“Remaining Human”: Leadership and Leadership Formation in Magnifica Humanitas

Abstract

Magnifica Humanitas (Leo XIV, 2026) addresses the safeguarding of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, and does so largely through an analysis of power: who holds it, how it is concentrated, and what its proper use requires. This article expounds the vision of leadership and of leadership formation that the encyclical proposes, reading it within the tradition of the Church’s documents on formation and ecclesiastical studies from Optatam Totius (1965) to Veritatis Gaudium (2017). The encyclical’s governing criterion is anthropological: authority is measured by whether those subject to it are recognised as persons rather than functions, and become more fully human under it. From this criterion the article traces the encyclical’s account of the leader’s self-understanding, marked by service, accepted limit, and the ordering of love; its account of the exercise of authority through discernment, distributed responsibility, and judgement that cannot be computed; its account of answerability, evaluation, and institutional memory; and its account of what the formation of leaders now requires, including integration of knowledge, a discipline of restraint, and a communicative formation adequate to a polarised public sphere.