From Rerum Novarum to Today: Pope Leo XIV Prepares to Add His Voice to the Church’s Social Teaching
During his recent apostolic trip to Cameroon, the Pope called on Catholic university students from central Africa to be ‘pioneers of a new humanism in the context of the digital revolution.’
With the publication of his first encyclical just around the corner, Pope Leo XIV is poised to add his voice to the Church’s tradition of social teaching, reflecting on what it means to be human in the midst of a digital revolution.
According to reports, the encyclical — a papal letter to the Church — will be called Magnifica Humanitas, Latin for “Magnificent Humanity.” It is expected to present the Pope’s moral guidance on how to approach artificial intelligence.
As Leo himself indicated in the first days of his pontificate, he will follow in the steps of his predecessor and namesake, Pope Leo XIII, whose encyclical Rerum Novarum, “Of New Things,” is widely considered the first in a long line of social encyclicals produced in the modern era of the papacy.
Catholic social teaching from the late 19th century to today is the Church’s attempt “to articulate itself in constantly new and evolving conditions,” said Anna Rowlands, a theologian and professor of Catholic social thought at Durham University in the United Kingdom.
Catholic social teaching is like a river, with “its own integrity and dynamism … changed partly by the obstacles that it hits,” she told the Register. With his forthcoming encyclical, “Pope Leo is jumping into that stream,” and “AI is obviously one of those things that’s … on the riverbed of the moment now.”
Catholic Social Tradition
Pope Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum, his encyclical letter on capital and labor, on May 15, 1891.
Leo XIII’s letter asks, “How can we draw from that deep well [of the tradition of the Church] to offer something which is living water for an industrial, modern age?” said Rowlands, who is also a member of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Integral Human Development.
“So, in that moment, the Church attempts basically to draw down that vision of the Gospel into a set of principles,” she explained. “And of course, those [principles] evolve over time. … They don’t arrive just completely packaged in 1891 in a way that we receive them now; It’s a genuinely dynamic unfolding.”
In the intervening 135 years, Leo XIII and his nine successors have released a subsequent 65 encyclicals, many of them focused on social challenges of their time: from war to birth control to the environmental crisis.
With Catholic social teaching, the Church seeks to present the principles of “human dignity, the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, the universal destination of goods, the preferential option for the poor and for the earth” in a way that responds to the issues of the times, she said.
Catholic social teaching is “not just theory,” Rowlands said. “This is speaking of the witness and the mission of the Church for the salvation of all souls who are embedded in the world. So this is about the story of the creation of the world, of the purpose of human beings and the destiny of human beings.”
In Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII presents a different story about “what it means to be human than the dominant storylines of liberalism, socialism, communism, fascism, etc.,” she said.
“That’s one of the reasons why I think Rerum Novarum does hit in a genuinely different way,” she said, “even if it’s repeating some of the themes that already would have been present in other forms of social action and analysis of the time. … It doesn’t give in to any of those ‘isms.’ It is its own story, rooted in the story of the Gospels, rooted in the Person of Jesus Christ in that revelation.”
Rowlands underlined that the model of “Magnificent Humanity,” as Leo XIV’s forthcoming encyclical might be named, is Jesus Christ. He is the Church’s example of what it means to carry out “social justice,” a view of social justice that “does not equate easily to a secular, liberal narrative of social justice.”
The new encyclical, she said, may help show what “social justice” is from the Catholic perspective, “where we understand what we might have in common with other people who genuinely believe in a convinced humanism, but also the things that make us different, that mark out the particularity of a Christian path.”
A ‘New Humanism’
Speaking during an apostolic trip to Cameroon in April, the Pope called Catholic university students from central Africa to “not be afraid of ‘new things’” and to be “pioneers of a new humanism in the context of the digital revolution.”
“Like every great historical transformation, this too calls not only for technical competence, but also for a humanistic formation,” he said at the Catholic University of Central Africa on April 17.
Humanism, historically, “is a movement looking at the emergence and the use of literature, art, history and philosophy to reflect on the human person made in the image and likeness of God,” but in its subsequent development, it “rejected the Christian project,” Matthew Bunson, vice president and editorial director of EWTN News, told the Register.
A historian and theologian, Bunson explained, “Secular humanism is what we are grappling with today … moving beyond an understanding of the person as made in the image and likeness of God and more toward a self-understanding of the person,” favoring progress and technological development over human dignity.
This is where the transhumanism and posthumanism movements emerge; in the former, its proponents hope to eliminate pain, suffering and death by the perpetual advancement of the human body; and in the latter, its advocates explore the merging of humans and machines, challenging the superiority of the human person and its central position in society.
Such viewpoints “render inoperative, and in their view, antiquated, any sense of a soul, anything that would be transcendent, non-material,” Bunson explained.
Transcendence and the Popes
Rowlands said refusal to acknowledge transcendence is the source of the uprootedness of cultures in our time, “because the modern era cuts itself off from that source of transcendence as an overt part of the public conversation.”
She said the Catholic Church insists that “thinking through transcendence is the basis for a rightly ordered humanity.”
“The thing that connects every single encyclical is the insistence that social crises have at their root a refusal of transcendence,” she said. “So for every crisis that we have faced, from Rerum Novarum to the contemporary day, each pope has pointed out that the imbalances and the failures of human relationship that structure those moments of crisis — whether it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis, whether it’s the environmental crisis, whether it’s the stuff that Leo XIII was writing about — it’s the active refusal of transcendence.”
“To accept that we are creatures of a Creator, that we are bound to each other in relationships of mutual entrustment and responsibility, and that we necessarily have to … give God, God’s due and to ensure that our neighbor has their due” — the definition of justice.
Leo XIV Responds to the AI Revolution
Bunson said Pope Leo XIV’s idea of a “new humanism” wants to renew appreciation for the transcendent and said “that progress is subordinate to human dignity and the Christian understanding of the human being.”
“The Pope is aware of trans- and posthumanism and the extent to which it is informing a lot of influential tech figures,” said Legionary Father Michael Baggot, a theology professor and expert in transhumanism and the ethics of emerging technologies, in an interview with the Register.
Pope Leo XIV, he said, sees “the need to represent in all of its fullness and beauty a Christian humanism that says ‘Yes’ to technological development, but not to a reckless accelerationalism that would sacrifice the weak, the frail, the vulnerable for the sake of potentially developing a kind of superior species, be that an enhanced human species or even a non-human, post-human artificial-intelligence successor.”
“The generative AI revolution and various chatbots,” Father Baggot explained, “have accelerated and intensified a technological absorption … that has interfered with deep conversation, with friendships, with appreciation for people of other backgrounds or interests or political viewpoints.”
“The Pope is calling us to recover these kinds of deep interactions and to appreciate the value of in-person experiences, to appreciate the value of working with our hands, contemplating nature, playing musical instruments, writing and reading books, engaging in deep conversations, dancing” and “in-person worship in community,” the priest said.
“We see so many simulations of human activities that until recently were very difficult for most people to imagine. So the Pope is sensitive to that and basically does not want us to settle for an imitation,” he said.
The renewed humanism of Leo XIV “utilizes those [AI] tools for research, for information, for streamlining administrative tasks, but will always turn back to in-person, embodied, community worship.”