Implications for Education and Young People in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Simon Uttley offers a personal reflection on the significance of Pope Leo XIV’s Encyclical, which has clear implications for the educational community, both Catholic and beyond.
Dr Simon Uttley is Adjunct Professor of Education at the University of Notre Dame (USA), London and Visiting Professor at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. He has been a secondary school headteacher for 20 years and is Director of www.koin-ed.org. Simon is also proud to serve as an Ambassador At Large for ‘Thoughtful’, helping young people benefit from the insights of philosophy.
Cite as Uttley, S. (2026). Magnifica Humanitas in the Tradition of Catholic Social Teaching: Implications for Education and Young People in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. London: Koinonia Educational.
Abstract
This paper attempts to do two things. First, it analyses Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter Magnifica Humanitas (2026) in relation to the tradition of Catholic Social Teaching (CST), with particular attention to its continuity with Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891). Second, it examines its significance in relation to the treatment of education and young people. The paper argues that Magnifica Humanitas applies the methodological pattern established by Rerum Novarum — reading the “new things” (res novae) of the present in the light of the Gospel — to the conditions of the digital age, extending the tradition’s core principles to artificial intelligence, data, and algorithmic power. On education, the document goes further than any previous social encyclical, advancing a concept of an “educational alliance” among families, schools, and civil society, defending the school as a formative community rather than a transmission mechanism, and treating the commercial exploitation of children’s attention by AI-driven platforms as a structural injustice. The paper identifies the document’s doctrinal originality, particularly its extension of the universal destination of goods to digital infrastructure, and notes where its educational prescriptions remain general and where its analysis of the Global South is underdeveloped.
Keywords: Catholic Social Teaching, Magnifica Humanitas, Leo XIV, Rerum Novarum, artificial intelligence, education, digital age, human dignity, young people
Introduction
On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. The date was chosen deliberately: it marks the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), the document that inaugurated Catholic Social Teaching (CST) as a formal tradition of papal engagement with social and economic life. That choice of date is not ceremonial. Leo XIV uses it to declare a methodological allegiance: he will do for the age of artificial intelligence what Leo XIII did for the age of industrial capitalism — take the “new things” (res novae) of the moment seriously, subject them to theological scrutiny, and articulate principles for just action.
The document is five chapters long, running from a survey of CST from Leo XIII to Pope Francis through a systematic treatment of its theological foundations, to substantive engagement with AI governance, the transformation of work, digital freedom, truth in public life, and the formation of young people. It is the most architecturally ambitious papal social document since Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ (2015) and the first to engage AI as a central rather than peripheral question.
This paper has two aims. The first is to show how Magnifica Humanitas locates itself within the CST tradition — not simply by citing previous documents but by adopting and extending the tradition’s method and applying its core principles to conditions those principles were not originally designed to address. The second is to examine what the encyclical actually says about education and young people, and what follows from it. Section 2 sketches the CST tradition and the legacy of Rerum Novarum. Section 3 analyses how Magnifica Humanitas engages with that tradition. Section 4 examines its treatment of education and young people. Section 5 assesses the document’s contributions and its limitations, followed by a conclusion.
Catholic social teaching and the legacy of Rerum Novarum
The emergence of a tradition
Catholic Social Teaching, as a systematic corpus of doctrine, is conventionally dated from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, issued on 15 May 1891. Leo XIII was confronted with the social dislocation of industrial capitalism: the massing of labour in factories, the erosion of guilds and craft communities, the exploitation of workers and their families, and the apparent choice between an unchecked liberal market and Marxist collectivism. His response was to apply an account of the human person — rational, social, possessed of inherent dignity, and oriented toward God — to the structures of economic life. The document affirmed the right to a just wage, the right to private property alongside its social function, the legitimacy of workers’ associations, and the duty of the state to intervene when the common good requires it (Leo XIII, 1891). Pius XI later called it the “Magna Carta of Christian social action” (1931, §39); John Paul II called its method “a lasting paradigm” (1991, §57).
What made Rerum Novarum generative was not its specific prescriptions but its method. It took the empirical conditions of its time as a theological question, applied scriptural and natural law reasoning to them, and produced principles that could guide action without dictating political programmes. Every subsequent major social encyclical has repeated this structure, even as the specific conditions it addresses have changed.
