Rebuilding the City, not the Tower

Magnifica Humanitas and the Mission of the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation

On 15 May 2026, exactly 135 years after Pope Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIV signed his first encyclical. Ten days later, in the New Synod Hall, he became the first pontiff in modern history to personally present his own encyclical to the world — alongside Christopher Olah of Anthropic, two cardinals, and two theologians. The date and the staging are not coincidences. Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence¹ is, as Antonio Spadaro has rightly observed, the most significant institutional response to AI from a major religious body anywhere in the world.⁴

This encyclical is of great significance for the endeavour of the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation, which turned out to be a prophetic initiative in light of this magisterial teaching. Not only is this magisterial text significant because the Holy Father is our shepherd and because attention to his teaching is the ordinary discipline of Catholic life. But we also recognise that this document not only permits the work of the CDCF, it actually reads, at almost every paragraph that touches the digital, like a description of why such a foundation is necessary.

Magnifica Humanitas is about humanity in the algorithmic age, and its scope is far broader than any digital infrastructure project. The encyclical speaks to war, to work, to migration, to the formation of consciences, to the Church’s own internal renewal. But the encyclical does include digital infrastructure within its scope: explicitly, magisterially, at the level of the principles it draws from the whole of Catholic Social Teaching.

Spadaro, again, has named what is most striking in the document: it does not add artificial intelligence as a thematic appendix to the Social Doctrine of the Church.⁵ It recognises, instead, that the digital transformation challenges the categories of the Social Doctrine from within and asks for their further development. That is precisely what the Holy Father states at MH §17: artificial intelligence “should not be considered as merely yet another theme to be studied or a crisis to be managed, but rather as a development that challenges the categories of Social Doctrine from within, calling for their further development in fidelity to the Gospel.”

The Holy Father puts the choice before us in his opening paragraph. Humanity, he writes, faces “a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together” (MH §1). The city path is the path the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation, comprised of Catholic developers and technology practitioners and theologians, has been organised to walk, in service to the Church’s “digital mission”.

A second sign

The encyclical is not the only recent gesture by which the Holy Father has spoken to the digital age. Eight months before he signed Magnifica Humanitas, on 7 September 2025, in St Peter’s Square, Pope Leo XIV canonized Pier Giorgio Frassati and Carlo Acutis together.⁹ Carlo Acutis was fifteen years old when he died of leukaemia in 2006. He was a teenager who used his programming skills to catalogue Eucharistic miracles for the Church, freely, openly, in service of evangelisation — a young Catholic developer who loved his Lord and who made what he built available to anyone who wanted it. The Church has now formally placed him among the saints.

The two events form a single pastoral picture. In May 2026 the Holy Father teaches us by encyclical what the digital is for and what it is not for. In September 2025 he had already taught us the same lesson by gesture, raising to the altars a young man whose short life was, in compressed form, an answer to the question the encyclical now poses to all of us. Acutis can be considered, alongside Saint Isidore, a patron saint of the work the CDCF does, as he is unmistakably a sign that this kind of work belongs to the holiness of our time. The encyclical names the res novae of our digital age and asks who will respond to them; the canonization shows us, in a single human life, what one faithful response looks like.

There is a phrase the Holy Father quoted from Acutis in his canonization homily that captures the inversion we want to dwell on: “Not I, but God.”⁹ That phrase is, almost literally, the inverse of Babel. The builders of the tower said, in Genesis 11:4, let us make a name for ourselves. Acutis said not I, but God. The encyclical, at §10, denounces precisely the Babel-syndrome of those who “aspire to reach heaven without God’s blessing.” The young saint had already shown the alternative. A foundation that aspires to build a Catholic digital commons — to gather the gifts of many developers, none of whom is trying to make a name for himself, all of whom are trying to serve the Body of Christ — finds in Acutis a confirmation that this is recognisable Christian work. Holy work, even.

The timing of these two events should be received as a sign of the times in the Council’s own sense — a moment in which the Church, attentive to the Spirit, recognises both a challenge (the algorithmic age) and a witness (a young man who answered it with his life).

Two construction sites

The Holy Father returns repeatedly to two biblical images: the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1–9) and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah (Neh 2–6). They are, in the encyclical’s reading, the controlling figures of our age.

Babel is the temptation of our moment. A single language, a single technology, a single direction. A project, the encyclical observes at §7, conceived “without reference to God, supported by a uniformity that eliminated diversity and that chose homogenization over communion.” At §10 the Holy Father names what he sees in this image: an idolatry of profit that sacrifices the weak, and the pretence that a single language — including, he specifies, a “digital one” — can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into “data and performance.” At §5 he calls our attention to who actually builds today’s tower: not states but transnational private actors “endowed with resources and the capacity to intervene that surpass those of many Governments.”

