From the Factory to the Algorithm: Catholic Social Teaching Confronts the "New Things" of History

In 1891, the great challenge was the factory. Today, it is the algorithm. In between lies more than a century of history—and a common thread that has never been broken.

With Magnifica Humanitas (signed by Leo XIV on May 15, 2026, on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum), Catholic Social Teaching enters one of the most profound transformations of our time: artificial intelligence. But the issue is not technological. It is anthropological, social, and moral: what remains of the human person when work, the economy, power, communication, relationships, and even the way we make decisions are changing?

Then, the question was the workers' condition: wages, the dignity of labor, the conflict between capital and labor. Today, it is cognitive automation: algorithms, the redefinition of intelligence, and the risk that the person may be reduced to data, function, or performance.

In between, history has passed through economic crises, totalitarianisms, world wars, the Cold War, decolonization, globalization, financial crises, ecological crisis, pandemic, and social fragmentation. And every social encyclical has emerged in response to a fracture—without merely commenting on it. It offers criteria for discernment.

Laborem Exercens places human work back at the center. Laudato Si' shows that environmental crisis and social crisis are inseparable. Fratelli Tutti points to fraternity as a political and social principle. (The infographic reconstructs the entire journey, from Rerum Novarum to the present day.)

Magnifica Humanitas takes up this inheritance and brings it into the age of AI: technological innovation must be guided by the centrality of the person. Catholic Social Teaching is not nostalgia for the past; it is a compass for understanding the present.

For me, this is the most relevant message: progress is not truly progress if it increases the power of our tools while impoverishing the freedom, responsibility, and dignity of the human person—of the whole person and of every person.

The question, then, is this: are we placing these new tools at the service of humanity, or are we placing humanity at the service of the tools?

It is a question that applies at every scale. As AI accelerates, the instruments built after the Second World War to guarantee peace (the United Nations, human rights, multilateralism) seem to be creaking under strain. And the institutions that creak, whether in the world at large or within a family business, are always those that safeguard bonds over time: trust, agreements, shared rules. They are built slowly and dissolve quickly. This is what I see every day in my work with entrepreneurial families: governance is nothing more than the stewardship, on a smaller scale, of those very bonds.

And this is true at every level: no bond—whether of family, business, or between peoples—preserves itself.

Babylon or Jerusalem: the choice, Leo XIV writes, "begins within each of us."