In March 2026, Peter Thiel arrived in Rome for a series of closed-door lectures. The subject: the Antichrist.
Peter Thiel is one of the most influential intellectual figures of Silicon Valley, a key early backer of PayPal and Palantir, and one of the rare technological elites who openly thinks in theological, civilizational and eschatological terms.
The Vatican watched from a distance. Which makes what happened next particularly interesting.
On May 15, Pope Leo XIV published an encyclical: Magnifica Humanitas.
To understand why these two events belong in the same story, you first need to understand what an encyclical is.
It is not a press release or a policy guideline. It is the highest form of papal teaching short of an infallible definition of dogma: a doctrinal document addressed to the universal Church and, explicitly, to "all people of goodwill".
Encyclicals are written to last.
Rerum Novarum (1891) defined how the Church thought about labor and capitalism for a century. Laudato Si' (2015) repositioned the Church at the center of the global climate debate.
Each encyclical is a declaration that a new front has opened: one the institution considers important enough to commit its full doctrinal weight to.
Magnifica Humanitas is Leo XIV's first encyclical. And the first in the history of Catholic Social Doctrine to place the transformation of cognitive power at its center.
The global press covered it as the Church entering the AI debate. That reading is not wrong per se, but it misses the point.
The document is a declaration of position in a war for control over the infrastructure through which human beings understand reality, construct meaning, and answer the question of "what they ar"e.
This question is older than Christianity, older than the modern state, and older than capitalism.
The thesis of this essay is simple, and it will become harder to dismiss the further you read: Magnifica Humanitas is an act of power in the war for control over human cognition, published by an institution that has survived 2000 years precisely because it has always known how to recognise when the terrain of power shifts.
TL;DR
- Framing: the first move of the encyclical
- The political diagnosis
- The war the Vatican is actually fighting
- The blind spot the Vatican cannot afford to see
- The important detail: the date
- Conclusion
Framing: the first move
The encyclical opens with:
"Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together."
Before a single fact about AI has been stated, the reader has already been placed inside a structure: two camps. Those building Babel vs those rebuilding Jerusalem.
In the theological tradition, Babel encodes a precise cluster of meanings: vertical ambition unchecked by humility, the homogenisation of language, the reduction of human diversity to one order, autonomy from God, and the collapse that follows.
The document does not need to name OpenAI or Google or Anthropic... The architecture of the metaphor does the work.
Notice what this opening achieves technically: you (the reader) are positioned before you have had time to even evaluate the claim. The enemy is named before the argument is made.
This is a rhetorical structure as old as political theology.
The political diagnosis buried in paragraph §5
The political core of the document appears a few paragraphs later, inserted after the moral argument has been established:
"Today... the main drivers of development are private, often transnational, parties that are endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments." §5
That is an accurate geopolitical diagnosis. The document is describing something that strategic analysts have been tracking for years: the emergence of quasi-sovereign transnational and private actors.
This matters because it reframes everything that follows. The Vatican is not primarily worried about AI or chatbots giving wrong answers. It is worried about who controls the layer between human beings and their experience of reality.