In Might 1891, Pope Leo XIII printed an encyclical – “Rerum Novarum” – that gave the industrial-age West an ethical vocabulary that socialist forces would by no means match. Precisely 135 years later in Might 2026, his namesake did it once more. A special civilizational rival, a distinct technological revolution, however the identical reward.
Based mostly solely on compute, manufacturing output, or the velocity of state-directed deployment, the U.S. narrowly edges out China within the AI race, as these are areas the place the Chinese language Communist Get together’s authoritarian centralization has inherent structural benefits to competitors. What America and its allies can supply the world to really distinguish this race is one thing the CCP can not: AI rooted in a particular civilizational inheritance – Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem – that in the end produces each higher expertise and a greater life.
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”), isn’t a roadblock to American AI objectives. It’s essentially the most consequential strategic reward the free world has obtained since John Paul II labored with Ronald Reagan to make sure human dignity triumphed over Soviet Communism. The Trump administration’s intuition ought to be to choose this encyclical up and work alongside the pope to confront our new menace – AI untethered from human dignity and grounded within the debasing philosophies of the CCP, efficient altruists, and transhumanists.
America’s edge isn’t simply technical or financial, however civilizational. It rests on three pillars of the Western custom: Athenian democracy and philosophy; Roman regulation and republican authorities; and Jerusalem’s revelation that each individual is made within the picture of God with inalienable dignity. St. Augustine (of whom the pope is a follower) fused them; widespread regulation and the Enlightenment formalized them for a brand new age.
The product is a legal-political order wherein the individual is unconditionally dignified, equal earlier than the regulation, and protected against the state. American AI security statutes, state AG enforcement actions, and plenty of algorithmic protections are downstream of this inheritance. China has no analog, as its AI is constructed on a distinct anthropology completely: the state over the individual, the social gathering over the regulation, and surveillance – not subsidiarity – as governance.
The pope simply made this inheritance express for the AI age. To cite only a few strains: “Each human individual possesses an infinite dignity … which prevails in and past each circumstance, state, or scenario the individual might ever encounter,” “neither the person nor the household ought to be subsumed by the State” … and “confronted with this focus of energy within the digital world, the standards for judgment and discernment on this new scenario are the noble rules of Social Doctrine: the inalienable dignity of the human individual, the widespread good, the common vacation spot of products, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice.”
The CCP can’t reply this. Beijing can construct highly effective techniques, however not techniques that deal with the individual as ontologically previous to the state. Simply take a look at Xinjiang, the social credit score system, and the platform-state fusion. The encyclical doesn’t want to call China as a result of the road it attracts excludes Beijing by necessity.
The encyclical’s anthropology is incompatible not solely with CCP authoritarianism but in addition these strains of Silicon Valley that deal with the human being as an issue to be optimized, transcended, and even changed.
Transhumanism’s core – that consciousness is transferable computation and the individual a migratable dataset –is rightly referred to as out by the encyclical: “if the human being is handled as one thing to be perfected or surpassed, it turns into simpler to simply accept that some lives are much less helpful, much less fascinating or much less worthy”. So too the efficient altruist calculus, which treats individuals as datapoints tradeable in opposition to anticipated future utility: “within the identify of progress, ‘obligatory sacrifices’ might start to be justified, inserting the burden on essentially the most weak in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species”. These outlooks, the pope says, “devalue[] human limits and promise[] a purely technical type of ‘salvation.’”
The pope is anti-CCP, anti-transhumanist, and anti-effective-altruist. This isn’t mere coincidence however the actuality of the Western civilizational custom asserting itself in opposition to its primary three threats: the authoritarian one overseas, the gnostic one in San Francisco, and the actuarial one in Berkeley.
So what ought to America do now? To begin, our leaders should make the language of human dignity the default in AI export-control diplomacy. We already lead with “reliable AI” – this papal doc now provides that phrase a warrant the CCP can’t replicate. American AI merchandise ought to be differentiated on human dignity as a function, not a constraint.
The U.S. also needs to proceed to construct the coalition the CCP can’t – the 5 Eyes, Europe, India, Japan, Korea, Israel, Taiwan, and rare-earth-rich Latin American and African nations. The Vatican is the one establishment on earth that may convene that vary of states on a problem of such weight. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Holy See Ambassador Brian Burch may spearhead this work.
Within the coming days, accelerationists and transhumanists will declare the one approach to “beat China” is to disregard the pope. Trump’s opponents will likewise warp the pope’s phrases to drive a false “pope vs. president” narrative.
These narratives deprive humanity of its dignity and divide crucial world stakeholders exactly when partnership is important to making sure AI is developed by the West, for the advantage of all, as a device of humanity and never a alternative for it.
America can win this race, and our victory can be an everlasting and peaceable one if we heed the primary American pontiff’s name to uphold our magnificent humanity.
