For any of you who know me, personally, the idea that I am writing something in support of something a Pope said or did as a point of dogmatic theological practice is not just laughable, it is cosmically unlikely – like, getting hit in the head by a golf-ball sized meteor levels.  Yet here I sit writing this all down, with a glum look on my face, and a golf-ball sized hole in my head.

In 2023, a SpaceX engineer named Joshuah Gardner signed a lease for a trailer in Boca Chica Village, Texas, the cluster of airstream homes and ranch houses that would, two years later, vote itself into existence as the incorporated city of Starbase under the unblinking proprietorship of Elon Musk. The lease, as Gardner has since described it, contained a clause that should have read as anachronism and instead read as the present tense. If SpaceX fired him, he had ten days to vacate. The firings, when they came, came in waves; he called them purges; they tended to follow visits from the principal himself, who would tour the row of trailers, speak with supervisors, and within hours leave a column of recently unemployed and recently unhoused workers behind him. Nondisclosure agreements, by Gardner’s account, kept the workers from discussing the details on the way out.

Read past the rocket fairings and the lease form is older than the company. The coal patches of southwestern Wyoming and West Virginia ran on the same mechanism for the better part of a century: workers paid in company scrip, housed in company shacks, fired when they spoke too loudly, evicted when they were fired. A journalist who grew up in those Wyoming camps has called the current tech-billionaire enthusiasm for “freedom cities” a ketamine-infused repackaging of the company town, and the description survives every test you can run on it. There is no patent on the arrangement because the arrangement predates the patent system.

Two Leos

On May 15, 1891, Pope Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, the Catholic Church’s first sustained engagement with what unrestrained industrial capitalism was doing to the human person who showed up for shift. On May 15, 2026, one hundred and thirty-five years later to the day, Pope Leo XIV signed Magnifica Humanitas, his first encyclical, an explicit continuation of the Rerum Novarum line now extended to artificial intelligence and the financiers shoveling capital into its deployment. The signing date was chosen. The regnal name was chosen. The lineage is the argument before any sentence of the new document gets read.

A standing disclosure, since the next several paragraphs will trade in Catholic vocabulary: I am not Catholic. For most of my adult life I have considered the theological architecture of the Roman Church a structure of often-admirable poetry built on premises I cannot accept and have no interest in pretending to accept. Incarnation and resurrection are not, in my reading, foundations on which a defensible humanist ethics can be built. Papal infallibility is not, in my reading, a serious epistemic claim. The institutional record, through the periods of unchallenged temporal power, is the record of an organization that knew with great fluency how to suppress the masses it now positions itself as defending. None of that needs further argument here. It is the standing assumption that lets the rest of the work proceed.

The work proceeding: when you strip the theology out of both encyclicals, the 1891 one and the 2026 one, what remains is a diagnosis that does not require theology to be true. The diagnosis was correct in 1891. It is correct now. Only the address has changed, and the address change is the present moment’s most interesting feature.

Checks and Balances

Capital concentrates faster than the institutions designed to check it. The concentration produces a class of human beings whose basic conditions of life – food, shelter, voice, the time and space to rear children and to think – become discretionary line items on a balance sheet controlled by people who have no obligation to them beyond what legal contract and social shame can sometimes induce. Leo XIII saw the mechanism operating in the textile mills of Manchester, the coal mines of Belgium, the meatpacking plants of Chicago, and the sweatshops of the Lower East Side. He saw it in the aftermath of the Haymarket affair, five years before he wrote, when an unknown person threw a bomb into a labor rally in support of the eight-hour day and a Chicago judge proceeded to hang four anarchists who could not be shown to have thrown it. He saw it in the recent founding of the Knights of Labor in the United States, the Second International in Europe, the rapid spread of socialist parties across Western industrial democracies, and the equally rapid hardening of the response of capital and state to those formations.

