The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas opens with two intensely feminine images: two communal projects represented by two cities, which in Scripture are often portrayed as women—or, more precisely, as young maidens, since in the ancient world a young woman and a virgin were considered synonymous: the “Virgin Daughter of Babylon” (Isaiah 47:1) and her counterpart, the “Daughter of Jerusalem.” (Isaiah 37:22), the ‘maiden of Zion’ (ibid.). These two young women are the emblem and personification of the city, much as Marianne personifies the values of the French Republic today. The fact is that in the Bible the city often appears as a woman. Jerusalem is the Mother of Nations: ‘And of Zion it will be said: “Each one was born in it’ (Ps 87:5), and she is also the bride, ‘coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride’ (Rev 21:4). The city is thus presented as a living fabric, not merely as an aggregation of dwellings, but as a network of relationships capable of generating life and welcoming it into its womb—a distinctly feminine image of great symbolic value.
Babel/Babylon and Jerusalem embody, each in its own way, a communal technological project. Babel, in the Book of Genesis, undertakes a great endeavour and decides to build a tower whose top reaches the heavens (Gen 11:4). A seemingly magnificent project, envisaging a single language, a single technology, a single direction: ‘the technocratic paradigm’, whose fate is inevitably ruin. ‘Babel thus reveals the limits of any effort that, however grandiose, arises from self-affirmation, sacrifices human dignity for efficiency and aspires to reach heaven without God’s blessing’ (MH, 7). In contrast, Jerusalem, in the time of Nehemiah, represents the opposite model. It too is a work in progress, like the Tower of Babel, but it springs from the shared responsibility of the whole people. ‘It is an undertaking with God at the centre, which rebuilds relationships before rebuilding with stones’ (MH 8), and for this reason, it is capable of embracing diversity and creating a common—though not uniform—language, that of the harmony which arises when each person takes on their part.
With this image in mind—the Nehemiah project as an alternative to the Tower of Babel paradigm—Pope Leo XIV revisits the major themes of the Church’s Social Doctrine: a body of principles and guidelines concerning the economy and social life that have been developed over the past one hundred years on the basis of Scripture and the reflection of the great Christian thinkers. The Pope traces the history of these hundred years through the teachings of the 20th-century popes, following in their footsteps and presenting the key principles that guide the Christian vision of politics, the economy and social life. These principles, which at the beginning of the 20th century sought to shed light on the new social movements born of the Industrial Revolution, remain relevant today as we find ourselves in the midst of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution, spearheaded by the internet and, in particular, by Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is not the central theme of the encyclical, although the Pope devotes the extensive third chapter to it, seeking to offer criteria and guidance for wisely discerning the use of AI, and the direction we wish to give it in the future in the light of the principles of social doctrine. In this sense, Leo XIV is doing the same as his predecessor Leo XIII did at the end of the 19th century in the face of the changes that the Industrial Revolution had brought about in society: adopting a criterion for discerning novelty—welcoming, purifying, and denouncing.
The term ‘artificial intelligence’ encompasses many diverse things, which share common features. Today, AI has quietly permeated our lives: we find it in programmes that answer our questions, in chatbots capable of generating synthesised text, in programmes for editing or creating photographs, in those that control the swimming pool robot or the domestic vacuum cleaner, not to mention self-driving cars or autonomous weapons. Thanks to AI, these machines perform tasks and calculations at astonishing speeds, comparing millions upon millions of data points and generating text or carrying out actions based on probability calculations. These are machines that imitate certain traits of human intelligence, sometimes brilliantly, but they are not intelligent. These programmes can mimic languages and behaviours, but they do not understand what they produce ‘for they lack the affective, relational and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom.’ (MH 99). Be that as it may, the temptation of our time is to make the technocratic paradigm—the ‘Babel project’—the dominant criterion for the use of AI: optimising resources to increase profit by reducing human costs.
It is precisely this dominance of AI, which extends to various fields, to which the Pope devotes special attention, pointing out to us several areas for action: firstly, the dissemination of the truth and its protection in an era dominated by social media, controlled by algorithms, where it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between what is true and what is false (fake news), which can ruin the lives of many people. Secondly, the world of work. AI is already causing an upheaval in the world of work: mass redundancies of workers being replaced by AI, and difficulties in accessing employment for young people and women. Thirdly, the defence of freedom against new forms of digital dependency, and against the trafficking of women, migrants and children, treated as commodities in a ruthless market – the new face of slavery in our time. And finally, although the Pope devotes a separate chapter to it, war: there is a danger of delegating the conduct of war to AI, allowing it to decide autonomously which targets may be attacked, without taking collateral damage into account. No, there is no such thing as a just war, although it is always just to defend oneself with force against an unjust aggressor. War is always a defeat for humanity.
In the face of all this, the encyclical once again proposes the ‘civilisation of love’, a term coined by Paul VI, which had gradually fallen into oblivion. No, it is not true that we live in a world dominated by the Darwinian logic of the survival of the fittest. Nature offers countless examples of collaboration between species sharing the same habitat. Why should it not be possible to seek cooperation between nations in the pursuit of peace, rather than fighting for dominance? The Pope invites everyone to play their part, adopting a healthy realism, which is the opposite of the cynicism of Realpolitik. ‘The spirituality I wish to commend is that of the “wise architect” who, driven by hope for the Kingdom of God, is committed to building the world for the common good’ (MH 236), following the example of Nehemiah in Jerusalem. The women of WUCWO are also called to take part in building this Jerusalem, each doing her own small part. To this end, the Pope uses an image that is particularly dear to us in WUCWO: that of the weavers. With the faith of Mary, ‘poet and prophetess’, he says, ‘let us become “weavers of hope” in our world, sharing who we are and what we have, so that the presence of Jesus may grow among us and his Kingdom take shape’ (MH 245)
