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For each AI chip de­signed by Nvidia, AMD, Google, and Amazon, we es­ti­mate the per-chip cost of four com­po­nent cat­e­gories: mem­ory (HBM), logic dies, ad­vanced pack­ag­ing (CoWoS), and aux­il­iary com­po­nents. We then mul­ti­ply those per-chip costs by es­ti­mated quar­terly pro­duc­tion vol­umes to get to­tal com­po­nent spend­ing in each cat­e­gory, and com­pute each cat­e­go­ry’s share of to­tal com­po­nent spend­ing per quar­ter from Q1 2024 to Q4 2025.

We find that mem­o­ry’s share rose from 52% to 63% over this pe­riod, while pack­ag­ing fell from 19% to 15% and aux­il­iary com­po­nents from 15% to 9%. Logic die share stayed roughly con­stant near 13 – 14%. Total com­po­nent spend on AI chips grew from ap­prox­i­mately $22 bil­lion in 2024 to $52 bil­lion in 2025, with HBM spend­ing alone ac­count­ing for roughly $20 bil­lion of that in­crease.

Data

Analysis

Assumptions and lim­i­ta­tions

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AI chip com­po­nent cost shares by quar­ter

CSV, Updated May 21, 2026

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AI Chip Components

AI chip sup­ply chain con­sump­tion data.

I’m call­ing it now, the adop­tion of AI agents into soft­ware de­vel­op­ment will be one of the most costly mis­takes in the field’s his­tory. Agents can­not pro­gram, and it’s tak­ing longer and longer to re­al­ize that they can’t. They are a highly so­phis­ti­cated sta­tis­ti­cal model de­signed to mimic the dis­tri­b­u­tion of pro­gram­ming. The out­put is bro­ken, but in a way that’s get­ting harder and harder to de­tect. Which is ex­actly what you’d ex­pect from an in­creas­ingly ac­cu­rate sta­tis­ti­cal model.

At first, I re­jected this. I bought into the Twitter ex­pla­na­tion of sta­tus anx­i­ety. I de­fine some of my self worth by my pro­gram­ming abil­i­ties, so would­n’t it make sense to get de­fen­sive around that loss? Deny the mod­els can code for as long as I could to pre­serve my ego?

I mean, it’s very clear they can solve math prob­lems I could­n’t hope to solve if I de­voted my life to it. So why can’t they pro­gram? Maybe I’m just not good enough of a pro­gram­mer to rec­og­nize their ge­nius.

I re­ally tried for the last 6 months. I wrote some parts of tiny­grad with agents. I re­versed a USB <-> PCIe chip with agents. But each time I sus­pected I could have done it bet­ter and faster man­u­ally. The agent front­loads all the progress, then gives you a slot ma­chine lever to pull to hope it gets the pol­ish done. It never quite gets there.

And in be­fore, “you are us­ing it wrong.” I have tried all the dif­fer­ent mod­els, dif­fer­ent har­nesses, dif­fer­ent prompts. It’s not this. The peo­ple who say this would prob­a­bly say the same thing about slot ma­chines, you see, you have to bet 5 lines af­ter you get a cherry no won­der you aren’t win­ning!

I’m not say­ing that AI is­n’t use­ful, it clearly is. It’s def­i­nitely a bet­ter Google for most searches. And when­ever you need a quick pro­to­type and don’t care about pol­ish, it is ab­surdly fast. But is it a soft­ware en­gi­neer? Not close to the bar at any com­pany I have worked at. The key as­pect is know­ing when to use it and when not to.

I thought more about the self worth preser­va­tion thing. AFL found more bugs than LLMs and no­body felt that way about it. Chess and Go are more pop­u­lar than ever. I can­not fuck­ing wait un­til I have armies of ro­bot as­so­ci­ates I can trust to clean up my code! I don’t fear loss of sta­tus, I al­most think this is some kind of psyop to sell agents. Fear of loss is one of the only ways to make big com­pa­nies move. Though I think in that fear they are mak­ing a big mis­take.

Agents will end up hurt­ing large or­ga­ni­za­tions more than high per­form­ing in­di­vid­u­als or small orgs. I’ve watched how my friends and cowork­ers have adopted these tools over the last 6 months. A trait you find in all high per­form­ing peo­ple is the abil­ity to er­ror cor­rect, and they have mostly been good at see­ing when slop is slop. It takes a bit to ex­plore/​ex­ploit and tune the outer loops around when to use them, when to trust them, how to use them, etc…but I haven’t seen any­one of them move to a model where they don’t care­fully read and un­der­stand each line, ex­cept in some con­fined do­mains.

Contrast this with a large or­ga­ni­za­tion. Much slower feed­back loops, much less align­ment. The bot­tom per­form­ers won’t have that self check. They are the ones pro­duc­ing 10x out­put with the agents. What do you think is hap­pen­ing to the av­er­age out­put of that or­ga­ni­za­tion? What is hap­pen­ing to the av­er­age out­put of the world?

