by very powerful interests in today's world. Among those ideologies, I find one especially insidious: the one that says each person must earn or justify his or her own worth — to the point of assigning more value to those who are more efficient, more effective, more productive. Follow that logic and people become a means to an end, a resource to be used and exploited, and stop being recognized as ends in themselves, never to be instrumentalized. But the value of a person does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that belong to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny them or arbitrarily curtail them.
We do not always mean the same thing by the word "dignity." Sometimes we mean moral dignity — the way a person directs his or her own choices and actions. Sometimes we mean social dignity — a person's living conditions and the concrete respect they actually receive from those around them. Sometimes we mean existential dignity — how a person perceives their own worth and the value of their life. All of these can be raised or lowered. But beneath them lies something more fundamental and more important, which the tradition calls ontological dignity. By that I mean the dignity that belongs to every human being simply because they exist — because they have been willed, created, and loved by God. (Ontological is just the philosopher's word for "having to do with the fact of being itself," as opposed to circumstance or achievement.) No sin, no failure, no humiliation, no exclusion can diminish the deep value of a life that God has willed and called into being.
The basic dignity of each person, then, is neither acquired nor earned, and it does not need to be justified to anyone. The recent declaration Dignitas Infinita — the title means "Infinite Dignity" — sums up the Church's thinking here: "Every human person possesses an infinite dignity, inalienably grounded in his or her very being, which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter." In plain terms: always, and without exception. The dignity of every human being can be called infinite, as John Paul II said, for two reasons. First, because the love of God who calls us into friendship with him is itself infinite. And second, because that love is absolutely unconditional — search as long as you like, and you will never find anything that can cancel or deny it.

The supreme value of human rights

The Church gratefully recognizes that "the movement toward the identification and proclamation of human rights is one of the most significant attempts to respond effectively to the inescapable demands of human dignity." John Paul II called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, proclaimed by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, one of the highest expressions of the human conscience of our time — "a milestone on the long and difficult path of the human race." Which is why, seen from a Christian point of view, human rights are not some external add-on to the person. They are an expression of an intrinsic dignity, one the international community is called to protect and to advance.
Human rights are inviolable, precisely because they are "inherent in the human person and in human dignity." That is what makes them universal and inalienable — they cannot be transferred away or revoked. And because they rest on the shared dignity of every man and woman, they have teeth: real practical consequences and real legal effects. For, as the tradition puts it, "it would be vain to proclaim human rights if, at the same time, everything were not done to ensure the duty of respecting them — respect by all, in all places, and for all." First among these is the right to life, from conception to its natural end, without which no other right can even be exercised. When that foundational right is denied — and the encyclical names induced abortion, the killing of the innocent, and euthanasia — the Church judges these to be gravely wrong choices.
Looking honestly at our own moment, we cannot ignore that the protection of human rights faces two especially serious dangers. The first is that rights get declared in a purely formal way — proclaimed on paper — while technological progress marches on alongside violations of human dignity, some hidden, some out in the open. The second danger, which is actually the root of the first, is that we lose the ability to say why these rights are universal at all, because we have abandoned, in Pope Francis's words, "the search for the solid foundations sustaining our decisions and our laws." Francis warned us not to underestimate this. His point was that when reason takes human nature seriously and examines it carefully, it can in fact discover values that hold for everyone, because they flow from what human beings are. Give up that inquiry, and it becomes entirely conceivable that rights we treat as untouchable today could one day be questioned or denied by whoever holds power — perhaps after extracting only the appearance of consent from populations that have been frightened or manipulated.
Alongside a deeper awareness of the worth of each person and their rights, recognition of the rights of minorities has also grown. And yet there is still a long way to go before the rights of a great many people — namely, women — are genuinely and equally guaranteed everywhere in the world. It remains a fact that "doubly poor are those women who endure situations of exclusion, mistreatment, and violence, since they are frequently less able to defend their rights." So it is not enough to simply assert that men and women have equal dignity and rights. That equality has to show up in concrete decisions: in laws, in access to work, in education, in social and political responsibility, in whether a society actually listens to and values what women contribute. As long as that gap persists, we cannot honestly claim that society fully recognizes that women share the same dignity as men.
What matters, in the end, is individuals — each and every person, together with their families. Social movements, collective ideologies, grand political proclamations made in the name of "the people": all of it is worth nothing unless it leads to the flourishing of actual persons, men and women, with their inalienable rights. By the same logic, it is not enough to celebrate individual freedom or private enterprise while allowing a multitude of people to go on living without decent work, without protections, without access to the basics.

The principles of Social Doctrine

The principle of the common good

To recognize that every man and woman has an inalienable dignity, along with rights that no human power may betray or nullify, is to take on an obligation: to shape how we live together — our economics, our politics, the very layout of our cities — accordingly. And from that obligation comes the first major principle of Social Doctrine I want to highlight: the common good. You can think of it as the social expression of the dignity we recognize in each person. When Benedict XVI listed the non-negotiable values the Church must always defend, he counted among them "the promotion of the common good." For a Christian, stepping beyond the narrow walls of self-interest and committing oneself, within the limits of one's ability, to the common good is exactly that kind of non-negotiable — as is the defense of life itself.
The Second Vatican Council defined the common good as "the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily." That gives us a useful starting point, but only a starting point — because the common good cannot be reduced to a checklist of conditions or institutions. It is not the sum of individual benefits, nor the overlap of everyone's private interests. It is a greater good, one that belongs to everyone, and it can only be achieved, nurtured, and protected by our acting together. Social action reaches its fullness, you might say, when it is aimed at this shared good — just as a person's moral action finds its fulfillment in choosing the true good.
In this sense the whole really is "greater than the sum of its parts," and precisely because of that, "the mere sum of individual interests is not capable of generating a better world for the whole human family." It is an illusion to think that chasing your own progress, without any care for others, somehow adds up to the good of all. That view misses the distinct, irreducible value of the common good — which is the product of an interdependence that builds a network of social good, a network that grows and reaches back to touch people's lives. The common good is, in this sense, a "plus": something that emerges from interaction and mutual influence, from the way actions, initiatives, efforts, and decisions connect to one another. Add up all the individual goods you like, and you still cannot account for that "plus" — the surplus that goes beyond them and, at the same time, enriches every one of them.
It is the pursuit of the common good that brings a people to life — not a people as a heap of individuals, but as a living reality in which men and women come to recognize that they are bound together and jointly responsible for the res publica, the public thing, the shared concern. Each person helps to build up that people through, in Francis's phrase, "a slow and arduous effort calling for a desire for integration and a willingness to achieve this through the growth of a peaceful and multifaceted culture of encounter." Working together for the common good means sharing a vision. Of course there are deep ideological and practical differences among people, competing interests, frequent disagreements — but none of that makes it impossible to sit down and reach a set of basic agreements, a shared vision solid enough that everyone can move forward on it together.
It is the State's job to secure the cohesion, the unity, and the proper ordering of civil society, so that the common good can be pursued with everyone contributing. Concretely, that means public authorities carry the delicate duty of "harmonizing the different sectoral interests with the requirements of justice" — striking a balance between particular interests and the common good, without abandoning the most vulnerable along the way. When politics gives up the long view and shrinks into short-term calculation or sterile polarization, the language of the common good loses its credibility — and, at the same time, social inequalities and divisions widen.
The same holds at the level of international politics. As the gap between nations grows, a mindset of confrontation and aggression takes hold, and the difficult road toward a more united and brotherly world suffers fresh and painful setbacks. In a climate like that, talk of a shared journey toward fairer development for the whole human family "sounds like madness." And yet we must not lose hope. I invite everyone to imagine new ways of cooperating, and more effective international institutions, capable of safeguarding the global common good without trampling the legitimate diversity of peoples and nations. The common good can never be pursued at the expense of a people's right to exist, to keep its own identity, and to bring its own distinctive gifts to the family of nations. And any attempt, any plan, to eliminate or subjugate a nation is gravely immoral, and therefore unacceptable.

The principle of the universal destination of goods

"Among the numerous implications of the common good, immediate significance is taken on by the principle of the universal destination of goods." First and foremost, this principle reminds us that the goods of the earth — soil, water, air, natural resources — are given by God to the entire human family, to sustain the lives of all, and that every person has an inherent right to use them, both now and in the future. As John Paul II put it, "God gave the earth to the whole human race for the sustenance of all its members, without excluding or favoring anyone." It follows that "it is not in accordance with God's plan to use this gift in such a way that its benefits accrue solely to a select few." And today we are called to see that this universal destination applies not only to material goods, but to immaterial and cultural goods as well.
There is, of course, a right to private property, with its own real meaning and purpose — but it is always subordinate to the universal destination of goods. For John Paul II this subordination is the golden rule of social conduct, the "first principle of the whole ethical and social order." In the Church's tradition, property has been understood as a way of protecting and managing goods so that they better serve the common good. Since, as he insisted, "the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable," property's social function is not some optional theological opinion — it is settled Church teaching, present already in scripture and in the writings of the early Christian thinkers, the Church Fathers. This is why Francis reminded us that solidarity, lived out to the full, also means "to restore to the poor what belongs to them."
Today, among the goods meant for everyone, we have to include new kinds of property: patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure, and data. In a world where the wealth of nations rests more and more on knowledge and technology, when these goods stay concentrated in the hands of a few — with no adequate way to share them or grant access — a new imbalance opens up, one that runs directly against the universal destination of goods. And that imbalance widens the gap between the included and the excluded, between those who can take part in the digital revolution and those left at the margins. Beyond that, care for our shared home and our responsibility toward the poor and toward future generations demand that the use of creation's goods — and of the new possibilities technology opens up — be regulated so as to respect the environment, avoid waste, and prevent new forms of exploitation.

The principle of subsidiarity

The principle of subsidiarity flows from the very same understanding of the person that has guided everything we have said about dignity and the common good. If every woman and man is called to take ownership of their own life and to help shape society, then social institutions have to respect and support that responsibility rather than swallow it. Social Doctrine defines subsidiarity as the principle that the role of individuals, families, local communities, and intermediate organizations should not be taken over by higher-level authorities. (The name comes from the Latin subsidium, help or support: the higher level exists to assist the lower, not to replace it.) More than that: higher-level institutions are obliged to recognize, protect, and promote the freedom and creativity of the smaller bodies beneath them, coordinating their contributions so they can actually cooperate, effectively, for the common good.
From Leo XIII on — from the very beginnings of modern social teaching — the Church has insisted that neither the individual nor the family should be absorbed by the State, but should be left free to act, as far as possible, so long as the common good is not harmed. John Paul II took up this view and developed it, noting that the political community exists to serve civil society, and that the State must protect the common good and step in when necessary — but without permanently supplanting the responsibilities of intermediate organizations and social institutions. So subsidiarity is not a license for the State to disengage; it is a guide for how the State should act. Public intervention is in fact necessary, precisely so that all the actors in society can carry out their mission without being stifled. It is the political community's job to create the conditions in which individuals, families, associations, and intermediate organizations can fulfill their mission — not to replace them, and not to demote them to mere helpers carrying out someone else's plan.
This principle pushes us past any paternalistic or purely welfare-style way of running social life, and toward a culture of shared responsibility: a State that values the initiative of its citizens, and a civil society able to forge bonds and mobilize energy in service of the common good. Under subsidiarity, decisions get made at the level closest to the people affected — which builds up community life and keeps people from being handed decisions that have already been made for them. That is how people actually participate in the decisions that shape their lives. When families, associations, local communities, volunteer groups, and what we now call the "third sector" are recognized and supported, social life becomes more accessible, services line up better with real needs, and the solutions that emerge are more creative and more respectful of each person's dignity.
Subsidiarity applies with particular force in the digital revolution. Here the "highest level" is not the State at all — it is the major economic and technological actors who exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life. That level, which monopolizes the expertise, the data, and the decision-making authority, is made up of companies and platforms that set the terms of access, the rules of visibility, the forms of interaction, even people's economic opportunities. Subsidiarity demands that these processes not be imposed from on high in an opaque, one-sided way, but be steered toward the common good with transparency, accountability, and meaningful participation — including independent oversight, transparency about the algorithms themselves, equitable access to data, and real avenues for recourse.
In this setting, States and transnational institutions are called to guarantee fair rules and effective safeguards, so that local communities, intermediate organizations, schools, universities, religious institutions, and associations have a voice — so they can take part in weighing the choices that shape daily life: employment, access to services, the handling of data, the design of digital environments. When it comes to decisions about economic flows and digital platforms, and about the governance of data and algorithms, we cannot let a handful of actors dictate those processes on their own. We have to build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good.

The principle of solidarity

Having considered the common good and subsidiarity, I want now to reflect on the principle of solidarity. It grows out of a vision of the human person that comes from faith: that every human being is created in the image of God and is woven into a web of relationships binding them to others, to particular peoples, and to creation itself. Paul VI observed that the obligations of solidarity, justice, and charity are rooted in the bonds of brotherhood — human and, beyond that, supernatural — that unite individuals and peoples. Brotherhood, on this view, is not just a believer's aspiration; it is a social and political reality, something to be made real in the choices and undertakings of a community. Solidarity, then, is the concrete recognition that the future of each one of us is bound up with the future of all — that, in Francis's words, "no one is saved alone." Here you can see exactly how solidarity and subsidiarity hang together. Subsidiarity without solidarity collapses into the mere protection of particular interests; solidarity without subsidiarity degenerates into a kind of welfare that does nothing to build responsibility. And this interconnection reaches into the responsibility of genuine participation, too. Solidarity shows itself when each person — alone and together with others — takes part in the life of the community: staying informed, engaging with others, making their voice heard, contributing to public decisions, while also shouldering real responsibility, so that the common good is reached through shared decision-making.
In many areas we already live in a kind of "de facto solidarity," whether we chose it or not, because our lives are simply intertwined — digital networks connect people and communities across the world in real time, and global economies and communications mean that what happens in one place ripples out everywhere. But that web of relationships only amounts to solidarity in the full sense of the word when it becomes a conscious choice. Faith invites us to read this entangled reality as a call: we are not merely neighbors to one another, we are entrusted to one another, so that each of us takes responsibility, as best we can, for the lives and the wounds of our brothers and sisters. Solidarity begins exactly at the moment we decide not to stay indifferent to what happens to our neighbor — and instead to turn those unavoidable bonds, economic and cultural and technological, into channels of sharing, cooperation, and mutual care, embracing what Francis calls "thinking and acting in terms of community."
The Church's teaching stresses that solidarity is both a principle and a virtue. As a principle, it names the objective order of relationships among individuals, groups, and peoples, and points to the fact of interdependence — that the good of each depends on the good of all. As a virtue, it demands a "firm and persevering determination" to work for the common good, with particular attention to those most in need. Francis described solidarity as "a way of making history," one that builds communities rather than mere masses of individuals. And so it asks something of us: a modest and shared way of life, a willingness to forgo immediate benefits in order to open up opportunities for others down the line, and the readiness to question our own habits and privileges — including those tied up with digital consumption and the use of technology — whenever they keep others from living with dignity.
In a world of ever-tighter connections between people, communities, and nations, solidarity also takes on a global dimension. Benedict XVI pressed hard on the link between development, justice, and our responsibility to future generations: authentic development, he argued, requires solidarity and intergenerational justice, along with an awareness of the bonds that tie us to the natural environment. Today that responsibility extends to digital and information infrastructure as well. Like the natural environment, the "digital ecosystem" can be preserved or strip-mined, shared or monopolized. Solidarity demands that decisions about data, algorithms, platforms, and artificial intelligence weigh not just the immediate gain for a few, but the impact on all peoples — and on the generations that come after us.

