As promised, here is our episode about Pope Leo XIV's recent encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, in which he brings to bear Catholic social teaching on the perils of artificial intelligence and what they reveal about what it really means to be human being. It's a distinctly Augustinian reading of our nature and destiny, marked not just by Leo's attention to our limits as flawed and fallible creatures, but the joy and hope found by living into them—which, finally, becomes his plea to see life from the perspective of the lowly, the downcast, the abandoned.

To help us explain such a rich document, we had on our friend Jack Hanson, one of the most perceptive American writers on the Catholic Church. We tease out the connections between this Leo's first and encyclical and that of his namesake Leo XIII's Rerum novarum, an intervention on behalf of working people during the industrial and considered the origin of Catholic social teaching; Leo's "Augustinianism"; the encyclical's critique of artificial intelligence and what that has to do with its account of what really makes us human; and more.

Sources:

Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica humanitas, May 15, 2026

Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, May 15, 1891

Jack Hanson, "A Serious Man: The Militant Mysticism of Charles Péguy," Commonweal, May 3, 2021

– “The Heresy of Americanism,” The Drift, Jun 10, 2025.

Michael Oakeshott, "The Tower of Babel" in On History and Other Essays (1983)

Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Tower of Babel" in Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (1937)

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” (1985)

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