On Tuesday, Italy celebrated the Festa della Repubblica, the eightieth anniversary of the referendum – the first in which women could vote – that established the Italian Republic. All Rome’s museums were free and all the most agreeable coffee bars were shut.

It’s all in those early chapters of Magnifica Humanitas – the ones nobody’s really interested in – where Leo sets out the proper relationship between Church and society. The scale of the encyclical encouraged some frantic CTRL+F analysis straight after its publication (and let’s not even start on AI summaries), yielding morsels for everyone to enjoy. By Monday, the Italian press was publishing exegeses of the quote from The Return of the King in chapter five.

But if you’re backward enough to start reading at the beginning, the variety of the document seems entirely natural. Professor Paolo Carozza of the University of Notre Dame, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences who chairs the Meta Oversight Board, observes that the collapsing attention economy makes it hard to recognise coherence. The encyclical’s unique contribution to the digital revolution is in the application of general principles to the atomised crises that obsess its partisans.

“I have yet to encounter anyone who does not have a sincere desire to be doing good,” Carozza tells me of his dealings with Silicon Valley. What these individuals lack is a full sense of responsibility for the technology they have developed and its consequences. A few critics have complained of a lack of instruction in the encyclical: “Tell us what to do,” they told the Pope. That’s the CTRL+F understanding of the Magisterium, where you look something up to check if it’s allowed, rather than the time-consuming business of following the development of an idea from the start and taking responsibility for it your self. It’s an understanding of the role of the laity inherited from Newman, says Carozza, and through Vatican II it saturates those early chapters of Magnifica Humanitas.

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