Why a Math-Major Pope Wrote an Encyclical on AI

Opening

Dear reader, on May 15, 1891, Pope Leo XIII issued the Catholic Church’s first social encyclical¹ addressing the labor exploitation created by the Industrial Revolution. The document, Rerum Novarum (“On New Things”), posed a question: “When machines replace people, who protects human dignity?”

Exactly 135 years later, on May 15, 2026, Pope Leo XIV signed his first encyclical. Its title: Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”). Its subject: protecting human dignity in the age of AI. And standing at the document’s unveiling won’t be Google or OpenAI — it’ll be Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah.

Let me cut to the point: this isn’t religious news. It’s the moment the world’s largest institutional organization, with 1.4 billion followers, stakes out a formal position in the AI governance debate.

🏭 1891: When Machines Pushed People Out

In the late 19th century, Europe’s factory districts were battlegrounds. The Industrial Revolution’s productivity gains were staggering, but behind them lay 16-hour workdays, child exploitation, and a cycle of poverty. Wealth concentrated among a handful of capitalists while most workers were pushed below the line of survival.

European society at the time had split into two camps. Socialists called for abolishing private property; liberals trusted the market’s self-correcting power. The Church stood with neither. More precisely, it hadn’t yet found its footing.

Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum filled that vacuum. Its core message was clear: neither socialism nor unrestrained capitalism was the answer, and workers’ dignity and rights had to take priority over any economic system. Specifically, it called for just wages, limits on working hours, and workers’ right to form associations. It was the first time in history the Church had staked out a formal position on labor issues.

The document’s power came from moral authority. Catholics at the time made up nearly half of Europe’s population. It carried no legal force, but a single papal statement could shift the moral baseline for hundreds of millions of people. What’s striking is that Rerum Novarum criticized both socialism and capitalism. Denying private property and exploiting workers were both, in its view, affronts to human dignity. In practice, the document went on to serve as one of the intellectual foundations for labor law reforms and welfare-state systems across Europe. Encyclopaedia Britannica calls it “the starting point of modern Catholic social doctrine.”