In 1954, the French Christian philosopher Jacques Ellul published a warning that the world was not ready to hear.

In The Technological Society, he argued that the modern obsession with technique—efficiency, optimization, and the relentless pursuit of the one best way to do anything—was quietly fragmenting the human person from the inside. Human beings are “created with a certain essential unity,” Ellul wrote, "and [are] fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.” His remedy was not a retreat from civilization but a more demanding engagement with it: a refusal to accept the world as it is and an insistence on the world as God meant it to be.

Seventy years later, Pope Leo XIV has issued one of the most significant public theological works in a generation. Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence comes 135 years after Leo XIV’s namesake Leo XIII issued his magisterial encyclical Rerum Novarum, and it carries that tradition forward with new urgency into the age of artificial intelligence.

Ellul wasn’t interested in retreating from the world. He was interested in the thisness of the world, his conviction that things could change for the better. He was interested in making sure we understand that your neighbor is not a resource to be optimized or a problem to be solved, but a human being to serve alongside.

Pope Leo XIV is issuing that same refusal, in what may well be seen as a paramount theological reflection for the next century, addressed to a world whose tools have grown almost incomprehensibly powerful.

“The primary choice,” he writes, “is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem.”

The titans building towers will keep building. That is what Babel does. But for those of us who believe that the rejected stone is the cornerstone—that the child going hungry in Mississippi matters infinitely, that each of us has been given a calling and a section of wall—there is another project. Older, humbler, and far more durable.

Pick up your tools. Your section of wall is waiting.