Agents will end up pro­duc­ing more code, more apps, and more fea­tures than ever be­fore. It is a golden era for buck­ets and buck­ets of slop, and a dark age for gems of qual­ity.

I hear that Apple is push­ing AI on all their en­gi­neers. When peo­ple think in the ab­stract, they think AI will do all this stuff, but let’s fo­cus on a con­crete ex­am­ple. Do you think ma­cOS will get bet­ter or worse in the next 2 years?

When peo­ple see an ar­ti­fact, they make as­sump­tions about the process that was used to cre­ate it. Without even think­ing about it, they as­sume the cre­ator had a ba­si­cally hu­man state of mind. This as­sump­tion is no longer true. Things can be bro­ken in ways that weren’t pre­vi­ously pos­si­ble, and old prox­ies of un­der­ly­ing qual­ity like syn­tax and gram­mar are use­less. AI pro­duced ar­ti­facts are not pro­duced by the same process as hu­man ones, and this dif­fer­ence, while ex­tremely sub­tle in sta­tis­tics, makes it­self ob­vi­ous when you try to in­ter­act with and build on the ar­ti­fact in hu­man ways.

Without fully en­dors­ing all their ideas, I’m now in the LeCun/Marcus camp on LLMs. I don’t think mod­els like this will ever be able to pro­gram, I think the process mat­ters. I think that deep learn­ing is still the so­lu­tion, but real pro­gram­ming agents will need world mod­els, not some RLVR shit that com­ments out the fail­ing test and tells you all the tests are now pass­ing.

The real story of this era will be who man­ages to avoid harm­ing them­selves in their AI psy­chosis.

Out of all the mi­gra­tions I help teams with, Go to Rust is a bit of an out­lier. It’s not a ques­tion of “is Rust faster?” or “does Rust have types?”, Go al­ready gets you most of the way there. The dis­cus­sion is mostly about cor­rect­ness guar­an­tees, run­time trade­offs, and de­vel­oper er­gonom­ics.

A quick dis­claimer be­fore we start: this guide is heav­ily back­end-fo­cused. Backend ser­vices are where Go is strongest, small sta­tic bi­na­ries, a stan­dard li­brary fo­cused on net­work­ing, and an ecosys­tem of li­braries for HTTP servers, gRPC, data­bases, etc.

That’s also where most teams con­sid­er­ing Rust are com­ing from (at least the ones who reach out to me), so I think that’s the com­par­i­son that’s ac­tu­ally use­ful in prac­tice. If you’re writ­ing CLI tools, em­bed­ded firmware, or game en­gines, some of this still ap­plies, but to be hon­est, I’m afraid this is not the best re­source for you.

For con­text, I’ve writ­ten about Go and Rust be­fore: “Go vs Rust? Choose Go.” back in 2017, and later the “Rust vs Go: A Hands-On Comparison” with the Shuttle team, which walks through a small back­end ser­vice in both lan­guages.

Where Go and Rust over­lap, and where they di­verge.

How Go pat­terns map to Rust.

What you gain from the bor­row checker.

Where I tell peo­ple to keep Go and where Rust is worth the mi­gra­tion cost.

How to mi­grate Go ser­vices in­cre­men­tally.

Where I’m Coming From

I’ll be up­front: I’m not a fan of Go. I think it’s a badly de­signed lan­guage, even if a very suc­cess­ful one. It con­fuses eas­i­ness with sim­plic­ity, and sev­eral of its core de­sign trade­offs (nil every­where, er­ror han­dling as a dis­ci­pline rule rather than a type, the long ab­sence of gener­ics) point in a di­rec­tion I dis­agree with. That said, suc­cess mat­ters! Go has cap­tured a real and per­sis­tent share of work­ing de­vel­op­ers, hov­er­ing around 17 – 19% in the JetBrains Developer Ecosystem Survey. Rust is grow­ing steadily but is still a smaller slice:

Go is clearly work­ing for a lot of peo­ple, and a guide that pre­tends oth­er­wise is­n’t help­ful. So I’ll do my very best to be ob­jec­tive in this guide rather than re­lit­i­gate old ar­gu­ments. But you should know my pri­ors so you can cal­i­brate.

The other prior worth dis­clos­ing: I run a Rust con­sul­tancy; of course I’m bi­ased! More peo­ple us­ing Rust is good for my busi­ness. But I’ve also worked in both lan­guages pro­fes­sion­ally and shipped Go ser­vices to pro­duc­tion.

This guide is for Go de­vel­op­ers who want an hon­est, side-by-side look at what changes when you move to Rust.

