The Sagrada Familia metaphor

The revitalisation of Sagrada Familia, coming soon after Pope Leo's note on AI and Catholicism, is showing that he is serious about a leadership role for Catholicism in the AI age. Other traditions should note the ambition and the speed.

Pope Leo XIV greets faithful as he presides over the Midday Prayer at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia in Barcelona. Photo: Simone Risoluti/Vatican Media via Vatican Pool.

The year 2026 has emerged as an unexpected inflection point in global religious and political history. The election and early governance of Pope Leo XIV, the American-born former Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, has injected a new vigour into the Vatican. Far from a passive institutional custodianship, the Leonine papacy has initiated a profound reconstruction of Catholicism.

This revival is anchored by two monumental events: the publication of the pontiff's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and his historic Mass at Barcelona’s Sagrada Família. Supported by the intellectual infrastructure of modern apostolic foot soldiers like Bishop Robert Barron, this Catholic renaissance is not merely an internal theological realignment. It is a sweeping, counter-cultural defence of the human person that is actively reshaping the intersection of religion and global geopolitics.

On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. The timing was a deliberate historical echo, signed on the 135th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII’s landmark 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. Just as Leo XIII formulated the Church's social doctrine to protect workers from the dehumanizing excesses of the Industrial Revolution, Leo XIV has positioned the Church as the ultimate defender of human dignity in the face of the Digital Revolution.

The intellectual architecture of the encyclical rejects the modern technocratic paradigm that views human beings as projects to be optimized, upgraded, or algorithmically managed. Leo XIV draws upon two contrasting biblical motifs to frame the current epoch. First, the ‘Tower of Babel’, a symbol of technocratic hubris, uniformity, and corporate computational centralization. It represents an empire of efficiency that sacrifices human exception and local community for totalized control. Then, there is the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, a model of collaborative, relational, and embodied communion. It emphasizes building a "civilization of love" step by step, grounded in real human vulnerability.

The encyclical argues that human intelligence is uniquely embodied—forged through suffering, physical presence, and moral conscience—and cannot be replicated by data processing or statistical adaptation. By defending human limitation, illness, and aging not as bugs to be cured by transhumanism but as loci of sacred dignity, Magnifica Humanitas challenges the metaphysical assumptions undergirding the Silicon Valley and state-led artificial intelligence complexes.

If Magnifica Humanitas provided the intellectual blueprint for this Catholic revival, the Pope's journey to Barcelona on June 10, 2026, offered its visual and rhetorical manifestation. Presiding over a spectacular Mass marking the centenary of Antoni Gaudí’s death, Leo XIV blessed the newly completed, 172.5-meter Tower of Jesus Christ, effectively making the modernist masterpiece the tallest church building in the world.

Standing beneath Gaudí's soaring geometric spires, the Pope delivered a sermon that reverberated far beyond the Catalan capital. He linked architectural completion to civilizational choice, explicitly declaring that Christians "cannot believe in Jesus and promote war."

"Humanity is facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. No algorithm can make war morally acceptable," Pope Leo XIV said at the Sagrada Família.

This message was a direct shot across the bow of contemporary realpolitik, which has increasingly normalized and rehabilitated conflict as an instrument of international diplomacy. The sermon highlighted that the reconstruction of Catholic identity is intrinsically bound to a muscular, uncompromising theology of peace and cross-border solidarity, setting the Vatican on a collision course with rising nationalist popes of secular power.

A papal revival requires global amplification, and this is where figures like Bishop Robert Barron and his Word on Fire Catholic Ministries play a crucial role. Bishop Barron has long critiqued the post-Vatican II era of "beige Catholicism", a well-meaning but ultimately enervated form of the faith that scrubbed away its intellectual and aesthetic distinctiveness to blend into secular culture.

Barron’s project is one of vibrant retrieval. By publishing special editions of Magnifica Humanitas and flooding the digital ecosystem with high-level philosophical commentary, Barron is turning the encyclical's abstract warnings into actionable cultural critique.

Furthermore, Barron’s public role exemplifies the delicate tightrope the contemporary Church must walk. Even while serving on civil bodies like the U.S. Religious Liberty Commission, Barron has aggressively defended the independence of the papacy. When nationalist political figures attacked Leo XIV's foreign policy stances on the remilitarization of the Americas and the escalation of conflict with Iran, Barron publicly demanded accountability, asserting that the Pope's mandate is to articulate timeless moral truths, not to validate the partisan calculations of any state. This intellectual pushback ensures that the Catholic revival remains firmly Christocentric rather than a tool for domestic political theatre.

The broader revival of Catholicism under Leo XIV fundamentally alters the global geopolitical landscape. For centuries, the Vatican has operated as a transnational moral actor, but the Leonine shift moves the Church into a new kind of arena: a direct confrontation with computational imperialism.

The Vatican is actively challenging the new monopolies of data. Magnifica Humanitas introduces the concept of technological and epistemic asymmetry, arguing that when a handful of corporate or state entities control the core algorithms of human interaction, democracy and human agency are subverted. The Church is positioning itself as an advocate for the Global South, demanding the ‘universal destination of technological goods’, and local community sovereignty over automated systems.

By explicitly linking high-tech progress to the brutal physical realities of its supply chains, such as the exploitation of women and children mining rare earth minerals in conflict zones, the Church is tearing away the clean, abstract veneer of the digital economy. It forces international relations theorists to view technology not just through the lens of state power or market capitalisation, but through the lens of human cost.

