And right now, that mission is up against high-powered people in Silicon Valley and in Washington who reject the very idea of a common good.
OpenAI’s (ChatGPT) Sam Altman has openly said that most jobs won’t survive what he’s building.
Palantir’s Peter Thiel wrote that democracy and freedom are incompatible — and his money has been shaping the Trump administration’s agenda for years now.
Elon Musk has put his largest AI data center in Boxtown — a historically Black neighborhood in Memphis — running gas turbines that pollute the air people there have to breathe.
When it’s fully built, it will draw as much electricity as a small city. No vote was taken.
The Pope calls this “the technocratic paradigm” — the logic of efficiency, control, and profit alone deciding what matters and what can be discarded.
He further calls the worldview that people must earn or justify their worth “particularly insidious.” The idea that the more efficient deserve more, that human beings are resources to be used rather than persons with dignity that no government can touch.
There are rights, he writes, that belong to everyone “simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them.”
He goes further. The earth’s goods — “soil, water, air and natural resources — are given by God to the entire human family to sustain the lives of all.” And: “it is not in accordance with God’s plan to use this gift in such a way that its benefits accrue solely to a select few.”
Then he asks us to choose. We are “servants of the coming Kingdom, instead of lords of towers destined for ruin.”
Pope Leo asks everyone to “abandon the construction of yet another Tower of Babel and to join forces in building up the common good.”
