[I]f an authentic “more than human” exists, where is it to be found? The Christian faith answers that question by pointing to a fulfilment that does not arise from a technological divinization, but through God’s grace received in Christ (Magnifica Humanitas,126).
I’ve spent the last few hours reading Pope Leo’s new encyclical. However, I’ve only made it to paragraph 170 thusfar. But there’s so much to discuss, it seems best to write something now and let the rest marinate and then write more next week, God willing. Meanwhile, I’ve got another author doing some more analysis, so stay tuned for that.
Pope Leo’s basic orientation for approaching the Antichrist Technocracy of today is faithful to St. Augustine, in which he quotes the fundament passage of City of God against the Pagans in paragraph 130:
Two loves have built two cities: the earthly city, the love of self even to the contempt of God; the heavenly city, the love of God even to the contempt of self.
But he makes the framework of the Two Cities from the opening paragraphs of the document: the decision in our time is “either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” As it happens, The New Tower of Babel is the title of a book by Trad Godfather Dietrich von Hildebrand, in which he says many of the same things reiterated in Magnifica Humanitas in our own context. More from the new encyclical:
What are we building? As technological development rapidly transforms languages, relationships, institutions and forms of power, we believers must and can choose which projects to work on and in what manner, so as to safeguard and value the grandeur of humanity that has been given to us as a gift. This is a choice not only for our future but also for our present, since artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies are already part of our daily lives (90).
This reiterates the “idolatry” that Vatican II warned about:
In our own time, moreover, those who have trusted excessively in the progress of the natural sciences and the technical arts have fallen into an idolatry of temporal things and have become their slaves rather than their masters (Apostolicam Actuositatem, 7).
A mention of idolatry comes in paragraph 10:
We must, then, avoid the “Babel syndrome,” namely the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language — even a digital one — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance (10).
Later on, he has forceful words against Artificial Intelligence, saying that it is a tool, yes, but “we cannot consider AI to be morally neutral” (104). It must rather, first, be “disarmed”:
AI is already an environment in which we are immersed, as well as a force with which we must engage. For this reason, merely regulating it is insufficient; it must be disarmed, welcoming and accessible (110).
He provides in a footnote lots of sources which give a deeper analysis of AI:
Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith – Dicastery for Culture and Education, Note Antiqua et Nova (14 January 2025): AAS 117 (2025), 159-210; Francis, Message for the 57th World Day of Peace (8 December 2023): AAS 116 (2024), 54-64; Francis, Message for the 58th World Day of Social Communications (24 January 2024): AAS 116 (2024), 261-266; Francis, Address to the G7 Session on Artificial Intelligence: “An exciting and fearsome tool” (14 June 2024): AAS 116 (2024), 866-875; International Theological Commission, Quo vadis, humanitas? Thinking about Christian anthropology in the face of some scenarios on the future of humanity (9 February 2026); Message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications (24 January 2026): L’Osservatore Romano, 24 January 2026, 2-3.
Here we must ask Trads to keep an open mind about his quotations from Pope Francis. Note how the following quotation sanitises Synodality by making the telos of Synodality Almighty God Himself, not a Masonic humanitarianism:
Indeed, this is the 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. In the Book of Revelation, John sees the New Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21:2) as a gift for all humanity. And this vision of grace is an invitation for us Christians to work together in order to foster a peaceful, just and dignified life in community within today’s “cities” (emphasis added, 10).
And thus the quotation at the beginning of this essay (from 126) where any true building is the result of grace building on nature all the way up to Almighty God. But note this: the whole encyclical itself uses the word “only” in its opening paragraph:
Whenever humanity is in danger of marring its true identity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, knowing that it is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.” In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness (emphasis added).
That’s a quote from Vatican II with the word “only.” No more “all paths lead to God” heresy. We’re back on the path to God through the Holy Name of Jesus Christ. Anything else is the Tower of Babel – that’s the most important message of this encyclical. Reminds me of another pope denouncing the “Satanic scourge” of the errors of Russia:
On the bases of liberalism and laicism they wished to build other social edifices which, powerful and imposing as they seemed at first, all too soon revealed the weakness of their foundations, and today are crumbling one after another before our eyes, as everything must crumble that is not grounded on the one corner stone which is Christ Jesus (Divini Redemptoris, 38).
But we have to admit that Pope Francis had an important insight from Laudato Si’, and that is his critique of the “technocractic paradigm.” That concept is a great insight, which, by the way, is the same paradigm that created the Novus Ordo Missae, according to Joseph Ratzinger’s famous quotation about “technical production.” So let’s not be afraid to admit where Pope Francis did something good. Pope Leo says this about the said paradigm:
In his Encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis denounced the growing dominance of a technocratic paradigm in our globalized world: the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control and profit alone shape personal, social and economic decisions. This makes it clear that technology is not simply a tool. When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency (82).
This reminds me of the way that the Algorithm Beast judges how OnePeterFive gets bounced around the internet. And it reminds me of how Catholic media voices (including myself) are tempted into sensationalism (against truth and charity) for the sake of clicks, because our brains are addicted to the dopamine bursts that the Algorithm Beasts gives us in our “feed.”
Back to Pope Leo:
This paradigm has spread rapidly in recent years, fueled in part by the expansion of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, nanotechnology, robotics and biotechnology. In themselves, these innovations can greatly serve integral human development and the care of our common home. Yet precisely because of their power, they can also hasten the expansion of the technocratic paradigm and therefore require a new spiritual, ethical and political framework. More power does not necessarily imply something better. In this respect, the words of Romano Guardini remain relevant: “Contemporary man has not been trained to use power well” (93).
For me, I appreciate the way that Pope Leo notes how the new technocracy is in the hands of elites who wield the power (5, 95), but I wonder about how the angelic wills are involved. I would be shocked if the fallen angels have not taken the technocratic paradigm we have created to do their own programming. I asked a friend who knows AI and he said the following is accurate:
Indeed, current AI systems are more “cultivated” than “built,” for developers do not directly design every detail, but instead create a framework within which the intelligence “grows.” As a result, fundamental scientific aspects — such as the internal representations and computational processes of these systems — remain, at present, unknown. There thus emerges an urgent need for a twofold commitment: on the one hand, a deepening of scientific research; on the other, the exercise of moral and spiritual discernment (98).
So if this is true, then that means that we’ve created a system which is free from the human will, and exposed to the angelic will – those fallen angels who have so much more knowledge and power than we do in so many ways. And this uncontrollable thing – which is probably under some power of the fallen angels – is now controlling whether or not this article that you are reading (or listening to) gets into the hands of the readership. Amazing! This reminds me so much of C.S. Lewis’s epic masterpiece That Hideous Strength which teats on the “technocracy” in 1945.
I’m more than half way through, but I’m already convinced that everyone should read this whole encyclical completely, and we should all discuss it. The reason is because unlike other social encyclicals, the impact of the technocracy impacts so many more people – and more deeply – than any other industrial revolution. So stay tuned for more.
CHRIST IS RISEN!
T. S. Flanders
Editor
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