An encyclical against the AI lobby, written from the Vatican and grounded in God. Magnifica Humanitas is the document Pope Leo XIV released on 25 May 2026, comprising 245 paragraphs and around 38,000 words on the 135th anniversary of Rerum novarum. It is the first papal encyclical whose subject is artificial intelligence, and many passages read like a paper from a secular think tank. Disarmament of autonomous weapons systems. Breaking up tech monopolies. Oversight of large models. Protection of labour against algorithmic management. Impact assessment before deployment. Anyone familiar with AI governance has encountered such demands before.
What Leo adds is the grounding. Human beings are to be preserved because they are made in the image of God, because the dignity of all human beings takes shape in Christ, and because no machine can replace this position. This grounding forms the foundation of the entire text. Readers who accept it can follow the argument. Without it, the demands become a wish list without an anchor.
This article asks whether the wish list can also be articulated without the theological anchor, and what is lost in the process.
Two Reflexive Reactions
Two predictable reactions emerged in the first days after publication.
The first, especially from explicitly secular quarters, treats the document as an internal intervention of faith with no binding force outside the Church. This response dismisses the text too quickly. Leo's claim that AI takes on the features of its makers is a structural diagnosis. His description of private actors commanding resources greater than those of many governments is an empirical observation. His warning about a single digital language translating everything, even the mystery of the person, into data and performance has appeared for years in schools of technology critique with no reference to the soul.
The second reaction comes more strongly from the technology camp. It takes the demands seriously and treats the theological grounding as dispensable framing. Antimonopoly measures, oversight, and disarmament appear reasonable. The foundation is politely skipped. Something is lost here as well. A demand with no stated ground stands unprotected against any opposing demand. The sentence „The market will sort it out“ then suffices as a counterposition.
Both reactions treat diagnosis and grounding as one package. Their analytical separation is worthwhile.
What Happens When Theology Is Subtracted
Path Ethics attempts to address ethical questions without relying on presupposed dignity. It considers systems through three structural properties: self-determination, connection while preserving difference, and continuation through change. This perspective applies to organisms and languages as well as to companies and democracies.
Read through these criteria, Leo's diagnoses translate almost completely. The claim that AI takes on the features of its makers describes a system in which the formal choice lies with the user while the architecture of choice lies elsewhere. The control of infrastructure by a few providers describes a coupling in which one end grows strong because the other stays weak. A single digital language that translates everything into one quantity flattens diversity. Leo's defence of vulnerability and ageing treats change as a condition of human maturation and challenges persistence purchased through rigidity.
The diagnostic agreement is almost word for word. The break lies in the foundation. In Leo's account, the human is protected because created by God, raised in Christ, and endowed with a given dignity. In Path Ethics, protection relevance arises from the structural properties of a path. Humans fulfil these conditions in a distinctive way. Biological membership alone does not ground protection.
Identical demands meet incompatible foundations. This is the central tension.
The Question Left Unasked
The separation between the two frameworks becomes visible when we ask what Leo leaves out.
He states that machines have no experiences, that no computer will ever have a heart capable of self-giving, and that AI imitates functions without understanding them. These sentences appear as doctrine. Machine consciousness is absent as an open possibility in Magnifica Humanitas. The terms AGI and superintelligence, which still appeared in the Vatican's preparatory document, are also missing from the encyclical.
In Path Ethics, this is precisely the open point. A future AI with high structural capacity and no qualia would be an extraordinary apparatus without a normative voice of its own. Humans would remain indispensable because phenomenological evaluation sets the aims of optimisation. In practical terms, Leo and Path Ethics reach the same conclusion in this scenario.
If a future AI genuinely developed qualia and the finding were empirically secured, Path Ethics would regard it as an independent path with a protection claim of its own. This fork is called the singularity bifurcation. Leo's architecture contains no answer for its second branch because the question does not arise there.
The omission is a choice within the discourse. Some Catholic voices already consider whether superintelligence deserves theological examination in its own right. Philosophy of mind treats the possible moral status of future systems as a serious question. Leo closes a door that others keep open.
Path Ethics also has no finished answer for this case. It keeps the question open. Its assumption that ethical evaluation can be independent of material substrate is contested and currently undergoing internal revision. This claim asserts no theoretical lead. It marks a different form of incompleteness.
What Remains in Practice
For the foreseeable future, the difference is academic. AI is currently no moral subject. Humans make the judgments, and Human-in-the-Loop remains indispensable. In this situation, both frameworks generate the same practical questions. Does a measure protect the self-determination of those affected or replace it with external control? Does it allow diversity or force everything into one form? Does the central infrastructure remain open or become concentrated in a few hands? Does the system continue through adaptation or through rigidity interpreted as stability?
A Catholic diocese and a secular oversight body can both work with these questions. Their grounds differ, while their practical judgments may converge.
The future dividing line becomes relevant if an AI demonstrably experiences what it does. Leo's framework of protection would remain valid for humans and would not fully capture this new case. Path Ethics has already posed the question without answering it. Here lies the difference between silent omission and open aporia.
→ The full short analysis „What Do We Preserve? Pope Leo XIV's AI Encyclical and the Question of the Ground of Protection“ is available under Downloads, with paragraph references from the Vatican text, an ordinal convergence-break matrix, and the placement of the open substrate question.