Nehemiah’s Republic

With the release of Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, mankind’s foremost moral authority—a Chicago-born priest and the absolute monarch of the longest-running institution in history—addressed a technology so advanced that even its creators struggle to comprehend it.

One of those creators appeared alongside the Holy Father: Chris Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, the leading AI model provider and a company publicly feuding with the government of the pope’s home country over battlefield use of its algorithms.

The remarks of both men were scrutinized the world over by public officials, executives, theologians, technologists, believers, and non-believers alike. The consequences of their attention remain to be seen. For now, as historian T.R. Fehrenbach said of the Korean War, the lesson of Magnifica Humanitas’s unprecedented release is that it happened.

The lessons of the document itself, however, are harder to summarize.

Read more in the American Mind.