Magnifica humanitas: A new teaching in an ongoing tradition

Sr Helen Alford OP
28 September 2026, The Tablet

From the Tower of Babel to the rise of AI, Pope Leo XIV’s first social encyclical confronts the moral challenges of a changing age, inviting Christians to place human dignity, the common good and hope at the heart of social renewal

Catholic Social Teaching, despite the joke that it is the best kept secret of the Catholic Church, has had a series of post-conciliar popes who have developed it extensively. In the 1967 encyclical Populorum progressio, Paul VI initiated a new line of thinking focused on the concept of development which was recognised by subsequent popes in the ways that they commemorated it.1

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