Read most often as a moral commentary on artificial intelligence, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (2026), is better understood as something more consequential: the first large-scale theological and constitutional response to the emergence of algorithmic sovereignty. This essay reconstructs the encyclical along that axis. Its governing claim is that the governance failures the document diagnoses are not, at root, ethical failures—failures of intention, virtue, or regulatory compliance—but constitutional failures: failures in the architecture of authority itself. Where the dominant policy literature treats artificial intelligence as a powerful instrument to be used well or badly, the encyclical’s deeper logic treats it as an emergent infrastructure of sovereignty that reorganizes who decides, on what basis, and with what possibility of appeal. Beginning from the founding opposition between Babel and Jerusalem—recast here as the opposition between centralized informational sovereignty and a plural, subsidiary technological order—the argument develops, in turn, the ontology of simulation without consciousness, the metricization of human dignity, the rise of digital neocolonialism and algorithmic sovereignty, the internal separation of algorithmic powers, the transformation of labor under cognitive-extractive capitalism, the displacement of liberal neutrality by predictive governance, the mechanization of moral agency in autonomous weapons, and the recovery of subsidiarity through decentralized architecture. Throughout, the encyclical’s anthropology is taken as the foundation for a jurisprudence of human supremacy whose institutional instruments—among them an internal separation of algorithmic powers, hardware-level containment of irreversible action, and an enforceable right to reconstruct automated decisions—are presented not as the heart of the argument but as the architecture that the encyclical’s own principles require.
Gaston Rey (Mon,) studied this question.