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Pope Leo XIV’s first social encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, arrives at a moment when the political right in Europe is being forced to answer a question it long avoided: what, ultimately, is economic freedom for? The document will inevitably be read as the Catholic Church’s intervention in the debate over artificial intelligence. That reading is not wrong, but it is incomplete. At its core, Magnifica Humanitas is a defence of a single, irreducible idea — that the human person is not a means, but an end. Everything else flows from there.
That principle has direct consequences for how conservatives should think about markets. Conservatives have traditionally defended economic freedom, and rightly so. Free markets remain the most powerful mechanism humanity has discovered for generating prosperity, rewarding initiative, and dispersing economic power away from the state. But markets are instruments, not gods. Their legitimacy derives entirely from what they produce for real human beings — families, communities, people living actual lives. A market that generates aggregate growth while hollowing out families, degrading communities, or treating workers as disposable units of production is not a success. It is a failure dressed in GDP figures. Leo XIV makes exactly this point, and conservatives should have the confidence to agree with him.
This is not a concession to the left. If anything, it is a direct challenge to it. The contemporary left has largely abandoned any serious concern for the human person as such. What it offers instead is an ideology of group identities, bureaucratic redistribution, and state-managed equality — a programme that consistently sacrifices individual dignity on the altar of collective categories. Where conservatives see a person, the progressive activist sees a representative of a demographic, a bearer of privilege or victimhood, a data point in a diversity spreadsheet. This is not humanism. It is its bureaucratic inversion.
Nor has the left anything serious to say about freedom. The progressive project across Europe has become, in practice, a project of administered life — ever-expanding regulation of speech, thought, professional conduct, and private conscience, enforced by institutions that are accountable to no electorate and answerable to no community. The ambition is not to liberate human beings but to manage them: to nudge, mandate, and correct until behaviour conforms to whatever the current ideological consensus demands. Dissent is not debated. It is pathologised, cancelled, or legislated away. This is the face of contemporary left-wing governance, and no amount of progressive rhetoric about rights and dignity can conceal it.
The assumption —imported largely from libertarian ideology— that every social question can be dissolved by more growth, more efficiency, or more technological innovation was always a departure from genuine conservative thought. But the left’s answer has been no better. Where market fundamentalism reduces the human person to an economic agent, statist ideologies (also found today in some new-right political movements) reduce them to a political subject —defined by the state, shaped by its programmes, and dependent on its largesse. Both represent a failure to take human dignity seriously. Both treat the person as a means. Leo XIV’s encyclical is a rebuke to both.
Much has been written about artificial intelligence as either humanity’s salvation or its greatest threat. Silicon Valley visionaries promise a future free from scarcity, disease, and even death itself. Critics warn of mass unemployment, digital surveillance, and the concentration of unprecedented power in the hands of a few corporations. Leo XIV acknowledges both opportunities and dangers, yet he refuses both technological utopianism and apocalyptic pessimism. He asks a more fundamental question: what kind of civilisation do we wish to build? The answer, he insists, must begin with the human person —not with the algorithm, the growth rate, or the productivity index.
Here too the left’s record is instructive, and damning. The same progressive institutions that claim to champion the vulnerable have proven the most enthusiastic architects of the surveillance state, the most eager advocates of algorithmic social management, and the most comfortable with concentrating digital power in the hands of ideologically-driven corporations. Big Tech censorship, social credit-style nudging, the systematic de-platforming of dissent — these did not emerge from conservative governments. They emerged from a cultural and political milieu thoroughly dominated by progressive assumptions about who deserves a voice and who must be silenced for the common good. The left’s relationship with technological power is not one of principled resistance. It is one of selective outrage: alarmed when corporations serve conservative ends, silent when they serve progressive ones.
The encyclical repeatedly returns to the idea that technology is neither inherently good nor inherently evil. It is a human creation and therefore reflects the values of those who design, finance, regulate, and deploy it. The real challenge is not whether artificial intelligence will advance —it will— but whether human beings will remain capable of directing that advance towards genuinely human ends. Power over technology is ultimately a question of political will. And political will must be rooted in a clear account of what human dignity actually requires —not what any ideological faction finds convenient.
