The Revolution of Pope Leo XIV, the Thinker of the 21st Century

The Pope is a spiritual leader, head of state, and American citizen. He is now at the forefront of a movement that will give a human face to a digital and artificial intelligence revolution, a revolution that has great dehumanizing power. By leading the movement, he becomes part of the next division between the US and Europe.

1.

Of the many names available to Cardinal Robert F. Prevost, upon being elected Pope, he took Leo XIV.

Leo before him was the XIII. He wrote at the end of the 19th century “Rerum novarum”, “On new things” and started a conceptual revolution, not only in the Catholic Church. In this encyclical, the Pope wrote about the industrial revolution and the obligation of the Church to preserve human dignity. From Leo XIII came the concepts of the dignity of work and the worker, fair wages, trade union organization... And, unlike the socialists and Marx who had written similarly, Leo XIII also determined that private property is sacred and that the state is there to guarantee a system in which the private economy can progress by integrating human dignity into this progress.

This was the basis for the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church, which greatly influenced the shaping of the idea of ​​the contemporary European welfare state.

2.

The new Pope, Leo XIV, published his first encyclical in mid-May, entitled “Magnifica humanitas” (Magnificent Humanity). And, just as he continued the number of his famous thirteenth successor, he continued with the foundation of his thought but now with the challenge of establishing the foundations of Social Doctrine in the 21st century. And he produced a book that, when published, will be about 150 pages long and that, with intellectual breadth and theological discipline, is a document that understands the time in which we live as a revolution to which he will formulate a doctrinal response. 

The Pope's response can be read in two ways. In the end, the Catholic flock will find the entire text justified, as it begins with quotations from the Old Testament, and ends with Saint Mary and the incarnation of the Word. But for those who are not believers, they will find a detailed explanation for our time, with the vocabulary of a sociologist, such as: 

“In many cases, in the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power lies not in the hands of states, but of large economic and technological actors. These actors determine in practice the conditions of access, establish the rules of visibility and shape the very possibilities of participation. When such power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it tends to become opaque and evade public oversight, increasing the risk of distorted forms of development that produce new dependencies, exclusions, manipulations and inequalities.”

Here Pope Leo raises the essential issue of the times we are going through: the risk that our societies (democratic and less democratic) will settle into a new form of authoritarianism, of a dictatorship hidden in technocracy. 

And, more knowledge, more technological capacity, more information and speed of their processing will not solve the problem by themselves. 

“Technological innovations, including artificial intelligence, are not neutral, because they can promote participation and justice, but they can also deepen inequality, control and exclusion. For this reason, they must be evaluated by asking a fundamental question: Do they really help individuals and peoples become more human and more fraternal, while respecting our common home and future generations?”

The answer is no, because we live in the “technological paradigm”, a term coined by its predecessor: “The technocratic paradigm in our globalized world is the tendency to subordinate personal, social and economic decisions solely to the logic of efficiency, control and profit. This makes it clear that technology is not simply a tool.”

3.

Pope Leo XIV, with his book, may have entered an ideologically and politically heterogeneous society of those who in recent years have been critically engaged with the revolution we are going through. Jurgen Habermas, a German philosopher of the Frankfurt School, published a book three years ago entitled “A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics”, in which he expressed the fact that the digital revolution and social media are improving debate in the public sphere, directly endangering liberal democracy. 

Yannis Varoufakis, the former Marxist Minister of Finance in Greece, warns in his book "Technofeudalism" that capitalism as we know it is dying because, among other things, the commodity being traded is us, our information which is collected through social media, search engines and the like, and which is ultimately used to direct our tastes and actions. 

Francis Fukuyama, who holds the fame of the author of "The End of History?" with which at the end of the last century and the end of the Cold War he announced the historic victory of liberal democracy, is recently part of an initiative by American intellectuals for internet regulation, in particular social media, as well as for full transparency of algorithms. 

All of this is found in the Pope's encyclical. He raises many of the ideas that have been discussed in recent years, including those of these thinkers, although without naming them, in what may be the first comprehensive philosophical treatise (with ethics, political economy, international relations, theology, and what not) that attempts to address the challenge of the digital revolution and artificial intelligence.

4.

The Pope is a spiritual leader and head of state at the same time. Leo XIV was also an American by citizenship. All of this is important for the future of the 21st century Social Doctrine that he initiated, considering that this new Doctrine could be one of the new dividing lines between Europe and the USA. “Magnifica humanitas” is embedded in the idea of ​​the European social state, of caring for the common good (the Catholic postulate of “Rerum Novarum”). The Pope’s encyclical aims to make the digital revolution part of the effort for the common good, through the participation of society and the individual in algorithm transparency, information privacy, the creation of ethical guidelines for artificial intelligence... In the USA, there is, not only in this administration, a culture of thought that any regulatory measure on the Internet (and now Artificial Intelligence) is a restriction of freedoms.

With "Magnifica humanitas" Pope Leo XIV may have paved the way for himself to be at the head of a movement that wants to give a human face to a revolution that has great dehumanizing power.