How can we build peace in a world fractured by the return of power logic and disrupted by the rise of artificial intelligence? Leo XIV’s answer is clear: by deepening our thirst for truth. Its simplicity will undoubtedly disconcert those who expect salvation from complex artifacts or perpetual innovations. However, this response is necessary and crucial. Because it is only with a view to the truth that dialogue thrives.
At a time when our country is seeing partisan blocs stand face to face, the Holy Father recalls that truth is not an instrument of power nor a territory to defend, but a “shared responsibility of all the people”. This affirmation, at the heart of Magnifica humanitas, is not only theological. It is the foundation of all democratic life, and it directly concerns those who are responsible for educating future generations.
Epistemic fatigue
By focusing on truth as a common good, the pope’s remarks go far beyond the confessional register. It touches on the very condition of democratic dialogue. The truth is not decreed from a summit – neither political, nor technological, nor even ecclesiastical. It is constructed through the patient confrontation of different perspectives, often more complementary than opposed, a confrontation that Habermas designated “communicational reason”.
When the generated image is worth the real image, when the arguments manufactured by algorithms replace the dialogue of consciences, it is the very possibility of deliberating that collapses. Democracy does not only die under the blows of authoritarianism, it withers in the epistemic fatigue of a people who have lost the taste for truth.
The pontifical reflection finds an obvious extension in the educational field. If truth is the basis of dialogue, it is also that of transmission between generations. Because transmission is not only a matter of content – knowledge, values, collective memory. It presupposes trust in the words of others, in the possibility that the experience accumulated by those who precede us will teach us something that we could not acquire alone.
The accumulation of knowledge dries up
However, this trust presupposes a common space where generations mutually recognize each other as inhabiting the same reality. When each generation navigates in its own information bubble indifferent to the meeting of the ages, dialogue between generations becomes impossible. A society that loses this thread of this dialogue is condemned only to the emergencies of the moment, incapable of inheriting, of transmitting, of hoping collectively.
The erasure of the boundaries between true and false also weakens the relational space without which the truth cannot emerge. The patient journey toward truth fades in the face of a “culture of immediacy and hyperstimulation that fuels fatigue, boredom and apathy.” Leo XIV reminds us that the digital revolution is not just a matter of technology or tools. It reconfigures our cognitive and emotional capacities, our relationship to time, to effort, to otherness. The digital age therefore calls for renewed attention to the inner life: “rhythms that provide for silence, in-depth study, reading, measured confrontation”.
It is the school’s mission to hold this thread together. Not as a museum of the past or a diploma counter, but as a place “where new generations can learn to seek and love the truth, to question the meaning of life and the dignity of each person”. Freed from this quest for meaning, the accumulation of knowledge dries up: “an educational system devoid of love for the truth risks seeing the light of day, in which the incessant flow of information replaces research, reflection and discernment”. The quality of training is not measured by compliance with the tools available, but by the depth of the relationship that each student forms with reality and with those who support them.
How to respond to this relational emergency? Leo XIV’s text recalls the depth and relevance of an essential principle of the social doctrine of the Church: subsidiarity. It is not the systems that train, the programs that instruct, the decrees that accompany. These are the communities, women and men gathered around the children entrusted to them.
Deepening subsidiarity
By calling for the renewal of educational alliances “between families, schools, Christian communities and public institutions”, the Holy Father is not drawing up an administrative list, but laying the foundations for a true anthropology of education. The truth is transmitted in embodied relationships, in communities that share not only programs but convictions and a vision of man. Structures on a human scale, where relationships prevail over procedure, where trust precedes control, where quality is better than conformity.
The educational challenge calls for a deepening of this subsidiarity. An educational community is not a relay for implementing national directives. She is an educational subject in her own right, capable of initiative and discernment. The standardization of responses to digital technology is itself a form of the Babel syndrome that the Pope denounces: claiming a single solution deployed from the top, which would resolve through technology what can only be resolved through relationships. Rebuilding Jerusalem means trusting, protecting, allowing everyone to take the initiative, to invent responses adapted to each student, each family, each territory.
Attaching ourselves to the truth therefore means renewing this alliance between all those involved in education, around the children and young people entrusted to us. It is as communities that we can choose between building the Tower of Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem, “between a power that claims to dominate heaven and a people who, in the presence of God, begin to work unitedly to raise the walls of fraternal coexistence.”
This choice is not only spiritual. It is educational, institutional, political. It engages our common responsibility towards the generations that succeed us – and towards those who preceded us and of whom we are the heirs. May Catholic teaching, with the freedom and rootedness that characterize it, bear witness for its part to this “beauty of a magnificent humanity inhabited by God”.
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