The National Register commentary by Paolo Carozza, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and co-chair of Meta’s “Oversight Board,” attempts to present “Pope” Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas as a profound meditation on human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence. Carozza argues that the encyclical’s true brilliance lies not in its treatment of technology but in its supposed deepening of the Church’s understanding of human dignity—its relational character, its unity of body, mind, and spirit, and even its relationship to human frailty and limitation. What Carozza’s enthusiastic endorsement reveals, however, is not the profundity of the conciliar sect’s magisterium but the utter bankruptcy of its theological method: a naturalistic, anthropocentric humanism that reduces the supernatural destiny of man to a horizontal, worldly project of “flourishing,” while systematically evading the only framework within which human dignity can truly be understood—the framework of original sin, redemption through the Cross, and the absolute sovereignty of Christ the King over all dimensions of human existence.
The Dignity of Man Without the Fall: A Modernist Heresy
The gravest omission in both the encyclical as summarized by Carozza and in Carozza’s own commentary is any substantive treatment of the Fall, original sin, and the radical woundedness of human nature after Adam’s transgression. Catholic doctrine before the Council taught with crystalline clarity that human dignity, while real, exists in a nature that is fallen—wounded in its intellect, will, and appetites, and ordered toward a supernatural end that can only be attained through the grace of Jesus Christ and the sacraments of His Church.
Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the principle that Christ’s kingship extends over “all nations… even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love,” encompassing “also all non-Cathians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” This is the only foundation upon which any coherent Catholic teaching on human dignity can be built: the recognition that every human being is subject to the authority and law of the Redeemer, and that dignity is inseparable from this subjection to divine order.
The modernist conception of dignity, by contrast, treats human nature as essentially intact and self-sufficient—needing not redemption but merely “enhancement” through technology and social progress. When Carozza writes that “human dignity always remains in important measure a mystery to be contemplated and plumbed more deeply,” he speaks as though the Church’s prior teaching on the subject were somehow deficient, as though the Fathers and Doctors of the Church—St. Augustine with his doctrine of original sin, St. Thomas Aquinas with his teaching on the natural law as participation in the eternal law—had failed to grasp the “depths” of what Leo XIV now supposedly reveals. This is the very essence of the modernist error condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), which rejected the proposition that “Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason.”
Relational Dignity: A Substitute for Supernatural Vocation
Carozza places great emphasis on Leo XIV’s claim that “the dignity of the human person is inescapably relational,” that “we are made for relationship—with others, for love and friendship and community.” On its surface, this sounds harmless, even pious. But in the context of the conciliar sect’s systematic demolition of the supernatural order, what does “relational” actually mean? It means a horizontal, sociological concept of the human person—defined not by his relationship to God through sanctifying grace, but by his relationships to other human beings and to the material world.
The Catholic teaching is that man is indeed relational, but his primary and defining relationship is to his Creator. “For You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You” (St. Augustine, Confessions I.1). The relational character of human dignity, properly understood, means that man is ordered toward communion with God—a communion that is made possible only through the Incarnation, the Redemption, and the sacramental life of the Church. To speak of “relational dignity” without this supernatural framework is to reduce the imago Dei to a sociological category, which is precisely the naturalism condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil” (Proposition 3).
Frailty as Revelation: The Heresy of Wounded Nature Without Redemption
Perhaps the most dangerous passage in Carozza’s commentary—and, by his own enthusiastic endorsement, in the encyclical itself—is the claim that “our limits, even our suffering, are not at odds with what makes human beings bearers of irreducible value, but exactly the opposite. In the experience of those weaknesses and dependencies, we discover more truly that the grandeur of human dignity transcends those limits.” The encyclical states: “Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others.”
