What would prompt a Pope to write a letter on algorithm design and governance? Whereas Magnificent Humanity is addressed to ‘all men and women of goodwill,’ its content is deeply rooted in Christian spirituality and especially in Saint Augustine’s. Landmark definitions of man, God and society established by Augustine — and then embodied in both Catholic and Protestant Christianity — risk erasure by a certain kind of algorithm governance and design, that Big Tech companies and other world powers are actively pursuing.

The Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE), which are promoting a significant effort to funnel AI investments into an and ethical framework, should consider the document if even just for a comparison. Last year’s (2025) ‘GCC AI Ethics Manual’ set clear rules for algorithm design (from risk assessment to non-discrimination, from human final decision to intellectual property protection). However, the most acute challenge concerns algorithm governance. On this sensitive topic, the jurist-mathematician pope presented a framework to manage AI with respect to human dignity, freedom of conscience, shared responsibility and balance of power, speaking in a Catholic language (re: a pre-Western and maybe in a post-Western language).

Saint Augustine: A Thinker for Empires’ Twilight

Few thinkers have been more consequential for Christianity than Saint Augustine (354-430). Born and raised in Africa, he witnessed in real time the collapse of Western Roman empire, including the pillage of Rome (410), the bloody barbarian takeover of his own province (429) and the folding of almost any established authority aside from the Church. Against this troubled background, Augustine lived an even more troubled personal life. In Confessions (400), maybe the first detailed autobiography ever published, he discloses the most intimate feelings he felt and the most shameful sins he committed from early childhood to his full conversion to Christ.

This breakthrough work provided Christianity with a brand new view on human being, God, universe and time, sharply divergent from those of previous cultural traditions. Later, in the monumental City of God (completed in 426), the African priest took the distance from the whole declining Roman civilisation, by labelling it as one of the many possible shapes of the earthly city—a society that men try to build without God, against God or in order to replace God, and thus is cursed to fail.

Also this work provided Christianity some brand new views, namely on society, power and the meaning of history. In fact, scholars now widely see the City of God as the mourn epitaph of the ancient world.

A New Anthropology

Confessions can be summarised according to the prayer quoted directly by Pope Leo (who belongs to Augustinian Order)—‘You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.’ According to Augustine, human being cannot exist nor be happy on their own. Their body and their mind together are driven by a perpetual desire to love and to be loved, that ultimately and secretly points to God. Even time is not an external item, but the output of three inner tensions of our soul—memory, attention and hope. The same structure of our language consists first in relations then in things.

Nothing can extinguish this interior thirst for relation: at most, corrupted by Adam’s sin, it can be deceived, turned away from its Creator and diverted toward other creatures (or, even worse, toward one’s own ego). Of course, creatures are incapable to satisfy such an overwhelming need for complete and eternal communion. So they end up becoming idols, which leads man to suffer and sin. Such was Augustine’s experience during his youth. Despite being a talented student, he turned out to believe in all kind of irrational superstitions. Only God’s undeserved call, received in a moment of despair, restored the proper use of Augustine’s natural skills.

The story told in Confessions reveals that ‘humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.’ As happened to Augustine, ‘when we face rejection, when we suffer the illness or loss of a loved one, when we encounter our own weakness or failure…mysteriously, it is precisely in such moments that we can discover a new wisdom, tangibly experience the closeness of others and encounter the presence of the Lord.’

From a Christian perspective, a needless and flawless man, as the one mulled by ancient philosophers and by some modern ideologues, could not exist and, if existed, would not be happy at all. Coherently, Jesus Christ chose to rescue mankind by sharing its harshest limits: ‘There is no moment or human situation that is not worthy of God…we have and adore, in our mysteries, a God who is born in a manger, a God who lives and travels in Judea, a God who dies on the cross, a dead God who lies in the tomb.’

Trinity

In fact, Augustine thinks that relation is the deep essence not only of man, but also of God, which man resembles ‘in image and likeliness.’ His lifespan matched the spike of debates about Trinity, that a huge part of the Roman world considered a blow to God’s perfection and a fallback to paganism. Though identity between God, Christ and the Spirit was suggested by some lines of the Gospel, it still needed to be rationally motivated.

Someone did it on logical-mathematical bases (one Infinite is the same as more Infinites), while others leased some old tools from Plato’s ontology. For his part, Augustine pointed out that the apostle John wrote not only “God loves”, but “God is love.” Now, to exist love requires ‘three things: the one who loves, the one who is loved and love.’ Yet ‘two realities turn up to be one: love and the one who loves”, like also “love and the one who is loved.’
That should help to explain Trinity, although in human and defective terms. Since God expresses himself ‘in the mutual gift of self and in sharing with the world,’ as pope Leo writes in his letter, ‘the deepest vocation’ of man should be ‘to enter into the Trinitarian dynamic of love received and shared.’

The Two Cities

Like Augustine’s personal life, also the history of human societies is marked by impotence to achieve good without the help of God’s undeserved grace. Since those who receive God’s grace enjoy ‘the love of God even to the contempt of self,’ they are not able to build any political state on this earth: they belong to an invisible ‘heavenly city,’ which is a pilgrim in this world and is set to triumph only at the end of time.

By contrast, all visible political powers are considered by Augustine expressions of the ‘earthly city,’ built on ‘the love of self even to the contempt of God’ with the ultimate aim to replace God with a mortal substitute. Politics mimics each godly gift: while pretending to bring unity, justice, peace and science, they actually deliver mass murder, unfair trials, tyranny and superstition. The Roman empire, even once christened, made no exception – which explains Augustine’s condemnations of torture, death penalty and the African slave trade. The Catholic Church itself is a rusty mirror of the ‘heavenly city.’ Despite that Augustine’s pessimism was gradually softened by further Catholic scholars, the ‘earthly city’ remained the model of villain in human history, cyclically bound to come back harassing Christians and the whole mankind.