The principle of social justice

For the Christian community, social justice is a concrete way of following Jesus and staying faithful to the Gospel. In the New Testament — the part of the Bible that recounts the life and teaching of Jesus and the first generation of his followers — Jesus announces "good news to the poor" and identifies himself with the lowly, the sick, the imprisoned, and the stranger. (The reference is to a scene in the Gospel of Matthew in which Jesus says that whatever is done to the least of these is done to him.) In doing so he teaches us that justice is born from, and completed in, brotherhood — because how we approach and relate to the least among us turns out to be, concretely, the measure of our relationship with God and with one another. But justice is not only about how individuals behave; it is also about how the structures of a society are conceived and built. On this point the Second Vatican Council reminds us that every institution exists to serve the human person and their dignity. Social justice, then, is the capacity of a social, economic, and political order to let everyone — and the weakest above all — live a genuinely dignified life, with no one left behind.
Recent Church teaching has insisted that social justice begins with the least among us. John Paul II spoke of a preferential option for the poor that ought to guide both personal and societal choices, while Francis denounced a "throwaway culture" that keeps generating new forms of exclusion. From this angle, social justice requires that we look first at individuals and communities starting from the most vulnerable: the poor, migrants, refugees, the internally displaced, the victims of violence, and those living on the geographic or existential margins.
The idea of "social justice" helps us see that injustice does not come only from the wrong choices of individuals — it also comes from structures, mechanisms, and economic and cultural systems that produce inequality almost automatically. John Paul II spoke in this connection of structures of sin: arrangements that run against God's will, and that call for both personal and social conversion to undo. (The phrase is worth dwelling on — it names evil that has been built into systems, not just into individual hearts.) Seen this way, justice is not merely about distributing resources more fairly or correcting present injustices; it also takes on a restorative dimension. It aims to mend broken bonds and to bring back in those who have been shut out, reckoning honestly with the wounds inflicted by injustice — wars, colonialism, racial and gender discrimination, violence against whole peoples, exploitation. In practice this can mean restoring dignity and a voice to those who were ignored, fostering processes of healing for a community's memory, opposing discriminatory laws and practices, and giving concrete support to those who still carry the consequences of wrongs done in the past.
In our day, social justice also has to contend with the environment that digital technologies have created. The spread of global networks, platforms, and artificial intelligence systems is changing how we get information, how we communicate, how we reach the services we depend on. Justice demands that we head off new forms of exclusion and lost freedom: individuals and whole peoples blocked from or denied access to basic technologies; communities subjected to invasive surveillance; social groups penalized by opaque algorithms that entrench prejudice and discrimination. In the digital age, a just social order guarantees everyone equal access to opportunity, protects the youngest and weakest members of society, fights hate and disinformation, and brings the use of data and technology under public oversight — so that the guiding principle is not profit alone, but the dignity of every person and the common good of all.
A litmus test for social justice today is how we treat migrants, refugees, and those forced to move by poverty, violence, climate change, and environmental disaster. The way a society treats them reveals whether its sense of justice is driven by fear or by the spirit of brotherhood. Francis urged us to see migrants not as a problem to be managed but as a living image of the People of God on the move. They are people — with dignity, with resources, with dreams — who have a right to be treated with respect and to ask to become active members of the societies that take them in. Social justice here involves at least two complementary commitments. On one side, protecting the rightful hopes of those forced to leave: safe and legal routes, dignified conditions of reception, real pathways to integration. On the other, defending the right to remain in one's homeland in peace and security — which means addressing the root causes that drive people to migrate in the first place, including economic injustice and the climate crisis. When both sets of rights are honored, migration can become an occasion for encounter and mutual enrichment among peoples, rather than a threat.

Integral human development

In his encyclical Populorum Progressio — "On the Development of Peoples" — Paul VI argued that development is only authentic if it is integral: that is, if it can "foster the development of each man and of the whole man." In the decades since, the Church's Social Doctrine has returned to that phrase again and again, using it to spell out the practical ways in which the noble principles — dignity, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, social justice — actually get lived out. By "integral human development" we mean a process in which the growth of individuals and of peoples touches every dimension of existence, and opens the future to the generations that will follow.
For individuals and for nations alike, development is both a duty and a right. Certain minimum conditions are needed for every person and every people to flourish in keeping with their dignity, rather than being held in dependence or shut out from the goods they need. Development is truly human when it puts people at the center instead of the accumulation of wealth, and when it concerns peoples and not just individuals. Justice demands that we recognize the rights of societies and the rights of peoples — and that we take on a responsibility toward future generations. Development is not truly human if it increases consumption for some while pushing the costs and burdens onto others, or if it relegates whole regions to subordinate roles, blocking them from realizing their full potential. It is integral only when it reaches beyond the economic sphere to lift the quality of life in its spiritual, cultural, moral, and relational dimensions — all while respecting our shared home, the diversity of peoples, and their ways of life.
Today the idea of integral human development is the benchmark we use to evaluate what the tradition has come to call integral ecology, which has become an indispensable part of the Church's Social Doctrine. (The thought is that you cannot separate justice toward people from care for the planet they live on — they are one problem, not two.) The quality of any development is measured precisely by its ability to hold those together: justice toward people and care for our common home, dignified living conditions, access to the goods people need, just social relations, the protection of creation, and consideration for those who come after us. It follows that true progress is never the kind that raises the well-being of some by degrading ecosystems, dumping the costs on the most disadvantaged communities, or compromising the living conditions of the generations to follow.
Seen in this light, integral human development is the framework through which we can read the changes of our time, including those driven by the digital revolution. Technological innovations, artificial intelligence among them, are not neutral: they can foster participation and justice, or they can deepen inequality, control, and exclusion. Which is why they have to be evaluated by asking one crucial question: Do they genuinely help individuals and peoples become more human and more brotherly, while respecting our common home and future generations? It is here that the principles of Social Doctrine stop being abstract and turn into concrete criteria for discernment — criteria for the very questions I will take up in the chapters that follow.

An examen for the Church

In closing this chapter, I want to touch on something that is especially close to my heart. Social Doctrine is not only a message addressed outward, to society. It is also an examination of conscience for the Church herself — a household and a school of communion that is always obliged to make sure these principles are applied first within its own structures. (An examen, in the spiritual tradition, is a deliberate, honest review of one's own conduct.) Within the Church, the common good takes the shape of what is called a synodal way of proceeding — synod meaning, roughly, walking the road together — a shared mission in service of the Kingdom. The Church is, as the recent Synod put it, the "communitarian and historical subject of synodality and mission." That requires close attention to how decisions are made and how responsibility is exercised. The Synod's Final Document names a culture of transparency, accountability, and evaluation as key practices for genuine missionary transformation.
With that in mind, subsidiarity becomes a guiding principle for how the Church is governed and how its pastoral life is led. It means recognizing and supporting the faithful and the intermediate bodies within the Church as they carry out their responsibilities — valuing people's gifts and skills, and refusing any paternalism that smothers the freedom the Gospel is supposed to set loose. In practice, the participation of ordinary baptized members in decision-making, and their shared responsibility for the Church's mission, become real only through participatory bodies that are genuine and not merely nominal.
For the Christian community, solidarity has its source in the mystery of Christ and is fed by the Eucharist — the shared bread and wine at the center of Christian worship, taken as the body of Christ. Solidarity rises out of a communion in faith and in the sacraments: baptism and confirmation (the rites of initiation into the Christian community) unite us in Christ, so that we become, in the old biblical phrases, "one Body and one Spirit," "one heart and one soul." The Eucharist, which is the sacrament of unity, deepens our belonging to that one Body and teaches us how to share. The different sensibilities present in the Church, and the strong convictions that drive each person, are a source of richness — but only if they stay anchored in the certainty that unity is, at once, a gift we have received and a responsibility we have to live up to.
To live out justice within the Church means purifying its relationships and structures of the distortions that breed inequality, secrecy, and the abuse of power. Here, listening to the victims of abuse — spiritual, economic, institutional, sexual, abuses of power and of conscience — is an integral part of any honest journey toward justice, a journey that includes acknowledging the harm done, making just reparation, and taking real steps so that it does not happen again. Every power within the Church exists to serve communion and mission; all authority exists to serve the People of God. That ministry of service shows itself not only in worship and in the sacraments, and not only in adopting a synodal style, but in the concrete sharing of goods. Following the example of the earliest Christians, the Church's resources need to be shared so that "no one among us may be in need" — a line that echoes a description, in the Acts of the Apostles, of the first community holding everything in common — and so that the way those resources are managed actually supports the mission of bringing the Gospel to the poorest. Regular reviews of how ministerial responsibilities are being exercised should be encouraged — not as verdicts on individuals, but as tools for learning and correction, oriented toward mission. Only insofar as we stay open to what we take to be the work of God's Spirit will these principles of Social Doctrine truly take flesh in the life of the Church. And only then will the Church be able to bear credible witness to the wider world that seeking the common good together — with shared responsibility and with brotherhood — is not a utopia, but a real possibility.

Chapter Three — Technology and Dominance: The Grandeur of Humanity in Light of the Promises of AI

Having laid out the principles that illuminate this tradition of moral thinking, I want now to focus on a few of the challenges that most deeply shape how we live today. The biblical image that runs through these reflections is a construction project. On one side stands the Tower of Babel — the people in the Book of Genesis who tried to build a tower to the sky and ended up scattered and unable to understand each other — where collective effort follows a plan that dominates and, in the end, dehumanizes. On the other side stand the ruins of Jerusalem, rebuilt section by section under Nehemiah as a project of shared responsibility (Nehemiah, you will recall, was the exile who returned to his ruined city, assigned each family its own stretch of wall, and rebuilt relationships before he rebuilt with stone). We are asked to look hard at the great "construction sites" of our era and to ask the plain question: What are we building? As technological development rapidly remakes our languages, our relationships, our institutions, and our forms of power, those of us who believe both must and can choose which projects to work on, and in what manner — so as to protect and honor the grandeur of being human, which I take to be a gift we were handed rather than something we earned. This is a choice not only about our future but about our present, because artificial intelligence and the other emerging technologies are already part of our daily lives.
I am convinced that the concrete shape of how we live out our relationships in the light of the Gospel is not fixed once and for all; it is a task handed down, generation by generation, to the Christian community. Guided by what we take to be the work of God's Spirit in history, the Church lets herself be enlightened by scripture, reads the signs of the times, and creatively looks for new ways to make the relationships between peoples and nations conform ever more closely to the demands of the Kingdom of God — the just and reconciled order God intends for the world. For that reason I urge everyone in the Church not to be frightened by the challenges in front of us, but to listen to one another and to take up, without flinching, the work of building a more humane and more fraternal society.

The technocratic paradigm and the new digital power

In his encyclical Laudato Si', Pope Francis named and condemned the growing dominance of what he called the "technocratic paradigm" in our globalized world: the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control, and profit — and nothing else — decide our personal, social, and economic choices. This makes one thing clear. Technology is not simply a tool. When it becomes the standard by which everything else is measured, it begins to dictate what counts and what can be thrown away, reducing the natural world to raw material for exploitation and human beings to interchangeable parts in a system tuned for ever greater efficiency.
This way of thinking has spread fast in recent years, driven in part by the expansion of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, nanotechnology, robotics, and biotechnology. In themselves, these advances can do enormous good for the full development of the person and for the care of our shared home. But precisely because they are so powerful, they can also accelerate the spread of the technocratic paradigm — and so they demand a new framework, one that is at once spiritual, ethical, and political. More power does not automatically mean anything better. On this point the words of the philosopher Romano Guardini still hold: modern man, he wrote, "has not been trained to use power well."
The danger that humanity might end up the victim of its own achievements was seen clearly by Pope Paul VI, who warned that "the most extraordinary scientific progress, the most astounding technical feats and the most amazing economic growth, unless accompanied by authentic moral and social progress, will in the long run go against man." This is why technological progress — valuable in itself — calls for careful judgment about the picture of the human person that guides it and the ends it serves. If our technology advances while our ethics and our social arrangements do not, the result can be an increase in means with no growth in humanity: "having more" without "being more." In that scenario there is a real risk that people will come to be evaluated chiefly by the outputs they produce.
Here we have to recognize another crucial fact, one I have touched on already. In much of the digital world, control over the platforms, the infrastructure, the data, and the computing power does not sit with governments but with a handful of large economic and technological actors. These actors effectively set the terms of access, determine the rules of who gets seen, and shape the very possibility of taking part. When that kind of power is concentrated in a few hands, it tends to grow opaque and to slip outside public oversight — which raises the risk of distorted forms of development that breed new dependencies, new exclusions, new manipulations, and new inequalities.
Faced with this concentration of power in the digital realm, the criteria we have for judgment and discernment in this genuinely new situation are the principles of the Church's social teaching: the inviolable dignity of the human person; the common good; the conviction that the goods of the world are meant for everyone; subsidiarity (the idea that decisions belong, wherever possible, with the smallest competent community closest to the matter at hand); solidarity; and social justice. Together these force a question: Does the power of our digital infrastructures and algorithms actually foster participation and responsibility, protect the vulnerable, guarantee fair access to opportunity, and stay aimed at the good of all? With that standard in hand, we can now look more closely at what artificial intelligence is, what it makes possible, and what it puts at risk.

Artificial intelligence

I do not intend to offer a full treatment of artificial intelligence here, or to survey the large literature on it; serious work already exists, including inside the Church. I will limit myself to recalling a few essentials for the kind of moral and social discernment that keeps the human person first — so that it remains human intelligence, with its conscience and its freedom, that steers these technical innovations and decides, responsibly, how and how far they are used.
Two things are worth saying up front. First, almost anything one asserts about AI is at risk of going stale quickly, given the remarkable speed at which these systems are advancing. Second, all of us — including the people who build them — understand only in part how they actually work. Today's AI systems are, in a real sense, more "cultivated" than "built": their developers do not hand-design every detail but instead create a framework inside which the intelligence "grows." As a result, some of the most basic scientific questions about them — what their internal representations are, what computations they are really performing — remain, for now, unanswered. Out of this comes an urgent twofold task: on one side, to deepen the scientific research; on the other, to exercise moral and spiritual discernment.
No single, comprehensive definition of AI is possible. What can be said is that we must resist the mistake of equating this kind of "intelligence" with human intelligence. These systems merely imitate certain functions of the human mind. In doing so they often outrun us in speed and raw computational capacity, and they deliver concrete benefits in many fields. But that power is entirely a matter of processing data. So-called artificial intelligences do not have experiences; they have no body; they feel neither joy nor pain; they do not mature through relationships; and they do not know from the inside what love, work, friendship, or responsibility are. Nor do they have a moral conscience — they do not weigh good and evil, do not grasp the ultimate meaning of a situation, and do not bear responsibility for what follows. They can imitate language, behavior, and analytical skill, and even simulate empathy and understanding, but they do not understand what they produce, because they lack the emotional, relational, and spiritual vantage point through which a human being grows in wisdom. Even when we describe these tools as able to "learn," the way they do it is unlike a person's. It is not the experience of someone who lets themselves be shaped by life and grows over time through choices, mistakes, forgiveness, and faithfulness. It is, rather, a form of statistical adaptation from data and feedback — which can be extraordinarily effective, but which carries no inner growth.

