Humanity of Ordinary People

The New Encyclical arrives in a void. There is no opposition to the Church, nor does anyone care about the common people. The Pope chose to speak for individual men and women, cast aside in a world of machines and superheroes.

A century ago, the task of Rerum Novarum was extremely difficult — almost impossible — one of resistance. It had to find a space for the Church in the conflict then raging against both capitalism and socialism. Both carried strong anti-Catholic impulses. The Church managed to find a foothold. It affirmed the Church’s existence and defiance, but little else. For over a century, capitalism and socialism fought each other, ultimately giving rise to modern capitalism as we know it today.

Magnifica Humanitas has a task that, at first glance, seems easier. It opposes a rising trend with few allies and little social consensus — turbo techno-capitalism, which offers algorithmic answers to human and existential questions. Simply by looking at the message’s positioning, one can see that today the Church is not on the defensive, as it was then, but on the offensive.

The tech billionaires themselves seem to twist themselves in knots, trying to give a humanistic perspective on their inventions and seeking a relationship with the Church. For instance, there are Peter Thiel’s theological interests, or the parade of ultra-billionaires, from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg, lining up for a photo op with Pope Francis.

Pope Leo, for his part, is not against tech billionaires in principle. On the contrary, he has signaled openness to dialogue. He invited the youngest among them to the presentation — Chris Olah of Anthropic, born in 1992, a generation ahead, perhaps in every sense, of his peer tech billionaires. More than his colleagues, Olah represents the future of the sector. He has raised deeply unsettling questions that the Church has neither refused nor concealed: there appear to be glimmers of consciousness within AI.

This doubt — which, four centuries ago, would have been burned at the stake as heresy against Christian teaching — now appears central to the papal encyclical. It underscores the encyclical’s cardinal point: the centrality of the human being. This is a banal principle of reality: men are men, not machines. At the limit, if even machines possess some form of force and consciousness, they could become somewhat human — they’d cease to be machines.

Humanity is central because it is true, concrete, and verifiable second by second. The dream of transcending humanity — of transforming man into a machine — is precisely that: a dream, an illusion. This reality is all the more powerful as machines seem to show signs of humanity, while man never ceases to be man.

The message is therefore clear: scientific and technological development is welcome, even holy, but humanity is undeniable. When it is denied, it is done so for inhuman or naïve purposes.

The inhuman ambition of technology is not limited to a small cluster of hyper-privileged Americans. Technology is the terrain of conflict, the military frontier between great and small powers alike. This is why the Pope issued a dramatic appeal to disarm artificial intelligence.

Realistically, given the current circumstances, the disarmament of artificial intelligence is unlikely. But the Church’s appeal for such disarmament will not have been in vain — quite the contrary. It is a warning, a brake on a wholly new arms race. Here, the greatest danger is not only nuclear extermination but also the electronic and technological annihilation that would accompany an atomic apocalypse.

The Pope’s banner for peace and dialogue becomes all the more fundamental as the winds of war rise. It is a check on all and for everyone, a voice for the sanctity of life and the centrality of man. In this, the Church today is greater than it was a century ago, because it alone speaks for the common man at a time when everyone races to think and speak for states and their political or business leaders, trampling on and ignoring the common man and thus humanity itself.

Yet states and their leaders live and are sustained by ordinary people — by that suffering and tormented humanity, that mass of “losers” who make states and leaders possible. If states and leaders wish to continue to exist, they must think about, not despise but care for, ordinary people. Without them, there would be nothing.

The Church, simply by reflecting on men and humanity, also reflects on states and their leaders who would otherwise be lost. Leaders who ignore their own customers or citizens are autistic or paranoid — they have lost human equilibrium and therefore risk losing themselves. To save themselves, they must rediscover their humanity and common sense.

Thus, the Church today has unique and gravely serious opportunities and responsibilities. It is alone — not crushed between adversaries who wish to eliminate it — yet this solitude is at once an advantage and a risk. No one is truly an enemy, but how many real friends does it have among the powerful of the earth, those who keep things moving day by day? After all, if the Church does not speak for eight billion people, who will speak for them? No one — not even the most powerful — can afford the luxury of ignoring people, the masses, individual human beings on the streets. And so a new, slender path is being forged for the Church to carry this humanity — all of it together — across a fordable crossing.

The Church seems to be emerging from a tradition of almost self-referential “orthodoxy” to broaden its address to everyone — those with faith and those without. This, without losing its own faith, affirms and underscores that man is made in the image of God. More than any theory, this idea explains the inviolability of man in his search for his future.