The Vatican’s official infographics for Pope Leo XIV’s debut encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity in English, read here), are akin to modern stained-glass windows, conveying deep meaning with pictures accessible to all and with some urgent, deeply necessary messages for us all in the age of AI (even for a heathen like me!), and if you just care about the infographics, you can scroll past my heathen verbiage
(Traduce en español/translate to Spanish) By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) July 16, 2026; *UPDATED same day to include the collaboration with Pope Leo of Ukraine’s 2022 Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Oleksandra Matviichuk (see my interview with her just months before she won the Prize) and *UPDATED July 18th to refine points on Calvinism and modern Christianity, adding some relevant sources on that note; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating as I make my overdue comeback! Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter means my content is actively suppressed, so your help is invaluable. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion. See my related AI Reading List here.
SILVER SPRING—At great risk of losing my audience, duty compels me to start this article with a massive disclosure (please stay with me, Believers, as you will appreciate what comes after the disclosure!). As an avowed nonbeliever/nontheist, I overall despise Christianity, the Catholic Church, the papacy, and religion in general—including all major religions equally both in concept and in practice (I here separate major religions from subsects)—for ample, demonstrable reasons played out over thousands of years. Yet remember how I said I despise them equally: I will defend Muslims from bigoted attacks from Christians, or Christians from bigoted attacks from Hindus (random examples, not meant to convey deeper meaning in their selection!), and defend all their human rights, including to practice their religion freely (so long as they are not harming others). The late, great Christopher Hitchens sums up his views and mine nicely here in his classic Letters to a Young Contrarian:
In order to be absolutely honest, I should not leave you with the impression that I am part of the generalized agnosticism of our culture. I am not even an atheist so much as I am an antitheist; I not only maintain that all religions are versions of the same untruth, but I hold that the influence of churches, and the effect of religious belief is positively harmful. Reviewing the false claims of religion, I do not wish, as some sentimental materialists affect to wish, that they were true. I do not envy believers their faith. I am relieved to think that the whole story is a sinister fairy tale; life would be miserable if what the faithful affirmed was actually the case.
That does not mean that there are not things that I do not like and value about each and every one of these faiths, or that I hate most adherents of Christianity or any religion: I do not. In the end, I am a Humanist who loves people above all else. Yet I am very much an antitheist, a nonbeliever in any of that mumbo-jumbo some of you may think is necessary to save my soul (and while I do genuinely appreciate the concern to the degree that it represents concern for my well-being, any attempts at proselytization or conversion will be either ignored or trolled, yet money is always accepted in my struggling freelance state). I happen to be an ex-Catholic and have a soft-spot for the very recent modern iteration of the Catholic Church (especially some of its better social teachings and charity work, led by Catholic Relief Services, actually one of the premier global relief charities) while also being extremely critical of the Church, a Church I left in disgust in the later half of the first decade of the twenty-first century. And I am not going back or signing up for any other divinity-focused team.
So, that fact that Pope Leo XIV’s elegant encyclical hit me like the River Isen bursting through the dam in The Two Towers really says something. I was not expecting Leo—and, by default the Church he leads—to become the salient moral and ethical voice on AI…
One of the remarkable things about Leo’s foray into the public square on the topic of AI is that he is less concerned with centering his arguments on God than on people; indeed, his encyclical translates in English to “Magnificent Humanity,” a resoundingly uplifting, positive, and hopeful document on the possibilities and wonders of human nature. *This is absolutely a rebuke to the spirit of Calvinism and America’s sick Evangelical Christianity, of the concept of the Elect, of the gospel of wealth/prosperity gospel, of the idea that God would damn most people to eternal hellfire (when it comes to hell itself, one of the most profound early Church Fathers, Origen of Alexandria [c. 185-c. 254 C.E.], did not even accept its existence, and for this and other kindnesses and beliefs he was undermined by rivals in his lifetime and excommunicated posthumously [apparently, technically “anathematized,” oh, Catholicism…]. Origen would have found himself in good company some sixteen centuries later, half-a-world away: as a non-theologian, Abraham Lincoln probably gave us some of the most profound meditations on faith of any major leader in history, and he, too, found it silly and dreadful to have hell or believe in it).