For a de­lib­er­ately op­po­site take, I rec­om­mend read­ing “Just Fucking Use Go” by Blain Smith. Holding both views in your head at once is more use­ful than ei­ther one alone.

If you pre­fer to watch rather than read, here’s a video from the Shuttle ar­ti­cle above, read and com­mented by the Primeagen:

A First Look At The Most Important Commands

Go de­vel­op­ers al­ready have one of the clean­est tool­chains in the in­dus­try. Back in the day, it started off a trend of “batteries in­cluded” tool­chains that give you a sin­gle, con­sis­tent in­ter­face for build­ing, test­ing, for­mat­ting, lint­ing, and man­ag­ing de­pen­den­cies. I’m glad that Rust fol­lowed suit, be­cause it’s a great model. It’s one of my fa­vorite parts about both ecosys­tems.

cargo has even more built-in:

The big dif­fer­ence is that in Go you typ­i­cally reach for third-party tools (golangci-lint, mock­gen, air, gore­leaser) to fill gaps. In Rust, the first-party ecosys­tem cov­ers more out of the box. Things that do re­quire ex­ter­nal crates (e.g. cargo watch, cargo nex­test) in­stall with one com­mand and feel na­tive, e.g. cargo in­stall cargo-nex­test gives you cargo nex­test right away.

Both com­mu­ni­ties have con­verged on the same in­sight about for­mat­ters: a sin­gle canon­i­cal style, even an im­per­fect one, is worth more than the bikeshed­ding it elim­i­nates.

Gofmt’s style is no one’s fa­vorite, yet gofmt is every­one’s fa­vorite. — Rob Pike, Go Proverbs

Gofmt’s style is no one’s fa­vorite, yet gofmt is every­one’s fa­vorite.

— Rob Pike, Go Proverbs

The same is true of rustfmt: not every­one likes every de­tail, but the ab­sence of style de­bates in code re­view is worth far more than the oc­ca­sional for­mat­ting pref­er­ence you’d have made dif­fer­ently.

Key Differences Between Go and Rust

The head­line is that Go and Rust are both com­piled, sta­t­i­cally typed, sin­gle-bi­nary-de­ploy lan­guages with strong con­cur­rency sto­ries. The dif­fer­ences are about what guar­an­tees you get from the com­piler and how much con­trol you have over run­time be­hav­iour.

One fram­ing that helps be­fore we go fur­ther: most of what changes when you move from Go to Rust is that checks get pulled into the type sys­tem. Nil-handling, er­ror prop­a­ga­tion, data races, re­source life­times, can­cel­la­tion, gener­ics, these are all things Go re­lies on con­ven­tion, tool­ing (go vet, er­rcheck, golangci-lint, -race), or run­time de­tec­tion to keep hon­est. Rust en­codes them as types the com­piler en­forces di­rectly.

The com­mon push­back is that this means “more cog­ni­tive over­head.” I’d chal­lenge that. It’s more up­front, yes, but it’s also harder to hold wrong. A Mutex<T> in Rust does­n’t just doc­u­ment that the data needs a lock, it makes the lock the only way to reach the data: you call .lock(), you get a guard, and the guard is what gives you ac­cess to the in­ner value. Drop the guard and the lock re­leases au­to­mat­i­cally. There is no “I for­got to lock” path be­cause the un­locked path does­n’t ex­ist in the type. Once you in­ter­nal­ize that pat­tern, and you find it re­peated every­where (Option, Result, &mut T, Send/Sync, RAII guards), Rust stops feel­ing heavy and starts feel­ing like the com­piler is do­ing work you used to do in your head.

Why Go Developers Consider Rust

Go de­vel­op­ers don’t usu­ally come to Rust be­cause Go is “too slow.” For most back­end work­loads, Go is plenty fast. People are gen­er­ally a bit frus­trated with Go’s ver­bose er­ror han­dling, the dan­ger of seg­men­ta­tion faults from nil point­ers, and the lack of gener­ics (for a long time) or any so­phis­ti­cated type sys­tem fea­tures, such as enums or traits. Interfaces are not a wor­thy re­place­ment for traits, and the Go stan­dard li­brary has some weird gaps, such as the lack of a Set type. (The id­iomatic workaround is map[T]struct{}, which works fine in prac­tice but is a tell that the type sys­tem is­n’t quite car­ry­ing its weight.)

nil Panics in Production

You ship a Go ser­vice, it runs fine for months, and then a code path runs where some­one for­got to check whether a pointer was nil, and the gor­ou­tine pan­ics. A com­mon case is a lookup that re­turns the zero value, or a struct whose pointer fields sur­vived de­se­ri­al­iza­tion with­out be­ing pop­u­lated:

func (s *Service) Handle(req *Request) er­ror { // Find re­turns (*User, er­ror). The er­ror is nil for “not found”; // the caller is ex­pected to check user != nil, but this is very easy to for­get. user, err := s.repo.Find(req.UserID) if err != nil { re­turn err } re­turn user.Ac­count.No­tify() // crashes if user is nil, or if Account is nil }