That diagnosis is not new to us. The CDCF Manifesto names exactly this danger when it declares that the Foundation “builds against the reduction of the person to a data point or a mere instrument of production.”² The Manifesto’s invocation of Pope Francis — that algorithms cannot be allowed to “limit or condition respect for human dignity” — anticipates almost word for word the encyclical’s repeated insistence that no human being can be reduced, as §51 puts it, to “a means of achieving results.”

Nehemiah is the alternative. Here the Holy Father is most precise, and most pastorally tender. The Nehemiah narrative is not, finally, about the walls. It is about the city — Jerusalem reborn as a dwelling-place for returning exiles, a community where God and people live together. The walls are the enabling condition for that life, the perimeter that makes shared dwelling possible; they are not the point. The encyclical itself is exact on this. MH §11: “Building a city founded on the common good implies, first and foremost, building on a firm relationship with God.”

Before he builds anything, the encyclical reminds us at §8, Nehemiah fasts and prays. Then he walks the perimeter of the destroyed city in silence. He does not impose solutions from above. He gathers families and assigns each of them a section of the wall, listening to their concerns, addressing opposition, coordinating their efforts. And critically — the line of §8 is the most important sentence in this whole image — the rebuilding happens “not through the initiative of one man, but through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people.”

This is, almost line for line, the model the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation adopted before the encyclical was written. The Manifesto opens by recognising “that early seeds of a new digital infrastructure have been planted by developers who love the Church… across countless repositories, there are tools built in the quiet of parish life… awaiting the nurture of a supportive community.”² The Foundation does not commission a tower. It walks the perimeter, listens, and gives form to what is already growing.

Spadaro summarises the contrast in lapidary terms: Babel is the work of those who build a tower to make a name for themselves; Jerusalem is the work of those who rebuild so that everyone can dwell within.⁵ We are explicitly, deliberately, by founding charter on the Jerusalem side of that contrast. And Magnifica Humanitas has just made the contrast doctrinally definitive.

The encyclical does not leave us with Nehemiah alone. At §10 the Holy Father lifts his gaze from the partial reconstruction of historic Jerusalem to the eschatological horizon. He recalls that in the Book of Revelation, John sees the New Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21:2) as a gift for all humanity. The same paragraph names what living toward that gift requires of us now: “transforming diversity into a resource and… making listening and dialogue the common ground upon which to cultivate justice and fraternity.” That is the spiritual horizon under which a digital commons becomes intelligible as Christian work, as a small, faithful participation, here and now, in the building of the City of God and in its gradual descent among us. A commons that aggregates the gifts of many developers across many languages and cultures, governed in the open, ordered toward the dignity of every person.

Subsidiarity, re-declined for the digital

If the Babel/Nehemiah pairing was the spiritual heart of the matter, this is its doctrinal core. Here the encyclical does something genuinely new in the tradition of the Social Doctrine.

Among the five doctrinal developments Spadaro identifies in Magnifica Humanitas, two are decisive for the Catholic Digital Commons Foundation. The first is the re-declination of the principle of subsidiarity for a digital environment in which the “higher level” is no longer the State but the great technological platforms that set the conditions of access to public life.⁵ The Holy Father makes this explicit at §71: subsidiarity requires that such processes not be imposed in an opaque and unilateral manner, but be directed toward the common good with “transparency, accountability and meaningful forms of participation.” He then specifies what that means in practice: “independent checks, transparency regarding algorithms, equitable access to data and avenues for recourse” (§71).

Place that text alongside the six algor-ethical principles to which the CDCF Manifesto binds the Foundation’s technical output, drawn from the Rome Call for AI Ethics: transparency, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, security and privacy, inclusion.² The argument writes itself. The encyclical names the danger; the encyclical enumerates the remedies; and the Foundation’s founding document already commits its work to the same remedies. We are being confirmed in what we have set out to do.

The second decisive development is the explicit extension of the universal destination of goods to the digital. At MH §67 the Holy Father teaches that the goods universally intended for everyone now include “new forms of property, such as patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data.” When these goods “remain concentrated in the hands of a few, without adequate forms of sharing and access,” he writes, “a new imbalance is created that contradicts the universal destination of goods.”

