Beyond Babel and Nehemiah: Interpreting Magnifica Humanitas from the Margins

I bent to kiss the earth in gratitude,

and found my face reflected in the river.

The ground beneath me was not beneath me at all —

But the breathing body to which I belong.

On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV presented his first papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence. Like Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, Magnifica Humanitas (MH) addresses the technological and digital paradigm represented by artificial intelligence, which, while offering tremendous possibilities, poses serious threats to humanity. In Pope Leo’s own words:

“Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity. On the contrary, it has formed part of our history since the beginning as ‘a profoundly human reality, linked to the autonomy and freedom of man’… At the same time, each phase of progress has also revealed the ambiguity of tools that can cause harm when not oriented toward the good” (§4).

As a researcher in African and North American Indigenous epistemologies, I read MH through a postcolonial lens because postcolonial theology examines how systems of power, institutions, and universal claims about humanity are often shaped by the histories and epistemologies of colonial modernity. This approach allows me to explore not only what the encyclical says about human dignity, but also whose understanding of humanity structures its moral and theological vision.

One particularity of the encyclical is its awareness of the role institutions play in shaping history (§§54, 123). The problem, however, is that, like artificial intelligence itself, institutions are never neutral. Thus, when Pope Leo writes that history demonstrates humanity’s capacity to create “institutions that protect our shared life” (§123), a postcolonial reading must ask: whose life do these institutions protect if humanity continues to be defined through anthropological assumptions formed within the horizons of Western modernity? From the perspective of African and Indigenous epistemologies, the danger lies in assuming that human flourishing is mediated solely through properly ordered institutions or through appeals to “a universal human family, with shared rights and duties” (§186), without sufficiently interrogating the uneven histories of power that shaped these categories.

There is an African proverb that better explains the current global political climate: “When two elephants fight, the shrubs bear the brunt of their stampede.” Today, the global competition for technological supremacy is escalating, resulting in Middle Eastern, African, and Indigenous communities disproportionately bearing the consequences of power struggles they did not initiate.

Contemporary tensions surrounding artificial intelligence already reveal how technological power is becoming inseparable from empire, military ambition, and selective visions of whose humanity deserves protection. On February 27, 2026, the Pentagon designated Anthropic, the parent company of Claude AI, as a “supply chain risk” after the company resisted granting the U.S. military unrestricted access to its artificial intelligence systems. Read through a postcolonial lens, this moment reflects a familiar pattern in history: speaking back to empire while still operating from within its structures.

Anthropic’s resistance matters not simply because it challenged state pressure, but because it exposed the moral fragility of technological power once it becomes entangled with military and geopolitical interests. Yet even this resistance revealed something deeper about the uneven moral geography of our digital age. Much of the public conversation centred on the dangers these technologies could pose to domestic surveillance and democratic freedoms within the United States, while the potentially devastating consequences for communities in the Global South remained largely at the margins of the debate. Once again, the question is not merely whether artificial intelligence will be regulated, but whose humanity remains visible within the moral imagination of technological governance.

It is perhaps in this same spirit that Pope Leo XIV’s invitation of Christopher Olah to the public presentation of MH carries symbolic weight. The presence of a scientist deeply involved in the development of artificial intelligence, yet publicly attentive to its ethical limits, evokes an older tradition of challenging empire from within its own structures of authority.

It is also in this light that MH represents one of the Church’s most significant efforts to address the ethical and spiritual challenges posed by artificial intelligence. Pope Leo XIV recognizes that contemporary technological development is not merely technical but deeply anthropological and civilizational. As he warns, artificial intelligence and emerging technologies are already transforming “languages, relationships, institutions and forms of power” (§90), while private technological actors now exercise “an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world” (§5). The encyclical thus frames artificial intelligence not merely as a technological development requiring regulation, but as a civilizational challenge touching the very meaning of human dignity, relationality, and the future of humanity itself. “Never has humanity had such power over itself” (§4).

The Pope’s concern extends beyond technology to a profound anthropological question concerning the meaning of the human person. Throughout the encyclical, he identifies the dangers of dehumanization (§§10, 15, 51), abstraction (§§10, 12), domination (§§5, 7, 10), and the reduction of the human person to data, efficiency, and performance (§§4–6). The encyclical’s critique of the “Babel syndrome” is particularly compelling, with Pope Leo warning against the idolatry of profit that sacrifices the vulnerable, uniformity that erases differences, and the belief that a single language, even a digital one, can reduce all—including the mystery of the person—to mere data and performance (§§4–10).

Having said all that, it might be important to pay closer attention to the biblical framework that the Pope applied to this encyclical.

For instance, the encyclical opens with a compelling contrast between the Tower of Babel and Nehemiah’s reconstruction of Jerusalem. On one side, the Pope explains, Babel symbolizes technological uniformity, pride, and a civilization built without reference to God. On the other hand, Nehemiah’s communal restoration after the exile exemplifies shared responsibility, collaboration, and rebuilding grounded in communion rather than domination (§§8–10).