A valuable tool that demands vigilance

With all that said, we can better understand both why AI can be a valuable tool and why it calls for a measured, watchful approach. Its private use has expanded dramatically in recent years, prompting more and more reflection on the opportunities it offers and on the risks of its rapid spread. In personal use, three features deserve real attention: how easily it produces results, the impression it gives of objectivity, and its simulation of human conversation. The speed and ease with which one can now reach information, complex analyses, media, and practical help undoubtedly make life easier. But they can also encourage overreliance and a hunger for ready-made answers, and they can erode our own creativity and judgment. The apparent objectivity of these systems' responses and suggestions can lead us to forget that they reflect the cultural assumptions of the people who designed and trained them — with all their strengths and all their blind spots. The artificial imitation of warm human communication — words of advice, of empathy, of friendship, even of love — can be engaging and at times genuinely useful. For a less discerning user, though, it can also mislead, creating the illusion of a relationship with a real person on the other side. When words are only simulated, they do not build real relationships, only the appearance of them. The artificial imitation of care or support becomes especially dangerous when it enters lives where real relationships and emotional bonds are missing. Here the danger is not so much that someone might believe they are talking to another human being, but that they might slowly lose the very desire to form genuine human connection at all.
Widening the lens to AI's use across society, we find it now embedded in decision-making in many sectors and at many levels — in communication, in management, in control. The gains in efficiency, and the potential to improve certain services, are real. But adopting these systems fast and uncritically exposes us to a range of risks, including the temptation to ignore their environmental cost. Current AI systems consume enormous amounts of energy and water, contribute significantly to carbon emissions, and place heavy demands on natural resources. As their complexity grows — especially with the large language models — so does their appetite for computing power and storage, which in turn requires a sprawling network of machines, cables, data centers, and energy-hungry infrastructure. For that reason it is essential to develop more sustainable technical solutions that cut the environmental footprint and help protect our shared home.

Responsibility, transparency, and the governance of AI

The use of AI is never a purely technical matter. The moment it enters processes that affect people's lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, standing, and freedom. Important and sensitive decisions — about a job, a loan, access to public services, even a person's reputation — risk being handed over wholesale to automated systems that know nothing of "compassion, mercy, forgiveness, and above all, the hope that people are able to change," and that can therefore manufacture new forms of exclusion. Some harmful uses are obvious, like the manipulation of information or the violation of privacy. But there is a subtler danger too: when AI systems present themselves as neutral and objective, they end up reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or the ideological bias of the people who designed and built them.
To hand an algorithm, in practice, the power to decide who is worthy and who is not — with no one bearing responsibility for the verdict — is to hand over the job of redrawing the boundaries of what a human life is allowed to be. In that handover, something is lost beyond empathy for the excluded (empathy, after all, can be simulated): political responsibility itself is lost. The exclusion of the vulnerable gets dressed up in a veneer of neutrality and objectivity, against which it becomes very hard to object. And so injustice slips past unnoticed, and compassion, mercy, and forgiveness — understood not as feelings to be performed but as real political acts — gradually disappear from view.
From this follows a simple but forceful conclusion: we cannot treat AI as morally neutral. Every technical tool already embodies choices and priorities — through what it measures, what it ignores, what it optimizes for, and how it sorts people and situations. If a system is designed or used in a way that treats some lives as worth less, or that excludes them with no avenue of appeal, then it is not merely a tool "to be used well," because it has already built in criteria that contradict the inviolable dignity of the person. So ethical discernment cannot stop at asking whether we are using a system for good ends or bad ones. It has to examine how the system is designed in the first place, and what vision of the human person and of society is baked into the data and the models that drive it.
For AI to respect human dignity and genuinely serve the common good, responsibility has to be clearly assigned at every stage — from the people who design and develop these systems to the people who use them and lean on them for real decisions. In many cases, though, the internal path from input to output stays opaque, which makes it harder to assign blame and harder to fix errors. This is where accountability becomes essential: the ability to identify who must "account" for a decision — justify it, monitor it, and, when it goes wrong, challenge it and repair the harm.
To ask for prudence, rigorous evaluation, and even, at times, a slower pace in adopting AI is not to oppose progress. It is to take responsible care of the human family. The need is all the more pressing because of the chronic mismatch between the speed of technological growth and the much slower pace at which our awareness, our norms, our safeguards, and our institutions catch up. It is not enough to invoke "ethics" in the abstract. What is required is robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users, and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility. Otherwise change will be governed by technocratic logic alone, presented as necessary and inevitable, and the rules will end up being set by whoever controls the data, the infrastructure, and the computing power.
We cannot rest content with calls to moralize the machines — the so-called "alignment" of AI with human values — without also having the courage to insist on a further condition: that the ethical frameworks involved be open to public debate and subjected to shared standards of social justice. Otherwise, those who control AI will simply impose their own moral vision, and it will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems. A more moral AI is not enough if its morality is decided by a few. What we need is a more active political engagement — one capable of slowing things down when everything is speeding up, and of preserving the room for communities to keep participating and keep asking questions.
In fact, as with every major technological shift, AI tends to amplify the power of those who already hold the economic resources, the expertise, and the access to data. Measured against the common good and against the conviction that the goods of the world are meant for everyone, this is cause for serious concern, because small but enormously influential groups can shape what information and what products people see, sway democratic processes, and bend economic dynamics in their own favor — eroding social justice and solidarity among peoples. For this reason it is essential that the use of AI, especially where it touches public goods and fundamental rights, be governed by clear criteria and effective oversight, rooted in participation and subsidiarity. Communities and the institutions that stand between the individual and the state must not be reduced to passive recipients of decisions made somewhere else; they have to be able to take part in the discernment and the oversight. And the ownership of data cannot be left entirely in private hands; it has to be properly regulated. Data is the product of countless contributors, and it should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a chosen few. We need to think creatively about how to manage data as a common or shared good, in a spirit of participation — much as John Paul II already suggested in his thinking about collective goods.
The principles of the Church's social teaching give us a framework for understanding this new reality. In a world where data, computing resources, and regulatory influence remain in a few hands, to speak of the common good means exposing this new form of epistemic, economic, and political asymmetry and naming the new monopolies of AI for what they are. To speak of the universal destination of goods means finding ways to ensure that both the technologies and the education needed to use them are genuinely available to all. To speak of subsidiarity means protecting the ability of communities to make choices and corrections, rather than confining them to rubber-stamping standards already set somewhere else. To speak of solidarity means acknowledging the hidden, often exploited workers who keep these algorithmic systems running. To speak of justice requires us to interrogate the global distribution of power that decides who actually gets to train these models and who is merely subjected to them. It means recognizing, too, that social justice is not only a goal to be defended after a technology is deployed; it is a condition that must shape the design of the technology from the very start.
Finally, I want to use a word that is close to my heart: "to disarm." To disarm AI means freeing it from the mindset of "armed" competition — a competition that today is not confined to the military, but is also economic and cognitive. It is the race for ever more powerful algorithms and ever larger datasets, driven by the hunger for geopolitical or commercial dominance. To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to rule. To disarm does not mean rejecting technology; it means stopping technology from dominating us. It means freeing it from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate — making it human-friendly, and returning it to the plurality of human cultures and ways of life. Our task today is not only ethical or technical. It is ecological in the deepest sense, because it concerns a new dimension of our shared home. AI is already an environment we are immersed in, as well as a force we have to reckon with. For this reason, regulating it is not enough. It must be disarmed: made welcoming and made accessible.
I want to address a special word to the people who build artificial intelligence. In one sense, technological innovation can be a way of taking part in the divine act of creation itself. Developers therefore carry a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, because every design choice reflects some vision of what a human being is. Just as the maker of a work of art or literature must reckon with the values it carries, so developers are called to embed values in their work with real seriousness — with transparency, with responsibility toward the communities their work affects, and with careful attention to making sure that what they are cultivating is a genuine good.

What must not be lost

Having considered responsibility and the governance of AI, we have to return to the central question: what does it mean to safeguard our humanity? The risk runs deeper than the misuse of particular technologies. More gravely, the pervasive technocratic paradigm we are immersed in — amplified now by the digital revolution and by AI — threatens to normalize an anti-human vision of life. In that vision, the fullness of life gets equated with having more, with reducing weakness, with eliminating uncertainty, with exerting total control. When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of worth, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimized rather than as persons made for relationship and communion.
The truth is that elevating any single dimension of human existence into an absolute is always a mistake. Disorder does not come only from scarcity; even unchecked growth can produce its own kind of poverty. In an ecosystem, balance breaks down when one species expands at the expense of the rest; in a human life, something similar happens when one faculty claims to be the measure of everything. Intelligence, made absolute, eclipses the other essential dimensions of life — affection, the will, commitment, relationship. In the same way, technical power, left unbalanced, does not make us more capable; it makes us more isolated and more exposed to being dominated and excluded. This point is not an argument against intelligence. It is a reminder that when intelligence becomes self-referential, it loses its true purpose, which is to serve life and the human person.
The quality of a civilization is measured not by the power of its means but by the care it is able to give — by its capacity to see the other as a face rather than a function. The ability to care for one another is a fundamental part of being human, and it is learned and mastered through lived experience. Reading stories to a child, keeping an elderly person company, arranging a home so that it feels welcoming — these are simple gestures, often rooted in family life. They teach us to value care at the level of a whole society, and they train us to recognize others as persons worthy of attention. Technology can support this mutual care between people too — for instance, by giving us tools that help us anticipate and organize — so long as it does not undercut human freedom and human judgment. In the end, human beings are the subjects of relationships and the ones responsible for their own decisions.

The stories underneath: transhumanism and posthumanism

To shed some light on the cultural assumptions riding along with the digital revolution, I want to turn now to certain currents of thought that read progress as a way of surpassing the human condition itself — currents often gathered under the labels of transhumanism and posthumanism. These views form the ideological backdrop in some centers of technological power, and in a simplified form they have taken hold of the collective imagination, especially in the media and on social networks. They tend to stoke enthusiasm for new technologies with a futuristic image of an "enhanced human being" or a "human-machine hybrid."
Transhumanism and posthumanism cover a range of currents and sensibilities, which makes them hard to pin down in any single, clean definition. Think of them as an archipelago of conceptual "islands" — distinct from one another, yet connected by a common "sea" of assumptions: the central role of technology, and the aspiration to transcend the limits of the human condition. Broadly, transhumanism imagines enhancing human beings through technology — biomedicine, body engineering, devices, algorithms — with the aim of boosting performance and capability. Posthumanism, in its more radical forms, goes further: it challenges the idea that the human being is the center of things and envisions a blending of human, machine, and environment, even anticipating a threshold at which humanity surpasses itself in a new evolutionary stage. Even where such ideas remain largely speculative, they matter, because they reshape the collective imagination — and through it they influence social, economic, and political choices.
From the standpoint of the Church's social teaching, the key issue is not the use of technology as such, but the vision underneath it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable, less worthy. In the name of progress, "necessary sacrifices" can start to be justified, with the burden falling on the most vulnerable in pursuit of some supposed optimization of the species. Here Paul VI's warning keeps all its foresight: scientific and technical advances, cut loose from moral and social progress, end up turning against humanity. So a clear distinction is needed. It is one thing to fold technology into a human-centered, relational vision of life. It is another thing entirely to be led by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical kind of "salvation" — a rescue and completion of the human person that, in the religious sense, only God can give.

The limit, the heart, and the grandeur of the person

Our relationship with life itself seems to be in crisis today. Everything that shows up as a "limit" — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen first of all as a defect to be fixed, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to others. And yet we have to remember that human beings flourish not in spite of their limits but, often, through them. Faith offers a way of seeing reality that helps us recognize the "contingency" of the things of this world — the fact that nothing here is necessary or permanent, that everything might have been otherwise and will one day pass. While it is right to work to relieve the suffering that marks human life, it is also wise to acknowledge our fundamental finitude — to live, without false simplification, "this ambivalence between human greatness and limitation," reading it in the light of what believers hold to be our original and fundamental relationship with God.
It is precisely inside our limitations that certain things find their place: compassion, and a sincere concern for what others need; a generosity that can surface even in the middle of darkness and failure; spiritual experience and the worship of God. We see this at the moments when our limits turn concrete — when we are rejected, when we suffer the illness or the death of someone we love, when we run up against our own weakness or our own failure. Mysteriously, it is exactly in such moments that we can discover a new kind of wisdom, feel the nearness of others in a tangible way, and encounter what believers experience as the presence of God.
Even when limitation is felt as inner suffering, human wisdom teaches us not to deny it or suppress it, but to integrate it. To abolish suffering entirely would mean, in the end, abolishing love and desire as well. Those who love and desire cannot help but pass through trial and suffering; and over the years we carry within us lessons that leave their mark like scars — the memories of a journey shaped by freedom and failure, by dreams and disappointments. It is only through the interplay of all these that the wonders of the soul take place in us, letting us sense the full richness of being human. To renounce that adventure — at once tragic and splendid — in the name of some presumed transcendence of all limits could mean a great many things, but it would no longer be human.
The moral corruption of our limits as created beings — the evil that, plainly, stirs in the human heart — wrecks society and life, sometimes reaching extreme forms of inhumanity. And yet even these painful expressions of our limitation leave openings for the good. Even when people dehumanize themselves and bring about tragedy, a small light keeps shining within humanity, one that can be rekindled — with what believers call God's grace, an unearned gift from beyond ourselves — along paths of conversion and reconciliation. As the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl observed, in the depths of horror "we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips" — the central prayers, respectively, of Christianity and of Judaism.
Finitude, when it is truly accepted, does not diminish us; it opens us to recognizing the face of God and of other people. Precisely because we experience limits — vulnerability, suffering, failure — we are able to recognize the inviolable dignity of every person, our own and everyone else's. In that same experience we remain able to sense a fraternity larger than ourselves and to feel injustice as a scandal. Authentic culture and art keep this spark alive, resisting the normalization of evil. This is why certain works have taken on an almost prophetic weight: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as a longing for unity; Picasso's Guernica as an indictment of dehumanization; Schindler's List as a refusal to let the past slide into oblivion.
History is not only a record of human violence; it is also evidence that humanity is capable of building institutions that protect our shared life. Over the last two centuries this shows up in a handful of emblematic achievements: the founding of the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863, whose operational neutrality guarantees humane care to everyone; the long process that led to the abolition of slavery, which was not just a legal change but a transformation of conscience; the establishment of the United Nations in 1945 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which gave us a shared language for affirming — at least as a common ideal — the universality of human dignity; and the 1951 Refugee Convention, which recognized the duty to protect those fleeing persecution and danger. In each case, the desire for good took concrete shape in the public arena — in laws, institutions, and practices capable of limiting the abuse of power and defending the vulnerable. And none of it came without resistance, narrow interests, or sheer cultural inertia. Moral progress almost always unfolds through a long and demanding road, often marked by setbacks — one need only think of stalled peace processes, or of how slowly environmental commitments get implemented. The very fragility of these achievements is what makes the responsibility of those who start them and sustain them so precious.
Certain events make it clear that history can change when individuals genuinely take everyone's dignity seriously: the civil rights movement in the United States, bound up with the witness of Martin Luther King Jr.; or the end of apartheid in South Africa after the release of Nelson Mandela and his decision not to surrender the future to hatred. In very different settings, many courageous and generous women have stood out as well — Saint Laura Montoya, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Dorothy Day, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Maria Montessori, Elisabeth Elliot, Wangari Maathai, Benazir Bhutto, and countless others from every continent whose commitment has helped make history more humane.
Alongside these public signs runs a more hidden but decisive story. We see it in religious communities that choose to serve in poor and dangerous places. We see it in those who died for fraternity and justice — Saint Maximilian Mary Kolbe, Saint Oscar Romero, Blessed Enrique Angelelli — and in witnesses who embodied the hope of the Gospel and human dignity amid harsh, often inhumane conditions, such as Cardinal Francis-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận, who held onto that hope through years of imprisonment. Above all we see it in the "martyrs of everyday life" who care, teach, accompany, and comfort without any fanfare — parents, nurses, doctors, volunteers, and those who simply stay beside an elderly person or an outcast. Their witness shows that goodness does not advance on its own; it requires perseverance, memory, and the inner conversion needed to begin again, even after defeat.
It is this weave — of just institutions, credible witnesses, and daily fidelity — that sustains hope and gives clear direction to technological progress without letting the heart regress. For this reason, humanity, in all its grandeur and all its woundedness, must never be replaced or surpassed. We can embrace the technological progress that relieves suffering and opens new possibilities, so long as we do not surrender the very essence of being human — our capacity for relationship and for love. Which leads to a crucial question: if an authentic "more than human" exists, where is it to be found? The Christian faith answers by pointing not toward a technological self-divinization but toward grace — an unearned gift, received in Christ.