The development of the tradition
Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931) formalised the principle of subsidiarity and extended the analysis of capitalism to the systemic concentration of economic power. The wartime radio messages of Pius XII articulated an international order grounded in natural law and human rights. John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963) broadened the tradition’s scope globally; the latter addressed, for the first time, not only Catholics but all people of goodwill (John XXIII, 1963). Gaudium et Spes (Second Vatican Council, 1965a) was a methodological turning point, establishing the practice of reading the “signs of the times” in the light of the Gospel and insisting that the Church must engage concrete historical situations rather than abstract principles alone.
Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967) introduced “integral human development” — development that concerns “each person and the whole person” (§14) — while Octogesima Adveniens (1971) acknowledged irreducible contextual diversity and called each Christian community to interpret its own situation. John Paul II’s three social encyclicals — Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), and Centesimus Annus (1991) — deepened CST’s anthropological foundations and named the systemic dimensions of injustice as “structures of sin.” Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate (2009) placed charity at the centre of social analysis. Francis’s Laudato Si’ (2015) introduced integral ecology, and Fratelli Tutti (2020) proposed universal fraternity as a response to social fragmentation.
Leo XIV describes the result as “a harmonious, though not always linear, development” (§45) — a corpus in which revealed truths are brought continually into dialogue with historical change. The phrase is accurate: there are genuine developments of emphasis across the tradition (on rights, on ecology, on structural sin) as well as a stable core of principles that each document applies to its own moment.
Core principles
Scholars of CST have identified several principles that persist across the tradition (Curran, 2002; Himes, 2005; Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, 2004): the dignity of the human person as created in the image of God; the common good, understood as “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfilment more fully and more easily” (Second Vatican Council, 1965a, §26); subsidiarity, which holds that decision-making should rest at the lowest appropriate level; solidarity as both an objective principle of interdependence and a moral virtue demanding active responsibility for others; social justice, which attends especially to the most vulnerable; and the universal destination of goods, which holds that the earth’s resources are given for the benefit of all. As will be shown below, Magnifica Humanitas takes up each of these and extends them to the digital domain.
Magnifica Humanitas within the CST tradition
Continuity of method
The clearest sign of Magnifica Humanitas’s methodological continuity with Rerum Novarum is its opening. Leo XIV notes the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, invokes Leo XIII as “my beloved predecessor” (§3), and frames his own task identically: to ask what the “new things” of the present era require, in the light of the Gospel and the principles already developed in the tradition. The “new things” he identifies are “digitisation, artificial intelligence and robotics” (§4) — not mere technical novelties but forces that, like industrial capitalism before them, are restructuring the basic conditions of work, community, and power.
The parallel is structural, not merely rhetorical. Leo XIII diagnosed the industrial system as creating a concentration of economic power that exposed workers and their families to exploitation without recourse. Leo XIV diagnoses the digital system as creating a concentration of technological power in private, transnational hands — actors “endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments” (§5) — that exposes citizens, consumers, and especially children to manipulation and exclusion without adequate recourse. In both cases, the response the tradition advocates is the same in form: apply the principles of dignity, the common good, and subsidiarity to constrain and redirect that power toward just ends.
Extending the core principles
The most doctrinally original move in Magnifica Humanitas is the extension of the universal destination of goods to digital assets. Leo XIV explicitly includes in this principle “patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data” (§67). This is not an obvious extension: the traditional formulation concerns material goods and the earth’s resources, and it required a positive argument — which the encyclical makes — that the wealth of nations now depends increasingly on knowledge and technology, and that when these goods are concentrated without adequate sharing or access, a new structural inequality is produced. The implication is that the concentration of data and algorithmic power in the hands of a few major corporations is not a regrettable side effect of market competition but an injustice of the same order as the expropriation of common land — one that the tradition’s principles require be addressed.
The treatment of subsidiarity (§§68–72) is similarly extended. In its classical formulation, subsidiarity concerns the relationship between individuals, families, and the state. Leo XIV argues that in the digital context, “the highest level is not the State, but rather major economic and technological actors that exercise de facto power over the conditions of everyday life” (§71). Subsidiarity therefore requires that these actors be subject to transparency, accountability, and democratic participation — requirements that echo Leo XIII’s call for state intervention to protect workers (1891, §§32–35) and Pius XI’s formulation of subsidiarity as a constraint on higher-level authority (1931, §79), but now applied to a level of power the tradition had not previously had to address.
