Being the Blessing

📣 Magnifica Humanitas, the announcement of Pope Leo’s forthcoming encyclical on the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence; it is the first of his pontificate.
📌 The letter, signed by the Holy Father on May 15th, which is also the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, will be published on May 25th.

Learn more: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-first-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas.html

Join Us in Astonishing the World.

The apex of the church’s temporal power is centuries in the rearview mirror, and we’re living in, if you like, a disenchanted world. And yet we find ourselves with a pope to the left of any number of mainstream American institutions and a president enraged by his own inability to dampen the pontiff’s convictions.

The artifacts of the Trump administration’s side of the feud—however unprecedentedly hostile—are likely to remain either inscrutable or too daft to warrant parsing. The president keeps mentioning the fracas at inopportune moments, such as at his own public-relations stunt to highlight his tax bill’s “no tax on tips” provision. But how much “there” is there to Trump’s AI-generated image of himself in papal regalia, or the quickly deleted image of himself as a robed, Jesus-like figure healing a sick man? These are desperate bids for attention from a bellicose lame duck. The richer texts come from Leo, whose provocations remind us that religious and secular concerns can converge beautifully on the matter of human dignity in a world riven with inequality and violence.

The pope’s promotion of peace and communal care is not a concession to some woke infiltration but the most organic possible outgrowth of the stated principles of the church he leads. His words at his first Christmas Eve mass at St. Peter’s Basilica were unequivocal: “On earth, there is no room for God if there is no room for the human person. To refuse one is to refuse the other.” Read more from Rose D’Amora: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/pope-leo-trump-vance/