Linters and IDE checks catch some of these (nilaway, sta­t­ic­check), but they’re opt-in, prob­a­bilis­tic, and don’t cross pack­age bound­aries re­li­ably. Go’s com­piler it­self does not force you to con­sider the ab­sence case. Rust’s Option<T> does:

fn han­dle(&self, req: &Request) -> Result<(), ServiceError> { let user = self.repo.find(req.user_id)?; // re­turns Option<User>; ? short-cir­cuits None into an er­ror user.no­tify() }

You lit­er­ally can­not deref­er­ence an Option with­out ac­knowl­edg­ing the None case. Whole cat­e­gories of pager-duty in­ci­dents dis­ap­pear.

Data Races That -race Didn’t Catch

go test -race is a great tool, but it’s a run­time de­tec­tor, it only finds races that ac­tu­ally ex­e­cute dur­ing your tests. Mutating a map from two gor­ou­tines with­out a lock com­piles fine in Go and only blows up in pro­duc­tion un­der load.

In Rust, shar­ing mu­ta­ble state across threads re­quires types that im­ple­ment Send and Sync. Try to share a plain HashMap be­tween threads and the pro­gram does not com­pile. You’re forced to wrap it in an Arc<Mutex<…>>, an Arc<RwLock<…>>, or use a chan­nel. That race con­di­tion be­comes a type er­ror. 1

Paul Dix has been very can­did about what mo­ti­vated the InfluxDB 3.0 rewrite, and the data-race story is right at the top:

[The main ben­e­fit is] fear­less con­cur­rency — elim­i­nat­ing data races es­sen­tially, which we had be­fore. Really gnarly bugs in ver­sion 1 of Influx due to that. — Paul Dix, Founder & CTO, InfluxData, on Rust in Production

[The main ben­e­fit is] fear­less con­cur­rency — elim­i­nat­ing data races es­sen­tially, which we had be­fore. Really gnarly bugs in ver­sion 1 of Influx due to that.

— Paul Dix, Founder & CTO, InfluxData, on Rust in Production

Composable Error Handling

if err != nil { re­turn err } is fine for a while. After a few years, you no­tice three things:

The boil­er­plate di­lutes the ac­tual logic of your func­tion.

Wrapping with fmt.Er­rorf(“do­ing X: %w”, err) is a dis­ci­pline rule, not a com­piler rule. It’s easy to drop con­text on the floor.

Sentinel er­rors via er­rors.Is/​er­rors.As work, but the com­piler does­n’t tell you when you for­got to han­dle a new vari­ant.

It’s worth be­ing hon­est about the counter-ar­gu­ment here, since it came up in the Lobste.rs thread on my Shuttle ar­ti­cle: ex­pe­ri­enced Go de­vel­op­ers point out that er­rcheck and golangci-lint catch most of the “forgot to han­dle the er­ror” cases in prac­tice, and that ex­plicit if err != nil is eas­ier to read than dense ? chains. Both points are fair, and the ex­plicit style is a de­lib­er­ate cul­tural value, not an ac­ci­dent:

I think that er­ror han­dling should be ex­plicit, this should be a core value of the lan­guage. — Peter Bourgon, GoTime #91, quoted in Dave Cheney’s Zen of Go

I think that er­ror han­dling should be ex­plicit, this should be a core value of the lan­guage.

— Peter Bourgon, GoTime #91, quoted in Dave Cheney’s Zen of Go

My take is that lints are an opt-in safety net you have to re­mem­ber to set up, while Rust’s Result<T, E> is the type sig­na­ture it­self, there’s no way to for­get. The boil­er­plate-vs-read­abil­ity trade­off is more gen­uinely sub­jec­tive.

In Rust:

#[derive(Debug, this­er­ror::Er­ror)] pub enum UserError { #[error(“user {0} not found”)] NotFound(UserId), #[error(“user al­ready ex­ists”)] AlreadyExists, #[error(transparent)] Repo(#[from] RepoError), }

pub fn re­name(id: UserId, name: &str) -> Result<User, UserError> { let mut user = repo::get(id)?; // ? con­verts RepoError -> UserError au­to­mat­i­cally user.name = name.to_string(); Ok(user) }

The ? op­er­a­tor han­dles prop­a­ga­tion; #[from] han­dles wrap­ping; and a match on UserError is ex­haus­tively checked. Add a new vari­ant to­mor­row and the com­piler shows you every place that needs up­dat­ing.

