On Monday 25 May, the Vatican released Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas (“On Safeguarding the Human Person in the time of Artificial Intelligence”). CTC Director Fr Angus Ritchie reflects on its implications for our congregations and communities.
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical has extraordinary breadth, in both its vision and its intended audience. Magnifica Humanitas will be read by politicians and business leaders, ethicists and scientists, in a huge range of countries and cultures. And yet it has something concrete and practical to say to every reader.
Here, as in many western democracies, we see an increasingly polarised and negative public discourse. Our political systems are becoming less effective at the very moment when technological change is accelerating. There is an urgent need for clear and robust action to place technologies such as Artificial Intelligence at the service of the common good. Yet the fragmented state of our politics makes such action harder than ever. It would be easy to despair, or to retreat into forms of spirituality that turn their back on these realities. But Leo summons us to realism and to hope-filled action.
Released the day after Pentecost, this encyclical reminds us that it is the Spirit of Christ who draws us together across difference to discern and promote a truly common good. Pope Leo invites us to see the God-given possibility of
building together, of transforming diversity into a resource and of making listening and dialogue the common ground upon which to cultivate justice and fraternity. Within this shared task, Christians discover their unique role of guiding actions toward God so that, in his light, pluralism does not dissipate into disorder, but instead, through the practice of synodality, it becomes the space in which humanity rediscovers its solid foundations and its final end (S10).
Pope Leo and community organising
Reading Magnifica Humanitas helps us to see why Pope Leo gave such a strong endorsement of community organising at his audience with Citizens UK leaders in Rome last June. It is an approach he was familiar with from his time in Chicago, the birthplace of broad-based organising in the 1930s through the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF). It also has strong resonances with that of the Latin American church in which he, like Pope Francis, served for many years.
Community organising begins with the “listening and dialogue” which leads on to concrete action to build “justice and fraternity”. Its faith-filled approach means Christians do not have to leave the Gospel at the door when they build alliances with others. Rather, it creates a space of encounter which can help humanity “rediscover its solid foundations and its final end”. In doing so, it embodies the Church’s teaching on Synodality as well as on Social Action.
The question of foundations stands at the heart of the encyclical. Pope Leo asks each of us to reflect on what we are building and why. When we place our trust in force, wealth and status – or in divisive and charismatic leaders whose language exalts these things – we are like the people who built the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.
When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-sufficiency, communication breaks down, languages are confused and people no longer understand each other. The result is not unity, but dispersion. Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing (S7).
At Pentecost, by contrast, it is because the apostles have learnt the need for humility and divine grace that God’s blessing is poured upon them. Communication is restored when humanity rediscovers its solid foundations and its final end.
Faith-filled
Magnifica Humanitas contrasts the vain builders of Babel with the prophet Nehemiah. When his people were in exile, Nehemiah drew them together, “listened to their concerns, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition”. The city was reborn, not through action by one man, but through collective action in which power and responsibility were shared.
It is an undertaking with God at the centre, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones. Thus, ancient Jerusalem rediscovers a common language — not one of uniformity, but one of communion, namely the harmony that arises when all persons assume their own role and recognize that their strength comes from the Lord (S8).
Now, as then, the process of rebuilding our common life is a spiritual one. We need the guidance of the Holy Spirit to discern the signs of the times (Matthew 16.2-3) and to respond (S22). In this process, Catholic Social Teaching is not a “handbook of principles and norms to be applied” but rather “a process of shared discernment… born from the encounter between the eternal truth of the Gospel and the questions of history.”
This is a vital insight for our community organising. It must be faith-filled, putting deep roots down, even as it takes walls down to work with others. These roots are about a living relationship with God, just as they were for Nehemiah and for the Apostles. Christian social action is not simply living out a set of Gospel values, but experiencing the active presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit as we journey.
The Church — together with other Christian denominations and believers of other religions — must make her voice heard, not in order to dominate, but to promote communion. Understood in this way, Social Doctrine becomes a theology of communion in history, a history in which the Word made flesh continues to be present through dialogue, memory and prophecy (S27).
Institution-based
Like Nehemiah, we cannot rebuild the city alone but in relationship with one another and with the Lord. This requires “the pursuit of the common good that gives life to a people, understood not as a mere collection of individuals, but as a living reality in which people learn to recognize that they themselves are interconnected and jointly responsible for the res publica.” (S62)
This is why veteran Industrial Areas Foundation organiser Ernesto Cortés Jr is keen to emphasise that community organising is “institution-based” and not just “broad-based” (Inclusive Populism, 19). Pope Leo reminds us that to weave individuals into a people requires a rich institutional life.
When families, associations, local communities, volunteer organizations and those in the so-called “third sector” are recognized and supported, social life becomes more accessible to people, services become more attuned to real needs, and solutions are more creative and respectful of the dignity of each person.
Community organising offers a concrete way to respond to his call to “move beyond” the “paternalistic or welfare-based management of societal life” and to instead “promote a culture of shared responsibility in a State that values citizens’ initiative, and a civil society capable of forging bonds and mobilizing energies in the service of the common good” (S70).