The authentic "more than human": grace and Christian humanism

The phrase "more than human" is not the private property of technological promise. For centuries the Christian tradition has held that human beings are not boxed in by the limits of their own nature; they are called to go beyond themselves — not by fleeing reality or despising their limits, but by being completed in love. Faith recognizes an openness toward the "beyond," one that arrives as a gift from God. This transformation is understood as the work of God's Spirit. As Thomas Aquinas taught, this lifting-up and transformation "surpasses every capability of created nature," because an infinite gap separates our finite nature from the life of God. And yet it remains possible to enter into the heart of that inexhaustible life, even as we make our way through the limits of this world. The only one who can make that passage possible is the Eternal One who gives himself away; it is God himself who closes the "infinite" distance. In him, the human person is re-created — as the apostle Paul put it in one of his letters, "If anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new."
When we accept the possibility of transcending ourselves through grace, we do not deny our nature, and we do not become less human. On the contrary — as Pope Francis put it, "We become fully human when we become more than human, when we let God bring us beyond ourselves in order to attain the fullest truth of our being." Here is the radical break from the Promethean dream (the myth of the figure who steals fire from the gods to make humanity self-sufficient): what saves us is not enhanced self-sufficiency but a relationship that sets us free, a communion that transforms us. Seen this way, a technology that merely sorts and optimizes what already exists can — however unintentionally — become an obstacle to change and to growth. For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected. For a person, an error can be the catalyst for a profound change. A person's future is not calculable; it depends on their freedom — lifted up, believers would say, by the inexhaustible grace of God — and on the relationships they cultivate.

Two cities and two loves

Christian humanism does not reject science or technology. It receives them with gratitude and realism, and it grounds them in a higher calling. The creative intelligence of humanity is a gift that can relieve suffering and open new possibilities, but it has to stay ordered toward the common good, toward justice, toward the care of the vulnerable and of creation. In this sense the real alternative is not between enthusiasm and fear. It is between two paths of development: a progress that serves individuals and peoples, or a progress that subjects them to the logic of power. In the end the decisive question is the one John Paul II posed: does this technology "make human life on earth 'more human' in every aspect of that life? Does it make it more worthy of man?" If the answer is yes, then we can recognize it as an opportunity to be embraced responsibly, on a road of patient, shared reconstruction — much like the rebuilding of Jerusalem in the Book of Nehemiah. But if power grows while the heart withers and human bonds fray, then we are looking at a new form of Babel: a construction that is grandiose and, at its foundation, dehumanizing.
To question this alternative path of progress — how we read it and how we live it — is, in the end, to examine our own hearts. The way we understand and shape our relationships, our work, and our institutions reveals, in practice, what we actually value. It all comes back to what we hold most dear: a love that tells us what we truly cherish, both as individuals and as a society, and that steers our lives and our actions. Augustine described human history as a contest between two loves, which give rise to two ways of inhabiting the world and living together — two "cities," as he put it. On one side, the love of God and neighbor; on the other, the exclusive love of self. In his words: "Two loves have built two cities: the earthly city, the love of self even to the contempt of God; the heavenly city, the love of God even to the contempt of self." As they have throughout history, these two loves still contend for the upper hand in our hearts today. The age of AI is no exception. The building of Babel or the rebuilding of Jerusalem begins inside each one of us.

Chapter Four — Safeguarding Humanity at a Time of Transformation: Truth, Work, Freedom

Having laid out the context in which the challenge of technological transformation sits — especially the parts tied to AI and to the transhumanist and posthumanist currents I described earlier — I do not think we can stop at general analysis. When the languages and the tools change, everyday actions and social relationships change with them. So I want to focus on a few specific domains where these transformations have particularly concrete, and sometimes tragic, consequences. Read through the principles of the Church's Social Doctrine — that long, accumulating tradition of moral thinking about how we live together — the digital transformation invites us to do three things: to recover truth as a common good, to protect the dignity of work, and to safeguard freedom against every form of dependence and commercialization.

Truth as a common good

Truth and democracy

The use of digital platforms and AI systems is driving deep changes in how we communicate publicly and politically. Tools that could foster dialogue and participation are routinely used instead to build distorted narratives and to blur the line between true and false, mixing fact with opinion. Disinformation did not begin with AI. But today it has found, in AI, an extraordinarily powerful amplifier. The ability to manufacture and manipulate text, images, and video exposes people to biased or outright misleading versions of the world. The problem is both cultural and moral, because the quality of public communication depends directly on social trust — and, in turn, shapes it. And here is the part that is easy to miss: truthful information does not come out of centralized or automated control. In public life, the truth of a fact has a rational dimension — it has to be verified, cross-checked against sources, defended with responsible argument. But it is also deeply relational: it is built through bonds of trust and shared practices, through honest exchange with other people and with the world itself. Only the shared pursuit of what is actually the case — treated as a common good, something we hold together rather than each privately — can give just communication a solid foundation.
Those who command powerful technological and economic resources, along with the human capital to deploy them, have a real capacity to engineer cultural change. In the end, they can shape what a great many people believe to be true — about human beings, about the world, about the meaning of existence, about the family, even about God. This is raw power detached from truth, quietly or openly imposing on others what it wants them to accept as real. And underneath it lies a deeper, often unnoticed sickness: as John Paul II put it, "modern man is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life and society — a presumption that follows from being selfishly closed in upon himself." Once you believe that, you come to think you can construct reality, and that whatever best fits your own claims must be what is true. John Paul II called this a "crisis of truth," and pushed the point hard: "once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes." In such a world we stop recognizing that there are truths that hold for everyone, truths that precede us and that conscience is obliged to accept. This led Pope Francis to ask, with characteristic bluntness: "What is law without the conviction, born of age-old reflection and great wisdom, that each human being is sacred and inviolable?" And to answer it: "If society is to have a future, it must respect the truth of our human dignity and submit to that truth. Murder is not wrong simply because it is socially unacceptable and punished by law, but because of a deeper conviction. This is a non-negotiable truth attained by the use of reason and accepted in conscience. A society is noble and decent, not least for its support of the pursuit of truth and its adherence to the most basic of truths."
The search for truth is an essential element of democracy, and democracy is itself one of the ways we serve the common good. When the question of what is true stops being interesting to us — when a kind of pragmatism takes over that is satisfied with whatever looks useful or effective — democratic life is hollowed out from the inside. Democracy is not just rules and procedures. It rests, above all, on a solid agreement about the facts and a genuine commitment to the good of individuals and of society as a whole. Indifference to the truth leads, slowly but reliably, into totalitarianism. The philosopher Hannah Arendt saw this clearly: the ideal subjects of a totalitarian regime, she wrote, are not the ideologically convinced but rather "people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist."

Communication and the collective imagination

It is worth recalling, here, that communication "is not only the transmission of information, but it is also the creation of a culture." The content circulating through our digital environments shapes how people perceive the world; it deposits images and narratives into the collective consciousness, and those in turn steer our desires and our daily choices. This is "not a parallel or purely virtual world." What starts online now becomes part of people's actual lives — especially the lives of the youngest among us.
So those who control the platforms and the channels of communication hold a considerable power: the power to shape the collective imagination and to present one particular picture of reality as the desirable one. That power has to be held in check, constantly, by a commitment to truth and a respect for human dignity — so that the culture growing up on the internet does not become an instrument of distraction, homogenization, or domination, but a place where inner freedom and critical thought can actually mature.

Toward an ecology of communication

Our first task is neither to demonize these tools nor to worship them, but to use them on a clear principle: that truth is a common good, not the private property of whoever has power or influence. We need, in other words, an ecology of communication. At the level of public policy, that means writing rules so that the decisions behind what content gets selected and promoted become more transparent, and so that personal data is protected. At the social and cultural level, it means strengthening the intermediary institutions — serious journalism, real forums for debate — where reasoned argument and verification carry more weight than the instant reaction. For families and schools, it means a new kind of educational literacy: formation in the careful, critical use of digital tools, AI, and the commercial and financial platforms people now live inside. And in the universities, the central challenge is the integration of knowledge — cultivating both the ability to connect and synthesize what we know, so that we can grasp complexity, and the basic skill of checking whether something is actually true.
Christian communities are called to this same standard: transparency in how we communicate and honesty in the pursuit of facts. Sadly, we have not always lived up to it. We have watched, with shame, painful truths come to light about members of the Church and about the institution itself. Some journalists, driven by a passion for the truth, played a crucial role in dragging injustices and abuses into the open. To them I want to repeat what Pope Francis once said to journalists: "I also thank you for what you tell us about what goes wrong in the Church, for helping us not to sweep it under the carpet, and for the voice you have given to the victims of abuse." But vigilance and transparency remain, first and last, a grave responsibility of the Church herself. We should not wait for others to force us to face uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

An educational alliance for the digital age

In an age when truth is so often bent to serve a particular interest or a communications strategy, education becomes decisive. And yet our rapid technological transformations have exposed just how unprepared we are, educationally. The sheer pervasiveness of digital media breeds a culture of immediacy and constant stimulation — and that culture produces fatigue, boredom, and a kind of apathy toward the slow effort that seeking the truth actually requires.
Education, by contrast, is a long road that demands patience: it needs time to unfold, and it needs sustained contact with reality beyond its surface appearances. This matters because every technology shapes the person who uses it. To educate people in the use of AI, then, is partly to teach them when and for what purpose it ought not to be used. The speed and ease with which we can now get an answer or a summary threatens to extinguish the desire to ask questions at all — and asking questions is a process that only bears fruit over time. Plato understood this. The deepest and most important things, he wrote, are learned only after long effort, by working through ideas in discussion with others — striking thought against thought, like flint against flint, until at last a spark of understanding is kindled within us. We have to learn, then, to exercise restraint with AI, and to protect the young from the seduction of the perfect machine — that subtle temptation that makes human thinking seem unnecessary at exactly the moment it is needed most.
Over the last several years, the psychological and psychiatric literature has documented, with growing insistence, how early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can damage sleep, attention, emotional control, and relationships — especially during the most vulnerable stages of life, sometimes with tragic outcomes. The damage is compounded by how easily children can now reach violent or degrading content, pornographic and hypersexualized material, messages that trivialize the body and the emotions, and content that normalizes risky behavior. Online predation — grooming, blackmail, the sexual exploitation of minors — is not rare, and it is made more insidious by fake profiles, by algorithms that quietly facilitate dangerous contact, and by AI tools that can manipulate images and video. Handing a child a personal device too early, and letting them use it without adult supervision, amplifies their existing vulnerabilities: it can foster addiction and expose them to isolation, to bullying and cyberbullying, and to pressure to share intimate images or sensitive information.
It is very hard for parents, on their own, to hold out against business models engineered to monetize attention and time. That is why we need an alliance — among policymakers, schools, and families — that can give concrete support to the adults carrying this burden. We need far-sighted public policy willing to stand against the immediate interests of the platforms, concentrated as those interests are in very few hands, when they conflict with the wellbeing of minors. Legislators have a proper role here: setting age limits, holding the service providers accountable rather than dumping the entire burden of control onto families, and providing specific protections against every form of online sexual exploitation and violence. That is how children and adolescents — who are, after all, entrusted to our care — can be genuinely protected as the treasure they are. At the same time, we have to teach children, adolescents, and young adults themselves how to recognize manipulation, how to defend their own dignity, and how to respect the dignity of others online.

The central role of schools

School is the place where each new generation can learn to seek and to love the truth, to reflect on what life is for, and to recognize the dignity of every person. This is why so many parents place great hope in schools as partners — they want their children to grow in the capacity to form relationships, to think critically, and to hold solid values. And yet parents have the primary and inalienable right to choose the kind of education and formation their children receive, consistent with their own moral, cultural, and religious convictions. Today the world of education faces a set of urgent challenges.
The first challenge is socio-political. Both within individual countries and across the different regions of the world, deep inequalities persist in access to basic schooling and to higher education. In many places, governments have not invested what it takes to guarantee a quality education for everyone — neither by adequately funding the public system nor by supporting the private institutions that provide this essential service. When a large share of education at various levels is handed to private institutions, access can become dangerously dependent on a family's ability to pay, especially where public support is thin. Against that risk, it is worth recognizing and encouraging the many private Catholic schools that work hard to keep their doors open to children and young people of every background, including those whose families could not otherwise afford it.
The second major challenge is pedagogical. Many education systems are struggling to keep up with change and to support the full, integral development of their students. The advance of information technology and AI is rapidly making obsolete curricula that were designed for a different era. Meanwhile the whole architecture of schooling — how schools are organized, the physical spaces, the methods of assessment, the role of the teacher — has to be rethought, so that education can address every dimension of the person rather than just one. Teachers need ongoing support and formation across their whole careers, so that they can engage new technologies positively and help students use them responsibly, critically, and creatively, rather than passively surrendering to their pull.
The third major challenge is intellectual: it concerns knowledge itself. Without real care, we could end up with an education system that has lost its love of truth — one in which an endless flow of information substitutes for the essential work of research, reflection, and discernment. As knowledge becomes ever more fragmented, it gets harder to grasp reality as a whole, harder to ask deep questions about meaning, harder to develop thinking that is genuinely critical and creative. Many educators already report signs of a kind of dehumanization, where a person may "know many things" and yet be unable to find direction in life — in part because they cannot connect raw information to deeper knowledge, or hold on to a sense of purpose. What is needed is a genuinely healthy way of learning, one whose rhythms make room for silence, for sustained study, for reading, and for judicious analysis. Without those elements, inner freedom itself starts to erode.
The Church's Social Doctrine invites families, schools, Christian communities, and public institutions to form a renewed educational alliance. It takes shape when we translate fundamental principles into actual educational goals: teaching students a sense of moderation and of limits; teaching them to recognize the rights of others, and the rights of future generations to enjoy the goods we have been given or have made by our own ingenuity; teaching freedom and responsibility; and teaching a sense of transcendence — of something larger than ourselves — and of the common good. Schools are not called to match the frantic pace of the digital world. They are called to offer what the digital world cannot give on its own: a shared, protected time for learning and for building trustworthy relationships.

The dignity of work at a time of digital transition

The value of work

From the very beginning of its Social Doctrine — starting with Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum in 1891 — the Church has insisted on protecting workers and combating every form of exploitation. But more than that, the Church's teaching office has recognized in work "the essential key" to understanding the whole social question, because it is through their work that people develop so many dimensions of their lives. We can see this in the great intuition of Benedict of Nursia, the sixth-century monk whose rule of life bound prayer and work together — ora et labora — and treated ordinary daily labor as part of how a human being responds to God. The conviction underneath is this: made in the image of a Creator, we in some way continue his work through our own. Through work we contribute to society and the common good, put to use the capacities we have been given, improve and beautify the world, support our families, enter into cooperative relationships, and — through listening and dialogue — learn to build together what none of us could build alone.
For all these reasons, work is not merely an instrument. It expresses and enlarges the dignity of our lives. It is a demand of the human condition itself, a normal road toward maturity, growth, and personal fulfillment. Yes, financial assistance to the poor may sometimes be necessary in an emergency — but it cannot become the whole of our response, because the real goal is to enable each person to live with dignity through their own work.
Today the convergence of automation, robotics, and AI is rapidly reshaping the very structure of work. We are told this will bring great improvements for everyone. In reality, the "new ways" of working are not necessarily better. As the US Catholic bishops have observed: "while AI promises to boost productivity by taking over mundane tasks, it frequently forces workers to adapt to the speed and demands of machines, rather than machines being designed to support those who work. As a result, contrary to the advertised benefits of AI, current approaches to technology can paradoxically de-skill workers, subject them to automated surveillance and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks. The need to keep up with the pace of technology can erode workers' sense of agency and stifle the innovative abilities they are expected to bring to their work." Precisely to avoid that drift, we have to design systems centered on the human person — not solely on performance.