This is a profound distortion of the Catholic doctrine of suffering. The Catholic teaching is that suffering entered the world through sin (Gen. 3:16-19), that it is a consequence of the Fall, and that it is redeemed—not glorified in itself—by the Cross of Christ. St. Paul writes: “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24). Suffering is redemptive when united to Christ; it is not intrinsically revelatory of human dignity. To claim that human frailty and limitation “open us to recognizing the face of God” apart from the Cross is to embrace a naturalistic mysticism of suffering that bypasses the entire economy of salvation.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili sane exitu, condemned the modernist proposition that “the teaching about Christ transmitted by Paul, John, and by the Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon does not correspond to the teaching of Jesus, but is a teaching about Jesus formulated by Christian consciousness” (Proposition 31). The modernist method is precisely to dissolve the supernatural content of the Faith into subjective human experience—to replace the objective reality of redemption with the subjective “experience” of limitation. This is what Leo XIV’s encyclical accomplishes with its language of “finitude” and “frailty.”
Transhumanism: A Symptom, Not the Disease
Carozza rightly notes that the encyclical critiques transhumanism and posthumanism. But he fails to recognize—or deliberately conceals—that these ideologies are not aberrations from the modern world but its logical fruits. The transhumanist project is the inevitable consequence of a civilization that has rejected the supernatural destiny of man and replaced it with the idolatry of human power and progress.
Pope Pius XI warned in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The transhumanist dream of “overcoming human limitation through technology” is the technological expression of the same pride that built the Tower of Babel—the pride that seeks to “be like God” (Gen. 3:5) not through obedience and grace but through human power and ingenuity.
But here lies the fatal contradiction of the conciar sect’s position: while Leo XIV critiques transhumanism, the entire framework of Magnifica Humanitas—its naturalistic anthropology, its horizontal concept of relationality, its evasion of original sin and supernatural redemption—provides the very philosophical soil in which transhumanism grows. You cannot effectively critique the fruits of anthropocentrism while embracing its root.
The Silence on Christ the King: The Definitive Apostasy
What is most conspicuous by its absence in both the encyclical (as presented by Carozza) and in Carozza’s own commentary is any mention of the Kingship of Christ over human societies, over technology, over the entire order of human life. Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King precisely as a remedy against the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors”—the very secularism that now manifests itself in the dehumanizing ideologies of transhumanism and the “datafication of human identities.”
The Catholic teaching is unambiguous: Christ is King not merely of individual hearts but of nations, states, and all human institutions. “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men,” Pius XI declared. Any treatment of “human dignity in the age of technology” that does not begin and end with the recognition of Christ’s absolute sovereignty over the technological order is not merely incomplete—it is a participation in the public apostasy that the Popes of the pre-conciliar era so vehemently condemned.
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, as presented by Carozza, does precisely this: it seeks to “reconcile” the Faith with the technological order, to baptize the “datafication of human identities” and the “harvesting of intimate desires for commercial gain” with the language of “relational dignity” and “human flourishing,” rather than condemning these as fruits of a civilization in revolt against its Creator.
Carozza and the Meta Connection: The Face of Neo-Church Collaboration
It is no coincidence that Paolo Carozza serves as co-chair of Meta’s “Oversight Board”—the very entity responsible for moderating content on Facebook and Instagram, platforms that have become primary instruments of the “datafication of human identities” and the “harvesting of intimate desires” that the encyclical purports to critique. This is the neo-church in microcosm: men who serve simultaneously at the altar of Christ and at the altar of Silicon Valley, who speak of “human dignity” while being structurally embedded in the very systems that systematically destroy it.
The pre-conciliar Church understood that collaboration with systems hostile to the Faith was not “engagement” but apostasy. The Syllabus of Errors condemned the notion that the Church should “tolerate the errors of philosophy, leaving it to correct itself” (Proposition 11) and the claim that “the Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect” (Proposition 24). The neo-church, by contrast, has fully embraced the role of chaplain to the world—offering pious words about “dignity” while the machinery of technological dehumanization grinds on unabated.