The principle of solidarity is extended to what the encyclical calls the “digital ecosystem” (§76), which, like the natural ecosystem, can be shared or monopolised, sustained or degraded. Decisions about data, algorithms, and AI must therefore account for their impact on all peoples and future generations (§76) — a direct application of the intergenerational dimension of solidarity that Francis developed in relation to ecology (2015, §§159–162).
The biblical framework
One of the theological contributions of Magnifica Humanitas is its use of two scriptural images — the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) and Nehemiah’s rebuilding of Jerusalem (Nehemiah 2–6) — as a hermeneutical framework for the whole document. Babel names the situation the encyclical is written against: the application of collective technical power to a project of self-assertion that eliminates diversity, reduces persons to means, and ends in fragmentation. Nehemiah names what the encyclical commends: collaborative, God-centred rebuilding, in which “men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part” (§8), each taking responsibility for their section of the wall.
This framework is theologically functional, not merely illustrative. It situates the entire discussion of AI within the tradition of scriptural discernment of social realities that Gaudium et Spes formalised as the method of reading the signs of the times. It also supplies a criterion of evaluation — Who is building, for whom, in what spirit? — that runs throughout the document and shapes its treatment of education, work, and governance alike.
Relation to Pope Francis
Leo XIV is explicit about his debt to Francis. He describes Laudato Si’ as providing “the first significant systematic treatment of the environmental crisis in a social encyclical” (§43) and draws directly on its concept of the “technocratic paradigm” — the tendency to let the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone determine social choices — as a central analytical tool (§§92–93). The extension of integral ecology to the digital sphere follows Francis’s logic and language closely.
The document moves beyond Francis in two ways. It provides more systematic doctrinal engagement with AI specifically than any previous encyclical, devoting three of its five chapters to aspects of digital technology’s social impact. And it gives more space to education and young people than Francis devoted to the subject — or indeed than any previous social encyclical. It is to this dimension that we now turn.
Education and young people in Magnifica Humanitas
Education in the CST tradition
Education has appeared in CST documents since at least Pius XI’s Divini Illius Magistri (1929), but it has generally occupied a subordinate position in the tradition’s major social encyclicals. Rerum Novarum does not address education directly. Gaudium et Spes treats it briefly within a broader discussion of culture. Even Francis’s Laudato Si’, which devotes attention to ecological education (§§209–215), does not develop a philosophy of schooling. Magnifica Humanitas is different. Chapter Four, “Safeguarding Humanity at a Time of Transformation: Truth, Work, Freedom,” devotes separate sections to an “educational alliance for the digital age” and “the central role of schools” (§§136–145), and a later section of the same chapter addresses families and young people directly (§§160–165). The total space given to these themes is without precedent in the tradition.
The Educational Alliance
The organising concept in Leo XIV’s treatment of education is what he calls a “new educational alliance” (§137). The phrase originates in Francis’s Global Compact on Education (2020), but Magnifica Humanitas gives it specific content in relation to digital technology. The alliance involves families, schools, and civil society — including ecclesial communities — each with distinct responsibilities, collectively charged with forming young people capable of engaging critically and humanely with digital environments.
The structure of this concept reflects the CST principle of subsidiarity. Education is not the state’s function alone, nor — crucially — the function of the platforms and devices that increasingly shape how young people spend their time and form their habits. It belongs to the natural communities in which young people are embedded: first the family, which Leo XIII already called “a society of a very small number” with its own proper authority (1891, §12), and then the school. The educational alliance is explicitly set against the encroachment of commercial platforms on these roles — what the encyclical treats as a usurpation of formative authority by actors whose interests are not educational but extractive.
The school as formative community
Leo XIV’s account of the school goes beyond the question of what is taught to address what kind of community the school must be. Schools, he argues, must become “environments where critical thinking about information, digital tools and artificial intelligence is developed” (§141), which requires not only technical familiarity but the ability to “evaluate the reliability of sources, recognise manipulation and disinformation, and understand the mechanisms that govern platforms and algorithms” (§141). This is digital literacy as critical citizenship, not as vocational preparation.
