By Roger Kimball, American Greatness, May 31, 2026
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. …
Magnifica Humanitas lands its strongest blows not against machines, but against the old human temptation to mistake technological power for moral authority.
Reading around in Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope’s new encyclical on “Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence,” I couldn’t help but recall Dr. Johnson’s comment about Paradise Lost. He found a lot to admire in that sprawling opus. But Johnson also noted that “none ever wished it longer than it is.” Magnifica Humanitas weighs in at more than 40,000 words. It is inspired by, and in some respects modeled on, Rerum novarum, Leo XXIII’s 1891 encyclical on society’s duties to the poor. At some 14,000 words, that earlier “circular” seems almost sonnet-like by comparison.
Magnifica Humanitas is not only long. It is also prolix. Like the eponymous river in Turkey, it meanders. Its ostensible subject—the threat that artificial intelligence may pose to human flourishing—is counterpointed throughout by nuggets of politically correct sentiment. There is a lot about “economic injustices and the climate crisis” in this expostulation. Also migrants. He quotes with approval Pope Francis’s insistence that we view migrants “not simply as a problem to be managed but as a living image of the People of God on the move.” …
