Today the Vatican published Magnifica Humanitas — Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical and the Catholic Church's official moral teaching on AI. I woke up at 5am to read it, and it's remarkable.It names algorithmic systems making decisions about credit, jobs, and welfare benefits. It names data extraction from poor countries as a new form of colonialism. It describes the invisible human labor underneath every AI response. And on autonomous weapons, it establishes a three-part accountability framework that maps directly onto the targeting systems the U.S. military is using right now. Never thought I'd feel true ideological kinship with the leader of the Catholic Church.135 years ago, Pope Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum — a document that named the horrors of industrial capitalism and eventually became part of the intellectual foundation for the New Deal. Leo XIV named himself after that, and he's trying to accomplish the same thing today.Whether it works depends on who carries it from here.My full written analysis — including a speculative bibliography of the tech journalism that may have shaped Leo's thinking — is at The Rip Current:🔗 https://www.theripcurrent.com/p/the-vaticans-indictment-of-aiMembers get early access to this and all my analysis. For written reports, including all the source documents, consider becoming a subscriber at https://theripcurrent.com.