On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV signed the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas on the preservation of humanity in the age of artificial intelligence. This discussion paper deliberately interprets the document from an economic policy perspective rather than a theological one and puts forward the thesis that the encyclical identifies five areas for regulatory innovation aimed at further developing the social market economy in the age of AI.
The article begins by reconstructing the normative genealogy that has linked Catholic social teaching and Freiburg-school since Müller-Armack. It then systematises the encyclical’s analysis. On the one hand, it examines the concentration of private, often transnational power without a democratic framework; on the other, it analyses artificial intelligence as a non-neutral infrastructure; and finally, it highlights the epistemic threat to truth as a common good. The analytical value of the encyclical lies not in the initial description of these problems, but in their normative synthesis, coherence and legitimisation.
Based on this interpretation, the paper identifies five areas for action:
- the supranational application of the principle of subsidiarity
- a property regime for the digital age
- the dignity of work in the age of automation
- regulatory policy to counter the concentration of digital power
- and an information regime as a new social issue.
Taken together, these outline the contours of a digital economic constitution – that is, a regulatory framework that continues the normative tradition of the social market economy under the conditions of the platform economy, without uncritically adopting its nation-state and industrial-capitalist premises. The associated foreign trade and geopolitical dimension of digital sovereignty is deliberately not elaborated upon as a sixth area but is instead identified at the end as a separate follow-up agenda. This paper is intended as a catalyst for translating normative principles into concrete regulatory design.
Please note, to date this paper is only available in German.
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