A reflection on Magnifica Humanitas and the truth that arrives from many directions at once.

First, this is not a religious essay. I am not writing to you as a Catholic, but as a truth seeker: what does it mean to live as a fully awake human being?

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, stopped me cold because he just spoke the truth on a platform that no one would ignore. Truth does not belong to any religion. It does not belong to any political position. It does not belong to any culture, any language, any era whatsoever.

Oftentimes, truth arrives through many forms and is translated or distorted into different beliefs and cultures, or for personal gains. But not this time. This is a piece of authoritative teaching, moral guidance, and one we should stop and study seriously.

The encyclical, signed May 15, 2026, carries a subtitle that could have been the subtitle of my book, Awakened Purpose, or my friend James Ong’s book, AI for Humanity: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. The five chapters solidify a sweeping vision of what AI is doing to humanity, what must not be lost, and what we are each being called to build.

I am going to walk through each chapter here to show you what I see when a truth I have long carried is spoken aloud by someone I never expected to be reading.

This is about all of us. It always was.

I. The New Things Have Arrived

The encyclical opens with a phrase borrowed from history. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum, which translates as “of new things.” It was his response to industrialization, to the suffering of factory workers, to an economic order that was devouring human dignity in the name of efficiency and profit. A hundred and thirty-five years later, Leo XIV opens by saying: the new things have arrived again.

The encyclical describes a world in which the power and prevalence of emerging technologies are woven into the fabric of daily life, shaping decisions and affecting the collective imagination in ways that were not fully predictable even a decade ago.

Pope Leo XIV directly called out where the power actually sits. It is not with governments. It is not with citizens. The main drivers of technological development, the document observes, are private, often transnational entities with resources that surpass those of many nations. Technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it, and use it.

His conclusion is clear.

The Pope does not condemn private technology companies as evil. But he identifies the concentration of technological power in private, unaccountable hands as one of the defining dangers of our time, and his conclusion is a four-part warning:

1. Power without accountability corrupts the common good.

Technological power has taken on an unprecedented, predominantly “private” aspect, which makes it even more challenging to discern, govern, and direct such power toward the common good. The problem is not private enterprise per se. The problem is that when power surpasses the reach of any democratic check, there is no mechanism to ensure it serves everyone rather than the few who hold it.

2. Data itself must be treated as a shared human good, not private property.

The Pope extends the Catholic principle of the “universal destination of goods” to cover digital resources directly, writing that among goods universally intended for everyone, we must also include patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure, and data. Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. He is saying that the raw material of AI, the data generated by billions of human lives, does not belong to those who captured it.

3. Technical power does not confer the right to govern.

The encyclical states directly: “To disarm means discrediting the assumption that technical power automatically confers the right to govern.” To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity.

4. Governance must catch up.

Pope Leo XIV reapplies the principle of subsidiarity to the migration of power from the State to private, transnational technological actors who now monopolize data and decision-making. He calls for shared discernment, multilateral governance, and redirecting this power toward the common good. He offers the moral framework for us to develop a more actionable institutional blueprint.

II. Babel or Jerusalem

In the second chapter, the Pope offers two images.

The Tower of Babel and the walls of Jerusalem under Nehemiah. Babel is the story of a civilization built without reference to anything beyond itself. One language, one technology, one direction, relentless efficiency. And precisely because it was built on self-assertion rather than truth, it collapsed into confusion. The people no longer understood each other. The result was not unity, but dispersion.

Nehemiah is a different story entirely. Jerusalem had been destroyed. The walls were rubble. The people were scattered and discouraged. Nehemiah did not impose a solution from above. He walked the ruins in silence first. He listened. He then convened every family, every household, and assigned each one their section of the wall to rebuild. The city was reborn not through a single hero but through shared responsibility. Everyone had their part. The work was communal. And at its center was not efficiency, but relationship.

The encyclical names the central question of the AI era as this: are we building Babel or Jerusalem? Are we constructing systems that aggregate power in the hands of the few and reduce the many to data points? Or are we rebuilding from the foundation up, with each person carrying their weight, their wisdom, their irreplaceable section of the wall?

When we let the optimization of performance stand in for the development of the person, when we build faster, smarter, more impressive towers and lose the thread of who we actually are and why we are building at all, we are in Babel.

Jerusalem is what happens when someone stops, walks the ruins, and asks: what were we actually here to build?