Nehemiah is not solely a figure of liberation, for he also stands as an imperial intermediary, functioning as a Jewish official within the structures of the Persian Empire. His authority to rebuild Jerusalem did not arise from within; it relied on imperial authorization, resources, and administration, binding Jerusalem’s restoration to the administrative logic and structures of empire. With Nehemiah’s authority derived from the empire, he also reflected the empire’s practices in determining inclusion and exclusion. He made his choices from the perspective of those aligned with imperial power while marginalizing those at its periphery. Thus, making Nehemiah the biblical framework for MH could create an ambivalence in the mind of a postcolonial reader of Leo’s encyclical.

Certainly, MH is not engaging Nehemiah from a historical perspective; yet, this dynamic can also be interpreted through Homi Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry. Nehemiah could, in that sense, be seen as a “mimic man”: a colonized subject who adopts the bureaucratic logic of empire to achieve a constrained restoration for his people. The problem, however, is that the rebuilding of Jerusalem becomes inseparable from imperial governance, controlled restoration, and the politics of boundary-making.

The walls of Jerusalem, therefore, should not be taken as purely representing symbols of protection but also instruments of identity regulation and exclusion. Besides, Nehemiah’s reforms reflected a politics of boundary-making, purity, and exclusion and, much like contemporary ultra-nationalist movements, rendered the restored city secure yet increasingly inaccessible to those at the margins.

This postcolonial hermeneutic of Nehemiah raises an uncomfortable yet necessary question for the digital age: when MH calls for rebuilding Jerusalem rather than Babel, whose humanity is being reconstructed? More specifically, what conception of humanity is being proposed? Who determines the structure of this reimagined humanity? Who will be included within the boundaries established by MH?

MH appropriately critiques technocratic domination, warning that technology “is never neutral” since it embodies the interests of those who design, finance, regulate, and utilize it (§9). The encyclical also acknowledges that technological power is increasingly concentrated in transnational private entities that exert “an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world” (§5).

However, while MH engages in all these critiques, its proposed solutions have not distanced themselves from the universalist approach. They are still primarily informed by institutional ethics (§§5, 14), governance structures (§§5, 13), universal humanism (§§50–55), and a social doctrine rooted in Western Christian anthropology (§§28–45). As a result, MH consequently risks reproducing a predominantly Euro-modern imagination of the human person, one that may limit its receptivity to the pluriversal perspectives present within African and Indigenous epistemologies.

The issue is not that these concerns lack validity; indeed, they remain urgently necessary. Yet a deeper question concerns the epistemological foundation of these concerns. While the encyclical critiques the consequences of technocratic modernity, it does not fully interrogate the civilizational and epistemological assumptions that underlie it. It presumes that the problems it identifies are not linked to the very epistemology that produced them. Throughout MH, the prevailing anthropological framework is fundamentally Western. It is grounded in Catholic personalism, universal human rights discourse, and European social doctrine traditions from Rerum Novarum to Laudato Si’. Even when employing relational language, the encyclical largely retains an anthropocentric framework characteristic of modern Catholic social thought.

In contrast to African and Indigenous relational epistemologies, MH continues to locate meaning and agency primarily within humanity. It addresses creation mostly in terms of human dignity, flourishing, and social order.

Today, even as the encyclical continues to speak largely within Northern epistemological frameworks, many Indigenous traditions still challenge how land is understood and described. They remind us that land is not simply an “environment” or even a “common home.” It is kinship. It is memory. It is a sacred presence. In these worlds of meaning, knowledge is not passed on primarily through abstraction, systems, or regulation, but through stories, ceremony, listening, reciprocity, and participation in a living web of relationships.

Similarly, African relational anthropology, exemplified by the Ubuntu tradition, defines personhood as interdependence—“I am because we are”—rather than as autonomous individuality.

From African and Indigenous marginalized epistemological perspectives, these traditions challenge the foundational assumptions of technocratic civilization. MH, therefore, addresses a crisis that is both technological and epistemological. The digital age threatens not only to mechanize labour or automate decision-making but also to reshape humanity through abstraction, extraction, and control.

Instead of dismissing MH, this analysis recognizes that it has initiated a necessary conversation about human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence. His warning about dehumanization matters deeply, and his appeal for humanity to remain “truly human” (§15) carries a prophetic urgency. Yet the vision still largely remains within a Northern epistemological horizon and does not fully enter the pluriversal worlds of Indigenous and African ways of knowing.

The future of humanity will not be secured merely by erecting new walls against Babel; it may require an epistemological transformation. Our collective survival in the information age might eventually depend on learning from those whose relational worlds endured colonial modernity. These are people who know that the land speaks, who believe stories carry memory, who recognize that trees remember, and who know that genuine communion cannot be achieved by systems alone.

The challenge facing the Church, therefore, is not merely to humanize technology but to decolonize the imagination of humanity itself; to understand that the ground beneath us is not beneath us at all — but the breathing body to which we all belong.