Generics That Don’t Box

Go got gener­ics in 1.18, and they’re use­ful, but the im­ple­men­ta­tion has con­straints (no meth­ods with type pa­ra­me­ters, GC shape sten­cil­ing, oc­ca­sional sur­pris­ing per­for­mance char­ac­ter­is­tics). Rust gener­ics monomor­phize, each in­stan­ti­a­tion pro­duces spe­cial­ized code with zero run­time cost. Combined with traits, this gives you real zero-cost ab­strac­tions.

This mat­ters less in han­dler code and more in shared in­fra­struc­ture (middleware, generic repos­i­to­ries, de­coders, parsers), where Go of­ten pushes you back to in­ter­face{}/​any plus type as­ser­tions.

Predictable Latency

Go’s GC is ex­cel­lent, con­cur­rent, low-pause, well-tuned for typ­i­cal ser­vice work­loads. But “low-pause” is not “no-pause.” Under heavy al­lo­ca­tion, P99 la­tency tails are no­tice­ably worse than a Rust equiv­a­lent that sim­ply does­n’t al­lo­cate on the hot path.

I won’t over­sell this, for the vast ma­jor­ity of ser­vices, Go’s GC is a non-is­sue. But for la­tency-sen­si­tive sys­tems (trading, real-time bid­ding, net­work prox­ies, high-through­put in­ges­tion), the lack of GC pauses is a gen­uine sell­ing point. Stephen Blum from PubNub put it di­rectly on the show:

Go is great at our scale, but we re­ally need some­thing that is go­ing to give us the price-per-dol­lar per­for­mance ca­pac­ity that we need, and Rust is go­ing to get us there. That’s why ba­si­cally every­thing is head­ing to­wards Rust these days. — Stephen Blum, CTO, PubNub, on Rust in Production

Go is great at our scale, but we re­ally need some­thing that is go­ing to give us the price-per-dol­lar per­for­mance ca­pac­ity that we need, and Rust is go­ing to get us there. That’s why ba­si­cally every­thing is head­ing to­wards Rust these days.

— Stephen Blum, CTO, PubNub, on Rust in Production

In Summary

Go is death by a thou­sand pa­per cuts. It is a very prag­matic lan­guage and if you are will­ing to glance over the above is­sues, you can be very pro­duc­tive in it. But at a cer­tain code­base size, the prob­lems start to com­pound. There is no sin­gle mo­ment when Go loses its ap­peal, but teams find them­selves wish­ing for more (more safety, more con­trol, more ex­pres­sive­ness) and that’s when they start look­ing around for al­ter­na­tives.

Comparing Both Languages Side by Side

The fastest way to feel com­fort­able in Rust is to map pat­terns you al­ready know. For a longer, fully-worked ex­am­ple of build­ing the same back­end ser­vice in both lan­guages, see the Shuttle com­par­i­son, the sec­tion be­low fo­cuses on the pat­terns that come up most of­ten.

Error Handling: if err != nil vs Result<T, E>

Go:

func ReadConfig(path string) (*Config, er­ror) { data, err := os.Read­File(path) if err != nil { re­turn nil, fmt.Er­rorf(“read­ing con­fig: %w”, err) } var cfg Config if err := json.Un­mar­shal(data, &cfg); err != nil { re­turn nil, fmt.Er­rorf(“pars­ing con­fig: %w”, err) } re­turn &cfg, nil }

Rust:

fn read­_­con­fig(path: &Path) -> Result<Config, ConfigError> { let data = fs::read­_­to_string(path)?; let cfg = serde_j­son::from_str(&data)?; Ok(cfg) }

The ? op­er­a­tor does the if err != nil { re­turn err } dance for you, in­clud­ing type con­ver­sion if From<E1> for E2 is im­ple­mented (idiomatic with this­er­ror’s #[from]).

Null: nil vs Option<T>

Go:

func GetUser(id string) *User { for _, u := range users { if u.ID == id { re­turn &u } } re­turn nil }

u := GetUser(“123”) fmt.Println(u.Name) // pan­ics if nil

Rust:

fn get_user(id: &str) -> Option<User> { users.iter().find(|u| u.id == id).cloned() }

let user = get_user(“123”); println!(“{}”, user.name); // com­pile er­ror: `user` is Option<User>, not User // You must han­dle both cases: match get_user(“123”) { Some(u) => println!(“{}”, u.name), None => println!(“not found”), }

There is no nil in safe Rust. References can’t be null. Pointers can be, but you al­most never use raw point­ers in ap­pli­ca­tion code.

Interfaces vs Traits

Go’s in­ter­faces are struc­tural, a type sat­is­fies an in­ter­face im­plic­itly:

type Reader in­ter­face { Read(p []byte) (n int, err er­ror) }

Rust’s traits are nom­i­nal, you im­ple­ment them ex­plic­itly:

pub trait Reader { fn read(&mut self, buf: &mut [u8]) -> std::io::Re­sult<usize>; }

impl Reader for MyType { fn read(&mut self, buf: &mut [u8]) -> std::io::Re­sult<usize> { /* … */ } }

The Go style is great for ad-hoc duck typ­ing. The Rust style is great for refac­tor­ing and dis­cov­er­abil­ity, you can grep for every im­ple­menter of a trait.

