Magnifica Humanitas of Pope Leo XIV: a new vision and a new pontifical Style

29/05/2026 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Leonardo Boff*

Upon finishing reading the first encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, we notice, with surprise, the introduction of a new style of argumentation: it is no longer the classic ecclesiastical style, with many references to Christian thinkers of the first centuries. But a new, contemporary one, which dialogues with various fields of knowledge and authors, men and women, beyond their confessional origin. It seems to us that we are reading a text by some contemporary theologian.

First of all, it is worth highlighting the generally hopeful tone of the encyclical when addressing such a controversial and thorny topic as Artificial Intelligence (AI). But it is realistic in describing the world situation of permanent belligerence: “it is not a gloomy and pessimistic description, but a necessary denunciation” (MH, 210). This denunciation becomes crystal clear when referring to “bombings against civilians, attacks on hospitals, schools or vital infrastructure, violence affecting children… scandals that wound humanity itself” (MH, 216). It is as if he were reporting on the crimes of the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip. He assumes the perspective of the victims “because it is not right to remain neutral in the face of conflicts” (MH, 216).

But when directly addressing the challenge of AI, positively, he immediately states that it always remains artificial and never replaces the natural (MH, 97). However, “it can represent a form of participation in the divine act of creation” (MH, 111). This fact implies that it must assume “a special ethical and spiritual responsibility, because each design choice expresses a vision of humanity” (MH, 111; 117; 129).

Moreover, this point is crucial in the Pope’s understanding: it is not enough to consider whether technology and AI are good or bad and their ends good, but to clarify “the underlying vision, whether they treat the human being as material to be perfected or surpassed…or their moral and social progress” (MH, 117). AI “is not morally neutral, since every technical artifact implies decisions and priorities: what it measures, what it ignores, what it optimizes, and how it classifies people and situations… One must ask “what is the design, what idea of person and society is inscribed in the data and models that guide it” (MH, 104).

It is “intrinsically ambiguous, it can defend as well as attack, or the boundary between protection and aggression tends to blur” (MH, 183). It is at this point that Pope Leo makes a strong criticism of two ideologies, transhumanism and posthumanism. These “give total centrality to technology and the dream of overcoming the limits of the human condition” (MH, 116). Transhumanism wants to exponentially exacerbate human capabilities (through biomedicine, body engineering, algorithms) to be more efficient and thus achieve lucrative advantages. Posthumanism “aims to go beyond the human being and connect him in such a way to the machine and the environment an environment that would inaugurate a new stage of evolution” (MH, 116).

Here, the natural limits of human beings are disregarded, and a purely technical “salvation” is promised” (MH 117). We can say that today, as several analysts have pointed out, an idolatry of technology prevails, a true religion. Among us, our world-renowned neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, professor in Autin University has publicly denounced this.

It would be lengthy to comment on the various points addressed by the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. Practically, its scope extends from philosophies of life, through politics (the various radicalisms), economics (financialization and cryptocurrencies), the rescue of the heart, education, the importance of the social imaginary, the issue of work and ecology, culminating in utopias based on digital, technological and cybernetic culture and finally in the civilization of love. This “is not a naive utopia, but a demanding project” (MH 186).

In summary, the intellectual, theological, and spiritual background of the current Pope is evident. He is founded on Saint Augustine (354-430), the inspiration for his Religious Order (Augustinians). As is known, the Bishop of Hippo, one of the geniuses of Western thought, articulates his vision of history in the dialectical interplay between the two cities and the two loves (MH,129-130): the earthly city and the heavenly city, the love of God and neighbor and the love of self. Biblically, this means: building Babel, the prototype of the human being who arrogantly thinks only of himself, forgetting God, and rebuilding Jerusalem, an example of the human being who makes history thinking of God and, from Him, of himself (MH, 130).

Leo XIV updates this dialectic with what is currently happening: a system of surveillance and control over populations, proposed by some digital platforms, especially the most perverse of all, Palantir (to control all the people of a country and use AI for war), and the system of care for the human being, of their respectful relationship with nature and universal fraternity among humans and between them and the Whole. All his reflection presupposes this current confrontation.

Clearly takes a stand for care, for selfless love, for the perspective of the victims, the poor, and the oppressed. It presents us with a contemporary, highly relevant text, using the language of our time and therefore accessible to all, without sacrificing the gravity and depth of the issues to be considered, addressed, and pursued in a way that generates hope for the possibility of a different world, affectionate, friendly to nature, and open to the Infinite.