The problem of unemployment

John Paul II recognized that unemployment is a grave evil — and that when it reaches massive scale, it becomes a genuine social calamity, one that demands the State take responsibility. Today, in the middle of what gets called the "fourth industrial revolution," the worry is sharper still, because innovation is so often pursued for one reason only: to cut costs and raise profits. In some places there is a legitimate fear of a large and rapid contraction in the number of available jobs — a contraction that would set off a chain reaction reaching deep into families, into the lives of the young, into whole local economies. In many sectors you can already see it, in new forms of precarious work and inequality: outsized pay for a small, highly specialized minority, alongside falling wages for a large share of the workforce.
It is certainly good for technology to relieve human beings of work that is brutal, repetitive, or dangerous, and to provide intelligent support for what we do. But the protection of people's livelihoods, and the irreplaceable role of the individual, must remain the general rule. The pursuit of higher profit cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs — because the human person is an end, never merely a means, and the economic order has to stay subordinate to human dignity and the common good.
At the same time, we have to be honest that every real transition involves discontinuity. It is uneven, fragmented, sometimes outright conflictual. There is no single model of change, no universal solution, because different places and situations call for different responses. Given how unequal the world already is, the spread of AI and computation produces very different effects in different places. Wealthy societies automate quickly and chaotically, shedding the need for human labor and opening up space for unemployment and institutional friction. Vast regions of the world, by contrast, stay trapped in hybrid economies, where underpaid human labor and partial technology coexist without ever producing a genuine transformation. These become zones of precarious work — and breeding grounds for instability and forced migration. So solutions have to be sought at the national and local level, with the involvement of intermediary communities. We need adaptive tools: well-structured models, local initiatives, progressive redistribution, and new rights of access to essential goods. We are not chasing some abstract harmony. We are trying to build concrete forms of human coexistence through a period of upheaval.
Work remains a fundamental dimension of human experience. It is not only a means of survival; it is a place for self-expression, for relationships, for contributing to the community. So the problems around work go well beyond the income a family needs to get by. A society that guarantees employment to only a small fraction of its people — even while reaching a very high level of technical development — risks condemning many others to forced idleness: a life without responsibility, without daily tasks or stimulus, and the human and cultural impoverishment that follows. This is the paradox of material progress alongside what I can only call anthropological regression: a hollowing-out of the human being that erodes the foundations of any just and stable social peace. For this reason the Church's Social Doctrine insists that access to work for all has to be a high priority of public policy and of economic life — and a criterion for judging whether any model of development is actually good for human beings. And in those parts of the world where work is shrinking or changing radically through technological and organizational forces beyond democratic control, we will have to rethink the very nature of work and its connection to citizenship, so that being unemployed does not mean being shut out of social participation altogether.
Seen in this light, the history of the Church's Social Doctrine after Rerum Novarum comes into focus. The initiatives that grew out of that tradition — associations, trade unions, cooperatives, mutual-aid and welfare organizations — did decisive work to improve labor law, protect the most vulnerable, and make conditions more humane. Today, though, those instruments are no longer enough on their own, faced with the transformations driven by AI, the new organization of markets, and a competitiveness that rarely concerns itself with social sustainability. We need new collaborative efforts — among political leaders, labor organizations, the business world, and the scientific community — to develop, quickly, adequate shared rules and protections, including at the international level. Labor unions, which the Church has consistently supported, are called to open themselves to new kinds of employment and to the corresponding needs of workers, so that they can keep representing and defending them. Without bold decisions in this area, the prospect that looms is greater poverty and deeper inequality — leaving many people marginalized, stranded, surrounded by the very machines and automated systems that replaced them.
In a transition like this one, it is not enough to react after the jobs have already disappeared. We have to govern the transformation in advance. One workable path begins with setting social criteria for innovation: every introduction of automation and AI should come with verifiable measures to protect workers' employment, to retrain them, and to keep them participating. That way technology is steered toward freeing up human time and capacity rather than toward producing exclusion. Second, we need proactive policies that make continuous training and professional transitions available to everyone, so that the cost of adapting does not fall entirely on the individual. And finally, we need a real corporate commitment to count the quality and dignity of work among the measures of success. Where these conditions hold, innovation can be an ally of safer, more creative, more dignified work. Where they are absent, innovation tends instead to become an accelerator of injustice.

An economy that values dignity

The labor market is the arena where the risks of these new technologies show up most clearly. So it is worth remembering that economic freedom is not absolute: it always has to be measured against the common good and the dignity of every person. Entrepreneurial initiative can be a genuine vocation — a way of generating wealth and improving lives, not just a variable that responds to profit — and it becomes one when it recognizes that creating dignified, valuable jobs is an essential part of its proper service to society.
Pope Francis warned, with something close to a prophet's edge, against an economic freedom proclaimed in words while the actual conditions on the ground prevent most people from ever benefiting from it. Economic models that exalt efficiency and individual success tend to treat investment in disadvantaged people, or in those who develop more slowly, as useless or inconvenient — as if a person's future depended entirely on their ability to keep pace with the "winners." In reality, a just society needs a vigilant State and civil institutions capable of overcoming that single-minded efficiency mentality, and of making sure that resources, creative solutions, and regulations actually favor the most vulnerable. Instead of waiting for the benefits of growth to reach the poor "eventually," we have to make decisions that render growth inclusive from the outset. The experience of recent decades is unambiguous: in every economic and financial crisis, it is the poor who pay the highest price, while the theories that promised automatic, general prosperity keep turning out to be illusions.
We need to move past our current metric of development — which for more than eighty years has been tied to Gross Domestic Product — because GDP almost systematically ignores things that are essential to the real wellbeing of people and of the environment. Developing parameters and metrics to complement GDP is crucial: it would improve the data we use for analysis, for political and economic decision-making, and for setting priorities at the regional, national, and international level. New parameters would let us assess, comprehensively and in real time, how a given law or regulation actually affects the dignity of work, shared prosperity, the reduction of inequality, and the protection of the environment. And it would reshape the very concept of development, along with our educational processes, our habits of mind, and public opinion — and even our peace, which is only ever real when it is built on justice.
In recent years finance has grown in weight and gone through significant innovation, driven partly by the rise of cryptocurrencies. As my predecessors observed in their encyclicals, the financial-intermediation sector, "when operating without the necessary anthropological and moral foundations, has not only produced manifest abuses and injustice, but also demonstrated a capacity to create systemic and worldwide economic crisis." There is also a real danger that income from capital comes to replace income from labor — with labor pushed to the margins of what the economic system cares about. And yet savings turned into credit for the real economy, generating both jobs and self-employment, remain central to development and to the investment any major transition requires. The social function of credit is irreplaceable. Finance for its own sake is a fundamentally different thing from finance aimed at the development, creation, and evolution of work.
This has to be set inside a wider view of the global picture. The world's wealth has grown in absolute terms, but it is increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, widening inequality both within countries and between them. As Pope Francis put it: "There are a few who have too much, and too many who have little — that is the logic of today." Scientific and technological advances, even in medicine, are not easily within reach of the vast majority of people, as the recent pandemic demonstrated in the harshest way. While some regions pour money into superfluous procedures, or into dreams of individual enhancement available only to a select few, other parts of the world lack the basic equipment that would save millions of lives. To imagine that new technologies will automatically benefit everyone is simply to ignore the evidence. Unless we prioritize, at the design stage, the prevention of new disparities, technological progress will inevitably manufacture structural inequality. Today, justice requires access to the fruits of innovation — to care, to knowledge, to tools, to opportunity.
We certainly need just laws and methods of redistribution to correct these imbalances — including tax systems that lighten the load on the weakest and ask more of those with the most resources. But the pursuit of social justice cannot be treated as a separate question that only comes up after wealth has been produced, as though the economy existed solely to create wealth and politics existed only to redistribute it afterward. Justice is at stake in every phase of economic activity — from acquiring resources, to financing, to production, to consumption. Every choice along that chain carries moral consequences.
More than ever, in the age of AI and robotics, we cannot rely on the market's "invisible hand" alone. It falls to politics to orient our economies and technologies toward the common good — to promote dignified work, social inclusion, and a fair distribution of the gains from innovation. And because so many economic decisions now cross national borders, we also need international cooperation capable of defining shared strategies, especially on behalf of the most vulnerable countries and people, in order to foster real development and move beyond mere dependence on aid. The thinking behind all of this is the immeasurable dignity of every person, the common good, and a world genuinely governed for everyone. The link between peace and development, which Paul VI wrote about with real foresight back in 1967, still holds today: prosperity only builds and strengthens peace if it is widespread, inclusive, and sustainable.
Concretely, in the age of AI and robotics, making the economy serve human dignity means committing to a few firm criteria. First, transparency and accountability. When data and algorithms shape who gets credit, who gets hired, who gets access to a service or an opportunity, those decisions have to be understandable, contestable, and open to oversight — so that a person is never reduced to a mere profile. Second, inclusion and access. The benefits of innovation have to be matched by investment in skills, infrastructure, and essential services, so that technology does not widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots. And finally, measures to ensure equity: taxation, social protection, and industrial policy have to correct the imbalances created by the concentration of wealth and power. These criteria are not a brake on innovation. They are what make it civilized and humane.

Families and young people: the social conditions for hope

The family is a primary social good. Founded on the enduring union of a man and a woman, it is the first environment in which any of us develops our potential, becomes aware of our own dignity, and learns the earliest forms of truth and goodness — absorbing the habits that later prepare us for life in society. As the first natural society, with rights of its own that are foundational, the family is the basic and irreplaceable cell of every form of community. It follows that when political projects and major economic decisions push the family to the margins, or treat it as secondary, the authentic growth of the whole social body is compromised.
And yet the family is also a fragile social good — one that is immediately exposed to the economic and technological forces now reshaping the nature of work. It needs cultural, legal, and economic support. The devastating effect of unemployment and job insecurity on family life is well documented. In the short term it can look advantageous to cut labor costs or maximize financial efficiency; in the long term it undermines the very foundations of how we live together. While we celebrate our technological successes, the social fabric is quietly eroding, as if by a silent virus.
For young people, job insecurity is especially devastating. As the US Catholic bishops have reminded us, work is not just a source of income but a crucial space in which a person's identity takes shape, friendships and relationships form, practical responsibilities are learned, and one's vocation — one's sense of what one is for — is discerned. When access to work is blocked by high unemployment, by inadequate training systems, or by structural barriers, many young people find the path to their human and professional fulfillment simply closed off. And because people now have to change jobs several times over a working life, continuous updating and retraining have to be made available, so that new generations can face — competently and on their own terms — the risks of an economic environment that is both fast-changing and often unpredictable.
This gives rise to a specific public responsibility. The State has a duty to support business activity by fostering conditions favorable to employment — promoting work where it is lacking and defending it in times of crisis — because work is a primary good for families and for society. Especially in an age of continuous technological change, we need a kind of political creativity that actively promotes "work" and puts the family and the coming generations at the center of its concern. Without that, our economic progress will only translate into new forms of insecurity and exclusion.
Supporting families and young people through this transition means making choices that actually make stability achievable. As I noted above, labor policy has to promote continuity and quality of employment, push back against insecurity as the normal condition of life, and encourage realistic paths into the workforce and for professional growth. Second, we need measures that make a healthy way of living possible — because without a proper balance between work, leisure, and rest, families are weakened and the young struggle to develop any sense of responsibility. Third, it is essential to invest in accessible education and retraining, so that the professional mobility the digital economy demands does not become a brutal sorting between those who can update their skills and those who cannot. And finally, social ties have to be supported — networks and educational communities that walk alongside people's life choices and keep uncertainty from curdling into loneliness or addiction. Done well, these transformations can be navigated without destroying the very capacity to build a future, which is what makes a society prosperous in the first place.

Protecting freedom against dependencies and commercialization

Dependencies and societal control

Having reflected on truth and education, on work and families, I want now to consider what the digital revolution does to human freedom — the risks it poses both to the mental health of individuals and to society more broadly. We should not underestimate the subtler forms of addiction tied to the "digital attention economy." Platforms and services are very often designed to capture a user's time and attention, exploiting their vulnerabilities and wearing down their inner freedom. When a business model thrives specifically on human weakness, the person is being treated as a means rather than an end — and those who design or finance such systems bear a moral responsibility that cannot be waved away. There is an urgent need to promote technologies that strengthen interior freedom instead: through education in what I would call digital sobriety, and through the protection of minors, so as to counter the models that prey on vulnerability.
There is a further risk, less visible but no less serious: social control, made possible by the mass collection of data and the use of algorithmic systems. When every action you take — your movements, your purchases, your relationships, your preferences — leaves a trace, a new kind of power comes into being: the power to profile you, to predict your behavior, and to influence it, often without your being remotely aware of it. When that data is then used to make decisions that affect your concrete opportunities — access to credit, to a job, to essential services — freedom itself is at risk, and the most vulnerable are the ones most likely to be discriminated against. And control is exercised not only through outright prohibition but through the architecture of visibility: what gets amplified and what gets buried, what gets rewarded and what gets penalized, all of it quietly shaping our opinions and our choices, breeding conformity and self-censorship. This is why freedom in the digital age is not only a matter of our inner life — it is a public concern. It calls for clear rules, for transparency, for the possibility of appeal, and for proportionate limits on the use of intrusive technologies, so that technology stays in the service of the human person and does not become a form of control over our very consciences.
At the root of all these problems lies a technocratic and posthumanist mentality that tends to regard the human person as an object to be manipulated, or a resource to be optimized — stripping away every safeguard against the unchecked pursuit of profit. What prevails is efficiency, not respect for freedom and dignity. Some posthumanist currents go even further, openly imagining "second-class" human beings, subordinate to the interests of an elite that considers itself superior. That prospect becomes far more dangerous when it is fused with technological tools that increase the capacity for control and selection by orders of magnitude. Even certain forms of structural debt — the kind that keep whole peoples locked in dependence — reflect the same mentality in a new guise: a mentality that tolerates relationships of subordination not far from slavery.