When I was writing Awakened Purpose, there was a clear urgency: in the era of AI, each of us has a responsibility in shaping it. Every search, every question, every click becomes data for AI to learn about humanity.

The Pope used the story of Jerusalem to remind us that Nehemiah walked the ruins in silence first. For me, walking the ruins in silence is our inner work. It is our own ruins we are walking. We listen to ourselves, we convene every part of us, and then we rebuild. This is beyond metaphorical. This is not only about building AI. It is about rebuilding ourselves so that AI can mirror our true self.

III. What Must Not Be Lost

This is the chapter I have been waiting for someone with institutional weight to write.

The encyclical names two ideological currents running beneath the AI conversation: transhumanism and posthumanism.

The Pope emphasized that dignity is ontological. It “is neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified.” The gravest temptation is the “particularly insidious” ideology that suggests every person must earn or justify their own worth by efficiency or output.

The Pope contrasts his vision of embodied, incarnate humanity with the false promises of technology that seek to minimize vulnerability and materiality, calling the lure of transhumanism “an enhanced and almost disembodied humanity.”

I don’t think he is arguing against enhancement. He is arguing that the very desire to escape the body, the limits, the vulnerability is a flight from what makes us human at all.

To transcend the flesh is not evolution. It is erasure.

He offers an alternative vision of transcendence entirely. He proposes a Christian humanism where human beings are not confined by the boundaries of their own nature; rather, they are called to self-transcendence through their fulfillment in love.

And in the encyclical’s most quoted line on this point: “We become fully human when we become more than human.”

This aligns perfectly with the intention of Awakened Purpose to reprogram ourselves to be more human, to operate from love, to self-transcend, to self-actualize.

IV. Truth, Work, and Freedom

The fourth chapter of the encyclical turns toward the practical dimensions of what is at stake, and it names three things that are already eroding in real time: truth as a shared foundation, the dignity of work, and freedom from new forms of dependency.

On truth: the document identifies the information environment as a common good being degraded. When truth becomes relative, when communication becomes performance, when the collective imagination is shaped by whoever controls the algorithm, something essential to human coexistence is being quietly destroyed. Not with weapons. With data.

On work: the encyclical is insistent that work is not merely economic. Work is an expression of the human person. An economy that automates without conscience, that pursues efficiency without considering the dignity of those displaced, is not progress. It is the old idol dressed in new code.

On freedom: the document warns against new forms of slavery dressed as convenience. The dependency architectures built into our platforms, our devices, our attention economies are not neutral. They are designed to capture. And what they capture, ultimately, is the inner life.

I have spent more than two decades inside the systems this chapter describes. Organizations filled with extraordinary people operating within architectures that structurally could not tap the full human. The moment you entered the hierarchy, you were asked to leave yourself at the door. The part that carried a sense of purpose learned to go underground.

The work I have been called to do, through Awakened Purpose and through my upcoming book, Still Awakening, is to bring that part back above ground. Not as an act of rebellion against organizations or technology, but as an act of fidelity to the human being.

We cannot build a civilization worth living in from half-humans. The complexity of what we now face, the integration of AI, the rebuilding of trust, the navigation of rapid identity disruption, requires the full human to step forward.

Truth matters. Work matters. Freedom matters.

V. The Civilization We Are Actually Building

The final chapter of the encyclical is the most demanding, and the most necessary.

The Pope names two possibilities plainly: a culture of power, or a civilization of love. The culture of power is what we already know. It normalizes force. It treats diplomacy as weakness. It weaponized AI faster than it deployed it in hospitals. It measures progress by dominance rather than by dignity. It concentrates what should be distributed and accelerates what should be slowed.

The civilization of love is what we are here to build. Not through naïve optimism. Not through a refusal to engage with power. But through a different premise entirely: that the human being is not a resource to be extracted, but a mystery to be honored. That progress measured without reference to the least among us is not progress at all. That every person has their section of the wall, and the city will not hold unless all sections are built.

This is the civilization of love in formation. Not organized by any institution. Not decreed by any authority. Emerging from ordinary people who have decided, one by one, that the life they were handed is not the only life available. That the identity they were assigned is not the whole of who they are. That the walls of a more just world will not be built by those who have optimized their performance, but by those who have recovered their humanity.

We Are One Construction Site

Here is what I want to leave you with.