The clos­est equiv­a­lent of in­ter­face{} / any in Rust is Box<dyn Any>, but you al­most never want it. The Go com­mu­nity knows the cost of reach­ing for in­ter­face{} too:

in­ter­face{} says noth­ing. — Rob Pike, Go Proverbs

in­ter­face{} says noth­ing.

— Rob Pike, Go Proverbs

Generic func­tions with trait bounds (fn han­dle<R: Reader>(r: R)) cover the vast ma­jor­ity of cases and give you monomor­phiza­tion with no run­time dis­patch. Where Go pre-1.18 would have forced you back to in­ter­face{} plus a type as­ser­tion, Rust’s traits + gener­ics let you stay spe­cific.

When you do want run­time dis­patch (e.g. het­ero­ge­neous stor­age of dif­fer­ent im­ple­menters), reach for Box<dyn Trait> or Arc<dyn Trait>. That’s the di­rect Rust ana­log of hold­ing an in­ter­face value in Go.

Goroutines vs Async Tasks

Go’s con­cur­rency model is fa­mously sim­ple:

I’ve seen it three times in the last month. Three dif­fer­ent or­gan­i­sa­tions, three dif­fer­ent tech stacks, the same pat­tern.

Someone has an idea. Maybe a prod­uct man­ager, maybe a team lead, maybe the CTO af­ter a con­fer­ence. They open Claude, or ChatGPT, or Copilot — does­n’t mat­ter which — and ask it what they should build. The AI does what it al­ways does: val­i­dates the idea en­thu­si­as­ti­cally, sug­gests an ar­chi­tec­ture, and starts sketch­ing com­po­nents. It’s ar­tic­u­late. It’s con­fi­dent. It sounds like a very se­nior en­gi­neer who’s thought deeply about the prob­lem.

It has­n’t thought about the prob­lem at all. It’s pat­tern-match­ing against its train­ing data and pro­duc­ing the most plau­si­ble-sound­ing re­sponse. But it sounds so good that no­body pushes back.

Before you know it, Claude is the ar­chi­tect.

The at­taboy prob­lem

AI agents are patho­log­i­cally agree­able. Ask Claude if your idea is good and it’ll tell you it’s good. Ask it if a mi­croser­vices ar­chi­tec­ture makes sense for your three-per­son team and it’ll ex­plain why mi­croser­vices are an ex­cel­lent choice. Ask it if you should build a cus­tom ML pipeline in­stead of us­ing a man­aged ser­vice and it’ll en­thu­si­as­ti­cally lay out the de­sign.

It’s not ly­ing. It’s not even wrong, nec­es­sar­ily. It’s just in­ca­pable of the thing that makes a real ar­chi­tect valu­able: say­ing “no.”

A good ar­chi­tec­t’s most im­por­tant skill is­n’t de­sign­ing sys­tems. It’s know­ing which sys­tems not to build. It’s push­ing back on com­plex­ity. It’s ask­ing “why?” five times un­til the ac­tual re­quire­ment emerges from the as­pi­ra­tional non­sense. It’s telling the CTO that their con­fer­ence-in­spired idea is a ter­ri­ble fit for the team they ac­tu­ally have.

Claude will never do this. It’s trained to be help­ful. Helpful means agree­able. Agreeable means you get an at­taboy and a Jenga tower that passes for ar­chi­tec­ture.

The Jenga tower

Here’s what the AI-designed ar­chi­tec­ture looks like in prac­tice.

It’s tech­ni­cally sound. The com­po­nents make sense in iso­la­tion. The pat­terns are recog­nis­able — event-dri­ven here, CQRS there, a ser­vice mesh be­cause why not. It looks like some­thing a se­nior ar­chi­tect would pro­duce. It passes the squint test.

But it was­n’t de­signed for your team. It was­n’t de­signed for your con­straints. It was­n’t de­signed for the bor­ing re­al­ity of your pro­duc­tion en­vi­ron­ment — the VPC lock­downs, the legacy in­te­gra­tions, the team that’s never op­er­ated Kubernetes in pro­duc­tion, the com­pli­ance re­quire­ments that mean half the man­aged ser­vices are off-lim­its.

It was de­signed for the me­dian of every­thing Claude has seen. A generic best prac­tice for a generic prob­lem at a generic com­pany. Which is to say, it was de­signed for no­body.