Breaking the chains of new forms of slavery

This distorted view of the human person shows up today in several forms of servitude tied directly to the digital economy. Nothing in the world of AI is immaterial or magical. Every seemingly instant, flawless response is the product of a long chain of mediation — vast networks of natural resources, energy infrastructure, and, above all, people. A significant part of how the digital economy actually functions rests on the silent labor of millions: people doing essential but largely invisible work — labeling data, training models, moderating content, often sifting through genuinely disturbing material. In many cases these workers are young, predominantly women, working under punishing conditions for minimal pay. Layered beneath that invisible labor is something even harsher: the work of extracting the raw materials needed to build the devices and microprocessors AI depends on. In some parts of the world, children and adolescents work in dangerous conditions, crushing the ore from which rare earth elements are pulled. Their bodies are scarred, injured, and worn down so that the flow of computation can continue without interruption. And beyond all this, criminal networks use online platforms, messaging systems, anonymous payment methods, and profiling techniques to recruit, control, and move the victims of human trafficking — very often minors — reducing men and women to "data" to be tracked and "packages" to be moved, inside the very same digital circuits that carry so much of the global economy. This reality is a deep challenge to the moral conscience of our time. It is not enough to invoke efficiency, or to celebrate the gains of innovation, if those gains are built on a chain of exploitation that has been deliberately hidden from view. If technology promises emancipation and instead produces new forms of global subordination, then it stands in direct contradiction to the foundational principle of human dignity.
The fight against these new forms of slavery is a decisive test of our ethical seriousness about AI and the digital transformation. In continuity with the tradition Leo XIII began, the Church renews her firm condemnation of every form of slavery, of trafficking, and of the treatment of persons as commodities. And she insists on the urgent need for reflection and action that keep the inalienable dignity of every human being, and the common good, as both the focus and the goal of society — and as the guiding criterion of every personal, social, and political choice. Without that ethical, humanizing reflection, the growing power of digital systems could carry us toward new atrocities no less shameful than the ones from the past that we now deplore — all while we keep presenting ourselves as "advanced" and "civilized" societies.
Human trafficking has to be recognized for what it is: a contemporary form of slavery and a grave violation of human dignity. To fail to respond firmly — or to tolerate these practices in any way at all — is, in some real sense, to become complicit in the sins of our own time, sins not unlike those of the past, when slavery was being concealed and justified.
Over the course of developing her teaching, the Church has come, gradually, to a deeper awareness of how grave these matters are. It is true that we cannot judge the past anachronistically, as though moral criteria that only matured over centuries had always been available. But neither can we deny or downplay how late both society and the Church were to condemn the evil of slavery. In antiquity and the Middle Ages, many individuals — and even some Church institutions — held slaves. In the early modern period, the papacy in Rome, responding to requests from monarchs, intervened more than once to regulate and even to legitimize forms of subjugation, and in certain cases the enslavement of "infidels." It was only in the nineteenth century that a formal, absolute, and universal condemnation of slavery was clearly articulated, notably under Pope Leo XIII. This is a striking example of how the Church grows in her understanding of the permanent truths she is meant to safeguard. There was not always consistency in practice — slavery was tolerated for a very long time before it was unequivocally condemned — and yet across history there was a continuous affirmation of the dignity of every human being, made in the image of God. Even so, it took eighteen centuries before the full incompatibility of that conviction with slavery was explicitly recognized. This is a wound in Christian memory, and not one we can pretend is no longer ours. It is impossible not to feel deep sorrow contemplating the immense suffering and humiliation endured by so many, in stark contradiction to their immeasurable dignity as persons infinitely loved by God. For this, in the name of the Church, I sincerely ask for pardon.
And this is exactly why the memory of our past complicity and blindness in the face of slavery becomes a call to vigilance now. What we have learned has to be translated into discernment and responsibility in the present. If we want to avoid having to ask for pardon all over again in the future — for having failed to protect the treasure of human dignity that our faith demands — then it falls to us, today, to denounce trafficking in all its forms clearly and without flinching, and, together with everyone committed to this cause, to back concrete efforts of prevention, protection, liberation, and rehabilitation.
Even now, colonialism is taking new forms. It no longer dominates only bodies; it appropriates data, turning the details of personal lives into exploitable information. Whole regions — especially those marked by structural fragility and limited geopolitical weight — are being subjected to a new logic of extraction: the extraction of health data, epidemiological profiles, genetic maps, demographic information. These have become the new "rare earths" of power — vital data that, once aggregated and analyzed, can be used to train predictive models, guide investment strategies, anticipate crises, and, above all, decide who and what is judged to matter. Those who control the health data of entire peoples — data often gathered under the banner of aid, research, or innovation — gain a structural leverage over the future, because they can shape needs and shape markets. They can also decide, before anyone else, where the medicines, the investment, and the protections will go. Here lies one of the most urgent moral challenges of our age: to make sure that shared knowledge becomes a genuine common good rather than an instrument of domination. That means giving people back not only the data that describes them but also the power to decide how it is used, by whom, and for whose benefit. Otherwise the digital age will not be post-colonial at all. It will simply be colonial in another form.
These new forms of slavery are fed by economic chains and by digital infrastructure, so action is needed on several fronts at once. First, the supply chains underpinning the tech industry and the digital economy have to become far more transparent, so that no competitive advantage can be built on hidden exploitation. Second, companies and investors need to adopt clear standards of preventive ethical verification — due diligence — putting the protection of workers, the fight against forced labor, and the assessment of the social impact of data-driven business models among their actual priorities. And third, the digital platforms themselves have to cooperate responsibly with the authorities and with civil society, so that the tools of communication, payment, and profiling do not become channels for recruiting and controlling victims. When these efforts converge, the digital environment can be turned from a space of exploitation into one of protection, prevention, and the promotion of human dignity.

A shared responsibility

The various domains I have just considered — the search for truth in public life, education in the digital environment, the transformation of work, the fragility of families, and the new forms of slavery — are not isolated phenomena. They reflect one underlying problem. If technology becomes the ultimate criterion, then the human person risks being reduced to data, to a cog in a machine, to a commodity. But if technology is integrated into a wiser frame, it can become an instrument of growth, of justice, and of human kinship.
From this vantage point, the Church's Social Doctrine calls for a shared responsibility. It asks that these processes be guided with foresight: by institutions able to regulate without strangling, and to protect without taking over; by businesses that treat work and dignity as measures of their success; by the intermediary organizations and educational communities that rebuild trust and relationships; and by citizens who cultivate responsibility, moderation, discernment, and a real feeling for the truth. Only this way can innovation genuinely serve the integral development of the human person, instead of becoming yet another engine of exclusion and domination. And only this way can the promise of progress be recognized as authentic — because it is measured against the inviolable dignity of every man and every woman.

Chapter Five — The Culture of Power and the Civilization of Love

Having looked at how AI is reshaping parts of our lives and our societies — and in particular at the serious threats it poses to human dignity — I have to turn now to a still more tragic subject: war. Here the question is not merely whether new tools are more efficient. It is whether technology, cut loose from ethics and responsibility, will make decisions about life and death faster and more impersonal, and will start to present the use of force as an obvious, ready-to-hand option. In a world that is more and more interdependent, peace is not just one issue among many. It is a precondition for the good of everyone, and a test of the moral maturity of peoples — above all of those who carry the responsibility of governing.
The digital revolution is changing the very nature of conflict. Alongside conventional warfare we now have hybrid forms: cyberattacks, the manipulation of information, influence campaigns, and the automation of strategic decisions. AI accelerates all of this, especially because so many of these technologies are intrinsically ambivalent — the same capability points both ways. What is built for defense can be quickly repurposed for offense, and the thin line between protection and aggression blurs. AI can sharpen the defense and protection of civilians; it can also lower the threshold for the use of force, insulate people from responsibility, and breed a culture in which the enemy is reduced to a statistic and the victim to "collateral damage." In the face of these shifts I want to recall the principles of the Church's accumulated tradition of moral thinking about how we live together — economics, politics, society, what we call its Social Doctrine — the dignity of the person, the common good, the conviction that the world's goods are meant for everyone, subsidiarity (the principle that decisions should sit at the most local level competent to make them), solidarity, and justice. These are the criteria by which we can judge whether a technology is genuinely serving humanity or quietly subjugating it. I would treat them, then, as guidelines for our decisions.
So in this chapter I want to set two opposing approaches side by side — the same two I sketched, through biblical imagery, in the Introduction. On one side is the temptation of the Tower of Babel: the grand project built on power and pride. (The Tower of Babel, from the Book of Genesis, was a people who tried to build a tower to the sky to make a name for themselves and were scattered into mutual incomprehension — the image of a proud undertaking that collapses into division.) On the other side is the patience it takes to rebuild Jerusalem "piece by piece," the way Nehemiah did. (Nehemiah, in the Hebrew scriptures, returned to a Jerusalem left in ruins after exile and rebuilt its walls not by decree but by assigning each family its own stretch to repair — the image of a shared project that protects people and the common good.)
If you look at the way the world is actually moving, you can see, more clearly than before, the spread of a culture of power, marked by polarization and violence. The modern Babel shows up not only in the globalized technocratic outlook but in a remote clash between rival imperialisms — between powers determined to hold on to their supremacy and powers hungry to seize it — which fragments into a multiplicity of local wars. And there seems to be no ceiling on the race, driven by an ambition that dehumanizes, to build ever more powerful technologies or to lock down control of them. Yet even inside this downward spiral, you can also glimpse a great part of humanity straining to stay human, working to build the holy city of coexistence and peace. Too often we are unwitting builders and clumsy architects of that city — capable of generous gestures, but with no overall plan. This project is slower, less visible, less spectacular, and it is still waiting to be understood better and coordinated better, so that it can become the conscious, deliberate responsibility of every community, from families to states to the relations between nations. It is this prospect — this construction site of hope — that I call the "civilization of love."

The civilization of love in the digital age

When Paul VI coined the phrase "the civilization of love," the world was deep in the Cold War, an arms race, and severe economic instability. Into that setting the Church proposed an alternative to the ideological standoff between systems: a social order in which justice and love are woven together, and love becomes the organizing principle of economic, political, and cultural life. We need to recover that vision now, and recover it without apology — because the civilization of love is not a naïve utopia. It is a demanding project. It means translating love into structures of justice, giving fraternity an institutional form, and treating others — whether individuals or whole peoples — as allies we need in order to build the common good. As the encyclical Fratelli Tutti reminded us, only this kind of social love can harden into a culture and a norm, and so produce a stable international order — turning a mere armed coexistence into a community with a shared future.
This becomes even more fundamental in the current moment of digital transformation. Digital networks, the globalized economy, and the development of AI bind us together ever more tightly, linking — in real time — a decision made in one place to its effects somewhere else. In that sense the words of the Second Vatican Council on the growing interdependence between peoples are still timely: the common good is taking on a more and more universal scope, with rights and duties that touch the whole human family. The project of a civilization of love, then, has to take on the work of converting this imposed interdependence into a chosen solidarity. That is the principle that should guide our technological processes. It is not enough for AI to make us more efficient or more connected; it has to serve the building of one universal human family, with shared rights and duties, where digital proximity becomes a real chance for encounter and mutual care.

The culture of power

In our time a culture of power is taking hold — one in which the availability of resources and the ability to dominate tend to set the agenda and define the criteria for every decision. In that world the common good of humanity slips into the background, and the concrete tragedy of peoples at war becomes a secondary concern next to strategic interests. This culture of power seeps into society, reshapes our relationships and our behavior, and grows by doing four things: normalizing war, chasing ever-greater military power, exploiting the crisis of multilateralism, and feeding a false realism that insists there is no alternative.

The normalization of war

In 1965, Paul VI's words rang out at the UN General Assembly: "Never again war, never again war!" And yet we have to admit that, for all the desires and declarations of peace, the past sixty years have been scarred by conflicts of astonishing brutality — often hitting civilian populations on a massive scale, killing innocents, driving mass displacement, destabilizing societies, and leaving wounds that last for generations. Still, in public discourse there was a widely shared conviction that war should be a last resort, hedged in by strict ethical and legal limits, and always pointed toward a political vision of peace. After tentative moves in the wake of the First World War, the real turning point came after the Second: peace was placed at the center of the international order, as the UN Charter above all attests, with the stated intention to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." Many national constitutions, too, restricted the use of force to extreme and tightly bounded circumstances. Even during the Cold War, for all its serious conflicts, there remained an awareness that a new world war had to be avoided at any cost.
Today, though, we are watching a genuine paradigm shift — in public discourse and in actual decisions about rearmament — with a troubling revival of war as an instrument of international politics, even as the very ethical principles that once limited its use are wearing away. Regional conflicts that drag on for years, escalating tensions, reciprocal threats — these are becoming almost ordinary, and forms of conflict driven by the appetite for territorial expansion, which we thought we had left behind, are re-emerging. Public opinion is gradually being shaped and conditioned by polarizing media narratives, frequently amplified by algorithms that reward conflict and confrontation.
We are also living through a disconcerting loss of historical memory, as the first-hand witnesses of the Holocaust and the two World Wars die off. The result is a selective or distorted rewriting of the past, in a climate where fake news and the manipulation of narrative bury the lessons we once learned. Without a living memory of the horrors of war, political decisions risk being made on the basis of raw power alone, with no thought for the long-term consequences.
To all of this the media and digital dimensions are adding new and decisive ingredients. Communication networks, fragmented information environments, and algorithms that reward conflict can magnify polarization and resentment, intensify propaganda, and make any shared discernment harder. War, then, is not only fought; it is culturally conditioned — through simplistic narratives, a friend-or-foe reflex, disinformation, and fear. When historical memory fades and the ethical principles that protect civilians and the most vulnerable are weakened, it gets easier to justify violence as necessary, inevitable, or even "clean." This is the context in which humanity is sliding into a violent culture of power, where peace no longer looks like a responsibility to be taken up, but like a fragile interval between wars. Today, more than ever — and without any prejudice to the right of self-defense in the strictest sense — it is important to say plainly that the "just war" theory, which has too often been stretched to justify any war at all, is now outdated. (The "just war" tradition is the centuries-old framework of criteria for when and how a war could be morally permissible.) Humanity has far more effective tools for promoting human life and resolving conflict: dialogue, diplomacy, and forgiveness. The resort to force, violence, and weapons betrays a poverty of relationship, and it always ends in disaster for civilians.

Force without limits

The growth of the military-industrial complex has become a defining feature of our political landscape, and a key sector of several national economies. The tight coupling of economic interests, the military apparatus, and political decisions produces what we might call an "armed nation" — one in which war looks like a natural extension of politics, and the arms market becomes an autonomous driver of military choices. Nor can we ignore the enormous economic interests behind war itself. The arms industry, and the countries that supply weapons, profit from a market that thrives precisely on conflict. There are, in plain terms, financial interests that help keep tensions burning in various regions of the world.
Military arsenals are getting renewed attention. In the past, the recognition that some weapons could destroy all of humanity pushed us toward détente and disarmament negotiations. That approach has unfortunately been abandoned, and the evolution of nuclear arsenals — including the prospect of their "tactical" use — is making the use of these weapons feel less improbable. Against that backdrop, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in 2021 with the backing of more than seventy countries, is an important step. But it risks remaining largely symbolic, because the major nuclear powers have refused to join. The result is a widespread — and mistaken — belief that nuclear deterrence is an indispensable precondition of security. And this belief has fed a new arms race, one that is hard to control, accompanied by the gradual dismantling of nuclear-reduction agreements and by the development of "miniaturized" weapons that make actual use feel like a more plausible option.
The same logic plays out in conventional warfare. Military force, weak diplomacy, and the tangle of competing interests all conspire to make conflicts protracted, at extremely high human and environmental cost. It is far easier to start a war than to stop one — and yet the conversation about preventing conflict in the first place stays tragically marginal.
The picture is further destabilized by new armed actors: jihadist groups, private militias, criminal networks — all of which mark the end of the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force. These groups often braid vague ideological motives together with concrete economic interests, turning war into a "way of life" for entire generations of young people and children. Here the goal is no longer a decisive victory but the perpetuation of conflict itself, as a source of power and income.

Weapons and artificial intelligence

This whole scenario is tied to the relentless development of weapons systems, and AI-enabled ones in particular. The Holy See — the central government of the Catholic Church and its diplomatic arm — has recently observed that the growing ease with which autonomous weapons can be deployed makes war more "feasible" and less subject to human control. That violates the principle that armed force should be used only as a last resort, in cases of legitimate self-defense. For that reason, the development and use of AI in warfare has to be held to the most rigorous ethical constraints — to guarantee respect for human dignity and the sanctity of life, and to head off a race to build such arms.
People sometimes talk about "artificial moral agents," as if machines could tell right from wrong more consistently than a human being can. But moral judgment cannot be reduced to calculation. It involves conscience, personal responsibility, and the recognition of the other as a person. So it is not permissible to hand lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions to artificial systems. No algorithm can make a war morally acceptable. AI does not remove the inherent inhumanity of conflict; it can only deliver that conflict faster and more impersonally — lowering the threshold for resorting to violence, turning defense into the prediction of threats, and so reducing victims to data. In this way it accustoms us to the idea that violence is inevitable and merely needs to be optimized. None of this lessens the importance of trying, as far as we can, to instill values and sound judgment into the systems we build, so that they can contribute to a moral ecosystem in which humans are better able to listen to their own consciences — and so that AI models can be made to respect appropriate limits.
It is not enough to invoke a generic "ethics." We need concrete criteria for discernment. The first concerns personal responsibility. When the decision to strike becomes automated or opaque, the risk of abdicating responsibility goes up. So the chain of responsibility has to be identifiable and verifiable: those who design, train, authorize, and deploy a technology must be held accountable for what it does. The second criterion is about the moral timeframe for judgment. AI tends to speed up decision-making — but speed and efficiency should never be the supreme motive for irreversible decisions made in war. The third criterion is the identification and protection of civilians. Any technology that makes it easier to attack without seeing the human face lowers the moral threshold of conflict. The choice of targets and the use of force must not blur the line between combatants and non-combatants, nor ignore the impact on defenseless populations.
Out of these criteria come several non-negotiable requirements. First, every system used in a war setting has to guarantee that decision-making can be retraced and reconstructed, so that accountability and blame are not quietly collapsed into "the machine." Second, the decision to use lethal force cannot be delegated to opaque or automated processes; it has to remain under effective, self-aware, responsible human control. Finally, we have to establish a shared framework — at the international level too — to rein in the technological arms race and to ensure robust protection for civilians and for the infrastructure they need to survive.