Rerum Novarum was, among other things, a strategic document. The Vatican wanted the working class organized along Catholic-influenced lines rather than along revolutionary socialist ones, and the encyclical was the instrument of that preference. Acknowledging the strategy does not weaken the diagnosis the strategy carried.

The diagnosis itself was specific. Paragraph 20 named the defrauding of workers of their wages a great crime that cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. Paragraph 35 condemned the grinding of men down with excessive labor to the point of stupefying their minds and wearing out their bodies. Paragraphs 36 through 41 affirmed the right of workers to create associations for mutual assistance and defense of their interests, including, as a last resort, the strike. Strip the scholastic theology and the encyclical’s substantive content is, more or less verbatim, the argument of the modern labor movement, set down three or four years before most of its largest unions were founded, in a document issued by the world’s then-largest religious organization. The famous wage passage, often paraphrased and rarely matched in its specificity, held that when necessity or fear forces a worker to accept worse conditions because no better are offered, the worker is made the victim of force and injustice. Six clauses of moral reasoning, one two-word verdict at the end. Force and injustice. The bargain is not free because the bargainer has no exit.

Leo XIV is making the same argument in a different idiom. The premise of Magnifica Humanitas is that technology is never neutral, because it carries the values of those who devise, finance, regulate, and deploy it. The claim is not theological on its face. Anyone who has read a competent history of the printing press, or the telegraph, or the internal combustion engine, can verify it in an afternoon. A system optimized for shareholder return optimizes itself away from anything that does not feed shareholder return, and the human cost of that drift gets entered into the books as efficiency, which is a word that has done more work in the last forty years of corporate prose than perhaps any other.

Paragraph 150 of the new encyclical argues that the productivity gains attributed to AI are extracted by compelling workers to keep pace with the machine’s tempo rather than by designing the machine around the worker’s tempo. One sentence, one inversion identified, a century of factory-floor literature compressed and updated for the algorithmic management era. The Pope is, in that paragraph, the spokesman for a position any union steward in a 1920 garment shop would have recognized without translation. The five organizing principles the encyclical names – the common good, the universal destination of goods, subsidiarity, solidarity, social justice – translate out of their Latin-and-Italian inheritance into the operating premises of every coherent labor movement of the past hundred and fifty years. The Pope is speaking Catholic, but the message is applicable to a wider audience of listeners.

Who reads what is written?

In 1891 the man Leo XIII was implicitly arguing with was the mill owner: inherited or accumulated capital, single-factory hostage of an entire town, moral vocabulary consisting of the assertion that the worker’s poverty was a function of the worker’s character. In 2026 the man Leo XIV is implicitly arguing with has a different address and a more developed theory of itself. Peter Thiel, the principal architect and financier of what political theorists have been calling the network-state project, wrote in 2009 that he no longer believed freedom and democracy were compatible. That sentence is the seed crystal. Everything in the monster of capitalist-surveillance state we now see lurching towards us precipitates from it.

What precipitates: a constellation of projects funded by largely the same set of names – Thiel, Andreessen, Lonsdale, Altman, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Armstrong – whose collective ambition is the construction of zones in which inhabitants live, work, eat, sleep, and vote inside an arrangement governed not by the laws of the surrounding nation-state but by the contractual relationship between inhabitant and corporate ground-owner. Próspera. California Forever. Pronomos Capital. The federal-land “Freedom Cities” being floated under the current administration. The marketing copy is futurist; and the bones it wraps are either fascist or feudal, depending on the audience the billionaire is preaching to.

Starbase is the working prototype, and Starbase has already shown its hand. Most voting residents of Musk’s incorporated SpaceX town, including the mayor and a majority of the Board of Commissioners, work for him at will and live in housing he owns, which is to say that dissent costs the income and the address in a single motion. Within weeks of incorporation, the city was sending notices to certain longtime residents warning that they might lose the right to continue using their own property under a new zoning ordinance. The lease is the technology that makes the city a city, the way the factory whistle once made Manchester a factory town. The technology has not become more sophisticated. It has become more brazen, which is a different kind of progress.