In conclusion, we can affirm that the current Pope, following in the footsteps of Saint Augustine and the great doctrinal tradition of the Church on social issues (summarized in the encyclical MH nn. 28-44), re-proposes the theme of the civilization of love (a term coined by Pope Paul VI). He defines it thus: “it consists of translating charity into structures of justice, in giving institutional form to fraternity and considering the other – whether person or people – as a necessary ally for the construction of the common good… Only this love can generate a stable international order, transforming coexistence from a simple armed coexistence into a community of destiny” (MH, 186).

Leonardo Boff,1938, is a Brazilian theologian and belongs to the Earth Charter International Group.

This liberation theologian was once silenced by the Vatican. In the Laudato Si’ era, he’s getting a second look.

03/02/2024 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

James T. KeaneJanuary 30, 2024- Review America

Leonardo Boff (Brasil TV/Wikimedia Commons)

Reflecting on more than 80 years of life in his 2022 book Thoughts and Dreams of an Old Theologian, Leonardo Boff summed up many of his theological and personal concerns in a clarion call for change. “Either we care for Mother Earth, our Common Home, and we join hands to work together in solidarity, or we join the procession of those headed for their own funeral. Here we see the importance and the urgency of nurturing good dreams that lead us to transformational activities and constantly nourish our hope,” he wrote, adding:

This is the dream I want to pass on, as my life nears toward its end, to the young people who will come after us. It is their task to take forward the dream of Jesus, of Pope Francis, of liberation theology at its broadest, and of so many others who also nurture dreams of a better humanity. These young people will have to be the leaders in shaping a better future for us, for nature, and for Mother Earth.

If those dreams and concerns sound somewhat familiar, even to a reader unfamiliar with Boff’s work, it is because many of them were also reflected in recent Vatican documents like “Laudato Si’” and “Querida Amazonia.” After the publication of the former, rumors circulated that Pope Francis had personally asked Boff for his input on the writing of the encyclical.

Leonardo Boff, the pope’s theologian?

After the publication of “Laudato Si’,” rumors circulated that Pope Francis had personally asked Leonardo Boff for his input on the writing of the encyclical.

It was not always thus. In a long and still-ongoing career, Boff was for many years one of the leading voices of liberation theology—and became a lightning rod for criticism of that theological school in the 1980s and 1990s.

Born in Concórdia, Brazil, in 1938, Boff entered the Franciscans in 1959 and was ordained in 1964. He earned a doctorate in philosophy and theology from the University of Munich in 1970. In the years that followed, Boff joined scholars such as Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jon Sobrino, S.J., and Juan Luis Segundo, S.J., in promoting the theology of liberation through books like Jesus Christ Liberator (1974). He was a strong proponent of comunidades de base, the small and local “base communities” which were championed by liberation theologians as centers of theological praxis in the face of economic injustice and structural sin. His 1987 book, Introducing Liberation Theology, co-written with his brother Clodovis, is still widely used in colleges and theological schools as a textbook.

In 1985, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) censured Boff for his book Church: Charism and Power and silenced him for a year. The C.D.F., then led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, criticized Boff’s “ecclesiological relativism” in seeing both Protestant and Catholic church structures as incomplete, and also cited his praxis-based approach to theology (centered on the base communities) that, the C.D.F. argued, seemed to relativize the nature of truth.

In a 1988 book on the matter, The Silencing of Leonardo Boff: The Vatican and the Future of World Christianity, the theologian Harvey Cox suggested that the Vatican singled out Boff because it saw the “grass-roots religious energy” Boff represented as a threat to the church’s teaching authority.

Cox, wrote the theologian Lamin Sanneh in America in 1988, placed Boff’s silencing “in the global context of world Christianity, in particular the potential scale of the fallout from the growing challenge of third-world Christianity to the accustomed privileges of Western religious hegemony.”

Harvey Cox suggested that the Vatican singled out Boff because it saw the “grass-roots religious energy” Boff represented as a threat to the church’s teaching authority.