The crisis of multilateralism

The culture of power also grows out of the crisis of the multilateral system. The institutions built to safeguard the idea of a common future for all peoples and a global common good now look weakened. That is due not only to structural limits, but to a frequent lack of shared will to support and reform them, or even to grant them moral authority. Instead of building on it, we are regressing from the significant turning point of the twentieth century. After 1989, the collapse of the communist regimes in Europe was followed by a globalization that was overwhelmingly economic — and that lacked any adequate political framework capable of sustaining dialogue and peace. An almost blind faith was placed in the markets' ability to generate prosperity, democracy, and stability. In reality, far from automatically producing unity and peace, globalization provoked fundamentalist, identity-based, and nationalist reactions. What has emerged is a long way from genuine multilateralism: a disorderly, conflict-ridden multipolarity, suffused with mistrust.
The temptation to forge a collective identity against an enemy has re-emerged as well, fed by narratives in which each party casts itself as the victim, entitled to payback. Reducing complex problems to simplistic categories — "me first," "friend or foe," "us or them" — makes it easier to take decisions that are often irresponsible and that erode trust among nations. The force of international law gets replaced by the claim that "might makes right." As a result, the courts that exist to settle disputes between states or to deal with war crimes are routinely weakened or bypassed, with devastating downstream effects on political culture and social cohesion.
In this climate, peacebuilding has been demoted to a secondary role. Cooperation for development, disarmament, conflict prevention, the slow construction of mutual trust — all of it is neglected in the name of power politics. The achievements of humanitarian law are being compromised, too. The principle of proportionality in responding to aggression, the protection of access to water, food, and essential goods, respect for the lives of civilians (especially children) — these come to be treated as naïve relics of the past.

A supposed political realism

We are living through a moment of real spiritual and cultural blindness. A false pragmatism urges us to cut ourselves off from the roots of our history, as if we could inaugurate a kind of "new creation" detached from the past. Even people who cite serious moral principles can fall into this historical nihilism — the mistaken belief that the atrocities of the twentieth century simply cannot happen again. In reality the same dynamics are resurfacing under new disguises. The mentality of armed equilibrium and deterrence appears to be reasserting itself. But today, unlike the two-sided standoff of the Cold War, the proliferation of actors and battlefields makes that mentality increasingly fragile. Escalating conflicts produce asymmetric, "hybrid" wars — fought not only on the battlefield but on economic, financial, and cyber fronts, where disinformation and fear-stoking campaigns are used to manipulate public opinion. In many countries, including in the Global South, rising military spending is sold as the only possible response to an uncertain future or a perceived threat. And the real cost falls on the poorest, who watch resources for healthcare, education, and social services get cut.
At the heart of all this is a false realism — grounded not only in the prevailing worship of force, but in a cultural and anthropological belief: that war is an inevitable part of human nature. Things have always been this way, the argument goes, apart from the occasional pause, and they always will be. So the concern is no longer the search for peace — which has been lost as a reference point on the international stage — but only how and when to take military action. The same argument holds that it would be irresponsible not to prepare for conflict. I would argue the opposite: that what is truly irresponsible is Realpolitik, the brand of political "realism" that sows in our consciences and our societies a resignation to the inevitability of war, and dismisses peace and dialogue as utopian or irrational positions that ignore the stakes. In fact peace is neither a naïve hope nor merely the absence of war. It is always possible — as the fruit of justice and love.
In such a climate, nihilism and pragmatism become entangled and end up normalizing grave errors. Religious extremism and identity-based fanaticism make common cause with irrational economic policies, while politics turns to disinformation, to ridiculing opponents, and to the systematic cultivation of fear and resentment. Diversity comes to be seen as a threat — which in turn feeds a hunger for possession, a will to dominate, hegemonic ambition, the abuse of power, and a fear of those who are different. The net effect is an environment in which new conflicts can take root almost imperceptibly.
This, then, is the fertile ground for new wars — wars perhaps even more dangerous than those of the past, because they tend to disregard every ethical limit. What was once unthinkable can now be carried out almost without hesitation, while the international response is shaped more and more by the interests of particular governments than by the objective gravity of the situation. Decisions seem to be driven almost entirely by economic calculation, dressed up with media distortion, manufactured enthusiasm, and "dreams" that inevitably shatter — generating frustration and still more violence. Once people come to believe that nothing is genuinely true and that principles are just empty words, the fuse is lit in their hearts for new eruptions of intolerance and aggression.
In situations like these, the question of concrete safeguards against future violence remains wide open. When a culture normalizes and justifies conflict, a dangerous path opens up: what seems unthinkable today can become acceptable tomorrow, in the name of utility or security. And in countries marked by serious social tension, we cannot rule out that some leaders will treat armed conflict as an effective way to distract from problems at home — a cynical instrument for managing their own difficulties.
A particular responsibility falls on those who work in research. All the key players in this field — scientists, founders, investors, university authorities, politicians, and others — have to operate with a transparent and responsible mindset, and keep a sharp awareness of the broader context of the technological advances they are helping to bring about, including those tied to AI. When people look only at their own narrow sector, they can fool themselves into thinking their actions are morally neutral, and dodge the questions about the ultimate ends a given line of experiments is serving. That way, they risk cooperating — perhaps unknowingly — with dubious projects that fuel new forms of violence, manipulation, and domination.

Building the civilization of love

To build a world locked in perpetual conflict is an evil, and it has to be named as one. Describing our situation this way may sound bleak or pessimistic, but I think the honesty is necessary. The Christian perspective, though, does not stop at denouncing evil. We read history in the light of a Lord who was crucified and rose again — the one to whom, in the words of the Gospel of Matthew, the Father "has given all authority in heaven and on earth." We do not treat the present as a predetermined fate, but as an opening for conversion, personal and collective. And we believe in the power of what the Gospels call the Kingdom of God — God's reign of justice and peace breaking into history — which grows from something as tiny as a mustard seed that, once sown, sprouts and spreads. (The mustard seed is Jesus's image, in the Gospel of Mark, for how the smallest beginning can grow into something that shelters many.) Amid all the surrounding noise and confusion, goodness keeps growing quietly out of the ground. As the prophet Isaiah put it: "Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth — do you not perceive it?"
A closer look at history bears this out. Even in the darkest nights, there arise men and women who refuse to give up, who keep doing good, who protect the vulnerable and open paths to reconciliation. The memory of the saints, of the righteous, of the so-often-forgotten peacemakers shows that grace — that unearned gift from beyond ourselves — does not magically dissolve conflict, but inspires an active resistance to evil and an astonishing creativity in doing good. Christians see the darkness and call it what it is, but they do not just stare at it passively, because they know the light — and they hold that the darkness has not overcome it and cannot defeat it. (The line is from the opening of the Gospel of John: "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.") That is why, even when suffering seems to have the last word, Christians keep serving the good, sustained by a hope rooted in their faith that gives reality both meaning and direction.

We can all do our part

At this point a subtle temptation can creep in: the thought that the problems are too big and we are too small, that our choices can't possibly make a difference. This is a polite form of resignation, usually disguised as realism. It's true that not everyone has the same power to change things. There are those who govern, who decide where capital goes, who lead institutions, who do research, who teach, who manufacture, who inform — and then there are those who only seem to be living their ordinary daily lives. But no one is without responsibility. Each of us has our own field of action, and it is precisely there — and nowhere else — that we choose whether to feed the mentality of force (even just through indifference, cynicism, lies, or hatred) or to keep alive the mindset of peace (through truth, restraint, closeness, and care).
The twentieth-century Catholic writer J. R. R. Tolkien put our responsibility this way, in the mouth of one of his characters: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till." The civilization of love will not come from one spectacular gesture, but from the sum of small, steadfast acts of faithfulness that hold the line against dehumanization. So it is worth pausing on a few of the ways each of us, in our own place, can help build it. Without pretending to be exhaustive, I want to propose five paths toward everyday and public responsibility: disarming our words, building peace through justice, taking up the perspective of victims, cultivating a healthy realism, and reviving dialogue and multilateralism.

The need to disarm words

The first thing we can contribute to a more humane civilization is to be careful with our words. "Let us disarm words, and we will help to disarm the world." Words have enormous power — we feel it in our daily interactions; a single spoken word can lift or wreck someone's mood. "Peace begins with each one of us: in the way we look at others, listen to others, and speak about others. In this sense the way we communicate is of fundamental importance: we must say 'no' to the war of words and images, we must reject the paradigm of war." So all of us should examine our consciences about the words we use, the prejudices we carry, and the aggression — open or hidden — folded inside them. We have a real chance to serve the common good every time we tell the truth, offer wise counsel, comfort someone who needs it, name an injustice, and give a voice to the voiceless.

Building peace through justice

All of us, at every level, can help lay the foundation of peace, which is justice. We are not after just any kind of peace — not the mere absence of conflict at any price — but the true peace that is born of justice. "There is a very close connection between the justice of the individual and the peace of everyone." Commenting on the line from the Psalms, "justice and peace have embraced," Augustine wrote: "There is no one who shuns the desire for peace, yet not everyone is willing to practice justice… But do the works of justice, keeping in mind that justice and peace have embraced; they are not at odds with one another. Why do you set yourself against justice? Here is justice telling you not to steal — but you pay no heed; not to commit adultery — and you turn a deaf ear; not to do to others what you would not want done to yourself; not to say about your neighbor what you would not want said about yourself… Do you wish to attain peace? Then practice justice!" Let us never grow tired of seeking justice.

Adopting the perspective of victims

There are moments when, in order to stay human, we have to set our reservations aside and take a stand. In some conflicts it is unjust to stay neutral, and it is not enough to protest that we are not personally complicit. When we watch civilians bombed, hospitals and schools and vital infrastructure attacked, violence reaching children, we are facing scandals that wound humanity itself. We cannot stop at the level of abstract analysis. Pope Francis urged us to "touch the wounded flesh" of those who suffer — to look at their faces, listen to their stories, acknowledge their wounds. Painful events demand both history and memory: history to recount the facts, memory to bear witness to what was actually lived.
Giving room to the perspectives and voices of victims, through communication and education, helps us grasp the abyss of evil inherent in war — and in every form of violence. It helps us refuse the normalization of conflict; not to look away when human dignity is violated; and to give victims back the dignity of being recognized and heard. Attending to these voices reinforces a conviction: that, apart from violent minorities, humanity does not want war. In a special way, the Church can be a place of living memory for victims. As Paul VI recalled, the Church feels she must make her own both the voice of those who died in past wars and the voice of the living who still carry their wounds — so that their cries become an appeal for peace and harmony, and not the prelude to new conflicts.

Cultivating a healthy realism

We need a healthy realism, one that avoids both political idealism and cynicism. There is a kind of idealism that, to protect its own worldview, selectively chooses its facts — distorting and renaming them — until its adherents end up living inside a reality custom-built to fit their convictions. And there is a debased realism that confuses observation with resignation, reasoning that because force prevails, it always will. Authentic realism does not give up on changing the world. It begins, rather, by clearly identifying the interests, the fears, the constraints, and the power dynamics at play — precisely in order to work out what can actually be achieved, and what it would take. It does not reduce politics to morality; nor does it surrender to violence. It looks for viable paths to make peace something more than a word — through credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiation, conflict prevention, and the protection of civilians.

Reviving dialogue

To build the civilization of love, we have to engage in dialogue, because dialogue is the primary mode of coexistence between people and between nations, and the alternative to open conflict. On the eve of the Second World War, Pius XII affirmed that nothing is lost with peace, while with war everything can be lost. People must go back to speaking with one another, he insisted, because a sincere and persistent dialogue always keeps open the possibility of an honorable solution.
Dialogue is an ordinary part of human life; it isn't only a matter of relations between states. It means acquiring a disposition that seeks to build bonds of fraternity through listening, an open bearing, making time for one another — even "wasting" time together. Because once we have had genuine encounters with others — with people who are different, with strangers and migrants — it becomes much harder even to imagine going to war against them.
At the political level, we urgently need to shift from a "culture of power" to a genuine "culture of negotiation," in which dialogue and diplomacy become the standard way of resolving conflict. Giorgio La Pira — the mid-century Italian mayor and peacemaker — voiced the hope that "the method of war be replaced by the method of peace: the method of negotiation, of encounter, of convergence — that is, the authentically human method!" The awareness that all peoples share a single future demands that this culture of negotiation become a more and more widely shared political and cultural commitment, capable of gradually leading humanity out of the cycle of violence.
To those who carry the honor and the responsibility of governing, I want to repeat the words I spoke at the beginning of my pontificate: "The peoples of our world desire peace, and to their leaders I appeal with all my heart: Let us meet, let us talk, let us negotiate! War is never inevitable. Weapons can and must be silenced, for they do not resolve problems but only increase them. Those who make history are the peacemakers, not those who sow seeds of suffering. Our neighbors are not first our enemies, but our fellow human beings; not criminals to be hated, but other men and women with whom we can speak. Let us reject the Manichean notions" — the habit, named for an old dualist religion, of carving the world cleanly into the all-good and the all-evil — "so typical of that mindset of violence that divides the world into those who are good and those who are evil."
In rejecting the mindset of violence, dialogue between religions plays a decisive part, because at the heart of the great spiritual traditions lies a message of peace. Those who invoke the name of God to legitimize terrorism, violence, or war betray his true nature — to fight in the name of religion is to attack religion itself. The "spirit of Assisi" — the practice of interreligious prayer and encounter that John Paul II launched in the Italian town of Assisi and that Francis carried forward, for instance through his dialogue with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, one of Sunni Islam's foremost authorities — shows that believers can draw on the most authentic sources of their own traditions, where there is no room for any "sanctified hatred."

The necessity of diplomacy and multilateralism

In international relations, dialogue is an irreplaceable diplomatic tool for preventing conflict and rebuilding trust. Against the impulsive broadcasts, the aggressive rhetoric, and the power politics that mark our time, "the vocation of diplomacy is to foster dialogue with all parties — including those interlocutors considered less 'convenient' or not deemed legitimate negotiating partners." So we should spend every ounce of humility and patience to nurture even the faintest signs of goodwill between warring parties, and so move the process of peace forward.
Cyberspace, too, has become a battleground. Cyberattacks, data manipulation, and influence campaigns — orchestrated with the help of AI — can destabilize whole countries before a shot is ever fired. And in this domain, attribution is often uncertain. When it isn't clear who carried out an attack, the risk of a disproportionate reaction, a miscalculation, an escalation, all rise. Diplomacy therefore has to be able to operate effectively in this new environment, negotiating shared rules on the use of digital technologies, so as to protect civilians and the most vulnerable from forms of violence that are "invisible" but entirely real.
International organizations — the United Nations above all — are essential instruments for building a civilization of love, because they can foster dialogue among nations and promote the peaceful resolution of conflict, the full development of peoples, the protection of the most vulnerable, disarmament, and the care of creation. Through such efforts the international community can work to reduce inequality, defend the rights of refugees and minorities, redirect resources from military spending toward human development, and protect our common home. The Holy See supports and accompanies these efforts, while also recognizing that the present weaknesses of the UN and of the international political system reveal the need for deep reform. This is not just a matter of technical fixes: the crisis of conviction and values — which reaches into the ethical foundations of nations themselves — makes it harder to steer multilateralism toward the true common good.
In the international arena, the diplomacy of the Holy See takes the Gospel's principle of mercy as a concrete criterion for political action. This is one of the ways the Holy See places itself at the service of humanity — appealing to consciences in the name of love and truth, defending the dignity of every person, and speaking up for the poor, for migrants, for the victims of war. In this way papal diplomacy expresses the universality of the Church, and contributes to building a civilization of love in which even new technologies can be oriented toward the common good.

