This morning’s word is Magnificent Humanity.
The anchor verses are Genesis 1:27 and Ephesians 1:17–18.
Yesterday, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical.
He titled it Magnifica Humanitas. Magnificent Humanity.
The document is forty-two thousand three hundred words long. The Pope signed it on May 15. That date was deliberate. May 15 was the one hundred and thirty-fifth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the 1891 encyclical of Pope Leo XIII that defended workers during the Industrial Revolution. The current Pope took his name from Leo XIII. Now he has written the AI-age companion text.
Read the title again.
Magnificent Humanity.
The Pope did not name his encyclical after the technology. He named it after the person GOD made.
That is the whole sermon.
Most conversations about artificial intelligence begin with what the machine can do. How fast. How smart. How many jobs replaced. How much money saved. The Pope started somewhere else. The Pope started with what GOD made when GOD made you.
The opening of his letter contains this line.
“Humanity, created by GOD in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which GOD and humanity dwell together.”
Two roads.
Babel was the place where people decided to build a tower to reach the heavens by their own power. They wanted to make a name for themselves. They wanted to consolidate. They wanted one language. GOD scattered them. Not because GOD was angry that humans wanted to build. Because GOD knew what humans become when they try to flatten the GOD-given diversity of the human person into a single optimized system.
The Pope warns of what he calls “the Babel syndrome.” He names it as “the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, a uniformity that neutralizes differences, and the pretense that a single language, even a digital one, can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.”
That is a hard sentence. Read it twice.
The mystery of the person cannot be translated into data and performance.
You are not a data point. The person beside you is not a data point. The neighbor you would rather not call is not a data point. Magnificent humanity is what GOD made when GOD made you, and what GOD made cannot be optimized.
Paul prayed for the church at Ephesus that GOD would give them “the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know HIM better. I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which HE has called you.”
The eyes of your heart.
That is a phrase no algorithm can process. No machine can see another person the way GOD sees them. Only you can.
The Pope ends his encyclical with the Magnificat. The song of Mary. The song that names the GOD who lifts up the humble and brings down the proud. The song that interprets history “through the eyes of those who suffer rather than the mighty.” The song that reads the world “from the viewpoint of the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the wounded child, the exile and the fugitive.”
That is the lens.
If the technology we build cannot see them, then the technology we build is building Babel.
If the technology we build serves them, then the technology we build is helping to build the city of GOD.
The choice is not the machine’s. The choice is ours.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.