Pope Leo XIV signed Magnifica Humanitas on 15 May 2026 — deliberately, on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. That date is not decoration. It is an argument. It says: this is not a new conversation. It is the same conversation the Church has been having since the First Industrial Revolution, applied to a new machine. And once you see the arc, the encyclical stops looking like a reaction to ChatGPT and starts looking like the next entry in a 135-year discipline of reading disruption through the dignity of the human person.
I am not a theologian. I am a builder of things, a disruptive innovator, and an economist by training, and I have spent thirty years at the seam where technology, human potential, and systemic change meet. From that seam, the Church's track record on disruptive innovation is more interesting than either its critics or its defenders usually admit. It has been, across thirteen decades, neither a Luddite nor a cheerleader. It has been something rarer: a slow, stubborn institution that keeps asking the one question the market is structurally unable to ask — what is this doing to the person?
The arc, in three eras
The visual anatomy of this lineage shows three eras. The industrial era opens with Rerum Novarum (1891) defending labor and human capital against the machinery of mass production. The media era — Miranda Prorsus (1957), Inter Mirifica (1963), the internet documents of the early 2000s — wrestles with mass communication as a structural force. And the cognitive era — the Rome Call (2020), Antiqua et Nova (2025), and now Magnifica Humanitas — confronts a technology that does not just move goods or messages but reshapes thought itself.
What stays constant across all three eras is the lens: dignity, common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, social justice, the universal destination of goods. What changes is the object the lens is pointed at. That consistency is the Church's actual competitive advantage in this debate. While the rest of us argue about capabilities and quarterly adoption curves, the magisterium holds a fixed question steady across 135 years of moving technology.
The honest history of innovation
Here is where my own conviction sharpens the Church's caution into something operational. If experience tells us anything, it is that many innovations have been the cause of devastation — particularly when multiple factors collide in a perfect storm, the way they seem to be colliding now around AI.
The mechanization of agriculture gave us extraordinary yields — and the Dust Bowl, when it collided with drought and bad land practice and economic desperation. Fuel combustion gave us mobility and lifted billions — and air pollution that we are still paying for. Technology, then multimedia, then the internet arrived in education promising transformation — and, implemented hastily, which is more often than not the case, they diminished the very learning they were supposed to enhance. Tech can be great for education. It rarely is, because we adopt it badly. And social media, which connected the world, also did measurable damage to the mental health of an entire generation.
AI is the next perfect storm — with one acceleration the others did not have: it reshapes cognition, not just labor or communication. That is exactly why the encyclical's instinct is correct. The work is to prepare in advance — to mitigate the negative impacts, and to facilitate a transition that lets societies actually enjoy the prosperity AI can bring. Disruption is not a reason to refuse the technology. It is a reason to govern the transition with seriousness, before the storm rather than after.
The thing the Church and I agree on
I believe that you cannot judge AI, transformation, or impact by looking backward. The argument that matters is not whether AI improves education or labor or institutions. It is that education as we know it must change. Labor must change. Academia must change. Corporate and institutional structures must change. It is not a question of whether AI fits the way we currently do things. It is that the way we currently do things — the way we exist, perform, and interact — must itself change. If we refuse, the misalignment will hurt us, individually and globally.
Magnifica Humanitas arrives at the same conclusion from the other direction. Where I argue institutions must change to capture AI's prosperity, the Pope argues the Church and society must change to protect the human person within it. Same imperative. Different motive. Both right. And here is the part most readers will miss: the encyclical is not only addressed to the world. Between its lines, it is a teaching to the Church itself — its formation, its catechesis, its pastoral practice will all have to be remade for a cognitively-mediated world. The institution that has spent 135 years telling everyone else to adapt to disruption with dignity is now, quietly, telling itself the same thing.
Where I differ — gently
I am a free-market economist by conviction. I believe the role of government — and, in its own sphere, of the Church — is to set the rules, ensure transparency, and hold participants accountable, not to direct outcomes or pick winners. Magnifica Humanitas leans, in places, toward a heavier structural hand than I would. But that is a family disagreement inside a shared premise. We agree that the transition must be governed. We agree that the person comes first. We agree that prosperity without exclusion is both the moral and the more durable economic model. We differ on the instruments, not the destination.
This is also why I am wary of governing the transition primarily through limitation. You do not secure shared prosperity by sanctioning the people building it. You secure it by working alongside them — embedding the sharing into the design of the systems themselves, so that broad benefit is a built-in property rather than a penalty applied after the fact. Prosperity shared proactively and by design is durable. Prosperity extracted by sanction is brittle, adversarial, and tends to arrive too late — after the storm has already done its damage. The lesson of every perfect storm I named earlier is the same: the cost was never that we innovated, but that we did not prepare to share the gains before the losses landed.
And on the deepest point we do not differ at all: the answer to disruptive innovation is not to slow the innovation. It is to cultivate the part of the human person the innovation cannot reach — what I have called, elsewhere in this series, the seed. The Church calls it dignity, the image and likeness. The 135-year arc is the story of an institution defending that seed through three industrial revolutions. Magnifica Humanitas is the fourth chapter.
So if I had to name my own call beside the encyclical's, it would be a humbler, more down-to-earth one. Where Pope Leo XIV calls for safeguarding humanity's dignity — for humanity's salvation — mine is practical: that we learn from the lessons of the past, and that AI's perfect storm ushers in an era of shared prosperity for all of humanity. Not a prosperity defended by limitation, but one built with those creating it — guaranteed proactively and by design, never by sanction. The Pope calls for saving humanity. I call for its shared prosperity. As ever, we are pointed at the same person.
— Carlos Miranda Levy
Coordinator of CEMI's Enhanced Intelligences