Praying and hoping

These avenues of responsibility are sustained by prayer, and in turn they feed it. For each of us, peace comes first of all "from God, the God who loves us all, unconditionally." It is a gift given by Jesus to his followers on the day of Easter — the day Christians mark his rising from the dead: "Peace be with you! It is the peace of the risen Christ. A peace that is unarmed and disarming, humble and persevering." With these words I greeted the Church and the world on the day I was elected to the office of Peter. I want to repeat them now, and to invite everyone to pray for this gift. Let us never tire of praying for peace, and of working to achieve it — in our relationships and in our societies.

Conclusion

"Let each builder choose with care how to build." With those words, written to the young Christian community in the Greek city of Corinth, the apostle Paul urged them to hold their unity together. I want to borrow them here. We have spent this whole reflection on the world we are building, and we have kept asking ourselves one question: what does it actually mean to safeguard the human person in the age of artificial intelligence? At the end of it, I want to set out a program — sober, but demanding — for a Christian way of living through this change, navigating it by the light of the Gospel. The path has four parts, and they are not abstractions: contemplating what I take to be God's plan for the world; living the unity of the Church by sharing in the Eucharist; building a world organized around the common good; and praying in company with Mary, the mother of Jesus.

The infinite entered a single human life

Our world is full of attempts to seize control of markets and spheres of influence, usually dressed in reassuring rhetoric and seductive ideologies. And yet what our hearts actually long for is something wise and generous — the kind of thing Mary praises in her Magnificat. (The Magnificat is the song the pregnant Mary sings in Luke's Gospel when she learns she will bear Jesus: a hymn that exalts a God who lifts up the lowly and casts down the powerful. I will come back to it at the end; for now, take it as the song of a God whose mercy reaches out, in every generation, to those who stand in awe of him.) I believe that this work of mercy is still unfolding in history right now — even in the middle of the fast, unsettling changes that algorithms and global networks are bringing — and that it can serve, in the digital era, as a compass for living a life worthy of the Gospel.
At the heart of everything, for a Christian, is what we call the Incarnation: the claim that the infinite entered a single finite human life — "the Word became flesh and lived among us," as John's Gospel puts it — that God became a vulnerable human being. The flesh of that Son was poor and exposed, and it calls to mind the flesh of so many of our brothers and sisters today who have been stripped of their dignity and reduced to silence. Through that nearness, peace enters the world by a strange and roundabout route. It comes through what scripture calls the power to become children of God, and it is awakened in us when we let ourselves be moved — by the tears of small children, by the frailty of the old, by the silence of victims, by the struggle of people fighting against an evil they do not want to commit. In that wounded but beloved flesh, we believe the Father shows us what a fulfilled human life looks like: one lived through openness and communion, the kind of life that makes us want his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.
In the promises of transhumanism — and in some of the posthumanist thinking that wants an enhanced, almost disembodied humanity — I recognize a longing that genuinely concerns me, which is the need for a fuller life, one less exposed to limits and to suffering. But the Incarnation points down a different road. On one side, old ideologies and new ones alike push humanity to overcome its limits through technology, and to rise above other people by asserting dominance over them. Against that, the mystery of the Son of God entering our human condition promises something else entirely. On this account the living God comes down into our history precisely in order to free us from every kind of slavery; he takes our weakness onto himself and turns it into a setting for rescue. There is no moment, and no human situation, that is beneath God's notice or unworthy of him. In an old line from the French theologian Pierre de Bérulle: "according to the teaching of our faith, we have and adore, in our mysteries, a God who is born in a manger, a God who lives and travels in Judea, a God who dies on the cross, a dead God who lies in the tomb." The future of humanity, then, has its measure in our ability to welcome this divine way of drawing near — of taking up a share of the world's burden, of changing relationships from the inside. "O wonder," Bérulle goes on, "man is God, and this God-Man passes through all those stages, endures all those states, and ennobles them, sanctifies them, makes them divine in himself." What saves humanity, on this view, is a divine love that descends to the most fragile point of our history and renews it from within.
For that reason — speaking as one believer among believers — I want to invite everyone to look at the face of the Son of God and to contemplate there the grandeur of being human, a grandeur that throws light even onto the age of AI. In Christ, we hold, we are called to take part in the ongoing work of creation, not to stand back as disinterested spectators while technological processes quietly narrow our freedom and our responsibility. The dignity that I believe God's Spirit has written into each of us shows up in something concrete: in our capacity to think critically, to choose and to love freely, and to form real relationships. No computational system, however sophisticated, can manufacture a heart that gives itself away, or a conscience that tells good from evil. Even where machines outclass us in raw efficiency, the center of our history stays the same — a human face, asking to be looked at. That face is the fullness toward which I believe all of history is moving. This is what Christian tradition calls "recapitulation": the conviction that the Father has resolved to draw all things, in heaven and on earth, back together under Christ as their one head. In that plan, nothing genuinely human is lost. Everything, instead, is purified and gathered back into the One who collects every fragment of a life — every tear, every authentically human achievement — pulls them back from nothingness, and hands them over, redeemed, to the Father.

One body

The spiritual life we need is, at its core, a Eucharistic one — by which I mean a spirituality of the Church's unity in love. The Incarnation and what Christians call the Paschal Mystery (the death and resurrection of Jesus, taken as the central act by which God enters our condition and remakes it) reveal a God who steps into the human situation and transforms it by the gift of himself. That gift, we hold, stays present and active in the Eucharist — the shared bread and wine at the center of Christian worship, taken as the body of Christ — in which the Lord gives himself and gathers the Church into one, so that his self-offering becomes the principle of unity and the source of new life. Christian solidarity flows out of exactly this, since, in a line I would underline, "union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself." Augustine, explaining this to the newly baptized in his own North African church, put it as starkly as anyone: the bread and wine on the altar are a sign of the unity of the faithful in Christ. "What is seen is a mere physical likeness; what is grasped bears spiritual fruit. So now, if you want to understand the body of Christ, listen to the apostle Paul speaking to the faithful: together you are the body of Christ. If you are the body and members of Christ, then it is your own sacrament that is placed on the table of the Lord; it is your own sacrament that you receive. You answer 'Amen,' and in answering you assent to it. You hear the words 'the Body of Christ' and you answer 'Amen.' So be a member of the Body of Christ, that your Amen may be true."
The "Amen" we say in worship, the body we eat and the blood we drink, shape the whole of our lives. The Eucharist, as Benedict XVI observed, "is an extremely personal encounter with the Lord and yet never simply an act of individual piety." It makes visible something we believe is true: that we "are the Church of Christ, his members, his body. We are brothers and sisters in him. And in Christ, though many and diverse, we are one." It opens us toward justice and toward sharing, with a deliberate priority for those weighed down by poverty or pushed to the margins. And precisely where new economic and technological networks tend to manufacture exclusion, isolation, and dependency, the Church — fed by the Eucharist — is meant to make a different pattern visible: one that protects human connection, gives a voice to the people no one sees, and insists that our processes be built to respect the dignity of persons.

The construction site of our time

The spirituality I want to commend is that of the "wise architect" — Paul's image again — who, carried by hope for the Kingdom of God (the world as it would be if God's justice and peace actually held sway), gives himself to building a world for the common good. As I said at the very start of this reflection, the work of building in our time has to put our relationship with God at the center. The rule we work by has to accept the limits of being human as a natural and even positive fact, not a defect to be engineered out; it has to be marked by shared responsibility, and by a way of speaking shaped by the Gospel. At the end of all this, the outline of what we might call a civilization of love comes into clearer focus — and the construction site, it turns out, is already up and running, thanks above all to the many "living stones" firmly joined to Christ the cornerstone (an old image: a community built like a wall, each person a stone set into it, resting on the one stone that holds the structure up). In this work we are called to take an active role, not to hide in spiritual sentimentality or retreat into our own small worlds. We have to stay faithful to the truth, invest in education, tend our relationships, and love justice and peace.
Let us stay faithful to the truth. Living inside ceaseless flows of information, opinion, and images, we know how easy it has become to steer people's decisions and preferences with ever more sophisticated algorithms. In that environment, it is urgent that we cultivate hearts that love the truth, that prefer what is right over what is most appealing, and that go after wisdom rather than instant results. We have to keep in front of us the truth about God and about humanity, as Christians believe Christ revealed it. We have to put down the individualistic, purely technical picture of the human being — as if reality were just raw material to be shaped to suit our interests, whether one person's or a whole group's. In its place, let us cultivate what Pope Francis called a "situated anthropocentrism": a view that keeps the human being at the center, yes, but recognizes that the human being is a creature embedded in a web of relationships with other living things and with the whole of creation. Faithfulness to the truth means folding the real possibilities technology offers into a framework governed by wisdom — wisdom capable of protecting both the dignity of each person and the future of our shared home.
Let us invest in education, starting with ourselves. All of us have to learn how to engage the digital world in a human way, as a genuine part of how we form our faith and our way of living. I would go further: we should treat the digital world as a new continent to be reached, one that needs generous people, mature in their faith, willing to go there. We need adults, in particular, to recover their calling as patient craftspeople of education, working at it a little each day, backed by broad and shared educational partnerships. Walking alongside children and young people as they learn to use technology for building responsible relationships — helping them see the risks, and choose what makes them inwardly freer — is a concrete form of love, and it protects their dignity. Teaching the next generations that technological change does not run along some predetermined track, but can be steered by personal and collective responsibility, is one of the most valuable things we can do for the common good.
Let us tend our relationships. In an age that rewards speed and fragmentation, the human person still longs to be cared for and recognized — by attentive minds, by kind words, by hands capable of tenderness. Digital culture multiplies our connections and opens up new ways to interact; even so, the human heart keeps an unshakable need for real closeness. I want to urge everyone to treasure the places and moments where physical presence is still essential — meals shared together, the gatherings of a community, time spent with the lonely and in service to the poor. These are signs of a humanity that still believes every person's body is a dwelling place of God, what scripture calls a temple of the Holy Spirit (the Spirit we take to be God's presence at work in the world). It is exactly this covenant between glory and fragility — that a frail human body can be the place where something infinite lives — that becomes our test for the models of human life on offer in the culture around us.
Let us love justice and peace. The very same technologies that make communication and access to resources easier can also prop up systems that exploit the most vulnerable, generate new forms of slavery, and turn a profit from conflict. Every technical or economic decision ought to carry a moment of genuine discernment — a chance to ask, honestly, whether advances in AI are actually promoting justice and participation, or just concentrating wealth and power in a few hands. I would encourage a hard look at the supply chains behind digital production, at the working conditions hidden inside our devices, and at the mechanisms that profit from manipulation and from war. And alongside that scrutiny, we have to find practical ways to advance fairness, participation, and care for creation. We proclaim a hope grounded in the One who, as the old phrase has it, came down from heaven to "create a new story here below." That is why those of us who believe commit ourselves to seeing greater justice take the place of inequality, and the craft of peace take the place of the industry of war.
As I look ahead, I want to come back to the figure of Nehemiah, whom we chose as our companion and guide at the outset. (Nehemiah is the Jewish official, serving the Persian king, who in the Bible's account heard that his ancestral city of Jerusalem lay in ruins after exile, and went back to rebuild its broken walls.) He heard the cry of a devastated city; he carried that pain into prayer; he weighed it before God; he asked for help, got permission to return, organized the work, faced down both internal and external resistance, and rebuilt the walls with the people, brick by brick. In this era of digital transformation, I see in him a striking parable of our own calling: not to be passive spectators of the social and cultural fractures around us, nor mere commentators on what is falling apart, but men and women ready to walk onto the construction sites of history — research labs, technology companies, schools, the media, institutions, local communities — to rebuild what has collapsed and to protect what is under threat. Like Nehemiah, we are called to hold listening together with courage, and prayer together with responsibility, so that even when a technocratic mindset or partisan interests seem to be winning, the human city can become a more fitting place to live.
The image of rebuilding Jerusalem points, in turn, to a promise from the New Testament — the holy city, which comes to us first of all as a gift. At the close of the Book of Revelation, the Bible's visionary final book, a "new Jerusalem" descends as a gift for all of God's people, "prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." In that vision the walls of Jerusalem are no longer defenses against attack but the precious ornaments of the bride; the gates Nehemiah once guarded so carefully now stand permanently open to every nation. God's presence is light and life for everyone. The city is a new Eden — a return to the garden of the world's beginning — with living water offered to the thirsty and a tree of life whose leaves, in the text's phrase, "are for the healing of the nations." While we wait for it to arrive in full, this vision is set in front of us as encouragement: a call to get past our divisions and to work together — because this, we believe, is the way of Jesus Christ, yesterday, today, and forever.

The song of hope

Having considered faith, which contemplates the Father's loving plan; love, which binds us into one body as a Church; and hope, which holds up our work in the world — the fourth pillar of this program for Christian life is prayer. And Mary's song goes with us as we work. In Luke's Gospel, standing before her relative Elizabeth, who has just told her that she is to become the mother of the Lord, Mary breaks into a hymn of praise and joy. Her soul "magnifies" the Lord — this is where the song gets its name, the Magnificat — and her spirit rejoices in God her savior, because he chose a young, poor, ordinary girl for his plan of rescue. All at once Mary sees the whole of history through the lens of this revelation. Nothing has changed around her; the political situation is exactly what it was. The Romans still occupy her land, her people are still subjugated and humiliated. And yet everything inside her has changed, and that lets her see what is otherwise invisible. God, she sings, has already shown the strength of his arm; he has already scattered the proud, pulled the powerful down from their thrones, lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty-handed. He has already come to the help of his people. As Benedict XVI read this song, God "takes the part of the lowly. His plan is one that is often hidden beneath the opaque surface of human events, where 'the proud, the mighty, and the rich' appear to triumph. And yet his secret strength is destined, in the end, to be revealed."
Mary does not only teach us to recognize God's hidden work; she also turns our eyes toward, in Pope Francis's words, "the points at which humanity is broken and the world becomes distorted: the contrast between the humble and the powerful, the poor and the rich, the satisfied and the hungry." She teaches us, he says, "to look at the world from below — through the eyes of those who suffer rather than the mighty; to read history through the eyes of the little ones rather than from the vantage of the powerful; to interpret the events of history from the standpoint of the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the wounded child, the exile, and the fugitive." And so Mary becomes, as one tradition has it, "poet and prophet of redemption," because on her lips is proclaimed "the strongest and most original hymn ever spoken, the Magnificat" — the song that reveals the transformative vision at the heart of a Christian understanding of how we ought to order our common life, a historical and social vision that still draws its origin and its force from Christianity.
With the same faith Mary had, let us become "weavers of hope" in our world — sharing who we are and what we have, so that the presence of Jesus may grow among us and his Kingdom take shape. In the humble fidelity of ordinary daily life, even the age of AI can become a time in which God's Spirit brings about that civilization of love among us. For I believe the Lord goes on making all things new, and offers every era the same chance: to become part of the long story of salvation, in the light of the Incarnation. I entrust this longing of ours to the mother of Christ, the woman of the Magnificat, asking that she guide our steps through this time of change and keep alive in each of us a true faith in the Gospel — so that we may bear witness to the grandeur of being human, the grandeur in which I believe God has made his home.

Given in Rome, at Saint Peter's, on 15 May, in the year 2026, the second of my Pontificate.

LEO PP. XIV

sshh12/magnifica-humanitas-plain-ai-translation.md