A reflection on Magnifica Humanitas

The deepest response to artificial intelligence is a more awake human being.

I am not Catholic. I do not write to you as a theologian or a believer asking you to adopt any faith.

But when Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on May 25, 2026, I read it twice. Because in 245 paragraphs, across five chapters, the most ancient institution in the Western world named the exact crisis I have been writing about for years.

This is not about religion. It is not about politics. It is about what we owe each other as human beings at the most consequential turning point in our shared history.

Here is what stopped me.

The Pope named where the power actually sits.

It is not with governments. It is not with citizens. The main drivers of technological development are private, often transnational entities with resources that surpass those of many nations. And the document's conclusion is unambiguous: technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it, and use it.

The raw material of AI, the data generated by billions of human lives, does not belong to those who captured it. That was stated plainly, in a papal encyclical, in 2026. If that does not land as significant, read it again.

He offered two images for our choice.

The Tower of Babel: built without reference to anything beyond itself, efficient, uniform, impressive, and ultimately hollow. When a civilization builds on self-assertion alone, it collapses into confusion.

Nehemiah's Jerusalem: rebuilt not by a single hero but through shared responsibility. Every family, every household assigned their section of the wall. The city reborn not through power but through relationship.

The question he poses for our era is the same one I have carried through every page of Awakened Purpose: are we building Babel or Jerusalem? Are we building faster and smarter while losing the thread of who we are and why we are building at all?

He named what must not be lost.

The encyclical confronts two ideological currents running quietly beneath the entire AI conversation: transhumanism and posthumanism. The belief that the human being is a prototype. That weakness is a design flaw. That the destination of progress is something no longer quite human.

His response is precise: dignity is ontological. It is neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified. The value of persons does not depend on what they achieve or produce. And his counter-vision is not retreat but transcendence of a different order: "We become fully human when we become more than human." Not through technology. Through love.

This aligns with the intention of Awakened Purpose exactly: to reprogram ourselves to be more human, to operate from love, to self-transcend, to self-actualize. Not upward into something inhuman. Inward into something real.

He named the civilization we are building.

A culture of power or a civilization of love. He is not naive about this. He does not pretend power does not exist. He names it plainly: AI was weaponized faster than it was deployed in hospitals. Technical power does not confer the right to govern.

The civilization of love is not soft. It is the hardest thing we will ever build. It requires each of us to go inward before we go upward. To walk our own ruins in silence, as Nehemiah walked Jerusalem's, before we presume to rebuild anything else.

Why this matters to you.

AI is already learning from what we collectively express. The future it helps shape depends entirely on the quality of our collective consciousness. This makes the inner work not a luxury. Not a spiritual hobby. An urgent, non-negotiable responsibility.

The Pope called it safeguarding the human person. In Awakened Purpose, I called it humanity for AI.

The words are different. The direction is identical.

We are one construction site on Earth. Every search, every question, every click is a brick.

Read the full essay on Substack.

Ryion is the author of Awakened Purpose and the co-founder of Restore Intuition. He works at the intersection of Awakening as healing and organizational leadership advisory.