Editorial - From Leo XIV, an encyclical born of hope. In the “praise of limits,” an invitation to cherish their magnificence
by Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on May 26, 2026
Magnifica humanitas is a love letter that the Church, through Pope Leo XIV, writes to humanity today. This benevolent gaze upon women and men is the first gift Pope Leo gives us. The Church, in its luminous times, has in fact loved the world even with the “charity of the eyes,” looking upon it with trust and hope. Even the lengthy and central discourse on Artificial Intelligence (AI), including its profound and precise “anthropological and spiritual guidelines for its use,” unfolds within this humanism of hope: “We wish to enter into dialogue with all the men and women of our time, with whom we share in the events, questions, and aspirations of humanity” (2). This is not an encyclical born of fear of the new; it does not condemn our time by placing itself outside of it, but under the same sky as everyone else, the Pope gives voice to the hopes, joys, and legitimate concerns of so many. An encyclical that thus speaks the same affectionate language as the Second Vatican Council. To understand its meaning, tone, and raison d’être, it must be approached not so much in the light of Rerum novarum as in that of Gaudium et spes, the Church’s other love letter to humanity in another new and difficult era.
A very beautiful, necessary, and important encyclical, at times truly magnificent and prophetic, which reveals to us the theology and the heart of Pope Leo, a text on par with the greatest encyclicals of the past. We were waiting for it, but in many pages it exceeds expectations: “The increase in military spending is presented as the only response to an uncertain future or perceived threats, while the real cost falls on the poorest” (204). The title, as in many encyclicals, is the synthesis and heart of the entire text: humanity is magnificent, and all the appeals he makes to it are aimed at safeguarding this precious magnificence. It says little, it is true, about the challenges related to non-human creatures, because, quite simply, in the era of transhumanism and posthumanism, Pope Leo today cares about the human; he cares about emphasizing the beauty and greatness of Adam. “Yet you have made him a little lower than God (Elohim)” (Ps 8:5), a theological distance that this encyclical further reduces, not because it lowers the Elohim, but because it elevates men and women.
And when he presents us with the challenges of AI viewed through the perfect lens of the principle of subsidiarity, Pope Leo continues his praise of Adam, of the value of his human words because they are an image of that Word who, from the Trinity, chose to become man: “When the word is simulated, it does not build a relationship, but a semblance of one. The artificial imitation of the relationship of care or accompaniment can become dangerous” (100). There are dimensions of work, even of care work, that can be well supported by AI (and we see this); but there are other decisive ones where the replacement of the word, the face, the hands, and the heart of humans simply produces devaluation and dehumanization.
There is much talk of work in Magnifica humanitas: the word “Jesus” occurs nine times, Christ thirty, “work” seventy-one, to remind us that that Logos had been a carpenter. In decisive human relationships, the word and the human heart cannot, must not, have perfect substitutes, and if we do so, we debase ourselves, our work, our magnificence. So, when a manager must fire an employee, even if they rely on algorithms, in the end, in the final stretch, their human word must come into play; they must speak with that employee, they must put their face and soul on the line, with all their limits and imperfections. It is no coincidence that the perhaps most poetic pages are dedicated to the “praise of limits”: “We must remember that the human does not flourish despite the limit, but often through the limit” (118), because “it is precisely in our being limited that compassion finds space, the sincere concern for the needs of others, the generosity that surprises even in the midst of darkness and failure” (119).
AI reduces cognitive costs and simplifies complexity: but Homo sapiens does not always love reductions in time and cost, because we often like to participate in processes; we like the longer, slower routes home because we want to look at trees and flowers. AI can create an agent that perfectly mimics the St. Francis of yesterday, but it cannot create new St. Francises and Leopardis today, which are what we need infinitely to live well. Because algorithms and machines will not be able to satisfy the essential dimension of human happiness: the desire to be desired by human beings. We are a desire that desires other desires, only human ones—the smaller desires serve us but are not enough: only Adam is the last rung of the earth’s ladder that can touch paradise.
The dialogue that Pope Leo establishes between the world of AI and the principle of subsidiarity is therefore highly fruitful. As it is currently developing, AI is anti-subsidiary, because it is concentrated in a very few economic and financial giants, and because there is no true biodiversity within it. Human intelligences, on the other hand, are as numerous as there are people, and no sum of human intelligences is superior in dignity to the intelligence of a single person. Democracy, and within it civil markets, function by aggregating billions of intelligences spread out in a marvelous bottom-up cognitive process, and the moment anyone were to think that millions of human intelligences have more dignity than a single one, democracy dies: “Subsidiarity demands that such processes not be imposed from above in an opaque and unilateral manner” (71). Finally, Leo XIV’s letter unfolds along two biblical threads, one dark and the other luminous: the Tower of Babel and Nehemiah’s reconstruction of Jerusalem. A flawed construction and a righteous one. Nehemiah (Neh 1–2) feels a call to return to Jerusalem to rebuild it: “To rebuild today means recognizing that … there is still a bright possibility: that of building together, … fostering justice and fraternity” (10).
The founder of Babel, on the other hand, is Nimrod, who “was the first to become powerful on earth” (Gen 10:8). Babel is therefore a great lesson on power and empires, and on their intrinsic corruption. Both the rebuilders with Nehemiah and those of Babel were workers; in both there was collective action, a working community. Every day, for millennia, history has been an interweaving of workers building Babel and workers building arks and rebuilding cities. In the Bible, Babel comes after the flood and Noah’s ark. The “Babel syndrome” (10) arrives right on cue when one has emerged from floods (globalization, wars…) or fears others, and the temptation to build the wrong walls becomes very strong: “Many, many years were devoted to the construction of the tower. In the eyes of the builders, a brick then became more precious than a human being; if a man fell and died, no one paid any attention, but if a brick fell, everyone wept. Pregnant women were not allowed to stop working even during labor: they gave birth while shaping bricks” (Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews). In this time of great and new suffering, Magnifica humanitas deepens our gratitude for the Church and for Pope Leo, and is a great gift for all those who continue to hope and believe that humanity, despite everything, is magnificent.