Conclusion: The Only True Foundation of Human Dignity
The Catholic teaching on human dignity, properly understood, rests on three pillars that are entirely absent from Magnifica Humanitas as presented by Carozza:
1. The supernatural destiny of man: Man’s dignity consists in his creation in the image of God, his elevation to the state of grace, and his eternal destiny of beatitude in the vision of God. This dignity is not “relational” in a sociological sense but is rooted in the soul’s relationship to its Creator.
2. The reality of original sin and the necessity of redemption: Human nature is fallen, wounded, and incapable of attaining its supernatural end without the grace of Christ and the sacraments of His Church. Human dignity does not consist in the “acceptance of finitude” but in the transformation of fallen nature through grace.
3. The Kingship of Christ over all human societies: Human dignity is inseparable from the recognition of Christ’s absolute sovereignty over every dimension of human life—including technology, politics, economics, and culture. Any “ethics of technology” that does not begin with this recognition is not Catholic but naturalistic.
The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, as interpreted by Carozza, represents the culmination of the modernist project: a document that speaks eloquently of “human dignity” while systematically evacuating it of its supernatural content, replacing the theology of the Cross with the anthropology of human flourishing, and offering the world not the Kingship of Christ but the benevolent smile of a neo-church that has finally completed its capitulation to modern civilization.
Quas Primas is not merely a feast to be celebrated—it is a permanent indictment of every attempt to speak of human dignity without first proclaiming: “You are Christ the King of glory.”
[Antichurch] Magnifica Humanitas: Modernist Anthropocentrism Disguised as Catholic Social Teaching
The National Register commentary by Paolo Carozza, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and co-chair of Meta’s “Oversight Board,” attempts to present “Pope” Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas as a profound meditation on human dignity in the age of artificial intelligence. Carozza argues that the encyclical’s true brilliance lies not in its treatment of technology but in its supposed deepening of the Church’s understanding of human dignity—its relational character, its unity of body, mind, and spirit, and even its relationship to human frailty and limitation. What Carozza’s enthusiastic endorsement reveals, however, is not the profundity of the conciliar sect’s magisterium but the utter bankruptcy of its theological method: a naturalistic, anthropocentric humanism that reduces the supernatural destiny of man to a horizontal, worldly project of “flourishing,” while systematically evading the only framework within which human dignity can truly be understood—the framework of original sin, redemption through the Cross, and the absolute sovereignty of Christ the King over all dimensions of human existence.
The Dignity of Man Without the Fall: A Modernist Heresy
The gravest omission in both the encyclical as summarized by Carozza and in Carozza’s own commentary is any substantive treatment of the Fall, original sin, and the radical woundedness of human nature after Adam’s transgression. Catholic doctrine before the Council taught with crystalline clarity that human dignity, while real, exists in a nature that is fallen—wounded in its intellect, will, and appetites, and ordered toward a supernatural end that can only be attained through the grace of Jesus Christ and the sacraments of His Church.
Pope Pius XI, in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), established the principle that Christ’s kingship extends over “all nations… even though their erroneous opinions have led them astray or discord has separated them from love,” encompassing “also all non-Cathians, so that most truly the entire human race is subject to the authority of Jesus Christ.” This is the only foundation upon which any coherent Catholic teaching on human dignity can be built: the recognition that every human being is subject to the authority and law of the Redeemer, and that dignity is inseparable from this subjection to divine order.
The modernist conception of dignity, by contrast, treats human nature as essentially intact and self-sufficient—needing not redemption but merely “enhancement” through technology and social progress. When Carozza writes that “human dignity always remains in important measure a mystery to be contemplated and plumbed more deeply,” he speaks as though the Church’s prior teaching on the subject were somehow deficient, as though the Fathers and Doctors of the Church—St. Augustine with his doctrine of original sin, St. Thomas Aquinas with his teaching on the natural law as participation in the eternal law—had failed to grasp the “depths” of what Leo XIV now supposedly reveals. This is the very essence of the modernist error condemned by St. Pius X in Lamentabili sane exitu (1907), which rejected the proposition that “Divine revelation is imperfect, and therefore subject to a continual and indefinite progress, corresponding with the advancement of human reason.”