This essay is not about religion. It is not about politics. It is not about any single tradition or tribe or worldview. The Pope wrote his encyclical from within his tradition. I write from within mine, as an ordinary person.

But the truth being named is the same truth.

We are in the middle of the most consequential transition in human history. The tools we are building have the power to heal and the power to destroy, and which they do depends entirely, I mean ENTIRELY, on the quality of the consciousness that holds them. The question is not whether AI will be good or bad. The question is whether WE will be awake when we build with it.

There is no version of a good future that does not require each of us to go inward before we go upward. No version that does not ask us to know ourselves well enough to carry our section of the wall without losing ourselves in the construction. No version that does not call us to rise above every identity that divides us — religion, nation, politics, profession, ideology — and remember that beneath all of it, we are one.

Eight billion reflections of one shared planet. One breath. One heartbeat.

Are you walking your ruins, listening to your parts, and building your section of this Oneness?

Ryion is the author of Awakened Purpose and the co-founder of Restore Intuition. He works at the intersection of Awakening as healing and organizational leadership advisory.
Read his previous blogs on: https://www.ryionpun.com/blog
Grab your copy of Awakened Purpose here.

Thank you for being here. This kind of writing only matters if it meets something real in you. If it did, tell me what. The conversation in the comments is where the real healing begins.

REFERENCES

Primary Source

Pope Leo XIV. Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. Signed May 15, 2026. Released May 25, 2026. Vatican City: The Holy See. Full text: vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html

Specific Paragraphs Referenced in This Essay

For readers who want to go directly to the source, the key passages are:

§4 — Technology as never neutral; res novae of our time

§5 — Private transnational power surpassing governments

§7–8 — The Tower of Babel and Nehemiah’s Jerusalem

§53 — Ontological dignity: “neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified”

§65–67 — Universal destination of goods extended to data, algorithms, and digital platforms

§110 — “To disarm does not mean rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity”

§112–114 — What must not be lost: affection, will, commitment, relationships

§115–117 — Transhumanism and posthumanism: the “enhanced and almost disembodied humanity”

§128 — “We become fully human when we become more than human”

Historical Reference

Pope Leo XIII. Rerum Novarum: On Capital and Labour. May 15, 1891. Vatican City: The Holy See. The encyclical that established Catholic Social Teaching, whose 135th anniversary Magnifica Humanitas was signed to honour.

Further Reading

If you want to go deeper into Magnifica Humanitas, these are the most substantive analyses published since its release:

Word on Fire — full chapter-by-chapter overview: wordonfire.org/articles/pope-leo-xivs-first-encyclical-an-overview-of-magnifica-humanitas

Catholic Stand — analysis of new ideas and the spine of the document: catholicstand.com/magnifica-humanitas-purpose-thread-new-ideas-and-the-missing-theology-of-labor

Catholic Digest — the “disarm AI” argument in depth: catholicdigest.com/news/from-the-vatican/magnifica-humanitas-pope-leo-xiv-makes-major-appeal-to-disarm-ai-in-his-first-encyclical

A note on the paragraph numbers: the encyclical has 245 numbered paragraphs, so citing by paragraph number (§) is the cleanest way to direct you to the source without worrying about page numbers varying by edition.

We built an entire wellness industry around not looking at it.

Before the pandemic, wellness was already a $4.9 trillion global economy.

The meditation and mindfulness market grew 25% from 2019 to 2020 alone. The fastest-growing segment in an already booming economy. By 2025, the global meditation market had reached $9.64 billion and is projected to expand to $27.51 billion by 2030. Not because people want to optimize their mornings. Because a species is in distress.

COVID gave us grief that had no funeral. Isolation that had no name. Anxiety that didn’t announce itself and just moved in.

Guided meditation. Journaling apps. Breathwork. Sound baths. Cold plunges. The nervous system became the new gym.

And yet. Despite all of it, those feelings were never fully processed. They were managed. Quieted. Temporarily relieved.

Managing stress is not the same as healing the stuck emotions. And they have been stuck for a very long time.

Shadow work, the term originally coined by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, refers to confronting the hidden parts of ourselves: our fears, suppressed emotions, unacknowledged traits. In 2024, it went viral. The Shadow Work Journal sold millions of copies. Videos under #shadowwork now hold over 2 billion TikTok views.

