From Rerum Novarum to Magnifica Humanitas

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 27/05/2026

The recent publication of the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo XIV reopens one of the great historical dilemmas of civilization: how to preserve human dignity in the midst of a technological revolution that radically transforms economic and social life.

Its content inevitably brings to mind the crisis humanity faced at the end of the 18th century, when the mechanization of textile production began and the steam engine ushered in the Industrial Revolution. From then on, numerous tasks previously performed by humans gradually fell under the control of machines. The first factories emerged, production methods were transformed, and decisive innovations appeared: mechanized manufacturing, new metallurgical and chemical processes, the extensive use of water power and steam, and the development of machine tools.

Productivity increased dramatically, and economic growth reached unprecedented speeds. However, these advances rested on the brutal exploitation of the workforce. No writer portrayed this reality better than Charles Dickens, who described a social world where poverty, hunger, forced labor, and institutional indifference reduced millions of people to mere cogs in the industrial machine.

It was precisely to respond to this reality that Pope Leo XIII published the historic encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. In it, he explicitly defended the right of workers to organize into unions, maintained that wages should be sufficient to guarantee a dignified subsistence for families, and rejected both revolutionary socialism and laissez-faire capitalism.

Leo XIII believed that the elimination of private property threatened individual liberty and family stability, but he also affirmed that the State had a moral obligation to protect workers and guarantee fair working conditions. For the Church, moreover, there was a higher responsibility: to offer the ethical principles necessary to preserve social cohesion in times of rapid economic transformation.

Today, humanity faces a comparable, though possibly even more profound, challenge: the rise of artificial intelligence. This phenomenon represents the advanced stage of the technological revolution that began with digitalization in the 1990s and has started to structurally alter the labor market, especially in developed economies.

For much of the 20th century, industrial societies created millions of routine, middle-income jobs—office workers, accountants, administrative technicians, and skilled laborers—that allowed people to support a family without a university education. Digital automation, advanced computing, and artificial intelligence have been replacing many of these roles. As a result, job growth is increasingly concentrated at the extremes of the wage spectrum: highly skilled occupations and low-wage, precarious jobs, while the economic space for the middle class is progressively shrinking.

In this context, Magnifica Humanitas takes on extraordinary relevance. According to various interpretations, the encyclical arose from extensive conversations with scientists, engineers, educators, political leaders, and families concerned about the future of the next generations. The document raises fundamental ethical questions about the place of human beings in a civilization increasingly governed by algorithms.

Among the most urgent concerns is the development of autonomous weapons systems and algorithms capable of determining access to employment, credit, health or public safety based on flawed data, ideological biases or opaque criteria impossible to audit by citizens.

Interestingly, these same concerns marked the later intellectual years of Henry Kissinger, who became one of the most influential voices warning about the geopolitical and philosophical risks of artificial intelligence. Along with Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie, Kissinger published the book *The Age of AI: And Our Human Future*, in which he argued that the speed of AI development could prove as momentous and potentially destabilizing as the emergence of nuclear weapons.

Kissinger warned that sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence could erode not only economic and political structures, but also human consciousness itself, weakening the ability of democratic institutions to exert control over technologies that evolve faster than traditional regulatory and ethical frameworks.

Viewed from the perspective of Magnifica Humanitas and Kissinger's reflections, artificial intelligence represents perhaps the greatest civilizational challenge since the dawn of modernity. The central question is no longer merely technological or economic, but profoundly moral and philosophical: whether humanity will be able to maintain control over a force created by its own intelligence before that force ends up reshaping the very essence of what it means to be human.

Ultimately, the challenge lies in bringing the genie that escaped the bottle of human creativity back into the channels of ethical, political, and civilizational control.

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