Over the past decade, civilizational discourse has become a staple of global political thought. This discourse presents nations like India, Russia, and, now, the United States as sacred bearers of a unique historical and cultural heritage. The term also evokes colonial echoes of a “civilizing” mission, positing one people as superior to others it encounters. Given historical work like Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts, this dimension of civilizational discourse seems thoroughly discredited. Gandhi was reportedly asked, “What do you think about Western civilization?” He tartly responded, “I think it would be a good idea.”

Gandhi’s quote resonates today not just for its snappy inversion of the usual status of colonizer and colonized, but also because of the kernel of hope it expresses. He was no relativist. As his program of nonviolent resistance showed, he sincerely believed that the force of the better argument and moral exemplars could civilize his opponents. Something like Gandhi’s example is evoked in Leo XIV’s revival of Paul VI’s aspiration to a “civilization of love” in Magnifica humanitas (186).

The very idea of a civilization of love may strike some as hopelessly idealistic. Stalin once dismissively asked, “How many divisions has the pope?” And even the discursive power of a document like Magnifica humanitas is compromised in today’s automated public sphere. Despite these challenges, the encyclical’s vision has already demonstrated enormous appeal around the world. It is a genuinely universalist civilizational discourse, prescribing “a social order in which justice and charity are intertwined and love becomes the guiding principle of economic, political and cultural life” (186). And given the growing destructive power of AI, Auden’s imperative to “love one another or die” suggests that imbuing the state and economy with more dimensions of selfless concern is the pragmatic option.

Magnifica humanitas symphonically unites many genres as instruments—calls to conscience, theological reflection, prayer, condemnation, praise, and, most important for our purposes, social theory. Leo’s social-theoretical method is straightforward yet profound. At a crucial point in the document, he contrasts the culture of power and the civilization of love. In a culture of power, there is “no limit to the race—driven by a dehumanizing ambition—to develop evermore powerful technologies or to secure control over them” (186). A civilization of love, by contrast, translates “charity into structures of justice, giving institutional form to fraternity and regarding others—whether individuals or peoples—as allies necessary for building the common good” (186). 

Bringing love (or faith, for that matter) to the public sphere may seem like a dangerous move. Brutally exclusivist movements have arisen out of all the world’s major faith traditions, and the ecstasy of civic love all too often curdles into hatred of its perceived enemies. But Magnifica humanitas manages to develop a conception of civic love with universal appeal, attractive to all persons of good will.

One important dimension of this civic love is the classic Catholic doctrine of a preferential option for the poor (14, 43, 78, 235). The most powerful and wealthy in society should not embrace AI simply as a way of eliminating the need for the labor of the poor and middle classes. To develop an “economy that values dignity,” Magnifica humanitas says we must recognize the following: 

Economic models that exalt efficiency and individual success often view investment in disadvantaged people or in those with slower development paths as useless or inconvenient, as if their futures depended solely on their ability to keep pace with the “winners.” In reality, a just society requires a vigilant State and civil institutions that are capable of overcoming the singular mentality of efficiency, and of ensuring that resources, creative solutions and regulations favor the most vulnerable. (158)

Amid all the present talk of an “AI arms race,” few are willing to acknowledge an obvious truth: some will lose the race, and some will choose not to participate in it. Protections for such communities, whether guaranteed by law or some other form of self-restraint, should be predicated on a universal social respect for pluralism. It should be more than acceptable to “fall behind” in AI in order to preserve artisanship, respect ecological limits, and aspire to virtue. These are exactly the types of human experience and commitments that AI bounty should support, instead of pressuring them out of existence in the name of a mechanized optimization.

The encyclical continually drives home the importance of wise intervention in the economy. Leo has no patience for a “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” characterizing AI as a panacea: 

To think that new technologies will automatically benefit everyone is to ignore the evidence. Unless transformations at the design stage prioritize the prevention of new and further disparities, technological progress will inevitably produce structural inequalities. Today, justice requires access to the benefits of innovation, including care, knowledge, tools and opportunities. (161)

Civic love requires a constant awareness of the plight of the most vulnerable. 

To be sure, pursuing this in actual political life is a tall order. It requires something of a revolution in political psychology whereby persons at almost all levels of developed societies stop looking above and ahead to covet more power and wealth. We must instead look with gratitude on what we have, and contemplate what kind of civic order could spread and enhance that prosperity for those left behind. This may seem like the type of utopian thought that the encyclical wants to avoid, warning as it does that “we are in need of a healthy realism that avoids both political idealism and cynicism” (218). But the encyclical’s persistent focus on inequality helps guide us forward. We should focus first on those with the most and the least. And as these most extreme inequalities are addressed, a political order capable of structuring technological change for the common good can take root.

