The reactions to Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas have been plentiful, ranging across a spectrum of interpretations of the document. Some encountered a cautious and specific moral reflection upon emerging technologies; others, a sweeping critique of technocracy and concentrated power. The New York Times faulted the encyclical for being “disappointingly mild”, implying that Leo XIV stopped short of offering genuinely radical institutional or economic prescriptions. The business magazine Forbes, by contrast, interpreted Magnifica Humanitas in almost apocalyptic terms, warning of “moral, social collapse” and foregrounding the Pope’s “Tower of Babel warning without human control”. Contrasts such as these reveal that the encyclical has a power to unsettle assumptions across ideological and intellectual boundaries simultaneously – that itself is usually a sign of something profoundly Catholic.