The underlying anthropology is characteristic of CST. Rerum Novarum’s treatment of labour was grounded in the claim that a worker is not a commodity but a person whose dignity precedes and exceeds any economic transaction. Leo XIV’s treatment of education is grounded in the parallel claim that a student is not a consumer or a data point but a person who is formed through relationships and whose development requires genuine community. The school matters, on this account, not primarily because it transmits knowledge but because it constitutes a form of social life that cultivates the habits — of attention, deliberation, encounter with genuine otherness — that the digital environment tends to erode.
This is the logic behind Leo XIV’s treatment of what he calls the “ecology of communication” (§§130–133). The informational environment, like the natural environment, can sustain or degrade human life. Algorithmically curated platforms are designed to maximise engagement rather than understanding; they create a communicative ecology that rewards provocation, confirms existing beliefs, and shortens attention. The school’s task, in this context, is partly remedial: to cultivate the habits of mind and relationship that commercial platforms undermine.
Digital dependency and the exploitation of children’s attention
The most urgent passages in Magnifica Humanitas on the subject of young people concern what Leo XIV calls the “commercialisation of attention” (§170) — the deployment of AI-driven techniques to capture and retain the attention of young people for commercial purposes. The encyclical’s analysis is direct: the business models of major digital platforms are built on capturing attention, and they exploit psychological vulnerabilities — including the specific vulnerabilities of adolescent development — to do so. This is not an accidental consequence of market competition but a designed outcome.
Leo XIV frames this as a structural injustice rather than a matter of bad individual choices. The language he uses is that of “new forms of slavery” (§§170–175) — a phrase deliberately evoking the tradition’s use of the same term for exploitative labour conditions. Just as Rerum Novarum argued that the exploitation of workers was a structural problem requiring structural remedies, not merely a matter of individual employer virtue, Magnifica Humanitas argues that the exploitation of children’s attention by commercial platforms is a structural problem requiring regulatory intervention. He calls specifically for “meaningful limits on the commercial exploitation of children’s data and attention” (§174) — a call for legislation that parallels Leo XIII’s call for laws regulating working hours and conditions.
The educational response is connected to but distinct from the regulatory one. Regulation addresses the structure; education addresses the person. What Leo XIV calls for is the formation of habits of interiority, critical awareness, and voluntary attention — the inner resources that enable a young person to make choices about their digital environment rather than being passively shaped by it. This formation cannot be achieved by instruction alone; it requires the kind of sustained, relational, unhurried community that good schools — and good families — can provide and that platforms cannot.
Families and social conditions
Leo XIV situates the school within the broader context of family life, and family life within the broader context of social conditions. The family is “the first school of humanity” (§161); its capacity to form young people is not merely a function of parental intention but of material conditions — economic security, housing stability, time, and the intergenerational bonds that transmit values. The encyclical connects the appeal of digital environments as substitutes for genuine community partly to the erosion of these material conditions: where families are fragmented by economic precarity and communities by social isolation, platforms fill the gap.
This connects education to the broader social agenda of CST in a way that is characteristic of the tradition. Just as Rerum Novarum argued that the condition of the worker could not be separated from the condition of the family (1891, §§26–28), Magnifica Humanitas argues that the digital formation of young people cannot be addressed by schools alone, in isolation from family conditions and social policy. Catholic educational institutions are implicated in this: their pastoral responsibility extends to advocating for the social conditions — adequate wages, decent housing, time for family life — without which their formative work is undermined before it begins.
The role of universities
Magnifica Humanitas addresses Catholic universities directly, which is unusual in a social encyclical. Paragraph 47 calls on “academic institutions and universities to give fresh impetus to these principles, and to apply them in a way that will be relevant and effective in addressing the digital revolution,” and asks theological and philosophical inquiry to “further explore and support the Church’s pastoral journey.” This is not merely an affirmation of academic freedom; it is a commission. The encyclical implies that the Church’s engagement with AI requires intellectual resources that the magisterium alone cannot supply — that the ethical analysis of AI, data governance, and algorithmic power requires the kind of sustained, disciplinary, empirically informed work that only universities can do.
The invitation builds on a long tradition of Catholic intellectual engagement with modernity, from Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (1879) to John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio (1998). What is new is the specific domain: the encyclical suggests that Catholic intellectual life has both a distinctive contribution to make to the ethics of AI — grounded in the tradition’s anthropology of the person — and a responsibility not to cede that ground to secular analysis alone.