And Leo XIV, against the public expectation of a careful diplomat in white robes, is reading these signals and pointing at them. Paragraph 213 of Magnifica Humanitas invokes a passage from Gandalf in The Return of the King about the proper limits of any single hand’s reach over the tides of history, and the placement has been read by even cautious commentators as a deliberate counter-strike against Thiel’s surveillance firm Palantir, which takes its name from the seeing-stones in the same novel – objects that, in Tolkien’s text itself, are instruments of domination corrupted by their use. The hit well. In leaked recordings, Thiel reportedly told Vice President JD Vance to ignore the Pope on moral issues, including the development of ethical AI. Taken at face value, the instruction is an admission that the Pope has become an obstacle – one which might lead to questions better left unspoken, let alone unanswered.

Thiel’s gospel

What Thiel actually believes is now part of the public record, and the public record has to be taken into account before the theology of the Catholic Church can be set down as cleanly as one might hope to set it down. The bracket I described above – setting the theological premises of both encyclicals aside on the grounds that they do not align with a generally enlightened humanist view of moral impetus – is honest, and I stand by it. The bracket assumes, however, that on the other side of it lies a secular landscape in which the question can be argued on its empirical merits, without further theological encroachment. That assumption no longer holds. The men funding the techno-feudal project have built a competing theology of their own, and it is not vague background metaphysics. It is explicit, aggressively developed, and being preached.

In a sold-out four-part lecture series in San Francisco in 2025, attendees instructed to keep the contents off the record, Thiel laid out his religious views to an audience of donors and acolytes. Those who propose limits on technology development, in his framing, do not merely hinder business; they threaten to usher in the destruction of the United States and an era of global totalitarian rule. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Antichrist would have been, in Thiel’s reading, a Dr. Strangelove figure doing evil, crazy science. The twenty-first-century Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop science, with Greta Thunberg and the AI-safety researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky named as legionnaires of that figure. Thiel has since extended the framework into an account of the “end of modernity” in which environmentalism, technology regulation, and global governance become spiritual markers of an end-times struggle over the future of the West.

Sit with that. The man building the surveillance apparatus and the company-town prototype is also delivering closed-door sermons in which the climate activist who wants atmospheric carbon reduced, and the alignment researcher who wants frontier models not to kill everyone, are theologically classified as servants of the demonic. He is not reaching for metaphor. The framing is direct, and, quite literally, theological. The Pope’s call for limits on AI development falls inside the same theological category as Thunberg’s call for limits on fossil fuel extraction, and any institutional or moral framework asking the men with the money to slow down is, in the most literal sense available to a Christian eschatology Thiel has chosen to adopt and to publicize, a tool of the Antichrist.

This is the religious framework being installed where the bracketed theology of the Catholic Church used to operate. Bracket the Pope’s theology and the room does not become secular. The room becomes one in which the only remaining theological vocabulary on offer treats the call for human limits as demonic possession, and treats unconstrained capital deployment as a sacrament.

A secular humanist who finds the Pope’s metaphysics unconvincing still has to take Magnifica Humanitas seriously as a present-tense philosophical-political document, because it is the only globally legible voice naming the new theology as the new theology.

What Persists Beyond the New Self-Styled Messiahs?

Two things to acknowledge before this closes.

The first is uncomfortable for anyone who has spent any time with the historical record. The institution now positioning itself as the defender of human dignity against techno-feudal concentration is the same institution that, in periods of its unchallenged political dominance, was an engine of mass suppression: of heretics, of dissenting theological positions, of indigenous populations across the Americas, of women who could read, of the poor it served and ruled in the same gesture. The Church’s record of carrying water for the powerful runs longer than its record of opposing them. Nothing about that disappears because Leo XIV has written a thoughtful encyclical. The encyclical does not retroactively re-author the Inquisition; it does not undo the role of mission compounds in colonial labor extraction; it does not need to, in order to be evaluated as a present-tense document about a present-tense problem. The configuration has reversed on the Church. It is no longer the dominant accumulator. The dominant accumulators are in San Francisco and Austin and the boardroom of Palantir, and in the fullness of time the Church has found itself standing roughly where it once placed others. The position is producing language secular humanists are obliged to take seriously even when we want nothing to do with the institutional history that gave the language its grammar.

