Paul NEMITZ

Visiting Professor of Law, College of Europe; Retired Director and 'Consigliere principale' of the European Commission, co-author of The Open Future and its Enemies – How we can protect free society from AI Dictatorship, April 2026, and Die Offene Zukunft und ihre Feinde – Wie wir die freie Gesellschaft vor der KI Diktatur bewahren können, June 2026

xIn the crowded field of AI ethics, few documents dare to name the enemy. Magnifica Humanitas –  the recent encyclical of Pope Leo XIV – does exactly that. Written with the solemn cadence of Catholic social teaching but addressed to “all people of good will”, this text, published on 25 May 2026, offers a searing indictment of concentrated technological power, rampant inequality, and the quiet dehumanisation that accompanies the digital age. While its theological scaffolding may seem distant from secular Social Democracy, its core diagnosis and prescriptions are remarkably, even startlingly, aligned with the values of Democratic Socialism.

Indeed, much of what this pontiff writes could be adopted verbatim into a Social Democratic platform – and in a world of deepening disparities both within and between nations, his insistence on reviving the principles of social justice, the common good and the universal destination of goods is not merely useful but urgent. The pope also puts human dignity in the centre where tech capitalism reduces humans to data and failing production factors. 

A shared diagnosis: power, not just technology

The encyclical’s central move is to reframe AI as a question of power, not just efficiency. Pope Leo XIV writes that “technology is never neutral” because it carries the fingerprints of those who design, finance and control it. He observes that the primary drivers of AI development are no longer states but private, often transnational, corporations whose resources surpass those of many governments, and that, therefore, their democratic control becomes a challenge to confront. This is pure Social Democratic language. When the document warns that “small but highly influential groups can shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics to their own advantage”, it could have been drafted by a European commissioner for competition or a critic of platform capitalism. The encyclical’s calls for binding legal frameworks to protect dignity and privacy, independent oversight, and (non-personal) data as a “common good” mirrors the most progressive currents in contemporary digital policy.

The principles social democrats can sign

Where the text truly shines for a secular left audience is in its systematic exposition of principles. The common good is defined not as a vague aspiration but as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people to reach their fulfilment”. The universal destination of goods – traditionally applied to land and water – is extended to patents, algorithms and data. Subsidiarity (decisions at the lowest competent level) serves as a tool against opaque corporate governance and the dominance of a few tech oligarchs. Solidarity is reframed as “conscious interdependence”, a choice to transform unavoidable economic links into mutual care. And social justice is given a restorative dimension: not just redistributing resources, but mending bonds broken by colonialism, discrimination and exploitation. The pope puts human gignity at the centre of what we have to work for in the future and thus clearly rejects any pipedreams of trans- or posthumanism. 

A Social Democrat could sign every single one of these principles without mentioning god. They are, in essence, a moral grammar for a just and human society – one that the secular left has so far often failed to articulate with comparable clarity and force as regards the impacts of AI and the ideologies behind it. 

The encyclical is at its most powerful when it turns to the concrete wounds of inequality, which are widened by the reduction to technical efficiency as the core societal yardstick that the AI ideology brings about. Within countries, it denounces a “throwaway culture” that treats the poor, migrants and the elderly as expendable. It insists that access to dignified work is a litmus test for any development model, and that automation must not be allowed to “de-skill workers, subject them to automated surveillance, and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks”. Between countries, it names a new colonial logic: the extraction of health data, genetic maps and demographic information from fragile regions, turning entire populations into “rare earths” for northern AI firms to train their models. It calls for the restoration of data sovereignty and for binding international rules to prevent the digital economy from replicating the horrors of past slavery. These are not theological abstractions: these are concrete policy demands.

Why this matters now

We live in an era of staggering inequality. The richest 1 per cent own nearly half of global wealth. Within wealthy nations, the gap between tech elites and precarious workers widens by the year. Across the Global South, resource extraction for digital devices fuels conflict and child labour. Mass data collection from billions of people all over the world amounts to total surveillance and opens up the possibility of all people being manipulated by AI, based on detailed data profiles constructed about them from their dialogues with AI. In this context, Magnifica Humanitas offers something the mainstream left has often lost: a moral vocabulary that is both universal and demanding. It refuses to reduce justice to technocratic tweaks or to rely on the “invisible hand” of the market. It insists that every economic and technological choice has moral weight, and that the dignity of all and the progress of the poorest must be the measure of all progress.

Social Democrats may baulk at the encyclical’s theological language, its references to sin and grace, its ultimately supernatural horizon. But they should not mistake the vessel for the content. The core of Magnifica Humanitas – its defence of human dignity against reduction to data and efficiency, its critique of unchecked corporate power, its insistence on solidarity within and across borders and its call for binding democratic governance of AI – is a programme any Social Democrat could champion. In a world that desperately needs a new moral compass for technology and a big tent for progressives, we would be foolish to ignore this voice, even if it speaks from a tradition we do not share.

Pope Leo XIV has given the democratic left a gift: a coherent, principled framework for resisting dehumanisation in the digital age. It would be a mistake to leave it on the Vatican’s shelf. Progressives and Social Democrats in search of programmatic orientation will find major inspiration in this Encyclical, which itself has been inspired by the great tradition of democracy and workers’ movements developing alongside the catholic social teaching since the industrial revolution.

Photo credits: Shutterstock/Marco Iacobucci Epp