A Great Prompt for Humanity

What Believers and Nonbelievers Should See in Magnifica Humanitas

Leo XIV’s first encyclical is, of course, a religious document. But stopping there misses why it matters beyond the Church.

At its core, Magnifica Humanitas poses the great prompt of our time: what kind of humanity do we want to build when our machines begin to imitate capacities that, for centuries, we considered exclusively human?

Its central contribution is not to make us fear artificial intelligence, but in changing the vantage point from which we ask the question. Faced with a culture fascinated by what technology can do, Leo XIV asks what it ought to do, who should benefit, and where its limits lie. Human dignity matters more than efficiency; truth more than virality; responsibility more than automation. Human work is more important than mere cost reduction. Peace should come before the optimization of war.

For believers, the encyclical grows out of a Christian vision of the human person. For nonbelievers, it contains an equally powerful warning: a civilization that increases its intelligence without increasing its wisdom may end up technically extraordinary and humanly poor.

In my book AI and the Wisdom of Popular Religiosity: Human Limits and the Dream of Omnipotence (2026), I propose a convergent and complementary idea: processions, pilgrimages, mourning rituals, promises and sacred calendars have preserved, across very different cultures, an ancient pedagogy of limits. They remind us that not everything should be accelerated, optimized, predicted or controlled.

Perhaps that is where the paths meet. AI needs good prompts. Humanity does too. And ours might be this: how do we use an intelligence that is becoming ever more powerful without becoming less human ourselves?

Magnifica Humanitas deserves to be read — with faith or without it — because that question now belongs to all of us.

Author bio

Alejandro Félix de Souza is a Panamanian-Uruguayan social and political analyst, writer, entrepreneur, VIP Senior Advisor, and former diplomat. He is the author of “Timeless Insights on A.I.: Artificial Intelligence Through the Eyes of History’s Greatest” (2024), “The Venusian Perspective: Great Women in History and Artificial Intelligence” (2025), and “AI and the Wisdom of Popular Religiosity: Human Limits and the Dream of Omnipotence” (2026). His work explores artificial intelligence through history, ethics, humanism and the accumulated wisdom of civilization.