By Peter Wolfgang, Catholic Culture, May 29, 2026

Peter Wolfgang is president of Family Institute of Connecticut Action, a Hartford-based advocacy organization whose mission is to encourage and strengthen the family as the foundation of society. His work has appeared in The Hartford Courant, the Waterbury Republican-American, Crisis Magazine, Columbia Magazine, the National Catholic Register, CatholicVote, Catholic World Report, the Stream and Ethika Politika. He lives in Waterbury, Conn., with his wife and their seven children. The views expressed on Catholic Culture are solely his own.  See full bio.

Who should get the award this week for the best of the worst takes on Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas? Is it the guy who was disappointed that he didn’t get “a papal bull excommunicating ChatGPT users or placing Silicon Valley under interdict?” Or the one who thought the encyclical was bad because the wrong people like it? Or the ones who thought Pope Leo’s reference to “structures of sin” was an icky Marxist thing, even though it was a direct citation of Pope St. John Paul II, the man who obliterated communism in Eastern Europe?

Papal documents are not above criticism. But the criticisms from major right-leaning commentators, in outlets both secular and Catholic, were not always this silly. After 12 years of Francis, the office of the papacy no longer commands quite the same Olympian height of moral certitude in people’s minds than it once did under, say, John Paul II. That may be part of it. …

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