Pope Leo XIV has recently surprised many not only by saying that he is not afraid of those who flaunt great military and political power. He has also surprised us by offering a critical — and at the same time hopeful — reading of the new society beginning to take shape through the redistribution of global power and the emergence of new technologies that challenge the human condition.
With the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV addresses some of the most urgent questions of our time: the concentration of power in new technological and economic elites; the purely pragmatic design of “artificial intelligence”; and the new inequalities now emerging. Yet beyond this entire social, economic, political, and cultural landscape, the pope moves into territory that has been censored, or at least “domesticated”: the deeper question of what kind of world we are building, what its most profound anthropological premises are, and within those premises, how fully we recognize our limitations and our need to reorient ourselves — personally and socially — toward the One who gives ultimate meaning to life.
In the time of St. Augustine, the Roman Empire was in crisis, and “scapegoats” were easy to find. Augustine knew that landscape well. But instead of settling for what we might today call political or geopolitical analysis, he perceived that the human heart — the “zero point” from which we exist and look out upon the world — must make a fundamental choice.
This is how The City of God came to be written at the beginning of the fifth century: as a believing interpretation of history in the midst of a world in crisis. In its pages, we find two ways of living together, two “cities” built from within. In one, power, arrogance, and self-absorption define relationships. In the other, cooperation and fraternity reveal that we are aware of our constitutive dependence on a personal Thou who surpasses us. This is the same exercise Leo XIV undertakes in the twenty-first century through Magnifica Humanitas: a necessary exercise if we are to recover the awareness that there is another path besides that of a falsely redemptive technocracy.
To relaunch this path, we must relearn how to engage in dialogue. Ideals of life such as friendship, solidarity, and love can seem utopian when dialogue is avoided or merely simulated. Diplomacy and the recovery of multilateralism in the international order are broad exercises in dialogue that, with patience, open up an alternative to war and to the forms of violence that are so common today.
At root, the virtual reality offered by contemporary technologies requires a reorientation that allows us to recover the capacity to encounter one another and to cooperate in solidarity. It requires social justice, so that no one is left abandoned by the wayside. And it requires stable friendship, especially with the poor and marginalized, helping us build a civilization in which love is possible not only as an experience of private life, but as a method of living together.
In a word, in an age of artificial intelligence and ruthless pragmatism, nothing is more necessary than recovering a truly human heart with which to discern, decide, and act.
[Editor’s note: This article was originally published in Spanish at El Heraldo de Mexico. Translated and reprinted with the author’s permission.]
Image: Vatican Media
Rodrigo Guerra López is the secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America.
Originally from Mexico City, he graduated in philosophy from the Free Popular University of the State of Puebla, Mexico; he was then awarded a higher degree in university humanism from the Ibero-American University, Mexico, and a doctorate in philosophy from the International Academy of Philosophy of the Principality of Liechtenstein.
He has held the role of academic coordinator of the John Paul II Pontifical Institute in Mexico City and has served as professor of metaphysics, bioethics, and philosophy of law at the PanAmerican University, Mexico. In 2013 he held the Karol Wojtyla Memorial Lectures at the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland.
From 2004 to 2007 he directed the Observatorio Socio Pastoral of the Latin American Episcopal Council. In 2008 he founded the Centro de Investigación Social Avanzada (CISAV), of which he is professor-researcher of the Division of Philosophy and member of the Consejo de Gobierno.
He is a member of the theological commission of the Latin American Episcopal Council and of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and is the author of numerous publications in the field of anthropology, bioethics, and social philosophy.
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