A pope's letter on AI gets read in The Atlantic the same week
Monday, June 1, 2026
Ecclesiastes 7:29
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Manila · https://rcam.org/encyclical-letter-magnifica-humanitas-of-his-holiness-pope-leo-xiv-on-safeguarding-the-human-person-in-the-time-of-artificial-intelligence/
A Roman encyclical on AI agents got pulled into the same news cycle as Atlantic ideas pieces. Ecclesiastes had a word for it long before anyone called it tech.
Ecclesiastes 7:29Behold, this only have I found: that God made man upright; but they search for many schemes."
Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical in May. It is about artificial intelligence. The argument runs long and refuses to hedge. Generative AI agents, he writes, are quietly eating away at something specific: the human capacity to judge, to create, to be the one in the room actually thinking. The letter is called Magnifica Humanitas.
Within ten days, it had been quoted in The Atlantic, First Things, Christianity Today, UnHerd, and Compact. A secular liberal magazine and a Catholic theology journal pulled the same paragraph in the same week. Roman encyclicals do not usually do that.
Ecclesiastes spotted the pattern thousands of years ago. The teacher looks at the human race and notices that we are tireless inventors. Give us a straight thing, and we will spend our lives engineering elaborate curves around it. The word he uses for these inventions, chishbonot, is the same root that eventually became the modern Hebrew word for a computer.
The encyclical is not telling anyone to stop building. It is asking the older question. What is all this building bending us into?
Sometimes a pope says the obvious thing at the right moment, and a lot of people who would not usually agree on much find themselves nodding at the same line.