Relational Dignity: A Substitute for Supernatural Vocation
Carozza places great emphasis on Leo XIV’s claim that “the dignity of the human person is inescapably relational,” that “we are made for relationship—with others, for love and friendship and community.” On its surface, this sounds harmless, even pious. But in the context of the conciliar sect’s systematic demolition of the supernatural order, what does “relational” actually mean? It means a horizontal, sociological concept of the human person—defined not by his relationship to God through sanctifying grace, but by his relationships to other human beings and to the material world.
The Catholic teaching is that man is indeed relational, but his primary and defining relationship is to his Creator. “For You have made us for Yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in You” (St. Augustine, Confessions I.1). The relational character of human dignity, properly understood, means that man is ordered toward communion with God—a communion that is made possible only through the Incarnation, the Redemption, and the sacramental life of the Church. To speak of “relational dignity” without this supernatural framework is to reduce the imago Dei to a sociological category, which is precisely the naturalism condemned by Pius IX in the Syllabus of Errors: “Human reason, without any reference whatsoever to God, is the sole arbiter of truth and falsehood, and of good and evil” (Proposition 3).
Frailty as Revelation: The Heresy of Wounded Nature Without Redemption
Perhaps the most dangerous passage in Carozza’s commentary—and, by his own enthusiastic endorsement, in the encyclical itself—is the claim that “our limits, even our suffering, are not at odds with what makes human beings bearers of irreducible value, but exactly the opposite. In the experience of those weaknesses and dependencies, we discover more truly that the grandeur of human dignity transcends those limits.” The encyclical states: “Finitude, when truly accepted, does not diminish us but opens us to recognizing the face of God and others.”
This is a profound distortion of the Catholic doctrine of suffering. The Catholic teaching is that suffering entered the world through sin (Gen. 3:16-19), that it is a consequence of the Fall, and that it is redeemed—not glorified in itself—by the Cross of Christ. St. Paul writes: “I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24). Suffering is redemptive when united to Christ; it is not intrinsically revelatory of human dignity. To claim that human frailty and limitation “open us to recognizing the face of God” apart from the Cross is to embrace a naturalistic mysticism of suffering that bypasses the entire economy of salvation.
St. Pius X, in Lamentabili sane exitu, condemned the modernist proposition that “the teaching about Christ transmitted by Paul, John, and by the Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon does not correspond to the teaching of Jesus, but is a teaching about Jesus formulated by Christian consciousness” (Proposition 31). The modernist method is precisely to dissolve the supernatural content of the Faith into subjective human experience—to replace the objective reality of redemption with the subjective “experience” of limitation. This is what Leo XIV’s encyclical accomplishes with its language of “finitude” and “frailty.”
Transhumanism: A Symptom, Not the Disease
Carozza rightly notes that the encyclical critiques transhumanism and posthumanism. But he fails to recognize—or deliberately conceals—that these ideologies are not aberrations from the modern world but its logical fruits. The transhumanist project is the inevitable consequence of a civilization that has rejected the supernatural destiny of man and replaced it with the idolatry of human power and progress.
Pope Pius XI warned in Quas Primas: “When God and Jesus Christ… were removed from laws and states and when authority was derived not from God but from men, the foundations of that authority were destroyed.” The transhumanist dream of “overcoming human limitation through technology” is the technological expression of the same pride that built the Tower of Babel—the pride that seeks to “be like God” (Gen. 3:5) not through obedience and grace but through human power and ingenuity.
But here lies the fatal contradiction of the conciliar sect’s position: while Leo XIV critiques transhumanism, the entire framework of Magnifica Humanitas—its naturalistic anthropology, its horizontal concept of relationality, its evasion of original sin and supernatural redemption—provides the very philosophical soil in which transhumanism grows. You cannot effectively critique the fruits of anthropocentrism while embracing its root.