The focus on the most disadvantaged, as well as the varied rhetorical registers of the encyclical, remind me of Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy. That masterpiece, enshrined in its original chapel in Naples, is one of the greatest works of art I have ever encountered. It is a direct and heartfelt response to Matthew 25:35–6: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” The crowded lower part of the painting packs in a burial, a visitation of the imprisoned, the slaking of thirst, and the sheltering and clothing of the homeless and naked. The top features Mary and the infant Jesus, borne by angels, gazing benevolently on the pageant of charity below. The split composition reminds one of Catholic social thought’s (CST) layers of meaning. It is possible for atheists and agnostics to be moved by it on purely secular terms, but CST is more beautiful and resonant when coupled with the Christian story of salvation. The interplay between the sacred and profane, the transcendent and the earthly, offers a spiritual salve neither can supply on its own.

Every Christian, individually, is biblically commanded to pursue works of mercy. Popes Leo XIII and XIV (in Rerum novarum [1891] and Magnifica humanitas), as well as all the popes who served between them, remind us that this is our social duty as well. We have the wealth and technology: as Jason Hickel and Dylan Sullivan estimated in 2024, “Provisioning decent living standards for 8.5 billion people would require only 30 percent of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments.” As a moral matter, we cannot allow the advance of AI to follow the pattern of so many other technologies, where the vast majority of the benefits go to a small elite and the disadvantaged scramble for crumbs (and bear an unfair share of the harms).

Like Magnifica humanitas’s passages on those who could be left behind by AI, The Seven Works of Mercy portrays the abject with realism, dignity, and grace. In his biography Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane, Andrew Graham-Dixon aptly characterizes the painting as pauperist, translating Jesus’ compassion for the needy and disabled into arresting images. As Graham-Dixon explains, “The pauperist strain of Counter-Reformation piety, to which Caravaggio had given such uncompromising expression in his Roman altarpieces, was especially strong in southern Italy [in part thanks to] the urban crisis gripping seventeenth-century Naples.” It was a faith profoundly shaped by St. Francis of Assisi, which saw beggars, prisoners, and the destitute as fellow pilgrims on a common journey. That solidarity contrasted with other currents in Catholic aesthetics of the time, such as the Baroque emphasis on ornament and triumphal splendor. One side saw holiness incarnate in disheveled pilgrims with dirty feet; the other portrayed God’s glory in mysteries like the Annunciation, Transfiguration, and Ascension.

These incarnational and transcendent dimensions of Catholicism persist to this day, and each has its place. A trinity that includes both a holy man and the Holy Spirit needs no less. But when it comes to the social doctrine of the Church, both Pope Francis and Pope Leo leave no doubt as to which they emphasize. A Vatican letter released during Francis’s papacy, Antiqua et nova, focuses on the incarnational aspect of our faith. Both Francis and Leo did much to rehabilitate liberation theology, which emphasized the centrality of the less developed world for social and economic theory—including Catholic social thought. After reading Magnifica humanitas, one has little doubt that a legitimate development of AI must prioritize the advances in agriculture, medicine, logistics, transportation, energy, and basic manufacturing necessary to bring decent quality of life to all. 

A deep challenge, though, is that left to AI-driven devices, persons may never develop the habits of character and reflection necessary to recognize and take on such responsibility. Magnifica humanitas laments that “early and unsupervised exposure to digital devices and social media can negatively impact sleep, attention span…emotions and relationships” (141). Moreover, “the speed and ease with which answers or summaries can be obtained risk extinguishing the desire to ask questions, which is a process that bears fruit only over time” (140). The encyclical rightly critiques those habits of mind and heart. In their place, it commends the type of reflection and deliberation that a society-wide AI acceleration would render well-nigh impossible. As Leo stated last year in an address to filmmakers and actors:

Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is above all an invocation. When cinema is authentic, it does not merely console, but challenges. It articulates the questions that dwell within us, and sometimes, even provokes tears that we did not know we needed to express. 

Perhaps this will also be part of the fate of Magnifica humanitas: to inspire more persons to “articulate the questions that dwell within us” and find answers in our faith and deepest commitments. Technology is a means, not an end. Like Caravaggio illuminating the meaning of charity, this extraordinary encyclical powerfully articulates a “civilization of love” as the ultimate worthy aim of technical mastery.

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