Pope Leo XIV will publish his first encyclical Monday, in what is expected to be one of the early defining acts of his papacy.
The encyclical, ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ (“Magnificent Humanity”) will be released on Monday, 25 May, and is expected to focus on human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence.
The Holy Father signed the document on 15 May, the 135th anniversary of the publication of the landmark social encyclical ‘Rerum Novarum’.
In the early days of his papacy, Pope Leo XIV had praised Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and expressed a desire to respond to the new challenge to human dignity posed by the revolution of artificial intelligence.
The first encyclical of any Pope is one of the most important documents of their pontificate and sets out the roadmap for their papacy and what it’s emphasis will be.
Pope Francis’ first encyclical Lumen Fidei focused on faith as the light that dispels the darkness and called particularly for faith to influence social action. Pope Benedict XVI Deus Caritas Est focused on the core definition of Christian love. Both these texts were also heavily influenced and partly written by their predecessors.
Pope John Paul II’s first encyclical “Redemptor Hominis” emphasised the importance of human dignity and rights and set the philosophical stage for his battle against communism during the late 20th century.
The first encyclical is not necessarily the defining text of the papacy though. Pope Leo XIII, who influenced the name choice of Pope Leo XIV, wrote a total of 86 encyclicals during his papacy and it was only his 38th, Rerum Novarum, that became his most defining.
Recent popes have written much less, however. Pope John Paul II wrote 14 encyclicals in his 26-year pontificate, Pope Benedict XVI wrote three and Pope Francis wrote four.
The publication on Monday will be accompanied by a presentation in the Vatican’s Synod Hall.
The speakers at the encyclicalʼs presentation will be: Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith; Cardinal Michael Czerny, SJ, prefect of the Dicastery for Integral Human Development; Anna Rowlands, professor of ethics and political theology at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom; Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic USA; and Léocadie Lushombo, it, professor of theological ethics at the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara University in Berkeley, California.
The encyclical will be released just over a year after Pope Leo XIV celebrated the one-year anniversary of his pontificate. Each of his three predecessors released their first encyclicals within the first year of their papacy.