The Silence on Christ the King: The Definitive Apostasy
What is most conspicuous by its absence in both the encyclical (as presented by Carozza) and in Carozza’s own commentary is any mention of the Kingship of Christ over human societies, over technology, over the entire order of human life. Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King precisely as a remedy against the “secularism of our times, so-called laicism, its errors and wicked endeavors”—the very secularism that now manifests itself in the dehumanizing ideologies of transhumanism and the “datafication of human identities.”
The Catholic teaching is unambiguous: Christ is King not merely of individual hearts but of nations, states, and all human institutions. “The Kingdom of our Redeemer encompasses all men,” Pius XI declared. Any treatment of “human dignity in the age of technology” that does not begin and end with the recognition of Christ’s absolute sovereignty over the technological order is not merely incomplete—it is a participation in the public apostasy that the Popes of the pre-conciliar era so vehemently condemned.
Pius IX, in the Syllabus of Errors, condemned the proposition that “the Roman Pontiff can, and ought to, reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (Proposition 80). The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, as presented by Carozza, does precisely this: it seeks to “reconcile” the Faith with the technological order, to baptize the “datafication of human identities” and the “harvesting of intimate desires for commercial gain” with the language of “relational dignity” and “human flourishing,” rather than condemning these as fruits of a civilization in revolt against its Creator.
Carozza and the Meta Connection: The Face of Neo-Church Collaboration
It is no coincidence that Paolo Carozza serves as co-chair of Meta’s “Oversight Board”—the very entity responsible for moderating content on Facebook and Instagram, platforms that have become primary instruments of the “datafication of human identities” and the “harvesting of intimate desires” that the encyclical purports to critique. This is the neo-church in microcosm: men who serve simultaneously at the altar of Christ and at the altar of Silicon Valley, who speak of “human dignity” while being structurally embedded in the very systems that systematically destroy it.
The pre-conciliar Church understood that collaboration with systems hostile to the Faith was not “engagement” but apostasy. The Syllabus of Errors condemned the notion that the Church should “tolerate the errors of philosophy, leaving it to correct itself” (Proposition 11) and the claim that “the Church has not the power of using force, nor has she any temporal power, direct or indirect” (Proposition 24). The neo-church, by contrast, has fully embraced the role of chaplain to the world—offering pious words about “dignity” while the machinery of technological dehumanization grinds on unabated.
Conclusion: The Only True Foundation of Human Dignity
The Catholic teaching on human dignity, properly understood, rests on three pillars that are entirely absent from Magnifica Humanitas as presented by Carozza:
1. The supernatural destiny of man: Man’s dignity consists in his creation in the image of God, his elevation to the state of grace, and his eternal destiny of beatitude in the vision of God. This dignity is not “relational” in a sociological sense but is rooted in the soul’s relationship to its Creator.
2. The reality of original sin and the necessity of redemption: Human nature is fallen, wounded, and incapable of attaining its supernatural end without the grace of Christ and the sacraments of His Church. Human dignity does not consist in the “acceptance of finitude” but in the transformation of fallen nature through grace.
3. The Kingship of Christ over all human societies: Human dignity is inseparable from the recognition of Christ’s absolute sovereignty over every dimension of human life—including technology, politics, economics, and culture. Any “ethics of technology” that does not begin with this recognition is not Catholic but naturalistic.
The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, as interpreted by Carozza, represents the culmination of the modernist project: a document that speaks eloquently of “human dignity” while systematically evacuating it of its supernatural content, replacing the theology of the Cross with the anthropology of human flourishing, and offering the world not the Kingship of Christ but the benevolent smile of a neo-church that has finally completed its capitulation to modern civilization.
Quas Primas is not merely a feast to be celebrated—it is a permanent indictment of every attempt to speak of human dignity without first proclaiming: “You are Christ the King of glory.”
Source:
Human Dignity and Human Frailty at the Heart of ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ (ncregister.com)
Date: 15.06.2026