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Cox saw Boff as “an evangelical radical, not a modernist” who did not want to bring the church up to date, necessarily, but to align it more closely with the Gospels, wrote America editor in chief George W. Hunt, S.J., in 1989. Cardinal Ratzinger, Hunt wrote, sought to recenter the church “intellectually and liturgically in its ancient homeland (Europe), and to achieve this his congregation must be ‘the protector not only of the integrity of the faith and the documents of Vatican II but also of their proper interpretation against cagey [non-European] theologians.’” Boff, on the other hand, found the solution to what ailed the church “not in ‘recentering’ but in ‘decentering,’ that is, a form of Catholicism ‘in which the Gospel can take root in a variety of disparate cultures and flourish especially among the poor.’”

Boff continued to write and teach (he was a professor of theology at the Jesuit Institute for Philosophy and Theology in Petropolis, Brazil, for 22 years) after his silencing ended, publishing such books as Ecclesiogenesis and Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor. In 1992, Boff faced a potential silencing once again from the C.D.F. Recognizing that his status as a priest under obedience in a religious order was an issue in the C.D.F.’s repeated efforts to discipline him, he resigned from the Franciscans that June. The next year, he took a position at Rio de Janeiro State University in Brazil, where he is now the Professor Emeritus of Ethics, Philosophy of Religion and Ecology.

In 2000, Cardinal Ratzinger reflected on the contretemps in a speech at the Vatican that suggested Boff’s silencing stood as a warning to other theologians. “At a distance of 15 years, it is clearer than it perhaps was then that it was not so much a matter of a single theological author, but of a vision of the church which circulates with different variations and which is still very current today,” Ratzinger said. Boff was one of many theologians censured by the C.D.F. during the pontificate of John Paul II, a process America’s editors criticized in a 2001 editorial, “Due Process in the Church.”

In recent years, in addition to Thoughts and Dreams of an Old Theologian, Boff has also published such books as Christianity in a Nutshell, Come Holy Spirit and The Following of Jesus. His theological work has increasingly focused on the ecological crisis facing the world.

“Boff’s skillful use of the sociology of knowledge enables him to explain why theologians of other ages interpreted the faith within the total social, cultural, political and economic realities of their day,” wrote Joseph P. Fitzpatrick, S.J., in America in 1990. “It also prompts him to declare why the perspective of liberation theology is the only authentic interpretation of the faith in the presence of the massive inhumanity, oppression and injustice of our day.”

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Boff’s primary concern theologically and sociologically has always been the poor and marginalized, particularly in Latin America. But that might not be the audience needs to hear him the most. “The Christian slum-dweller in Lima or Sao Paulo does not need a Gustavo Gutiérrez or à Leonardo Boff in order to know that something is terribly wrong and has to change, or that the Gospel has plenty to say about the nature of that change,” wrote Kevin P. O’Higgins, S.J., in a 1990 essay for America.

“It is the comfortable Christian suburbanite—clerical, religious or lay—in North America or Western Europe who has [the] most difficulty in seeing what is wrong and what is demanded by an authentic faith.”

Boff’s 1987 book, Introducing Liberation Theology, co-written with his brother Clodovis, is still widely used in colleges and theological schools as a textbook.

James T. Keane

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James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a senior editor at America.

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Has the era of global boiling of the planet begun?

03/08/2023 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

This expression is not mine, but that of the UN Secretary General, António Guterrez, uttered on July 27, 2023, upon learning of the unexpected acceleration of global warming. This has reached the point where the planet is entering a boiling process, given the carelessness of human processes, especially industrialism and capitalist productivism (including China) that misuse fossil energy, coal and other greenhouse-producing elements.

The average normal climate on Earth is 15 degrees Celcius. But this average has started to rise so much that it exceeded more than 17 degrees Celcius in July 2023.

This is all due to the fact that every year about 40 billion tons of CO2 are released into the atmosphere, which remains in the atmosphere for more than 100 years, plus nitrous acid and methane, which is 28 times more harmful than CO2, although it stays in the atmosphere for about 9-10 years.

The consequences of this increase can be seen in prolonged droughts, the flooding of entire regions and cities, hurricanes, extratropical cyclones such as in the south of Brazil, and fires almost everywhere on the planet. The impact on human lives is huge. The well-known journal Nature Medicine estimated that the high heat of 2022 caused 61,000 deaths in Europe alone. Let’s not even talk about Africa and Asia, or poorer countries that have seen thousands of children and elderly people killed, particularly in central India, where temperatures have been soaring.

