The universal destination of data
Leo XIV (2026). Magnifica humanitas. Encyclical letter on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. Vatican City, 15 May 2026. https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html
A magisterial document is not a book, and reviewing it as if it were requires a preliminary clarification. Magnifica humanitas does not put forward an author’s thesis to be accepted or rejected on the quality of its arguments. It is the normative act of an institution with more than a billion members, an educational and healthcare network of planetary reach, and a doctrinal tradition that works, on its own terms, as a cumulative body in which each document is read in the light of those that preceded it. That condition determines what can be asked of it. It cannot be faulted, for instance, for failing to engage the literature as a journal article would, but one can assess what it does with the concepts it inherits, what it takes in from outside, and what institutional consequences follow from what it asserts. Read in this way, the first encyclical devoted to artificial intelligence turns out to be a more interesting text than its press reception, focused on the condemnation of autonomous weapons and of transhumanism, suggested. Its main contribution lies not in its anthropology, which is largely inherited from the note Antiqua et nova (2025), but in its doctrine of property and of power.
The document is organized in five chapters preceded by an introduction that sets its figurative frame: the choice between building Babel, a project of “a single language, a single technology, a single direction” (§7), and rebuilding with Nehemiah the walls of Jerusalem, where each family is assigned a section and no one imposes “solutions from above” (§8). The first chapter reconstructs the tradition of social teaching from Rerum Novarum, whose one hundred and thirty-fifth anniversary occasions the text and whose method, the examination of the “new things” of each age, the author claims as his own. The second restates the principles (dignity, the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, social justice) and recalibrates them for the digital environment. The third deals with AI in the strict sense and with transhumanist currents; the fourth applies the principles to public truth, education, work and new forms of slavery; the fifth addresses war and multilateralism. The conclusion proposes a program of Christian life that culminates in the Magnificat.
The most significant doctrinal move occurs in the second chapter and consists in extending the universal destination of goods to “new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data” (§67). The novelty must be measured with care. The subordination of private property to the universal destination has been constant doctrine since Leo XIII, and John Paul II had called it the “first principle of the whole ethical and social order” (§66). What changes is the object. By adding to the list intangible goods whose scarcity is artificial, produced by regimes of exclusivity rather than by the nature of the thing, the encyclical moves the principle onto the terrain where the political economy of AI is now played out. §108 draws the consequence: data “is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few”, its ownership “cannot be left solely in private hands”, and it should be managed “as a common or shared good”, drawing on the notion of collective goods in Centesimus Annus (§40). The potential reach of this formulation is hard to overstate. It places under magisterial authority a thesis that the literature on digital commons and data governance had been defending with no backing other than the academic.
The second contribution, probably the most original from a conceptual standpoint, is the reformulation of subsidiarity. Formulated in Quadragesimo Anno as a limit on the absorption of competences by higher authorities, the principle was read for much of the twentieth century as an argument against the expansion of the State. §71 redirects it: “in the context of the digital revolution”, 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”, and it is companies and platforms that monopolize “expertise, data and decision-making authority”. The demand is translated into instruments (independent checks, algorithmic transparency, equitable access to data, avenues for recourse) and completed by a warning in §109 that has theoretical value of its own: the participation of communities cannot be confined “to mere oversight after the standards have been set elsewhere”. The image of Nehemiah here acquires a precise content. What it describes is a form of polycentric governance in Ostrom’s sense, with multiple nested centers of decision coordinated by a common good, and §153 turns it into a policy criterion when it states that “no single model of change or universal solution exists” and calls for “local initiatives” and “progressive redistribution”.
The third chapter contains the thesis that connects both developments to the contemporary technical debate. AI cannot be considered morally neutral because “every technical tool embodies choices and priorities through what it measures, ignores and optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations” (§104), a formulation any reader of Langdon Winner will recognize. From this follows the sharpest claim in the document, directed at the industry’s own vocabulary: it is not enough to call for the “alignment” of AI with human values without “the possibility of openly discussing the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice”, because “a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few” (§107). The category of “disarmament” in §110, which calls for “discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern” and for “freeing technology from monopolistic control and opening it to discussion and debate”, works as the political synthesis of the chapter. In the fourth chapter, the description of the invisible labor of data labeling and moderation (§173) and, above all, the thesis that colonialism “no longer dominates only bodies, but appropriates data”, turning the health and genetic records of peripheral regions into “the new ‘rare earths’ of power” (§178), bring into magisterial language an agenda that until now belonged to critical data studies. The formula that closes that paragraph (“the digital age will not be post-colonial, but colonial in another form”) has the force of sentences destined to be quoted.