The second is the substantive matter. What Magnifica Humanitas defends, once the theology is set down, is not Catholic doctrine. It is the preconditions of humanity. Art, philosophy, poetry, science, medicine, technology in its non-extractive forms – none of these arose from the activities of a class of people optimized for the smooth functioning of someone else’s quarterly earnings. They arose from people who had enough food, enough shelter, enough security, enough leisure, enough literacy, and enough horizon of life that something other than survival was available to them as a thought.

The historical record on this is not subtle, nor is it permeable to perspective-minded revisionists.

Sappho composed her lyrics on Lesbos in the late seventh century BCE under a specific set of conditions: an aristocratic surplus in a Greek island polity that produced a tier of women with literacy, time, a trained ear, and an institutional setting – the thiasos, the circle of young women she taught – in which a woman could write at all. Subtract any one of those conditions and the surviving fragments do not exist.

Ibn al-Haytham wrote the Book of Optics in early-eleventh-century Cairo because the Fatimid caliphate had built and funded an actual physical building in which scholars were paid to think and to write and to revise and to argue. The building was the institutional condition that the optics were an output of, not the other way around.

Marie Skłodowska arrived in Paris in 1891, the precise year of Rerum Novarum, because France had reached a point at which the Sorbonne would, with some friction, admit a Polish woman to its physics program. Her arrival required public universities, public laboratories, public scholarship funds, and a labor market sufficient to let a foreign student survive in a sixth-floor garret while she studied.

John Coltrane learned his instrument inside the AME church choirs of North Carolina, the apprenticeship culture of Philadelphia jazz clubs, the GI Bill that paid for his time at the Granoff School of Music, and the late-night gigging economy that sustained him while he developed.

None of those institutions were optimized for shareholder return. All were forms of public or semi-public surplus being spent on the cultivation of human capacity rather than on its extraction. Paragraph 154 of the encyclical warns that AI-induced inactivity – the absence of daily tasks and stimuli, the gradual dismantling of the conditions under which work is structured and skilled and consequential – produces a specific kind of human and cultural impoverishment. The Pope is not romanticizing toil. He is describing what withers when the trellis is pulled out from under the vine. A civilization in which the machine does the work and the human does nothing structured, owns nothing meaningful, and decides nothing consequential is not a civilization that produces another Sappho, another Ibn al-Haytham, another Curie, another Coltrane. It produces the meal locker, the algorithmically managed warehouse, the freedom city in which freedom is the word the marketing department put on the legal document that revoked it.

This is the call available to us without the metaphysics underneath it. Not the sacramental theology, not the institutional claims to moral authority earned through a history the institution has not yet fully reckoned with: just the recognition of the mechanism. The mechanism Leo XIII named in the Manchester mill in 1891 is the mechanism Leo XIV is naming in the San Francisco data center in 2026. The mechanism does not care which century it is operating in. It is patient. It has the capital to wait. What it needs from us, what it has always needed, is for the people in front of it to forget what it looked like the last time it built a town and called the town freedom.

The looms at Lowell are silent now. They stand in rows in the basement of a federal historic site, their leather belts cracked, the bobbins gray. School groups walk past them on field trips and are told, with reasonable accuracy, that this was once how cloth was made and that the mill girls, fourteen to twenty-two mostly, were used until they were used up. The looms were the mechanism in 1891. The model weights are the mechanism now. The model weights will eventually stand in another museum, and a child walking past them will be told some version of what we are now in the middle of failing to decide. The ten-day lease Joshuah Gardner signed is one of the artifacts. It is also a sentence in a longer document the rest of us are being asked, very quietly, to sign.

References

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