Magnifica Humanitas. Human dignity, truth and freedom

Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s first major letter, lands in 2026 with a clear claim: artificial intelligence and digital systems are now one of the main places where human dignity, truth and freedom will be decided.

Illustration courtesy of Noema Magazine.

When the Catholic Church issues an encyclical, it is a significant choice from an institution that has spent more than a century writing about labour, war, land, migration and the economy. This time, the opening move is AI. The message is simple enough: what happens in code and data centres belongs in the same conversation as poverty and peace, not in a separate “tech” file.

Most people in our churches and communities will never read the document. They don’t need to. The terrain it names is already under their feet.

South Africans queue for grants on cards and, increasingly, apps. Informal business supply chains run on WhatsApp and digital payments. Job opportunities, school placements and housing allocations move through systems nobody in those queues designed. These systems are described as efficient, modern, inevitable. They are also opaque, fragile and largely unaccountable to the people they govern.

That is the tension we care about.

Right now, South African communities are being wired into infrastructures they didn’t design, can’t see, and rarely get to question. Anyone who cares about social justice should be uneasy with that sentence.

The issue is not only what these systems do today. It is who holds the wiring diagram and who decides which risks matter and which can be ignored. Those decisions are being taken, daily, in rooms where the people most affected are not present.

Every so often, someone uses their place inside those rooms differently.

I think of my friend Sandro Bucchianeri. When he returned to South Africa to lead Absa’s security work, he carried with him a stubborn idea: a cybersecurity academy that would draw students from places the industry usually overlooks, and train them to a level where they could hold their own in any global team. He pushed for it, protected it, and kept pushing when it would have been easier not to.

The result, in partnership with the Maharishi Invincibility Institute, is an academy that has taken young people from townships and small towns, including blind students, and walked with them into real cybersecurity roles.

These are not symbolic appointments. They are ordinary people now skilled to monitor real threats on real systems.

For us, this is what Magnifica Humanitas looks like in practice. A document in Rome speaking about “magnificent humanity”.

In Johannesburg and Cape Town, a group of these graduates, now navigate threat landscapes that decide whether a bank stays online or a customer loses everything. The line between “beneficiary” and “custodian” shifts, pragmatically.

The same shift is visible in small, almost hidden programmes: a modest classroom in a Diepsloot, Gauteng, where a small group of young people are learning to recognise phishing attempts, understand basic network security and support local organisations when something goes wrong. That room is simple but the stakes are not.

Each person who gains that competence slightly alters the balance of power between a community and the systems that surround it.

If we stay with the language of the encyclical for a moment, three words matter: dignity, truth, freedom.

Dignity, in this context, is the experience of a person who can challenge a decision an algorithm has made about them. It is a grant holder who understands why a payment failed and has a path to fix it. It is a blind analyst whose tools work for them and whose authority in a team rests on expertise, not goodwill.

Truth is not only about media. It is about the integrity of the systems that move money, data and decisions. When those systems can be manipulated, exploited or bent to private motives, public trust erodes. These examples of local cyber capacity is one of the ways we protect that trust, especially in communities already carrying the cost of fraud and corruption.

Freedom, finally, is more than having a smartphone or an app login. It is the capacity to act without being quietly steered, scored or excluded by systems you cannot see. It is the difference between access and agency.

The growth of South African communities now depends on how we handle these three words in a digital environment. Clinics, schools and jobs still matter. So do fibre lines, scoring models, authentication processes and the people who understand them.

For civil society, this is a change of posture. It is not enough to run good projects “on top” of whatever infrastructure is given to us. We have to pay attention to the infrastructure itself. We have to read contracts, question specifications, sit on advisory boards, and insist that communities are present when systems are designed and reviewed. We have to cultivate our own “engine room” skills, not only our advocacy and storytelling.

Magnifica Humanitas places AI and digital systems inside the Church’s justice agenda. That is a signal.

The question for us is whether they occupy the same place in our own work. If we ignore the infrastructures that now mediate daily life, we reduce our politics to commentary and activism theatre.

We have lived through one era in which systems were designed over people’s heads and enforced in their daily routines. We know how that story ends. The forms have changed. The stakes have not.

If human dignity, truth and freedom are to mean anything in the growth of South African communities, they have to mean something in the wiring.

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