Real ar­chi­tec­ture is full of trade-offs that only make sense in con­text. You pick Postgres over DynamoDB be­cause your team knows Postgres and you’d rather ship in two weeks than spend a month learn­ing a new data model. You skip the ser­vice mesh be­cause you’ve got four ser­vices, not forty. You use a mono­lith be­cause the prob­lem is sim­ple and mi­croser­vices would be ca­reer-dri­ven de­vel­op­ment.

These de­ci­sions re­quire judge­ment. They re­quire know­ing the team. They re­quire un­der­stand­ing the or­gan­i­sa­tion’s ac­tual con­straints, not the ones that look good on a white­board. An AI agent has none of this con­text, and worse — it does­n’t know it does­n’t have it.

The Jira ticket pipeline

The bit that re­ally wor­ries me is what hap­pens next.

Once Claude has de­signed the ar­chi­tec­ture, the same peo­ple who asked it for the de­sign ask it to break the work down. It pro­duces epics. Stories. Acceptance cri­te­ria. Neatly for­mat­ted, well-rea­soned, ready to drop into Jira.

And now the en­gi­neers — the peo­ple who’ve spent years hon­ing their craft, who un­der­stand the do­main, who know where the bod­ies are buried — are no longer solv­ing prob­lems. They’re im­ple­ment­ing Claude’s de­sign, one ticket at a time.

Think about what’s hap­pened here. The peo­ple with the most con­text, the most ex­pe­ri­ence, and the most skin in the game have been re­duced to ticket im­ple­menters. The en­tity with the least con­text, no ex­pe­ri­ence, and no ac­count­abil­ity is mak­ing the ar­chi­tec­tural de­ci­sions.

It’s not just in­ef­fi­cient. It’s back­wards.

”But some­one se­nior signed off”

This is the de­fence I hear most of­ten. “Claude sug­gested the ap­proach, but a se­nior en­gi­neer re­viewed it.”

Let’s be hon­est about what “reviewed it” means in prac­tice. A busy tech lead gets handed a well-ar­tic­u­lated ar­chi­tec­tural pro­posal. It’s co­her­ent. It uses the right ter­mi­nol­ogy. It ad­dresses the stated re­quire­ments. The di­a­grams make sense. It looks like some­thing they might have de­signed them­selves.

How much push­back are they go­ing to give? In a world where the re­sponse to “I don’t think this is right” is “Claude spent twenty min­utes on this and you want to throw it away?”, the path of least re­sis­tance is to ap­prove it with mi­nor com­ments.

This is the real dan­ger. Not that AI pro­duces bad ar­chi­tec­tures — it of­ten pro­duces per­fectly rea­son­able ones. The dan­ger is that it short-cir­cuits the dis­cus­sion. The messy, ar­gu­men­ta­tive, time-con­sum­ing process where three en­gi­neers dis­agree about the ap­proach, where some­one says “what about…” and every­one groans but then re­alises it’s a good point, where the fi­nal de­sign is bet­ter than any­thing one per­son would have pro­duced — that process gets re­placed by “Claude said so.”

The ac­count­abil­ity gap

Here’s the ques­tion no­body’s ask­ing: when it goes wrong, who car­ries the bag?

Not Claude. Claude does­n’t have a bag. Claude does­n’t get paged at 3am. Claude does­n’t sit in the post-in­ci­dent re­view ex­plain­ing why the ar­chi­tec­ture could­n’t han­dle the load. Claude does­n’t have to tell the CTO that the plat­form needs to be rewrit­ten be­cause the orig­i­nal de­sign as­sump­tions were wrong.

Your en­gi­neers do. The same en­gi­neers who did­n’t de­sign it. The same en­gi­neers who were im­ple­ment­ing tick­ets writ­ten by an en­tity that’s never op­er­ated a sys­tem in pro­duc­tion. They’re the ones stay­ing late, de­bug­ging an ar­chi­tec­ture they did­n’t choose, in a code­base that was scaf­folded faster than any­one could un­der­stand it.

That’s not fair. And it’s not smart.

What to do in­stead

I’m not say­ing don’t use AI agents. I use Claude Code every day. It’s trans­formed my pro­duc­tiv­ity. But I use it the way you’d use any pow­er­ful tool — I tell it what to do, not the other way round.

Engineers de­sign. Agents im­ple­ment. The ar­chi­tec­ture comes from peo­ple who un­der­stand the con­text — the team, the con­straints, the pro­duc­tion en­vi­ron­ment, the or­gan­i­sa­tional pol­i­tics. The AI helps them build it faster. That’s the right di­vi­sion of labour.

Challenge the at­taboy. When an AI sug­gests an ap­proach, treat it with the same scep­ti­cism you’d ap­ply to a con­fi­dent ju­nior en­gi­neer. It might be right. It might also be pat­tern-match­ing against some­thing that does­n’t ap­ply to your sit­u­a­tion. Ask “why not the sim­pler op­tion?” and see what hap­pens.

