In May 1891, Pope Leo XIII published an encyclical – “Rerum Novarum” – that gave the industrial-age West a moral vocabulary that socialist forces would never match. Exactly 135 years later in May 2026, his namesake did it again. A different civilizational rival, a different technological revolution, but the same gift.
Based only on compute, manufacturing output, or the speed of state-directed deployment, the U.S. narrowly edges out China in the AI race, as those are areas where the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian centralization has inherent structural advantages to competition. What America and its allies can offer the world to truly distinguish this race is something the CCP cannot: AI rooted in a specific civilizational inheritance – Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem – that ultimately produces both better technology and a better life.
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas” (“Magnificent Humanity”), isn’t a roadblock to American AI goals. It’s the most consequential strategic gift the free world has received since John Paul II worked with Ronald Reagan to ensure human dignity triumphed over Soviet Communism. The Trump administration’s instinct should be to pick this encyclical up and work alongside the pope to confront our new threat – AI untethered from human dignity and grounded in the debasing philosophies of the CCP, effective altruists, and transhumanists.
America’s edge isn’t just technical or economic, but civilizational. It rests on three pillars of the Western tradition: Athenian democracy and philosophy; Roman law and republican government; and Jerusalem’s revelation that every person is made in the image of God with inalienable dignity. St. Augustine (of whom the pope is a follower) fused them; common law and the Enlightenment formalized them for a new age.
The product is a legal-political order in which the person is unconditionally dignified, equal before the law, and protected from the state. American AI safety statutes, state AG enforcement actions, and many algorithmic protections are downstream of this inheritance. China has no analog, as its AI is built on a different anthropology entirely: the state over the person, the party over the law, and surveillance – not subsidiarity – as governance.
The pope just made this inheritance explicit for the AI age. To quote just a few lines: “Every human person possesses an infinite dignity … which prevails in and beyond every circumstance, state, or situation the person may ever encounter,” “neither the individual nor the family should be subsumed by the State” … and “faced with this concentration of power in the digital world, the criteria for judgment and discernment in this new situation are the noble principles of Social Doctrine: the inalienable dignity of the human person, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice.”
The CCP can’t answer this. Beijing can build powerful systems, but not systems that treat the person as ontologically prior to the state. Just look at Xinjiang, the social credit system, and the platform-state fusion. The encyclical doesn’t need to name China because the line it draws excludes Beijing by necessity.
The encyclical’s anthropology is incompatible not only with CCP authoritarianism but also those strains of Silicon Valley that treat the human being as a problem to be optimized, transcended, or even replaced.
Transhumanism’s core – that consciousness is transferable computation and the person a migratable dataset –is rightly called out by the encyclical: “if the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy”. So too the effective altruist calculus, which treats persons as datapoints tradeable against expected future utility: “in the name of progress, ‘necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species”. These outlooks, the pope says, “devalue[] human limits and promise[] a purely technical form of ‘salvation.’”
The pope is anti-CCP, anti-transhumanist, and anti-effective-altruist. This is not mere coincidence but the reality of the Western civilizational tradition asserting itself against its main three threats: the authoritarian one abroad, the gnostic one in San Francisco, and the actuarial one in Berkeley.
So what should America do now? To start, our leaders ought to make the language of human dignity the default in AI export-control diplomacy. We already lead with “trustworthy AI” – this papal document now gives that phrase a warrant the CCP can’t replicate. American AI products should be differentiated on human dignity as a feature, not a constraint.
The U.S. should also continue to build the coalition the CCP can’t – the Five Eyes, Europe, India, Japan, Korea, Israel, Taiwan, and rare-earth-rich Latin American and African nations. The Vatican is the only institution on earth that can convene that range of states on an issue of such weight. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, and Holy See Ambassador Brian Burch could spearhead this work.
In the coming days, accelerationists and transhumanists will claim the only way to “beat China” is to ignore the pope. Trump’s opponents will likewise warp the pope’s words to drive a false “pope vs. president” narrative.
These narratives deprive humanity of its dignity and divide the most important global stakeholders precisely when partnership is essential to ensuring AI is developed by the West, for the benefit of all, as a tool of humanity and not a replacement for it.
America can win this race, and our victory will be an enduring and peaceful one if we heed the first American pontiff’s call to uphold our magnificent humanity.