Looking at how little the big corporations and states are doing to stop this slow but ever present rise in temperature, everything indicates that we have already reached the point of no return. Science and technology have arrived late, they cannot stop the rise, they only help to mitigate the damaging effects that will be inevitable.

But not everything is fatal. It is worth remembering that the improbable can happen: human beings, under the perception of the risk of disappearing, take a leap of consciousness, towards the noosphere as Teilhard de Chardin projected in 1933, that is, uniting heart and mind (noosefera) to change the way of producing, consuming and particularly relating to nature, feeling part of it, not its masters and taking care of it.

If we look at the biography of the Earth, we see that warming belongs to the evolution of our planet. When we did not yet exist as a species on Earth, 250 million years ago, the climate reached and remained for thousands and thousands of years at 32 degrees Celcius. A massive extinction of species of living things occurred. Later, 50 million years ago, the Earth reached 21 degrees Celcius; crocodiles and palm trees adapted to this warming but there was also a major extinction of living organisms. Closer to us, 130,000 years ago, the Earth reached the temperature we are now experiencing, 17 degrees Celcius. Many creatures disappeared and the sea rose by 6-9 meters, which would have covered the whole of the Netherlands and the low-lying northern parts of the eurozone.

This increase in the earth’s climate belongs to geo-evolution. But the current one is caused by human beings themselves, not so much by the great poor majorities, but by the populations of the opulent countries, without the right measure in their actions either in the assault on nature or in the forms of sumptuous and unsympathetic consumption. It is said that we have inaugurated a new geological era, the Anthropocene. This concept means that the greatest threat to life on the planet and to the future of nature depends on human beings. In the words of biodiversity biologist Edward Wilson, humans have behaved like the Satan of the Earth and turned the Garden of Eden into a slaughterhouse. Some go even further and refer to the necrocene, given the increasing process of death (necro) of species of living beings in the order of 70-100 thousand per year. Lately there has been talk of the pyrocene, i.e. the age of fire. This is also caused by humans but particularly because the soil has become drier, the rocks have become hotter; all it takes is dry leaves and sticks on them to produce large and devastating fires almost everywhere on the planet, even in humid Siberia.

What scenarios might we face? They are all gloomy if there is no quantum leap that defines another path and another destiny for the life-system and the Earth-system. There is no denying that the planet is getting warmer day by day. The UN agencies that monitor the evolution of this disastrous event warn us that between the years 2025-2027 we will have exceeded the 1.5 degrees Celcius predicted for 2030 by the Paris agreement in 2015. Everything has been anticipated and by this date, between 2025-2027, we will reach what is happening today, a climate that could stabilize above 35 degrees, reaching 38-40 degrees in some regions of the planet. Millions will have to emigrate because they can no longer live in their beloved homelands and crops will be totally lost. Brazil, currently one of the largest exporters of food, will see its production profoundly reduced. According to James Lovelock, (Veja, Yellow Pages, October 25, 2006) Brazil, because of its vast sunny expanse, will be one of the hardest hit by global warming and climate change. Those in agribusiness should heed these warnings, for as Pope Francis wrote in his encyclical Laudato Si: How to Care for Our Common Home, addressed to all humanity and not just Christians: “Catastrophic predictions can no longer be looked upon with scorn and irony; we would leave for the next generations too many ruins, deserts and garbage” (n.161).

This is what no one wants for their children and grandchildren. But to do so we must summon up the courage and boldness to change course. Only a radical ecological change can save the conditions that will allow our continuity on this splendid planet Earth.

Leonardo Boff is an eco-theologian and has written: The Dignity of the Earth: the cry of the poor and the cry of the Earth, Vozes, various editions; Inhabit the Earth, Vozes 2022; member of the International Initiative for the Initiative of the Earth Charter; The Protection of the Earth, Vozes 2022.

The current collapse of ethics

13/05/2023 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

I perceive two main factors, among others, that strike at the heart of ethics: the globalization of predatory capitalism and the commodification of society.

The globalization of capitalism, as a mode of production and its political expression, neo-liberalism showed the perverse consequences of capitalist ethics: its structuring axes are unlimited profit, accumulated individually or by large corporations, unbridled competition, the assault on goods and services of nature, the relaxation of laws and the minimization of the state in its function of guaranteeing a minimally balanced society. Such ethics is highly conflictive because it does not know solidarity, but competition that makes all opponents, if not enemies to be defeated.