As the world fragments into competing spheres of influence led by technological superpowers, a revived, assertive Catholicism offers an alternative pole. It refuses to align with either Western tech-monopolies or Eastern state-surveillance regimes. Instead, it leverages its global network of over a billion adherents to advocate for a multipolar world governed by human dignity, strict just-war constraints, and interfaith dialogue.

Bishop Robert Barron, the most influential American Catholic public intellectual and the founder of Word on Fire, wrote the most widely read commentary on Magnifica Humanitas, published in Fox News of all places, a platform choice that tells you something about where he believes the persuadable audience is. Barron has been Leo's most significant intellectual ally in the English-speaking world since the day of the election, when he posted from St Peter's Square that he knew the new pope as "a man of great intelligence, experience, and prayerfulness" and hoped his election would have "a vivifying effect on the American church." What Barron brings is something Leo needs: a proven capacity to translate demanding theology into language that reaches people who do not read encyclicals. His YouTube channel has 4 million subscribers. His documentaries have aired on Netflix. He understands, as Leo understands, that the Church's intellectual tradition is among its greatest assets and that most Catholics have never been properly introduced to it.

All of this is happening against a backdrop that nobody predicted with confidence a decade ago. France recorded over 20,000 adult baptisms at Easter 2026 — a 20 percent increase on the already record numbers of 2025, with the largest cohort being young professionals in their twenties and thirties. Austria, Belgium, and the United States are showing similar, if smaller, trends. More than three million pilgrims attended papal audiences and liturgies in the second half of 2025 alone. The crowds lining the streets around the Sagrada Família were not bused in. Spain — a country that experienced severe religious crisis after Franco's dictatorship ended, and which has spent fifty years in vigorous secular reaction — turned out in vast numbers for an American pope who had arrived three days earlier to urge its bishops to pay reparations to abuse survivors.

This last detail matters. The revival, if that is what it is, is not happening in spite of Leo's willingness to confront the Church's failures; it may be happening partly because of it. He told the Spanish bishops plainly that reparations are owed. He has made abuse accountability a non-negotiable institutional priority. The cynical reading of the crowds at the Sagrada Família — that people were coming for the spectacle and the history — is probably partly right. But the spectacle and the history are inseparable from the message he delivered inside: that faith in Christ is incompatible with violence, indifference, and the neglect of those who suffer.

What does any of this mean for the world beyond the Church?

More than is usually acknowledged. The Catholic Church is not primarily a European institution; it is a global one, with 1.4 billion members and active institutional presence in virtually every country on earth. It operates the world's largest non-governmental network of schools, hospitals, and social services. In sub-Saharan Africa, where Leo spent eleven days in April visiting Algeria, Cameroon, Angola, and Equatorial Guinea, the Church is often the most competent institution operating in regions where states have failed or been captured by predatory elites. In Latin America, where Leo served for decades as a bishop in Peru, the Church's relationship to social movements and democratic politics shapes outcomes that no foreign ministry fully understands. In the Philippines, Poland, and parts of the United States, Catholic social teaching is a direct input into electoral politics.

A Church that is intellectually reinvigorated, institutionally reforming, and demographically growing in the Global South while staging genuine recovery in the West is a Church with geopolitical weight. Leo is already exercising it. He has positioned the Vatican explicitly in opposition to the U.S. administration's geopolitical posture — on AI deregulation, on autonomous weapons, on Ukraine, on immigration — without framing any of this as partisan politics. He has done so from an Augustinian framework in which the proper goal of political life is the common good, not national advantage, and in which the measure of any policy is what it does for the weakest. This is not, in the current international climate, a neutral position. It is a serious one.

Meanwhile, the intersection of religion and geopolitics is becoming more consequential everywhere. The secular assumption that modernisation means secularisation — that as countries develop, religion retreats — has not aged well. It was always primarily a description of a specific Western European trajectory, not a universal law. In Africa, the fastest-growing religious populations in the world are Catholic and Pentecostal. In Asia, the Catholic Church is expanding in South Korea, Vietnam, and among Chinese diaspora communities. In the Middle East, Leo has already visited Lebanon and spoken to a Christian community that has survived as a minority in the Arab world for two thousand years and whose continued presence he treats as a matter of civilisational importance.

The papacy is, among other things, a soft power instrument of extraordinary range. The incumbent pope understands this. A Chicago-born Augustinian who speaks five languages, spent most of his adult life in Latin America, was elected by a global college of cardinals rather than European ones, and is now making AI ethics part of his magisterium — this is a pope whose natural constituency is not the American culture wars or the European centre-right, but the emerging-world majority that is both deeply religious and deeply aware of what unaccountable technological and financial power does to the people at the bottom.

There is a line in Magnifica Humanitas worth returning to. Leo writes that "the rejected stones — the poor, the sick, the migrants and the least among us — will become the cornerstone." He was quoting scripture, but he was also, standing three weeks later in Gaudí's basilica, describing the building itself: a structure in which every stone is load-bearing, every column functional, every surface an argument about the nature of the world. Gaudí designed it to be unfinishable by any one generation — a collective project across centuries, built by people who knew they would not see it complete.

Leo XIV may be the pope who finally completed the tower. But the project he is engaged in is considerably longer than 144 years. The Church has outlasted every civilisation that was certain it would not. The AI age is the latest civilisational challenge, and Rome, as it always has, from the Stamperia Vaticana to Vatican Radio to the Synod Hall on May 25, 2026, has arrived at the conversation with opinions, resources, and no intention of leaving quietly.