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Monday, 25 May 2026
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Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, begins with the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1–9). Babel represents the grandiosity of our technological age, of attempting to surpass our creaturely nature and thereby preclude communion with God. Limitations are integral to human dignity; they are to be cherished and protected, not wished away. There is thus an inherent grandeur to being human, and particularly to organic, human intelligence.
The natural capacities with which we are endowed as creatures of God are relational, and therefore moral and spiritual. Unlike the machine, we have conscience, we experience love and loss, we acquire wisdom, we exercise compassion and undergo suffering for others. Crucially, such things are indispensable for communion with God in Christ. Hence, Magnifica Humanitas declares, “We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.”
Today’s Babel, Leo writes, is the “technocratic paradigm” within which technology becomes “the standard by which everything is judged,” and all is reduced to the logic of “efficiency, control and profit.” Then, “the fullness of life is equated with having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control.” Even our own lives are treated as machines we can code as we will, seeing ourselves “as a project to be optimized rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.” (If anyone doubts this, I’d happily direct them to the contents of my social media algorithm.)
On the societal level, the technocratic paradigm results in a “culture of power.” This is when the logic of the machine runs wild, there is a limitless arms race to develop the most sophisticated AI, shadowy non-state actors exert unrestrained transnational influences, technology provides ever new forms of weaponry, and multipolar geopolitics increasingly degenerates into war.
Cherishing the grandeur of creaturely limits, by contrast, brings the promise of a “civilization of love.” This will arise, says Leo, not “from a single or spectacular gesture, but from the sum total of small and steadfast acts of fidelity that serve as a bulwark against dehumanization.” We’re encouraged by the pope to use technology for building a civilization of love. The point is to apply a “spiritual, ethical and political framework” to questions of whether, how, and when technological developments should be utilized.
The document explains the principles of Catholic social doctrine to this end. The idea is that we’ll stop capitulating to anything machines offer, and instead ask to what degree some new development can foster human dignity, a commitment to the common good, subsidiarity and solidarity, and so forth.
Pope Leo notes that when societies without a sound ethical and spiritual framework encounter new technologies, everything is “governed only by technocratic thinking and presented as necessary and inevitable, ultimately imposing rules shaped by those who control data, infrastructure and computing power.” Working in a university, I saw this firsthand when AI first appeared. We were told that questioning its use was futile: The only option was an uncritical embrace.
Magnifica Humanitas presents the antidote. Families, schools, and the broader culture are encouraged to impart the dispositions necessary to use technology appropriately. The passages in question deserve much careful, collective reading by those involved in any such context.
As Pope Leo’s first encyclical, this document perhaps sets the tone for subsequent papal teachings. It is a work of balance and deliberation that displays heartfelt concern for the dehumanizing aspects of contemporary life and puts a particular accent on peacemaking and the horror of war.
This is also a pope for whom Church unity is given special emphasis, with little hint of factionalism or intra-ecclesial point-scoring. At the center of this impetus is the Eucharist, which challenges the technocratic paradigm by building and strengthening profound communion, human and divine. In discussing this point, Leo quotes his own papal motto: In Illo uno unum.
As an outwardly focused encyclical, aimed at all people of good will, it seems the pope’s valuing of unity applies also to the human race and not just the Church. Solidarity is described as “the concrete recognition that the future of each individual is connected to the future of all.” Fraternity is presented as global and universal—“not merely an aspiration of believers” but “a social and political reality to be embodied in communal choices and endeavors.”
Such statements undoubtedly serve as important reminders of the capacious breadth of Christian anthropology. Recent years have, however, made some of us wary of how universalized and global initiatives can function as just another expression of a culture of power, and correspondingly appreciative of how national expressions of political will sometimes bring welcome disruption.
One wonders if institutions like the U.N., for example, are really the most adequate safeguarders of human creatureliness, given their position on abortion and gender ideology. As the pope himself notes, one of the dangers of technology is a universal “homogenization” of identity, something not unrelated to the concerns that drive many populist movements worldwide.
Pope Leo still interprets “transnational institutions” more favorably. Maybe this is as much generational as anything. It is no coincidence that the Vatican II document quoted most frequently here is Gaudium et Spes. Even the young Ratzinger famously said this constitution was in danger of seeming “guileless” and “downright Pelagian” in its 1960s-style optimism.
