The rejected stones of the digital age

For too long, the political conversation around AI has been dominated by fascination, maybe less about thought. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas refuses that comfort. It begins with the human person, with fragility and freedom.

It stands in a proud lineage: Rerum Novarum on industrial capitalism, Pacem in Terris at the height of the Cold War, Laudato si’ on our common home.

Each time, the Church said what too many preferred not to hear: that power is never neutral. Today, Pope Leo XIV says the same about AI. Forbes has called it one of the boldest Vatican critiques of capitalism in decades. That label alone tells you something about the nerve it has struck.

Not everyone is comfortable. Free-market critics argue the encyclical exaggerates AI’s dangers while underestimating its potential for medicine, education, and human flourishing. On the left of the political spectrum, meanwhile, the opposite is charged: that it condemns corporate concentration rhetorically while the Vatican simultaneously partners with AI companies; what they have called ‘popewashing’.

Both critiques deserve to be heard. A document this ambitious invites serious challenge.

But beneath the disagreement lies a shared assumption that the encyclical directly challenges: that technology is neutral, and therefore beyond moral or political judgement. 

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) was built on exactly the opposite premise: that platforms which host, curate, and amplify content are making choices, and that choices carry responsibility. We fought hard to establish that principle in law. The tech industry fought equally hard to resist it. As someone who spent some years working with my colleagues at the European Commission on legislation such as the DSA and the AI Act, I know what that neutrality myth costs in practice. We saw it in the boardrooms, in the lobbying corridors, in every attempt to keep citizens as prisoners rather than rights-bearing persons.

Thierry Breton, my colleague in the College of Commissioners, put it plainly: certain actors preferred citizens transformed into captive users rather than free subjects. That is not a side effect of the technology but a business model.

We legislated because we believed laws must answer to people, not to platforms.

The encyclical’s sharpest question is also the one that drove our legislative battles: who decides, for whom, and to what end?

Proclaimed rights without structural change are not rights but decorations

It is one of the most urgent political question of our time. And the Pope makes clear who bears the cost when the answer is wrong.

He names them directly: the poor, the sick, the migrants, the “rejected stones,” as he puts it, those left behind by models of progress that promise flourishing for some while shifting the burden onto others.

The digital revolution, he states, is already widening the gap between those who participate and those who remain on the margins. Algorithms that entrench discrimination. Platforms that expose the most vulnerable to surveillance and manipulation. Automation that displaces workers without a safety net in sight.

The AI Act’s risk-based approach was designed with precisely these people in mind: the ones who cannot afford to be the test case for an unregulated system.

And women. The encyclical says plainly that it is not enough to declare equal dignity if that equality is not reflected in laws, in access to employment, in how society listens to and values women’s contributions. Proclaimed rights without structural change are not rights but decorations.

The warning about Babel also resonates. The dream of a post-political world run by a handful of private infrastructures (unaccountable and unelected), is precisely the future we legislated against in Europe. And it is precisely what the Pope is naming as a danger to our common humanity.

Yes, the document could go further on concrete enforcement. Naming the problem is not the same as solving it. But naming it clearly, at this scale, with this authority, still matters.

Europe showed, with the AI Act and the DSA, that democratic governance of technology is possible. The Vaticanis now reminding us why it matters. That is worth reading.

Helena Dalli is a former European Commissioner and Minister for Equality.