Quite different, for example, is the ethics of the Mayan culture. This puts everything centered in the heart, since all things were born from the love of two great hearts, Heaven and Earth. The ethical ideal is to create sensitive, fair, transparent and true hearts in all people.

Or the ethics of “bien vivir y convivir” of the Andeans, based on balance with all things, between humans, with nature and with the universe.

Globalization, interrelating all cultures, also ended up revealing the plurality of ethical paths. One of its consequences is the general relativization of ethical values. We know that law and order, values of fundamental ethical practice, are the prerequisites for any civilization anywhere in the world.

What we observe is that humanity is giving in to barbarism towards a true global dark age, such is the ethical breakdown that we are seeing.

The second major obstacle to ethics is the commodification of society, what Karl Polaniy already called “The Great Transformation” in 1944. It is the phenomenon of the transition from a market economy to a purely market society.

Everything becomes merchandise, something already predicted by Karl Marx in his text “The Misery of Philosophy” of 1848, when he referred to the time when the most sacred things like truth and conscience would be taken to the market; it would be “the time of great corruption and universal venality”. For we live in this time: nowledge, schools, universities, neo-pentecostal churches, courses, lectures, counseling, sex, human organs, everything, everything is an object of business and gain. A self-serving and mercantilist relationship prevails, which greatly weakens solidarity, cooperation and gratuity.

The economy, especially the speculative one, dictates the direction of politics and society as a whole, which is characterized by the generation of a deep gap between the rich few and the great impoverished majorities. Here, traces of barbarism and cruelty are revealed as few times in history.

What is the ethics that can guide us as humanity living in the same Common Home? It is that ethics that is rooted in what is specific to us, as humans and that, therefore, is universal and can be assumed by all.

I believe that in the first place is the ethics of care. According to the fable 220 of the slave Higino of the roman imperial time and well interpreted by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time and detailed by me in Knowing how to care, it constitutes the ontological substratum of the human being, that is to say, that set of objective factors without which the human being would never arise and other living beings.

Because care is of the essence of what is human, everyone can experience it and give it concrete forms, according to different cultures. Care presupposes a friendly and loving relationship with reality, with an outstretched hand for solidarity and not a clenched fist for competition. At the center of care is life. Civilization must be bio-socio-centered.

Another fact of our human essence is the solidarity and ethics that derive from it. We know today through bioanthropology that it was the solidarity of our anthropoid ancestors that allowed us to make the leap from animality to humanity. They sought food and consumed it in solidarity. We all live because there was and there is a minimum of solidarity, starting with the family. What was founding yesterday is still founding today.

Another ethical path, linked to our strict humanity, is the ethics of universal responsibility. To be responsible is to realize the beneficial or harmful consequences of our personal and social actions. Either we responsibly assume the destiny of our Common Home together or else we will walk a path of no return. We are responsible for the sustainability of Gaia and its ecosystems so that we can continue to live together with the whole community of life.

The philosopher Hans Jonas, who first elaborated “The Responsibility Principle”, added to it the importance of collective fear. When this appears and humans begin to realize that they may meet a tragic end and even disappear as a species, an ancestral fear erupts that leads them to an ethic of survival. The unconscious assumption is that the value of life is above any other cultural, religious or economic value.

It is also important to rescue the ethics of justice for all. Justice is the minimum right that we give to the other, so that he can continue to exist and give him what he deserves as a person: dignity and respect. Institutions, in particular, must be fair and equitable to avoid the privileges and social exclusions that so many victims produce, particularly in Brazil, one of the most unequal, that is to say, most unfair in the world. This explains the hatred and discrimination that tear society apart, coming not from the people, but from those wealthy elites who do not accept rights for all but want to preserve their privileges.

Justice does not only apply to humans, but also to nature and the Earth, which are bearers of rights and, therefore, must be included in our concept of socio-ecological democracy.

Finally, we must incorporate an ethic of shared sobriety to achieve what Xi Jinping, the supreme leader of China, said “a moderately well-off society”. This means a minimal and achievable ideal.

These are some fundamental parameters for an ethics, valid for each people and for humanity, gathered in the Common House. Otherwise, we may experience a social and ecological Armageddon.

Leonardo Boff wrote: How to take care of the Common Home, Petropolis/Rio 2018.