Nonetheless, Leo is orientated by Pelagius’s great adversary, St. Augustine. For the Bishop of Hippo, political optimism or utopianism was precluded by the way he distinguished the ecclesial and political realms as two cities; the City of God, centered on the love of God (amor Dei), and a City of Man, centered on pride and self-love (amor sui).
Confusing the human polis with the City of God is a likely outcome of Pelagian presumption, enacting what Eric Voegelin called “the immanentization of the eschaton.” Pope Leo seems sensitive to this. He makes clear that the City of God is, properly speaking, the Heavenly Jerusalem of Revelation 21—a gift of divine grace, not something we can achieve by human endeavor or political initiatives.
In other words, Pope Leo XIV may be a Boomer, but he is a decidedly Augustinian Boomer. This promises that Magnifica Humanitas’ affirmation of our God-given grandeur, over against the overbearing grandiosity of the machine, will have the impact it should on those younger generations that need to hear it the most.
Sunday, 24 May 2026
Have always loved this... and today is Whit Sunday
The Whitsun Weddings
PHILIP LARKIN
That Whitsun, I was late getting away:
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displace the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.
At first, I didn't notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewelry-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochers that
Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
Yes, from cafes
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed abroad: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known
Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots. and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem
Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
-An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl -and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:
There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Traveling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
Not till about
One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday
Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,
All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense
Of being in a hurry gone. We ran
Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street
Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence
The river's level drifting breadth began,
Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.
All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept
For miles inland,
A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.
Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and
Canals with floatings of industrial froth;
A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped
And rose: and now and then a smell of grass
Displace the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth
Until the next town, new and nondescript,
Approached with acres of dismantled cars.
At first, I didn't notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade,
And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls
I took for porters larking with the mails,
And went on reading. Once we started, though,
We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls
In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,
All posed irresolutely, watching us go,
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it. Struck, I leant
More promptly out next time, more curiously,
And saw it all again in different terms:
The fathers with broad belts under their suits
And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;
An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,
The nylon gloves and jewelry-substitutes,
The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochers that
Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.
Yes, from cafes
And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed
Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days
Were coming to an end. All down the line
Fresh couples climbed abroad: the rest stood round;
The last confetti and advice were thrown,
And, as we moved, each face seemed to define
Just what it saw departing: children frowned
At something dull; fathers had never known
Success so huge and wholly farcical;
The women shared
The secret like a happy funeral;
While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared
At a religious wounding. Free at last,
And loaded with the sum of all they saw,
We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.
Now fields were building-plots. and poplars cast
Long shadows over major roads, and for
Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem
Just long enough to settle hats and say
I nearly died,
A dozen marriages got under way.
They watched the landscape, sitting side by side
-An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,
And someone running up to bowl -and none
Thought of the others they would never meet
Or how their lives would all contain this hour.
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:
There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Bright knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Traveling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.
Friday, 22 May 2026
Thursday, 21 May 2026
SWASHBUCKLING MULLIGAN WRITES...
Hi Gene and all readers of your blog. I have had your message Gene and will oblige. It's just that at the moment I am very busy working on a project in Brussels.
In the meantime: we are all aware of the old adage A PICTURE TELLS A THOUSAND WORDS.
This picture of Detterling's nephew Cuthbert with his live-in partner Julian certainly does that.
Cuthbert Detterling (left) and his partner Julian
Saint Cuthbert was a wonderful saint from the North-east. I wonder how he would feel about his name featured here?
Swashbuckling Mulligan
Wednesday, 20 May 2026
REPOSTED
DETTERLING'S DESERT ISLAND DISCS
DETTERLING AGED 15 TRAINSPOTTING IN 1959
Rolf Harris ...
Two Little Boys
The Sex Pistols ...
The Lark Ascending
Emmerson, Lake and Palmer ...
The Curse of Baba Yaga From Mussourky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition'
Paul Gascoigne ... Wor Geordie's lost his Penga
Rev Ian Paisley ...
A selection of recordings of Rev Ian Paisley's speeches delivered in his 'Save Ulster from Sodomy' campaign
BOOK CHOICE
Granny Barkes Fell in Woolworths
Luxury
A print of any painting by Jack Vettriano
Tee! Hee! Hee! Chortle! Chortle!
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