As promised from the beginning of his papacy, Leo XIV has given us in Magnifica humanitas an encyclical letter that continues the legacy of Rerum novarum, serving as an act of aggiornamento to address the economic conditions of 2026 as Leo XIII addressed the conditions of 1891. The encyclical makes this connection explicit by naming artificial intelligence as one of the “new things” of this era—though as Leo XIII certainly knew, res novae can also be translated as an idiom for “revolutions.” While Leo XIV is no wild-eyed prophet of revolution, his observations on artificial intelligence are embedded in a broader argument with radical implications for Catholic thought about political economy. But this is not a letter simply about economics. Along with its discussion of the common good and the “idolatry of profit,” Magnifica humanitas also advances views of the Church’s teaching authority and engagement with the secular world that may amount to a revolution in their own right—or at least a substantial reimagining of the tradition of Catholic social thought that Leo XIV inherits from his predecessors. Without pretending to find a fully developed ecclesiology in Magnifica humanitas (this encyclical is, after all, Leo’s development of Rerum novarum, not of Gaudium et spes), we can at least identify a few themes that shed light on Leo’s thought about the Church and its mission.
First, Magnifica humanitas is marked by a thoroughgoing emphasis on the historically embedded character of the Church’s social teaching. At least in the realm of social teaching, Leo seems to be defending a particular idea about how the development of doctrine should be understood, and on the extent to which the Church’s official theology can change. The social doctrine of the Church, says Leo, has a “dynamic character”; it is “a living reality, in dialogue with history, cultures and sciences.”
On one level, there is nothing controversial here: though traditionalists might resent talk of “dynamism” and “dialogue” and “living realities,” it is undeniable that the popes of the modern era have engaged with changing political and technological situations, preferred different rhetorical approaches, and chosen different intellectual and moral questions on which to focus their witness. But there exists—and not only among traditionalists—a tendency to insist that these changes in the popes’ teachings are merely stylistic, or matters of varying emphasis, and that development of doctrine is nothing more than the filling-in of dogmatic lacunae left open by previous popes and councils. If the Church says something new, that’s merely because there is something new it hasn’t yet needed to respond to—some new confusion in this fallen world, against which the Church offers its sublime and authoritative clarity. On occasion, this requires extraordinary mental contortions, as when one wants to explain that the conciliar Declaration on Religious Liberty is perfectly consistent with Pius IX’s condemnation of religious liberty. But with some lawyerly creativity one can generally resolve these apparent contradictions, and save the image of the Church as a crystalline edifice whose unchanging wisdom is untouched by the tides of history, a wisdom from which one might receive conclusive answers to the questions of every age. It is easy to see how such a view might satisfy certain psychological needs, or suit a certain type of personality. But in Magnifica humanitas, Pope Leo seems to be pushing back subtly and gently against it.
Much of the first chapter of Magnifica humanitas is given over to the theme of “a Church journeying through human history.” This situatedness in history is not, in Pope Leo’s view, an exile or a missionary adventure for the Church, but rather a fundamental feature of how revelation is received. “History,” he says, is “one of the places in which the Church allows herself to be taught by the Spirit about the humanizing power of the Gospel.” While Leo affirms an “unchanging core of revealed truths regarding the human person and society,” the Church’s social teaching cannot be derived axiomatically from these truths but is “a process of shared discernment…born from the encounter between the eternal truth of the Gospel and the questions of history.”
This conception of Catholic social teaching as a process, not a set of definitions or a body of rules, enables Leo to historicize the work of his predecessors and to qualify the relevance of their specific words for our times. He expresses this mildly, and without any polemical edge:
In response to the challenges of their time, each [pontiff] interpreted historical changes according to the Gospel.… The result is a harmonious, though not always linear, development that is marked by different emphases, progressive insights, and, at times, changes in perspective that do not break with what came before, but allow its implications to mature.
But Magnifica humanitas also makes clear that Catholic social teaching’s “nonlinear development” and “maturing implications” do not exclude the outright rejection or suspension of teachings that have unquestionably been made by the papal magisterium. In making a formal apology for the Church’s historical defense of slavery, or in declaring the tradition of just-war theory “outdated,” Leo does not take the easy way out by pretending that these teachings were never formally advanced, or that they were merely prudential decisions that established no doctrinal precedent. Leo is building here on a foundation established by Francis, whose declaration in Laudato si’ that “the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute and inviolable” is hard to reconcile with an honest reading of Rerum novarum. A similar freedom of reinterpretation seems to inform Leo’s summaries of nineteenth- and twentieth-century papal documents in Magnifica humanitas: if he says of Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum that “at least two insights remain highly relevant today,” or of Pius XI that “at least three insights of his social teaching remain particularly relevant today,” it is hard to avoid the implication that other insights of those popes might not be highly or particularly relevant for our times.