This is the deepest theological warrant for an open-source commons in service of the Church. It is no longer a prudential preference that the Church’s digital infrastructure be commonly held, openly governed, and accessible to dioceses, religious institutes, and parishes on equitable terms. It is the application of a magisterially-affirmed principle. The CDCF Manifesto’s gloss on Hilaire Belloc — that the purpose of the Foundation is to support cooperation among Church institutions in maintaining shared digital infrastructure “without centralizing ownership or control beyond what is necessary for sustainability”² — now stands not as one option among many but as a direct operationalisation of §67.

A word, here, for fellow builders. This is why open source matters in our domain in a way that does not necessarily apply in every other. A proprietary parish-management SaaS, however well-intentioned, places diocesan data inside a “higher-level” platform whose terms can change tomorrow. The encyclical at §72 calls instead for “fair rules and effective safeguards, so that local communities, intermediary organizations, schools, universities, religious institutions and associations have a voice and can contribute to the discernment of choices that affect people’s daily lives.” Source-available code, governed in the open, by people accountable to the Church — this is what subsidiarity actually looks like, in code, in a digital ecosystem.

Anna Rowlands, the Durham political theologian who stood on the launch platform beside the Holy Father, gave an interview to Vatican News the same afternoon in which she identified the central task the encyclical sets: to create “common spaces” where the voices of those “most harshly affected by the reality of an algorithmic order” are heard first.⁶ Common spaces. That is the exact register in which the CDCF Manifesto frames itself: a “builder commons,”² a place where local ingenuity becomes a global resource without ever being expropriated. The question Rowlands raised at the launch is the question the Foundation has been organised to answer for the Church.

Governance as witness

There is a passage in Magnifica Humanitas that is often overlooked and that we, as a Foundation, find particularly searching. It is the section the Holy Father titles “An examen for the Church.” At §86 he writes that the Social Doctrine is not merely a message addressed to society; it is an “examination of conscience for the Church” — a home and school of communion called to ensure that its principles are applied “especially within its own structures.” At §87 subsidiarity becomes “the guiding principle for governance” of ecclesial life itself, requiring “genuine, rather than merely nominal, participatory bodies.”

Spadaro flags something striking about the Vatican’s institutional response to AI in the same window. The Inter-Dicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence, established by rescriptum the day after the encyclical was signed, rotates its coordinating leadership annually among seven Vatican bodies; it is not a pyramid but, as he observes, a network — and its founding mandate uses the vocabulary of “dialogue, communion and participation,” which is the vocabulary of synodality.⁴ The Holy Father is asking the world to govern AI through participatory bodies, and the Vatican is in the same gesture restructuring its own internal governance to match.

Read the CDCF’s published Governance Bodies page through that lens.³ The structure is not accidental. A Board of Directors carries responsibility for mission alignment and canonical scope. The Technical and Ecclesial Advisory Councils (TEAC), composed of experts in Catholic theology, canon law, technology, and governance, in deliberate combination, vet and accompany projects. A Project Management Committee governs each active project. A Community of contributors, users, and advisors — bishops, theologians, technologists — surrounds and informs the whole. Each layer carries its own portion of the work; none is asked to carry the whole. The TEAC, in particular, is structurally bilingual — ecclesial-theological and technical-governance — exactly the dialogue the encyclical demands at §23 when it speaks of the Social Doctrine’s need for “the contributions of philosophy and of the human and social sciences.”

The Manifesto names this posture in its own theological key. “Just as these great minds translated Christian theology into the intellectual idiom of the Greco-Roman world,” it observes of the early Church Fathers and the monastic translators after them, “so must we learn to speak the language of technology to carry the Gospel into the digital age.”² Cassiodorus and his scriptorium at Vivarium, the monks of Monte Cassino, the Irish at Clonmacnoise — these are the patrimony the Manifesto invokes, and they are the same patrimony to which the Holy Father appeals when he describes the Church as one that has always served as “a custodian of knowledge” across the ages.

Two days before Magnifica Humanitas was made public, the Franciscan theologian Paolo Benanti — a long-time AI advisor at the Vatican — published a short essay addressed to enterprise boards in Italy.⁷ Its argument deserves close attention, because it translates the encyclical’s §71–72 case into the language of CFOs and procurement officers, and the translation works perfectly.

Benanti’s claim: the token-based pricing of proprietary AI looks like neutral utility-style metering, but it is the surface of a structural dependency. The “cost of the exit door,” as he memorably puts it, is built into the price of entry from the start; proprietary APIs, closed models, and onerous exit clauses make migration “economically and operationally prohibitive in the medium term.”⁷ For boards, the consequence is that what looks like a finance decision is in fact a sovereignty decision, being delegated downstream from where it ought to be made. His closing line names what is at stake with unusual directness: AI, he writes, is not a utility like electricity — it is an infrastructure of power.⁷

The argument transposes almost without modification to the Church. A diocese choosing a proprietary parish-management stack faces the same lock-in dynamic Benanti describes for a corporate board: the cost of exit is incorporated into the price of entry; the consultant recommending the stack is often a commercial partner of the platform; the decision is taken at a technical level and arrives at the chancery already packaged. Where Benanti calls for sobrietà computazionale — knowing exactly what you are buying and negotiating it as such — the Holy Father at §72 calls for fair rules and effective safeguards that give religious institutions a voice in the choices that shape their daily life. Same argument, different register.