This concern places Magnifica Humanitas squarely within the central anxieties of our political moment. Across Europe, growing numbers of citizens feel that consequential decisions are made by distant institutions, transnational corporations, and technical experts who operate beyond meaningful democratic scrutiny. Leo XIV’s diagnosis is identical. Technological power is becoming concentrated in private actors whose resources exceed those of many governments, operating across borders and answerable to no community whose lives they shape. For a political tradition committed to democratic sovereignty and national self-determination, this ought to be a primary concern. For the left, which has spent decades building precisely such unaccountable transnational structures —in Brussels and in supranational regulatory bodies— it is an indictment.
Perhaps the most striking section of the encyclical is its use of two biblical images: the Tower of Babel and Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem. Babel represents the temptation to achieve greatness through centralised power, technical mastery, and the elimination of limits. Jerusalem is rebuilt differently — through shared responsibility, local initiative, and the cooperation of ordinary people. Babel is the fantasy that enough data, enough computing power, and enough control can engineer a perfect society. It is the logic of technocracy. It is also, stripped of its digital vocabulary, a recognisable description of every utopian project the left has attempted — each one promising to solve the human condition through the right combination of expertise, redistribution, and enforced consensus, and each one ending in the diminishment of the very people it claimed to serve.
Jerusalem represents a different civilisational vision: one in which communities are strengthened rather than supplanted, human scale is respected, and institutions remain close to the people they serve. It is, in essence, a conservative and a common-sense vision. A human-centred one.
This emphasis on limits is perhaps the most counter-cultural dimension of the document. Modern progressive culture treats limitations as defects to be engineered away —obstacles to self-creation, autonomy, and the perpetual reinvention of the self. Dependence, vulnerability, biological reality, cultural inheritance: all are presented as constraints from which the enlightened individual must be liberated. The promise of transhumanism is merely the technological endpoint of this logic —the final abolition of nature in the name of freedom. Leo XIV takes a fundamentally different view. Human vulnerability is not a malfunction. It is constitutive of who we are. Caring for the vulnerable, accepting dependence, honouring limits— these are not embarrassments to be overcome. They are expressions of our humanity. And any politics that treats them as otherwise is not a politics of liberation. It is a politics of contempt.
Conservatives will recognise this argument. Scepticism towards grand schemes of human redesign is one of conservatism’s defining commitments. Human nature is real and communities accumulate a degree of wisdom that no algorithm can replicate. Not every technological possibility should become a social reality. The Pope’s critique of transhumanism is therefore not only theological. It is a defence of anthropological realism against increasingly confident —and increasingly state-sponsored— attempts to redefine the human condition from scratch.
The encyclical also revives the principle of subsidiarity —the insistence that decisions should be taken as close as possible to those affected by them. Families should not be displaced by bureaucracies. Local communities should not be absorbed by remote institutions. This principle has immediate political resonance, and an obvious target. The centralising ambition of the European administrative state, the progressive reflex to regulate from above and homogenise from the centre, the systematic marginalisation of family, church, and local community as sites of genuine authority —all of these stand in direct contradiction to subsidiarity. Democracy does not function when power is perpetually migrated upward toward institutions that citizens cannot meaningfully hold to account.
Ultimately, Magnifica Humanitas poses a question that cuts to the heart of what the conservative tradition stands for. It is not whether artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence in particular tasks —it already has, and will continue to do so. The question is whether human beings will remember what makes them irreplaceable. Machines can process, optimise, and predict. They cannot love, forgive, sacrifice, worship, or enter into genuine communion with another person. They cannot build a home, raise a child, or inherit a culture. These are not residual functions that technology has not yet reached. They are the substance of human life.
Magnifica Humanitas should therefore be read not merely as a Catholic document, but as a contribution to the most important civilisational debate of our time. It defends dignity over efficiency, responsibility over utopianism, community over centralisation. It insists that markets, technology, and economic growth are genuine goods —but derivative goods, valuable precisely because and insofar as they serve human flourishing. When they cease to do so, no appeal to aggregate prosperity can justify them. And when the state —however well-intentioned, at times— overrides the person in the name of the collective, no appeal to social justice can justify that either.
At a moment when European politics oscillates between technocratic managerialism and ideological radicalism, between the market that forgets the person and the state that consumes them, Leo XIV points toward a different path —a common sense and human-centred one rooted in reality, attentive to limits, confident in communities, and clear about what economic and technological progress is ultimately for. Not efficiency, nor equality of outcome. Not the triumph of any system or ideology, but the flourishing of the human person.