Like Francis, Leo sees the treatment of refugees and migrants as a “litmus test” of this politics: “The way a society treats them reveals whether its sense of justice is driven by fear or by the spirit of fraternity.” (S81)
Just as civil society needs to hold the State to account, and to develop solutions that respect the dignity of the person, holding the market to account is an increasingly urgent task in the era of AI. Pope Leo warns us that
The use of AI is never a purely technical matter: when it enters processes that affect people’s lives, it touches on rights, opportunities, status and freedom… when AI systems present themselves as neutral and objective, they end up reflecting and reinforcing the stereotypes or ideological bias of their designers and developers. (S102)
Leo goes on to warn that AI “tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data” and that this power needs to be held to account for the common good (S108).
The Pope is calling us into a concrete, realistic set of practices – not a set of pious exhortations untethered from daily life. He calls for an “intertwining of just institutions, credible witnesses and daily fidelity that sustains hope and provides clear direction for technological progress without allowing the heart to regress.” (S126) Precisely because it focuses on the institutions in which citizens build a common life, and then weaves relationship and trust across those institutions to build collective power, community organising has a vital role to play in fulfilling this call.
Purifying our hearts
Churches and schools are vital places where “daily fidelity” and “care” can be lived out, as an essential relational and spiritual foundation to wider social action. For unless our hearts are purified, our common action will only add to the Babel around us.
Not that the Church is immune from the temptations of status, wealth and the abuse of power. This is an encyclical which lives out Jesus’ teaching about logs and specks (Matthew 7.3-5). Pope Leo calls the Church to reckoning with its own complicity with abuses of power – quite specifically asking pardon for its own role in the slave trade (S176,177)
Leo calls for an “examen for the Church”, writing that its social doctrine must apply first of all to its internal life. Catholic Social Teaching is
not merely a message addressed to society; it is also an examination of conscience for the Church — a home and school of communion that is always called to ensure that the principles outlined in this chapter are applied, especially within its own structures…In practical terms, 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 (S86-7).
This is why clergy and lay leaders in parishes from Anglesey to Dagenham – representing churches with over 5000 weekly worshippers – are currently embarking on a Congregational Development Learning Community with CTC and Citizens UK.
The practices of community organising (and in particular the one-to-one relational meeting and the process of power analysis) are precisely this kind of “examen” which ensures parishes themselves embody CST. The “Synodal journey” has both an internal and external dimension. When this approach is followed new leaders emerge and the parish’s mission, in all its dimensions, is strengthened.
Pope Leo calls us to this same honesty in our analysis of the world beyond the church’s walls. He invites us to recognise the realities of the world as it is, even as we work for the world as it should be. Leo urges us to cultivate a “healthy realism” which “does not give up on changing the world”. He tells us that such a realism
starts by clearly identifying interests, fears, constraints and power dynamics, precisely in order to determine what can be achieved, and the measures needed to achieve it. It does not reduce politics to morality; neither does it surrender to violence. Instead, it seeks viable paths for making peace more than a mere word… (S218).
A road-map for action
This encyclical offers each of us a road-map for faith-filled action. Whoever we are wherever we are, we can undertake the daily acts of “fidelity” and “care” that bear witness to the “magnificence” of the human person, revealed in the incarnation of the Word. We can also be part of local congregations whose ministry, within and beyond the Church’s walls, builds a “civilisation of love”.
Such work reweaves the social fabric that is eroded when technologies lose accountability to human flourishing. As this fabric is rewoven, communities acquire both the wisdom and the relational power to re-tether humanity’s growing technological ability to a vision of the common good.
Faith-filled community organising has an important role to play in this work. Over many decades, on both sides of the Atlantic, the practice has given birth to a wide range of transformative actions, deeply informed by Catholic Social Teaching. These have included campaigns for a Living Wage, for a more welcoming environment for refugees and recent migrants, for affordable housing and for a cap on interest rates. The latter two campaigns have drawn explicitly on the example of the prophet Nehemiah.
Today, this work is even more necessary. “More than ever,” writes Pope Leo, “in an age of robotics and AI… politics has the task of orientating economies and technologies to the common good, promoting dignified work, social inclusion and an equitable distribution of the benefits of innovation.” (S163)
One concrete example of this is the work of young Catholics in Citizens UK. They have been at the heart of a successful campaign to secure access to mental health professionals in every school across England, to address the rising incidence of mental health issues among children. The alliance is now turning its attention to some of the drivers of this rise, including the algorithms of social media applications. Pope Leo’s encyclical speaks very directly to this issue
When business models thrive on human weakness, the person is treated as a means rather than as an end; those who design or finance such systems bear a moral responsibility that cannot be ignored. There is an urgent need to promote technologies that strengthen interior freedom by fostering education in digital sobriety and the protection of minors, thus countering models that exploit vulnerability. (S170)
There is much more in the encyclical to nourish our reflections on what new actions may need to be taken to promote the common good in an age of AI. But the first task, for us as for Nehemiah, is to renew the foundations, rooting our action in a deeper relationship with God and with neighbour.
These two relationships are intimately connected. This is expressed powerfully in the final sections of the encyclical, which offer a meditation on the Song of Mary. Her Magnificat is a reminder that the foundation of faithful action is the ability to see the world as God sees it, and to discern this action in the turbulence of human history:
God “takes the part of the lowly. His plan is one that is often hidden beneath the opaque context of human events that see ‘the proud, the mighty and the rich’ triumph. Yet his secret strength is destined in the end to be revealed.” (S243, quotation from Benedict XVI)
Community organising is “faith-filled” precisely when it acts with confidence in the shape and strength of God’s action – though which the hungry are fed, the humble exalted, and the life of heaven becomes visible in our earthly cities. Magnifica Humanitas offers us fresh inspiration and direction for this work.