Critical assessment
What the document achieves
Magnifica Humanitas does several things that the CST tradition had not previously done. Its extension of the universal destination of goods to data and digital infrastructure (§67) is a genuine doctrinal development: it applies a principle rooted in scripture and patristic thought to the dominant form of twenty-first-century wealth creation, with direct implications for data governance, platform regulation, and digital access. No previous social encyclical had made this move, and it is the document’s most lasting contribution to the tradition.
The treatment of AI-driven commercial platforms as generators of structural injustice is also well-argued. The identification of designed addiction as a form of exploitation analogous to the exploitation of child labour — and the consequent call for regulatory protection — moves the conversation beyond vague warnings about “screen time” to a structural analysis with specific policy implications. Whether or not legislators and regulators pay attention, the argument is theologically grounded and politically usable.
The application of subsidiarity to transnational technological actors (§71) fills a gap in the tradition. Subsidiarity was formulated as a principle governing relations between individuals, families, and the state. Leo XIV’s argument that it must now be applied to the relationship between citizens and private actors whose power exceeds that of many states is a necessary development, not merely an analogy.
What needs to follow
Three limitations deserve attention. First, the educational prescriptions in Magnifica Humanitas are programmatic rather than specific. The call for digital literacy, critical thinking, and formation in habits of interiority identifies the right goals but leaves largely unaddressed how they are to be achieved in practice — what a curriculum shaped by these principles would look like, how teacher formation would need to change, or how resource-constrained schools in under-served communities are expected to implement them. This is a task Leo XIV explicitly delegates to episcopal conferences, academic institutions, and Catholic educational bodies (§47), but the delegation is made without specifying what it entails.
Second, the document says very little about Catholic schools as distinct institutions within pluralistic educational systems. The educational alliance Leo XIV envisions includes families, schools, and civil society, but the specific institutional character of Catholic schools — their dual accountability to parents and the Church, their presence as providers of education for the poor in many developing countries, their entanglement with state funding — receives no treatment. Given that Catholic schools educate roughly 60 million students worldwide, this provides scope for further scholarship and practice-based research.
Third, and more broadly, the encyclical’s analysis of AI in education is largely negative: it attends to exploitation, dependency, and the erosion of interiority, but not to the ways in which AI tools might genuinely extend educational access, support teachers in under-resourced schools, or enable personalised learning for students with disabilities or learning differences. The tradition’s own approach to technology — neither naive optimism nor blanket scepticism, but discernment guided by the question of whether the technology serves integral human development — implies a more balanced account, hence providing further scope for research.
Finaly, Magnifica Humanitas acknowledges global inequalities in digital access (§67) but does not engage in any depth with the specific conditions of the Global South, where the majority of young people live, where Catholic educational institutions are most numerous, and where the impacts of AI — including both its potential to expand access and its potential to entrench dependence on platforms designed elsewhere, for other populations — are most consequential. The tradition’s own insistence on the preferential option for the poor (§78) implies further scope.
Conclusion
Magnifica Humanitas is best understood not as a document about technology but as an application of the CST tradition’s method to the conditions of the digital age. Like Rerum Novarum, it takes the structural conditions of its moment — the concentration of power, the exposure of the vulnerable, the inadequacy of existing frameworks — and applies an account of the human person and the common good to them, generating principles for action that are more durable than any specific policy recommendation. Its extension of the universal destination of goods to data and algorithms, its application of subsidiarity to transnational technological actors, and its treatment of digital exploitation as a structural rather than individual problem are contributions that the tradition will build on.
On education and young people, the document is more specific than its predecessors and more demanding. The concept of the educational alliance insists that forming young people for the digital age is a shared responsibility that the state cannot discharge alone and that commercial platforms have no business discharging at all. The defence of the school as a formative community — not merely an instructional institution — has implications for curriculum, for teacher formation, for school architecture and culture, and for the political economy of education funding. The analysis of digital addiction as structural exploitation identifies the conditions under which children are currently being harmed and points toward the regulatory and educational responses needed.
Going forward, there is a need (in some settings already underway) to translate these principles into practice: into curriculum frameworks, pedagogical approaches, institutional models, and regulatory proposals that can be taken up by the educators, policymakers, and communities the encyclical addresses. That work belongs to the universities, episcopal conferences, and educational bodies to which Leo XIV explicitly delegates it. The scholarly and practical task is now to take this document forward.
Simon Uttley
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