A second theme in Magnifica humanitas is all the more salient in light of this selective rereading of past papal documents: Leo chooses to omit themes of culture war in contexts where most of his recent predecessors would have at least mentioned them. For instance, while Magnifica humanitas is a long encyclical, specifically dedicated to the subject of “humanity,” it has nothing to say about sexuality or gender identity. In fact, apart from a few references to the need for equal civic and economic rights for women, gender is not mentioned in the encyclical at all. This cannot be an accident: the arguments of Magnifica humanitas are informed by and repeatedly cite Dignitas infinita and Quo vadis, humanitas?, two recent publications of the Holy See on Christian anthropology that include extensive discussion of gender. And while John Paul II is quoted frequently in Magnifica humanitas, no allusion is made to his “theology of the body.”
If the choice to avoid the topic of gender could be justified by the fact that Magnifica humanitas is mainly an economic encyclical, an even more surprising omission is the lack of any denunciation of socialism. This, too, must have been a deliberate choice. In Magnifica humanitas, Leo XIV summarizes the social teaching of each of the popes since Leo XIII, and proposes to identify common themes that emerge from their writings—but the words “socialism,” “communism,” or “Marxism” appear nowhere in the text. From Pius IX to John Paul II, every pope denounced socialism, frequently and sometimes furiously, not only as a bad economic program but as an atheistic idea irreconcilable with Christian faith. But in Magnifica humanitas, this central concern of so many popes simply disappears. Even Centesimus annus is described merely as a “reflection on the collapse of the Soviet system,” as if John Paul II had been writing about a particular state rather than what he took to be the final defeat of socialist political ideas. There is, notably, one exception to Leo XIV’s decision not to engage with the anti-socialist arguments of his predecessors: he repurposes the principle of subsidiarity, beloved by Catholic libertarians as an argument for private enterprise against the state, as an argument for regulating tech companies lest they obtain unaccountable transnational power.
One cannot conclude from his silences alone that Leo XIV intends any development of doctrine on the questions of gender identity or of socialism. But his choice not to mention them is significant: some Catholics may see in it a long-awaited invitation to advance new arguments, and, at the very least, it signifies a desire to disengage the Church’s witness from those controversial issues in which religious authority is often advanced as a substitute for reasoned debate.
The question of authority is closely tied to a third ecclesiological theme of Magnifica humanitas—its continuation of Francis’s call for synodality in the Church. The encyclical does not lay out a detailed model for synodal Church governance, but Leo makes a point of calling for synodality as the ecclesiastical counterpart of the inclusive and collectively oriented approach to political economy that Magnifica humanitas describes: “In the ecclesial context, the common good takes the form of a synodal approach for mission at the service of the Kingdom.” Just as in temporal politics, “democracy…is itself a means of contributing to the common good,” so in ecclesiastical government “the participation of the baptized in decision-making processes and their shared responsibility in the mission are achieved through genuine, rather than merely nominal, participatory bodies.” What practical structures will arise from these principles remains to be seen, but Leo’s choice to include the theme of synodality in Magnifica humanitas tells us that this priority of Francis’s remains on Leo’s agenda for the Church as well.
Related to this bottom-up and participatory view of decision-making in the Church is a muted view of the specifically religious nature of Catholic social teaching. Needless to say, Leo presents his arguments about humanity and the ends of politics as completely congruent with Catholic theology, and he considers the Incarnation of the Word and the promise of future glorification to be the summit of human magnificence. But at no point do the social analysis or recommendations of Magnifica humanitas depend on papal authority, or on specifically Christian doctrines. Leo’s ambition is “to engage in dialogue with all men and women of our time, with whom we share in the events, questions and aspirations of humanity.” If the Christian tradition is a particularly valuable resource for this dialogue, baptism is not a prerequisite for fruitful participation in it, since “when reason seriously examines human nature, it is capable of discovering values that apply to everyone.” Just as he advocates for synodal governance in the Church, Leo also follows Francis in proposing a model of engagement with the secular world based on dialogue and persuasion—not command from on high.
In most of his public speeches, Leo has shown a preference for carefully worded, irenic statements, without some of the rhetorical flourishes for which Francis was loved and hated. The language of Magnifica humanitas is equally measured. But this should not lead anyone to assume that he is a “conservative” thinker or that he intends a reversal of Francis’s teachings. Between the lines of his commentary on economics and artificial intelligence, Leo has given us hints of a bold vision for how the Church can reimagine its own authority and engage anew in dialogue with the world.
We welcome your comments about this article. Please send your response to [email protected].
