By Marion Miner
It can sometimes happen that a person reading two things at once—two books, or a book and an essay, or a poem and a newspaper column—will find an unexpected and remarkable relationship between the two things being read, each illuminating and giving color to the other.
This happened to me a few years ago. I was reading Pope St. Pius X’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis for a study group at the same time I was reading Robert Hugh Benson’s classic dystopian novel “Lord of the World” for fun (also, as it happens, published in 1907). The two authors, both Catholic priests but separated by the particular responsibility of their offices, by the fact that one was writing an encyclical and the other a work of fiction, and by the nations of their birth (one Italian, the other English), simultaneously published reflections on the state of the world at the turn of the 20th century that profoundly reinforced each other.
It happened to me again this year as I read Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas (2026) and, shortly thereafter, Jean Danielou’s “Prayer as a Political Problem” (1967). I want to suggest that “Prayer as a Political Problem” is a great help to understanding the main thrust of Magnifica Humanitas, which is not artificial intelligence as such, but an urgent renewal of the perennial question: “Who is man?” Only after this question, and descending from it, is the encyclical a reflection on man’s engagement with technology and how it may either ennoble or deform him.
In “Prayer as a Political Problem,” Father Danielou—neither a pope nor an American (but French), writing six decades earlier and in a completely different kind of work than an encyclical—asks the same basic question and explores much the same terrain as Pope Leo XIV in Magnifica Humanitas.
Father Danielou describes a typical working person whose daily life is characterized by a “problem of rhythm, of the pace of time,” which admits of no silence or solitude and must meet “a never-ending barrage of demands from outside himself.” He typically escapes by visiting “the cinema,” the only place where he can be alone, where he obtains a release from that relentless pressure “by becoming depersonalized.”
This “never-ending barrage,” the “problem of rhythm” in daily life, and the escape to passive entertainment which is not bad considered simply of itself, but numbs us with repeated usage and does nothing to refresh or develop the personality—is this a phenomenon only of the ‘60s?
Father Danielou does not condemn “technological civilization” (as Pope Leo does not condemn “artificial intelligence”), and in fact he posits that the evident dangers posed by new technologies often lead us—individuals and whole societies—out of necessity to rediscover who man is, what he is for, and what will ennoble him versus what will depersonalize or deform him. Father Danielou asserts that Catholics living in our age have a special responsibility to find how to make “the religious dimension” (the sacred, the real) “really present in the technological civilization, working through the framework of society itself.” This means taking the world as it is and responding to it as it is, not shutting it out and trying to go back in time. Encounter with the living God—our end-all and be-all—cannot become the privilege of only a few who have the willpower to seek him out in an otherwise godless world, for “only a few [will] be able to find God in a world organized without reference to him.”
I will end by proposing another thought: just as Pascendi and “Lord of the World” warned, in 1907, of the danger of the integrity of the faith rotting away and being emptied of meaning from inside—by Catholic laypeople and clergy alike, trading revealed truths for sentimental and less demanding imitations—so Magnifica Humanitas and “Prayer as a Political Problem” describe a world in which human beings themselves are in danger—if we are not careful—of being hollowed out, depersonalized, because we trade personality, initiative, and interpersonal communion (truly human things) for uniformity, safety, and efficiency (which are desirable characteristics for machines).
We can avoid this hollowing out—and more, give ourselves with God’s grace a chance to become something great. But we must continually remember who we are, from Whom we receive ourselves, and why we truly should love what we receive. From this self-understanding we gain firm ground on which to stand and judge what is worthy and unworthy of man.