This is the reason the CDCF’s TEAC structure matters in practice and not merely in principle. A committee that puts theology, canon law, technology, and governance around one table is the institutional form of the discernment Benanti calls for and the encyclical demands. It exists so that the question Benanti puts to corporate boards — who is sitting on the other side of the table, and what arrangements are shaping the recommendation? — gets asked, on the Church’s behalf, before a diocese signs.

An invitation to the construction site

The Holy Father concludes the opening of the encyclical with a direct appeal. MH §16: “Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the ‘construction site’ of our time. Like Nehemiah, let us pray, plan wisely and work perseveringly, placing God at the forefront of our actions and the human person at the center of our choices.”

At §111 the appeal takes a more specific form, addressed to those who develop artificial intelligence: technological innovation can be, the Holy Father writes, “a human form of participation in the divine act of creation.” The CDCF Manifesto already quotes Pope Leo XIV’s December 2025 Address to the same effect: human beings are called to be co-workers in creation, not passive consumers of content.² The encyclical now confirms what the address inaugurated. The Foundation’s project is to give that vocation institutional shape — to make it possible for a developer who loves the Church to contribute to her digital life without surrendering that contribution to the logic of proprietary capture.

The Manifesto calls itself, in its closing pages, a “Digital Cathedral.”² We do not labour the architectural family resemblance — the cathedral, the city, the construction site — except to say that the family is real, and the Holy Father has just named the city for which the cathedral is built.

One last note on what we are building, and what we are not. Two days before publishing his procurement piece, Paolo Benanti wrote a second short essay, this one on the AI companions now entering the spaces of mental health, spiritual direction, and the grief of mourning. They are, he observes in a phrase that lands with peculiar force, commercial products that simulate relationships, not relationships that use commercial tools.⁸ The distinction matters intensely for any Catholic enterprise. The parish, the chancery, the school, the religious community — these are relationships that may make use of tools. The Foundation builds tools for those relationships. It does not build tools that simulate them. That is one way of stating, in compressed form, the entire purpose of the CDCF. It is also one way of glossing the Holy Father’s repeated insistence at §15 that the grandeur of humanity revealed in Christ is a splendor that no machine can ever replace.

We have tried, in our small way, to listen to the same Spirit who is guiding the Holy Father. The encyclical names the temptation (Babel) and the alternative (Nehemiah, opening onto the New Jerusalem). It names the principles — subsidiarity, the universal destination of goods, solidarity, social justice, integral human development. It names the method: synodal, participatory, transparent. The Catholic Digital Commons Foundation exists to make that method concrete in code, for the dioceses and religious institutes and parishes that need this infrastructure and that should never have to surrender it to the logic of Babel in order to obtain it.

If you have read this far, the Holy Father’s appeal at §16 is addressed to you as much as to us. We ask only three things in response.

Read the encyclical. All of it, not merely the passages on AI. Chapter Two on the foundations of the Social Doctrine of the Church is the deeper gift, and it is what makes the digital chapters intelligible.

Look at the Foundation, and consider where you fit. If you are a developer who loves the Church, the projects are public and the vetting criteria are open. If you are a bishop, a religious superior, or a diocesan administrator, consider how subsidiarity in your own digital estate looks today — and whether shared infrastructure, transparent and accountable, might serve your mission better than yet another proprietary contract whose exit door is already priced into your entry. If you are a theologian, a philosopher, or a technologist, the Technical and Ecclesial Advisory Councils need you; the Manifesto’s appeal to all people of goodwill “with technical and theological grounding”² is, in substance, the same appeal the Holy Father issues at §16.

Pray with us. Nehemiah fasted and prayed and interceded before he so much as walked the perimeter of the ruined city. We have no intention of doing the work differently.

The Holy Father closes the introduction of Magnifica Humanitas with words we want to borrow as our own closing line. They are §16, and they fit precisely: we are called to be servants of the coming Kingdom, instead of lords of towers destined for ruin.

That is the work. The city is being rebuilt. Each one of us is called to be one of the workers contributing to its construction.

---

Footnotes