This number is a confession.

A confession that an entire generation is beginning to understand they need to do something about their shadows.

Research in epigenetics now shows that trauma does not cause permanent changes to your DNA sequence, but it can powerfully impact the regulation of stress-related genes. The children of Holocaust survivors carry measurable biological markers of their parents’ suffering. The stress response system of a child raised in emotional chaos is wired differently.

One major wellness publication described 2026 as a shift away from optimization culture and toward something older, slower, and more rooted: healing as cultural rerooting.

We are entering the era of the work beneath the work.

And AI plays a role in this work.

Millions of people are now using Claude, ChatGPT, and other AI models not as productivity tools but as thinking partners. As mirrors. As a space where they can speak a half-formed thought at 2am and find it handed back to them with shape and language.

Research from contextual AI journaling studies shows that integrating large language models with behavioral sensing generates personalized prompts that encourage self-reflection and emotional development.

The most intimate use of artificial intelligence would be as a companion in self-inquiry.

AI, when used honestly as a reflection tool, can hold space for the question you have been afraid to fully ask. Studies show AI-enabled therapy support tools, used alongside human-led care, produce promising results in clinical outcomes and patient engagement.

The key phrase is alongside human-led care.

AI is not here to replace the human work. It is here to create more space for it. To remove the friction between the person and the page. Between the thought and the truth.

When competence becomes cheap, the deepest human work is to recover the part of ourselves that still matters.

AI accelerates that reckoning.

Now a warning.

Not all of what calls itself healing is healing.

What psychologists call concept creep, the gradual expansion of terms like trauma to encompass an ever-broadening range of everyday discomforts, risks diluting the clinical and cultural meaning of psychological language.

On platforms like TikTok and Instagram, trauma becomes both performance and product. Therapy-speak circulates in fragments: aestheticized, commodified, recycled, until the language of harm begins to eclipse the work of addressing it.

A journal prompt is not shadow work. An aesthetic reel about your inner child is not integration. A weekend retreat with a sound bowl and a sober bar is not transformation.

What many wellness brands have in common is a hollow reference to caring for people’s health and an insistence that consumerism helps people reach heightened states of wellness.

That inversion is dangerous.

Healing is not a product category. It is a practice. It is often uncomfortable, nonlinear, and unglamorous. It requires real relationship. With yourself. With others. With the Earth. With something larger than all of it.

The wellness industry, at its worst, sells you a smoother surface while the wound underneath gets no air. We must discern.

Healing is not a performance of vulnerability. It requires community with people who know your name when you are not performing it. That community is the container healing requires.

The Global Wellness Institute’s research shows that 83% of participants now prioritize mental wellness over physical and financial wellness, and that trauma-informed, community-centered practices represent the most meaningful frontier in inclusive healing.

What this means practically:

You need at least one person who can hold you in your actual story. With the parts still unresolved, still tender, still asking to be seen. This work is not for your Instagram posts. It is work between you and your soul.

The question to ask of any community, or any person who holds space,

is not: does this make me feel better?

It is: does this make me more honest?

2026 is a civilizational turning point.

AI is compressing time. Roles are dissolving. The things we used to be recognized for are becoming commodities. What remains is the inner self. The capacity to feel, to relate, to lead from a place that is whole.

The organizations that will matter in ten years are not the ones with the best AI stack. They are the ones led by people who have done enough of their own inner work to lead others with coherence.

What does healing actually ask of you?

It asks you to look at what you have been managing instead of moving through.

It asks you to stop upgrading your coping strategies and start questioning what they are coping with.

It asks for time. For slowness. For the kind of community that does not require you to be well in order to belong.

It asks for you to be willing to not feel better for a while, in service of feeling more real.

The meditation that preceded this era taught us to quiet the noise.

The healing that comes next asks us to listen to what the noise was covering.

The shift is already underway.

The future of leadership will be shaped by the people willing to go inward first.

Your leadership ceiling is your healing floor. Do the work.

Ryion is the author of Awakened Purpose and the co-founder of Restore Intuition. He works at the intersection of Awakening as healing and organizational leadership advisory.
Read his previous blogs on: https://www.ryionpun.com/blog
Grab your copy of Awakened Purpose here.

Thank you for being here. This kind of writing only matters if it meets something real in you. If it did, tell me what. The conversation in the comments is where the real healing begins.