By Robert Royal
A week has passed since the publication of Magnifica humanitas, and I have been rereading certain sections, trying to delve deeper into it (after my own quick reactions in a recent Prayerful Posse, the same day Pope Leo’s first encyclical appeared). Of course, serious questions remain about the text: its functional pacifism and an overly optimistic trust in multilateral statism and “dialogue” as the preeminent mechanism for halting not only the relentless advance of AI, but virtually every human conflict. (Strange positions for an Augustinian). But I confess that my initial suspicions may have been heightened by the many ways in which, for more than a dozen years, Pope Francis repeatedly left many of us on edge because of heterodox notions smuggled into papal documents. Leo’s effort to defend the human is carefully positioned within the Church’s modern social teaching; it is sincere, open, and, from its opening words, Christ-centered.
So I would like to acknowledge a fault; mea, but not maxima. Because we still need something much stronger and quite different to face the challenges of our “new era.” The Pope often speaks of “disarming” language and AI, when what we also desperately need is a call to arms, of a different kind, to defend the faith and human civilization.
If one stops to think about it, we have already had plenty of warnings, in many quarters, about the potential threats of AI—from job losses to environmental dangers and uncontrolled military uses—even from Silicon Valley itself. And the disastrous narrowness of the “technocratic paradigm,” that slow slide toward the belief that the machines we create will provide us with all truth and everything else we need, has been on our cultural radar for at least a century.
The true defense of humanity must begin with humanity defending itself from itself. Which, at times, requires physical means, but always involves patrolling the cultural peripheries, not only to “accompany” but—may one use a Christian term here?—to convert.
That is precisely the Christian challenge, which requires a more explicitly Christian solution: a more robust confrontation with what Christianity sees as the real situation of the creature made in the image and likeness, now in a fallen state, marked by sin and death, and in our time in particular, often closed to the saving message of the Gospel.
Leo himself acknowledged this a few days ago in an address to evangelizers gathered in Rome:
The prevailing cultural climate in media-saturated and consumer-driven societies diminishes the capacity to learn with patience and to undertake, with effort, a personal search for truth, with perseverance and critical judgment. Every message risks being perceived as just one more opinion among many.
That is a fair description of the present times. And he put his finger on the sore spot: “Certainly it is not by diluting the content or softening the demands that Christianity can become attractive, but by bearing witness with humility and courage to ‘the way, the truth, and the life’ that converted and sanctified so many people.” (Emphasis added).
I have been saying for years that it would be not only inspiring, but would truly grasp the scale of our challenge, if the Church showed as much urgency about conversion and eternal life as it has shown about peace, climate change, immigration, and ecumenism. Pope Leo has now sounded a similar note: “No one can take the place [of the Church] in this mission, which is as urgent as it is necessary to secure a reliable foundation for the future of humanity, so that it may be a future of peace, justice, freedom, and fraternity.” [Emphasis, again, added].
Profoundly true, but why stop there, with these earthly goals—however desirable they may be—when speaking to evangelizers, when Jesus himself did not dwell much on political and social issues, and was clearly more concerned with leading us toward eternal life? It has often been observed that the Church in Latin America has been promoting the “preferential option for the poor” and “social justice” for decades. Worthy goals, if pursued properly, but the Church there is shrinking. Meanwhile, evangelicals and other Protestants in South America preach Jesus and are growing.
Rome would do well to note this and speak with great care. Magnifica humanitas, for example, begins quite well by noting: “In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its greatness becomes the Way, the Truth, and the Life, opening the path for each of us…”. And what is that path? The sentence ends… “to grow toward fullness.”
Fullness? As I pointed out in our Posse last week, the word “sin” appears only three times in this encyclical; two mentions were not personal, but rather “structures of sin,” and the third came from a list of things in Dignitas infinita that do NOT diminish the dubious notion of an infinite human dignity. Some have written to me since saying that other major Church documents produced by traditional figures do not mention sin at all. And that is true. But they were not speaking of a “magnificent” humanity.
I do not know how one tells people with any degree of urgency that they desperately need Jesus Christ, unless one can first tell them why much of what they are doing will not “satisfy” them, even by creating a just order on earth, rather than aiming toward Heaven. That is, certainly, a more Augustinian vision.
“Fullness” is precisely the kind of neutral language and, in my view, the “watered-down” version of the Christian message against which the Pope himself warned in the address he gave to evangelizers late last week.
A good evangelizer must choose the best way to present the full Gospel in a given context, of course, and that may mean not saying everything at once in language people may not understand. But even at sporting events these days, the most meaningful Christian expression (John 3:16) appears on signs, something our worldly, death-denying civilization urgently needs to hear: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”
About the author
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West, and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.