The Catholic ‘Social Doctrine:’ Saving Modernity

Augustine’s influence on the Middle Ages cannot be underestimated, and when the press machine was developed in Europe his City of God remained for long the most printed book after the Bible. Both Martin Luther (the father of Protestantism) and Erasmus (the enhancer of Catholic humanism), were Augustinian clerics. When the Western part of Christianity turned secular and liberal to cope with the schism, it always entertained a double-sided relation with Augustine’s thought. On one hand, the City of God laid the groundwork for Church-State separation and critic to rulers, while Confessions paved the way for the idea of dignity of the individual. On the other hand, the rise of modern materialistic ideologies has repeatedly challenged Christian sensibility about what man is and where mankind is supposed to go, sometimes endangering the very survival of Christian religion.

We should, therefore, read Pope Leo’s Magnificent Humanity as the last warning against the harming potential of such ideologies (in this specific case, Silicon Valley technocracy and post-humanism): harming for Christianity, of course, but also for ‘all men and women of goodwill.’

As his predecessors did with communism (Leo XIII), nazism (Pius XI), consumerism (John Paul II), relativism (Benedict XVI) and doom environmentalism (Francis), the Augustinian pontiff tries to expose technocracy and post-humanism as idolatric cults: looking “secular” and “liberal” only by name, they delude men to possess the technical power of achieving salvation within the boundaries of physical world and during their lifetime. By doing this, they turn intrinsically intolerant against any dissent and they end up destroying, together with religion, the same secular and liberal institutions which allowed them to arise. In a word, the Catholic social doctrine is not a rejection of modernity, but an attempt to save modernity from the demons it summons but cannot control.

Earthly Cities and the Harnessing of Algorithms

Technocracy and post-humanism deny the Catholic account on man, God and society as Augustine first issued it. Their delusional promise of something ‘more than human’ downgrades man to ‘a project to be optimised,’ his limits ‘an error to correct’ and his ‘fullness of life’ to ‘having more, reducing weakness, eliminating uncertainty and exerting total control.’

In stark contrast with Trinity, the machine-god they feverishly wait for is called Singularity and, like any AI, ‘do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean.’ What’s more frightening for people of faith is that ‘those who command powerful technological and economic resources…possess significant capabilities for influencing cultural change. Ultimately, they can influence a significant number of people concerning the truth about humanity, the world, the meaning of existence, the family and even God.’

If platforms and LLMs — now are in people’s pockets and continuously drain people’s attention — were used as a tool to erase religion (or, more properly, rival religions), virtually nothing could stop them. As for society, according to technocrats and post-humanists it must be orderly run by few data collectors and algorithm providers, capable to capture or sideline institutions under the pretext to avoid a fall of Western civilisation (as Alex Karp pointed out in his Technological Republic) or a nuclear apocalypse (as Peter Thiel taught in his messianic conferences).

As pointed out by Friar Benanti, tech counsellor for the Holy See, Palantir is designed, maybe in good faith, to monopolise and optimise security like Meta did with public debate, Amazon did with retail trade, LinkedIn did with job placement, Youtube did with audiovisual entertainment. Like the Babel tower, Big Tech companies dream to behave as vertical, centralised and all-encompassing power structures, immune to both market competition and state regulation. Reining them in, from their perspective, equates to abandon humanity to disorder, bad decision-making and extinction risk. By creating Palantir, Thiel firmly believes to have created what the apostle Paul called the katechon, ‘the One who keeps back’ the apocalypse.

This messianic power must obviously seize and master also our intimacy, that for Augustine – and more broadly for Christians – was given us to host the encounter with God. When Thiel helped Zuckerberg to scale Facebook, more than twenty years ago, he said to him: ‘Who owns a machine to produce desire owns the world.’

Call for a Spiritual Fight

From a Catholic view, such pretensions are unacceptable—they show a systemic distrust in both God and in man who was ‘made at his image and likeliness.’ But even less acceptable, as we can easily infer from Magnificent Humanity, is the Chinese regime’s attempt to impose invasive surveillance and social control under the pretext of treating data as a common good in the name of the people.

When Leo states that ‘among the goods that are universally intended for everyone, we must also include new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data,’ he is not proposing to substitute a private-owned Babel tower with a state-owned one. There should not be any Babel anywhere.

Instead, Leo advocates for ‘transparency, accountability and meaningful forms of participation including independent checks, transparency regarding algorithms, equitable access to data and avenues for recourse,’ for multilateral cooperation and for shared governance involving ‘scientists and researchers, entrepreneurs and workers, educators and legislators, civil society, popular movements and faith communities.’ The metaphor he chooses is the rebuilding of Jerusalem walls after the end of Jewish exile in VI century b.C.

None of these concepts was freshly invented by the Pope. However, his religious background allowed him to display them in a coherent frame, to connect the dots and call humanity to a fight that is not merely technical, moral or political but, above all, spiritual.

GCC countries, that use to appeal to Muslim values to enframe their regulatory effort on AI, could easily answer to this call to choose between Jerusalem and Babel. The implication is perfectly understandable, allowing the pursuit of AI-governance criteria that match the best of Western tradition without be Westernising. Making AI work for the betterment of their societies in a way that compliments and does not contradict the dominant cultural anchors of their states.