Eh? So much for “Magnifica Humanitas.” Lots of words, the substance is weak.

Matthew Walther, The Pope Should Be Going to War Against A.I. Why Isn’t He? NYTimes, May 26, 2026.

This is not exactly the Unabomber manifesto. One is even tempted to call it naïve. The encyclical certainly does not live up to its billing as the A.I. equivalent of “Rerum Novarum,” the revolutionary text on the Industrial Revolution with which his predecessor and namesake Leo XIII inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching in 1891. The presence of Christopher Olah, a founder of the A.I. firm Anthropic, at the presentation of the encyclical on Monday rightly raised eyebrows. (Imagine if Leo XIII had invited John D. Rockefeller to hear him speak on the dignity of labor!)

For those of us who see the rise of A.I. as unambiguously evil, Leo’s emphasis on its ethical use is a nonstarter. He seems to underestimate A.I.’s ability to exacerbate existing crises and to accelerate processes of cheapening and redefinition. The encyclical says nothing, for example, about how A.I. abets the replacement of medicine as a humanistic profession with an algorithmic conception of health care justified by the language of “access.”

In perhaps the most telling passage, Leo contrasts the dangers of a myopic, self-aggrandizing “idealism” with what he calls “authentic realism,” a clearheaded outlook that “does not give up on changing the world” but rather, “by clearly identifying interests, fears, constraints and power dynamics,” is able to “determine what can be achieved, and the measures needed to achieve it.” (This, perhaps, is an implicit rebuke to technophobic critics.)

The pope’s sanguine attitude should not surprise anyone who is familiar with his personality. Unlike Francis, a well-known Luddite, Leo is an internet user, a quaint phrase that describes roughly six billion of us.

What might be possible:

For years now I have believed that, in the face of the technological destruction of human relationships, literacy and contemplation, the church may well become the only guardian of humanistic values, even for secular people. But it will not fulfill this role by publishing encyclicals or issuing sterner disciplinary measures, but simply by staying true to itself.

Catholics are able to bear witness not only to the power and beauty of holiness but also to forgotten habits, practices and values, to the importance of craftsmanship and deliberation, to the past as a worthy and even delightful object of study rather than a catalog of forgotten barbarisms. They are able to present truth as something immutable and transcendent rather than contingent and self-constructed, and to speak to the value of liberality, magnanimity, filial piety and countless other shabby neglected virtues.

How exactly the church’s message will reach a distracted world is unclear. But it will almost certainly not be a top-down endeavor, dependent upon the actions or personal charisma of a pope. What seems more likely is that in the decades to come we will see the emergence of a distinctly Christian cultural movement that defies standard political categories but is united against technological utilitarianism and the subsuming of human life into digital frameworks.

At the heart of this resistance, I suspect, will be the Mass. With its grand symbolic gestures, its hieratic language and profound silences, the liturgy exists outside the framework of ordinary human experience and even of time itself. The sacraments are impervious to technological improvement.

There's more at the link.