With Magnifica Humanitas, the first American pope penned a text on digital colonialism, the new religion of Silicon Valley, and the extreme concentration of tech power. It focuses on those who own the data, the machines, the available minds. On this new elite that no longer owns just the factories (as in the 19th century), but also the flow of attention, the algorithms, and the markets of truth.
Leo XIV wasn't named Leo by chance… In 1891, Leo XIII published "Rerum Novarum," the Church's famous social doctrine. Faced with the industrial revolution, he dared to say that the worker was not a machine part, that capital could not devour human dignity. In 2026, Leo XIV picks up the thread. Faced with the digital revolution, he essentially says: the human being is not a given, not a resource, not a variable for optimization.
What strikes me first is the political power of the text. Leo XIV speaks of slavery. He acknowledges the delay with which the Church and society condemned this scourge. He speaks of a "wound in Christian memory." And he asks for "forgiveness" in the name of the Church. This is rare. It is immense. Because this sentence forces everyone, believers or not, to confront a truth: great institutions sometimes err for centuries when they take the side of the oppressed too late.
Then, as a lawyer, I am struck by the sheer number of references to the major institutions of international law: the UN, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Refugee Convention, and even environmental texts. And Leo XIV adds this weighty sentence: “Moral conquests almost always take the form of a long and arduous path, also marked by setbacks: think of interrupted peace processes or slow implementation of environmental commitments.” One inevitably thinks of Gaza. Of climate change denial. Of everything our era is methodically dismantling, while cynics explain that international law is naive and that force has once again become the only language of the world.
And most impressively, Leo XIV cites the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and the fight against apartheid. He even invokes Hannah Arendt, for the first time in an encyclical, to remind us of this chilling truth: totalitarianism does not triumph simply when people believe lies. It triumphs when they can no longer distinguish truth from falsehood. When facts become opinions. When the press is replaced by noise. When fake news becomes an industry. When everyone is trapped in their own bubble, fed by an algorithm that seeks not truth, but attention.
This is precisely our era. We believe we are free because we scroll. But we are tracked, measured, predicted, and guided. We believe we choose, when in fact our preferences are calculated. We believe we speak, when invisible structures decide what will be seen, amplified, rewarded, or buried. Attention capitalism doesn't just want our money. It wants our time, our anger, our solitude, our inner availability.
And Leo XIV goes even further. He doesn't just criticize the excesses of the market. He attacks the root cause. GDP doesn't measure dignity. Growth doesn't guarantee justice. Inequality isn't simply a problem of redistribution after the fact, once wealth has already been captured. It begins earlier, in the allocation of resources, technologies, know-how, and infrastructure. In other words: if a few giants control the tools of production in the digital world, then they also control a part of our shared future.
This is why the Pope wants to "disarm" AI. He calls for strong public regulation, a decentralization of tech giants, and more open, democratic, and humane governance. Simply put: AI cannot be left to a few private companies that alone decide what we see, what we know, what we desire, and perhaps tomorrow, what we are allowed to become.
Perhaps this is the most relevant lesson of Magnifica Humanitas: the new social question is no longer played out solely in mines and factories. It is played out in data centers, social networks, AI models, attention markets, surveillance systems, confirmation bubbles, and information warfare.
In 1891, the Church asked who would protect the worker from industrial capital. In 2026, Leo XIV asks who will protect humanity from algorithmic capital.
This question concerns all those who refuse to allow the world to become a vast machine for classifying human beings, capturing their desires, predicting their behavior, and selling off their freedom piece by piece.
Human dignity is not an exploitable commodity.
Got this very interesting Pope Leo XIV message by email in French, I'm not sure who the author is or the publisher, translated and arranged to fit our blog for better understanding of these modern times dilemmas facing our entire world population.
As always, my many thanks to all.
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