Pope Leo Makes His Case for Authentic Humanism| National Catholic Register

The first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV addresses an issue that is not exclusively, or perhaps even primarily, theological.

Magnifica Humanitas presents a vision of humanity inspired by divine Revelation, but while a Christian humanism is proposed, the emphasis is more on humanism than Christian revelation. Pope Leo has evidently concluded that the widespread understanding of the human person in a technological culture has become so eroded that some philosophical repair work is needed first. Grace builds upon nature, and so it falls to a pastor from time to time to attend to nature (philosophy) first and then grace (theology) later.

The first clue to Leo’s purposes comes in the first citation, namely that it is “only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of humanity truly becomes clear.”

That comes from Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world. Paragraph 22 is the great charter statement of Christian humanism and the Church’s response to the “turn to subject” that marked the Enlightenment.

Philosophy turned from looking outward — and upward! — and began to look at man himself. At Vatican II, the Church answered that if man is to be truly understood, he must be understood in light of Jesus Christ. Hence, the Enlightenment’s turn to the subject ultimately leads back to God.

All ecumenical councils have fundamental questions that are to be answered. The Council of Nicaea — the 1,700th anniversary of which was the occasion of Pope Leo’s first foreign trip — and subsequent early councils took up the most basic religious question: Who is God? And the most basic Christian question: Who is Jesus Christ?

After the divisions of the early 16th century, the Council of Trent took up the pressing question of the day: What is the Church?

Vatican II — centuries after the turn to the subject in philosophy, the intervening rise of modern science and democracy, and the recent degradations of two world wars — took up the urgent question of the new age of human rights: Who is man?

Pope St. John Paul II’s lifelong project was Christian humanism in the face of totalitarianism, which reached its nadir at Auschwitz, just a short distance from his hometown of Wadowice. Ten years before his election as pope, John Paul wrote to Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac about his philosophical project:

“I devote my very rare free moments to a work that is close to my heart and devoted to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the person. It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on that level. The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is even more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order. To this disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideologies we must oppose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of recapitulation of the inviolable mystery of the person.”

What John Paul identified as the “pulverization” of the human person, Leo sees analogously as the “digitalization” of man. Atheistic ideologies can “pulverize” man with cruelty, but a digital world can degrade man, even dehumanize him, all the while appearing as information, entertainment and connection. Leo’s focus is not only man oppressed by the state, but man reduced by technology, possibly to be manipulated by others and, even worse, to lose a proper sense of his own “grandeur” (as “magnifica” is translated into English in the encyclical).

In 1979, John Paul was confident that he was writing to a culture sufficiently connected to its Christian roots that he could begin his first encyclical with this ringing affirmation:

“The Redeemer of man, Jesus Christ, is the center of the universe and of history. … God entered the history of humanity and, as a man, became an actor in that history, one of the thousands of millions of human beings but at the same time Unique! Through the Incarnation God gave human life the dimension that he intended man to have from his first beginning” (1).

Pope Leo begins Magnifica Humanitas in the same vein, but with important differences:

“Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, of guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted and fraternity is made possible. Yet every era also runs the risk of creating an inhumane and more unjust world” (1).

Grammatically, it is now humanity that is the subject of the first sentence, not Jesus Christ; God is present, but in a subordinate clause. And regarding humanity’s “task of shaping its own era,” it is described in terms that are not specifically Christian — dignity, justice and fraternity.

In Magnifica Humanitas, Leo is certainly not offering a merely secular humanism. The Holy Father’s keen insight is that the argument today for Christian humanism must first start with an authentic natural humanism. To put it another way, John Paul began with the Incarnation, but if today people have lost their own sense of humanity’s grandeur, how could it possibly make sense to them that God would become incarnate?

In a very broad encyclical, which has many centers, a key one is found in the section on “transhumanism” and posthumanism” (115-118). That is what got Leo’s attention in the same way that atheistic political regimes got the attention of previous generations.

“Transhumanism envisions the enhancement of human beings through technologies — such as biomedicine, body engineering, devices and algorithms — with the aim of increasing performance and capabilities,” writes Leo. “Posthumanism, especially in its more radical forms, goes further: it challenges anthropocentrism and envisions a hybridization of human beings, machines and the environment, even anticipating a threshold where humanity surpasses itself in a new evolutionary stage.”

When Leo argues against these dangers, he does not begin with man made in the image of God, but that man’s limits are essential to his identity and experience. That is known by all cultures without the benefit of divine Revelation.

“Our relationship with life seems to be in crisis today,” Leo observes. “Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.”

The Holy Father immediately points out that the “light of faith offers a perspective on reality that helps us recognize what we call the ‘contingency’ of the things of this world.” And he does conclude the section by suggesting that grace provides the only way of truly transcending our human nature. Nevertheless, Christian faith is not necessary to understand how our finitude is essential to our humanity.

In the presentation of Magnifica Humanitas, which Leo did himself — a first for an encyclical — the presence of Chris Olah, founder of AI giant Anthropic, was notable. An atheist, the 33-year-old Canadian tech pioneer was invited to give his views on the document.

Olah expressed gratitude “to His Holiness and the Church” for a collaboration on AI “between those of us who are building this and those who can see what we, from inside, cannot.”

“It is enormously important that there be people outside [commercial] incentives, to be our earnest, thoughtful critics,” Olah said.

The critique offered by Pope Leo is a Christian one, but before that, it is a human one — one welcomed by those who do not recognize that Jesus Christ is the Redeemer of man.