A new Australian reading guide aims to help Catholics engage more deeply with Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, connecting its teaching on artificial intelligence, work and human dignity with the local experience of the Church. Source: The Catholic Weekly.
Michael Walker from Sydney Archdiocese’s Justice and Peace Office says that in Magnifica Humanitas, the Pope draws a comparison between current realities to the construction of the Tower of Babel and the reconstruction of the walls of Jerusalem after the Babylonian exile.
One sows dispersion and disunity. In the other, shared responsibility and solidarity rebuild a city.
Dr Walker’s upcoming reading guide, Magnificent Humanity: An Australian Group Reading Guide to Pope Leo’s Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas breaks open the encyclical for anyone interested in studying it more deeply. He co-wrote the guide with US author Bill Huebsch.
The guide is designed to be used in small groups – such as teachers on staff development days, or in parishes where there are people who want to delve into the encyclical and its themes.
Dr Walker said his PhD and career background unexpectedly prepared him to write the guide. In a previous role, for example, he deployed an artificial intelligence app.
He has also researched how Uber was devouring business that had been conducted almost exclusively by private taxi operators, replacing that model with a monopoly with huge amounts of control, and then using it “to drive down wages”.
“It was sidestepping 100 years of labour protections,” he said.
“So, I understood the challenges of new technology at a level that not many other people in the Catholic social teaching space in Australia do. But it took me a little while to realise that.
“What was really gratifying was that my own instincts and reservations about the new technology are pretty much reflected in the document – things I was flagging almost 10 years ago about power being centralised in tech companies are identified by the Pope.”
Pope Leo XIV frames Magnifica Humanitas as continuing Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum’s concerns about labour, and about peoples’ material well-being. “He says, what are the new things of today? “It’s clearly the emergence of AI, and how is it affecting people’s working conditions,” Dr Walker says.
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New reading guide explores Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical (By Pauline Jasudason, The Catholic Weekly)
