Finishing What the Pope Started in Magnifica Humanitas

Applying the theology of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical to the bodies it cannot see.

I want to finish the arguments that Pope Leo did not intend to start in his theologically ambitious encyclical addressing artificial intelligence. AI is the occasion for the Magnifica Humanitas to locate incarnation as the answer to the modern temptation to transcend human limitation. This discussion on what it means to remain human in an age of algorithmic optimization makes claims that apply far beyond the territory the pope was willing to map. I am here to apply the theology of the document to the bodies it cannot bring itself to see.

Photo from NBC News

1. What the church called suffering was the site of love.

Arguing against the promise to upgrade humanity out of its vulnerability, the encyclical responds:

“To eliminate suffering entirely would mean, in the end, extinguishing love and desire as well.” —Magnifica Humanitas, §120

The Church has long taught female desire itself as not just suffering but the cause of suffering: the occasion of sin, the source of disorder, the wound of concupiscence that Augustine traced back to the Fall and located in the body’s wanting. Eliminating desire from the garden, and containing it within marriage and reproduction ought to address the suffering produced by desire. This is how one achieves purity, holiness, and a woman who can no longer cause the problem her body was always destined to create.

This is the logic the encyclical dismantled.

Because if you cannot eliminate suffering without also extinguishing love and desire, then the tradition’s project was not the elimination of suffering. Desire, as the document states, is inseparable from love. So what the institution has tried to extinguish was the very medium through which love moves. It extinguished women’s capacity to know their own interiority. It extinguished the erotic as a theological category, the body’s desire as knowledge about the self and about God. It extinguished the precondition for the self-giving love the tradition claimed to be cultivating: you cannot give a self that has been trained not to have one. You cannot make a genuine offering from a body that has learned its desire, and its being desired both as dangerous. What looks like the giving of the self on the outside is compliance on the inside and the encyclical knows that compliance is not love (“human persons are called to communion with God and can fully discover their true selves only in sincere self-giving” §48).

2. You cannot lose what was never in danger.

The encyclical distinguishes between four kinds of dignity. Moral dignity: how you direct your choices. Social dignity: the concrete respect a person receives from society. Existential dignity: how you perceive your own worth. And then the one named most profound and important: ontological dignity—which “belongs to every human being simply by virtue of existing, of having been willed, created and loved by God,” and which “no sin, failure, humiliation or exclusion can diminish” (§52).

Yet, what the Church has taught about bodies and sex ran on the logic of disposable dignity. It worked on moral dignity: the purity pledge was a moral accounting system where sexual sin was categorically worse than others. It worked on social dignity: your standing in the community was contingent on your history. It worked on existential dignity: how you felt about yourself was tied to what your body had or hadn’t done. And here, the encyclical calls the ideology that people must earn or justify their worth “particularly insidious” (§51). The tradition has built an elaborate system to damage something the system’s own theology states is impervious to damage.

Purity culture then is an attempt at something theologically impossible, a structural lie deployed at scale. The harm is not that it succeeded. The harm is that people believed it had. The damage to moral dignity was real. The damage to existential dignity was real. The estrangement from the body is real. The inability to receive pleasure without shame is real.

But what purity culture threatened, that deep irreducible worth of a person loved unconditionally by God was never in danger.

3. The framework that produced harm must be retired.

Declaring one of the oldest frameworks in Catholic moral theology outdated is a significant doctrinal move:

“The ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated. —Magnifica Humanitas, §192

Just war theory, built to limit violence, became the mechanism through which almost any war could be justified. The framework did not prevent the authorization of violence but produced theological language for it.

Earlier this month, the Vatican’s Synod Secretariat released a separate report that did the same thing to the Church’s treatment of queer people that the encyclical does to just war theory. It included, for the first time in Vatican history, testimony from gay Catholic men who had undergone conversion therapy, and acknowledged that conversion therapy had caused “profound suffering.”

Two Vatican documents in the same month. One retires a framework because it produced harm. The other finally admits that harm was produced. Neither document connects those two moves.

The Church’s framework for evaluating queer sexuality follows the same structural logic as just war theory: sexual acts must serve procreation and the bond of marriage between a man and a woman. If the intention of the framework was to protect human love and ensure that sexuality served genuine flourishing rather than exploitation or harm, it is not what it became. It has been used to justify “profound suffering.”

What does that admission require of the framework that generated it?

According to the encyclical, you do not refine it. You retire it.

4. Stop praying over what you should be receiving:

"Everything that appears as a 'limit' — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability — tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship."— Magnifica Humanitas, §118

The Church has long prayed over disabled people, not for their humanity to mature and open itself to relationship, but for their conversion into able bodies. The healing prayer tradition positioned disabled bodies as spiritually deficient and insufficiently surrendered to God. The message has been consistent: the body you have is not the body God wants you to have.

But the encyclical describes the limited body not as a body waiting for healing but a location for the wisdom of reality: “It is precisely within our limitations that compassion finds a place, as well as a sincere concern for the need of others, a generosity that can emerge even in the midst of darkness and failure, spiritual experience and the worship of God” (§119).

The tradition that prayed over disabled bodies for correction was not protecting us. It rejects the theology that disabled bodies carry.

Pray, if you so incline, that you may learn to receive the compassion, the concern, the generosity of the disabled bodies around you. Pray that you may be corrected from trying to fix what is not broken. Pray that you recognize that the body you have been trying to heal back into an image of wholeness has been carrying an experience of God you refuse to see.

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Template for Apologies

As the pope formally asks pardon for the Church’s complicity in slavery, he says the memory of that blindness “becomes a call to vigilance,” and that we must act now to avoid asking for pardon again in the future “for having failed to respect the treasure of human dignity that is required by our faith” (§176). The encyclical is thus building the precise theological case for future apologies.

The tradition has yet to name the structural sins of reducing women’s bodies to optimizable resources, condemning queer desire, and positioning disabled bodies as problems awaiting correction. They have caused documented, widespread, multigenerational harm to people the encyclical calls infinitely dignified, unconditionally loved, and worthy in every situation.

The pope closed with Mary’s Magnificat, which teaches us to view history from the perspective of “the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the wounded child, the exile, and the fugitive.” The people exiled from their own bodies by what the tradition taught about desire, about gender, about disability, about the limits of acceptable flesh, are also in that list. The Magnificat’s viewpoint is theirs: God entered weak flesh. The limited body is the site of the divine, and every body is a dwelling place.