To me, more than it is about “God” or Jesus or Christianity or religion, this encyclical is a document that is a robust defense of humans—their spirit, achievements, dignity, and possibilities—against their denigration, commodification, deprioritization, and oppression. Just as the subtitle—“On safeguarding the human person in the time of Artificial Intelligence”—states, it is a collective societal path for fighting dehumanization in a dehumanizing age, one that seeks, using AI, to elevate a tiny handful of humans and AI over the entire rest of our species, replacing our diverse ethical, moral, and philosophical systems with their fascist systems of dopamine manipulation that worship money and themselves as gods, not people in general, let alone “God.” Make no mistake about it, these big tech oligarchs are aligned with Trump and are as soulless as he is—Anthropic notwithstanding—and are firmly in the driver’s seat; thus, while Leo’s entrance here is an act of leadership, it is also a primal scream of panic for our species, a papal version of smashing the glass and pulling the alarm.
As for your imaginary friend(s), he/she/they do not concern me here. Much like an edition of the Bible compiled by Thomas Jefferson that removed all the religious, superstitious, and miracle inventions in favor of focusing on the actual teachings and meanings of Jesus for how to behave in a crazy world (see and read the digitized original!), Leo’s exhilarating encyclical is an inclusive roadmap for all when you separate the Christian religious stuff from its more temporal substance; however you feel about the ethereal metaphysics, the rest of it stands on its own just like Mr. Jefferson’s Bible, as needed a relevant message and wake-up call as anything else out there today.
I am not going to remove those religious references or attack them specifically herein (other than to give you Immanuel Kant’s famous quote from the same era as Jefferson: “Metaphysics is a dark ocean without shores or lighthouse, strewn with many a philosophic wreck.”), I leave them here while not endorsing them and heartily endorsing the rest. On that note…
Behold, be ye of faith, little faith, or no faith, the wonder that is Magnifica Humanitas in stained-glass, even hieroglyphics or graphic novel form—whatever you want to call it—these infographics speak not only for themselves, but for all of us fighting for humanity over hate and machines, greed and dehumanization (click on any to zoom)!
If you prefer, you can view the infographics as a slide show:
Or download as PDFs.
With all this and more, maybe we can even win over some of the hearts and minds on the other side. I consider Anthropic to be one of the main exceptions among the big teach companies on trying to provide moral and ethical leadership on AI (the rest seem mostly to be the problem), whether by saying no to Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon on the one hand or by partnering with the Vatican and Pope Leo on the other, and the fact that the latter are partnering with Anthropic inspires in me at least some measure of hope.
Having said that, I think the forces stacked against us are formidable and what seem to be Anthropic’s good intentions may be too little, too late. And yet, for now, let us who want to advance the collective cause of humanity keep fighting like we have a chance and use Leo’s empathetic encyclical (including its pictures-worth-a-million-words) as a moral and ethical North Star, a Phial of Galadriel (“May it be a light for you in dark places, when all other lights go out”), a light for those with hearts seeking illumination in these dark times. *Carrying far more moral weight than Anthropic and perhaps akin to Galadriel herself, Ukraine’s 2022 Nobel Peace Prize-winner, Oleksandra Matviichuk (see my interview with her just months before she won the Prize), is also welcomingly collaborating with the Vatican on this alongside many other Nobel laureates; and, much like Leo, Matviichuk sees us losing our humanity under assault from AI and the tech companies pushing AI onto us, even citing the horrific targeting abuses of AI in Gaza as used by the Israeli military. Noting the depraved “human safari” expeditions carried out by Russian military forces killing her fellow Ukrainians for amusement, she asks: “If Russians are capable of this while a human operator still sits behind the drone—what kind of hell awaits us once they do it with AI?”
Somehow, I have to figure how to combine Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas with Andor, and then we might be saved. Both the Catholic Church and Disney have been weak for some time in many ways, and then, somehow, they give us this encyclical and Andor… so maybe miracles are possible, with both the Catholic Church and Disney being something akin to John the Baptist’s mother, Elizabeth, birthing him when she was infertile? (Perhaps I am getting carried away sourcing fiction here, between Tolkien, Star Wars, and the Bible…). But even without miracles, Leo and his team are showing the way forward so transcendently, so beautifully, so effectively with this encyclical and its series of five epic infographics, the stained-glass windows for the cataclysm of our current AI-era. Stained-glass windows were not just art: for many centuries, they could could tell stories for illiterate peasants clogging the pews or gawking at Cathedrals from the outside, and, after reading about the death of reading à la Rose Horowitch in The Atlantic and watching Yuval Noah Harari explain recently why both liberalism as a world order is fading and AI is its enemy driving us into terrifying new world order, let us make sure it is not an apocalypse.
See my related AI Reading List here.
© 2026 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome
Also see Brian’s eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here).
If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.
Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!