The objections begin precisely there. The first concerns apparatus. The document reproduces with notable fidelity categories developed by Couldry and Mejias (The Costs of Connection, 2019), Ricaurte (2019), Gray and Suri (Ghost Work, 2019) and Crawford (Atlas of AI, 2021), yet its notes refer almost exclusively to the magisterium, the International Theological Commission and Antiqua et nova. The omission is explained by the conventions of the genre, but it sits uneasily with §23, which describes the contribution of the social sciences as “essential” to applying doctrinal criteria. It also has a practical effect: readers who want to go further find in the notes no route to the literature that has already done the empirical work, and the encyclical appears as the source of concepts of which it is, strictly speaking, the recipient.
The second objection is more substantive and concerns the distance between diagnosis and instruments. §109 identifies precisely “the global distribution of power that decides who in fact can train these models and who is merely subjected to them”, but when the text turns to proposals its vocabulary is that of access: “universal access to both technologies and the education needed to use them” (§109), “investments in skills, infrastructure and essential services” (§164). Access to a system trained elsewhere does not redistribute the capacity to build, audit or adapt it, which is exactly what the diagnosis identifies as the asymmetry. The instruments that the literature on digital commons associates with that redistribution (open-weights models, public compute, licenses that permit study and modification, open-science infrastructures) do not appear in the text. The demand to free AI “from monopolistic control” (§110) is compatible with them and could be read as their foundation, but the document does not take that step, and the principle of universal destination is left without the institutional translation that Rerum Novarum did provide in its time when it named the workers’ association.
The third objection concerns the place of the Global South. The phrase appears only once (§204), in connection with military spending, and the rest of the text places peripheral regions in the position of victim: “places of precarious labor” (§153), territories of mineral and data extraction. The diagnosis is correct and its inclusion is a merit, but the omission of the other half is not neutral. From the standpoint of the epistemologies of the South (Santos), and of experiences such as Masakhane or the SciELO/AmeliCA system, the South is not only where the asymmetry is suffered but also a place where institutional alternatives are already operating, often closer to the governance of commons that the encyclical proposes than any arrangement in the North. A text that chose as its central figure someone who rebuilds by listening to each family would have gained a great deal by recognizing who was already building.
The fourth objection concerns internal coherence. §72 entrusts “States and transnational institutions” with guaranteeing fair rules and effective safeguards; §201 observes that those institutions “appear to have been weakened” and that the international order has become “a disorderly and conflict-ridden multipolarism”. The document does not say what is to be done in the interval, nor which non-state actors might sustain the checks and the participation it demands, and it is precisely in that interval that arrangements become entrenched and later prove hard to reverse. To this one may add the treatment of the environment. §101 acknowledges the consumption of energy and water but settles it in a single paragraph that relies on “more sustainable technological solutions”, a strikingly technical remedy in a text that defines itself against the technocratic paradigm and has behind it the far more demanding precedent of Laudato si’.
Finally, it is worth recording what the document does to itself, because that conditions its credibility as a governance text. The section titled “An examen for the Church” (§86-89) applies subsidiarity and accountability inwardly and asks for “genuine, rather than merely nominal, participatory bodies”; §176 asks pardon for the papal legitimation of slavery in the early modern period. These are gestures that corporate codes of conduct rarely include. They do not remove the tension of a highly centralized institution preaching decentralization, nor that of a text which, in its section on education (§144), moves from the diagnosis of inequality to the defense of public support for private institutions, its own among them.
All in all, this is one of the most ambitious normative interventions on the governance of artificial intelligence produced outside the State and the industry, and the only one with an institutional network capable of carrying it into schools, universities and social organizations around the world. For science and technology studies its usefulness is twofold. It offers a category, inverted subsidiarity, that describes platform power in a vocabulary recognizable to political traditions that distrust both the State and the market. And it offers a thesis, that the alignment of systems is a question of justice and not only of engineering, with an authority no paper can give it. That its program lacks instruments is not, in the tradition to which it belongs, a definitive flaw: Rerum Novarum lacked them too, and they were built over decades by those who read it as a program. The question it leaves open is who will do that reading this time.