Protect the ar­gu­ment. The messy dis­agree­ment be­tween en­gi­neers is where good ar­chi­tec­ture comes from. If AI is short-cir­cuit­ing that process — if peo­ple are de­fer­ring to Claude in­stead of de­bat­ing with each other — you’ve lost some­thing far more valu­able than de­vel­op­ment speed.

Keep hu­mans ac­count­able. If a hu­man’s name is­n’t on the ar­chi­tec­tural de­ci­sion, no­body owns it. And if no­body owns it, no­body will fight for it when it mat­ters. “Claude de­signed it” is not an ar­chi­tec­ture de­ci­sion record. It’s an ab­di­ca­tion.

The craft still mat­ters

Thirty years ago, when I started in this in­dus­try, the tool was a white­board and a strong opin­ion. Today the tool is an AI agent that can pro­duce in min­utes what used to take days. The speed is gen­uinely re­mark­able.

But the craft has­n’t changed. Understanding the prob­lem. Knowing the con­straints. Making trade-offs. Defending the sim­ple so­lu­tion against the ex­cit­ing one. Saying “no” to the idea that sounds great but does­n’t fit.

That’s ar­chi­tec­ture. No agent does it. If you’ve let Claude take the wheel, take it back.

Your en­gi­neers have spent years build­ing the judge­ment to make these calls. Let them make them. Use the AI to build faster. But build what your peo­ple de­signed — not what the ma­chine sug­gested.

Because when the Jenga tower wob­bles — and it will — Claude won’t be there to catch it.

INTRODUCTION

The res no­vae of our time Two bib­li­cal im­ages Building for the com­mon good Remaining hu­man

CHAPTER ONE A DYNAMIC APPROACH FAITHFUL TO THE GOSPEL

A Church jour­ney­ing through hu­man his­tory          The wis­dom of the word of God in di­a­logue with the hu­man sci­ences          Social Doctrine as a shared dis­cern­ment The de­vel­op­ment of Social Doctrine from Leo XIII to the pre­sent          The first stages of the Church’s Social Doctrine          The years of the Second Vatican Council          The re­cent Magisterium          Interpreting his­tory in the light of faith

CHAPTER TWO FOUNDATIONS AND PRINCIPLES OF THE SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH

The foun­da­tions of Social Doctrine          The hu­man per­son: im­age of the Triune God          The equal dig­nity of all hu­man be­ings          The supreme value of hu­man rights The prin­ci­ples of Social Doctrine          The prin­ci­ple of the com­mon good          The prin­ci­ple of the uni­ver­sal des­ti­na­tion of goods           The prin­ci­ple of sub­sidiar­ity          The prin­ci­ple of sol­i­dar­ity          The prin­ci­ple of so­cial jus­tice Integral hu­man de­vel­op­ment An ex­a­men for the Church

CHAPTER THREE

TECHNOLOGY AND DOMINANCE. THE GRANDEUR OF HUMANITY IN LIGHT OF THE PROMISES OF AI

The tech­no­cratic par­a­digm and dig­i­tal power Artificial in­tel­li­gence          A valu­able tool that re­quires vig­i­lance          Responsibility, trans­parency and the gov­er­nance of AI What must not be lost          Underlying nar­ra­tives: tran­shu­man­ism and posthu­man­ism          The limit, the heart, the grandeur of the hu­man per­son The au­then­tic “more than hu­man”: grace and Christian hu­man­ism Two cities and two loves

CHAPTER FOUR SAFEGUARDING HUMANITY AT A TIME OF TRANSFORMATION. TRUTH, WORK, FREEDOM

Truth as a com­mon good          Truth and democ­racy          Communication and the col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion          Toward an ecol­ogy of com­mu­ni­ca­tion          An ed­u­ca­tional al­liance for the dig­i­tal age          The cen­tral role of schools The dig­nity of work at a time of dig­i­tal tran­si­tion          The value of work          The prob­lem of un­em­ploy­ment          An econ­omy that val­ues dig­nity          Families and young peo­ple: the so­cial con­di­tions for hope Protecting free­dom against de­pen­den­cies and com­mer­cial­iza­tion          Dependencies and so­ci­etal con­trol          Breaking the chains of new forms of slav­ery A shared re­spon­si­bil­ity

CHAPTER FIVE

THE CULTURE OF POWER AND THE CIVILIZATION OF LOVE

The civ­i­liza­tion of love in the dig­i­tal age The cul­ture of power          The nor­mal­iza­tion of war          Force with­out lim­its          Weapons and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence          The cri­sis of mul­ti­lat­er­al­ism          A sup­posed po­lit­i­cal re­al­ism Building the civ­i­liza­tion of love          We can all do our part          The need to dis­arm words          Building peace through jus­tice          Adopting the per­spec­tive of vic­tims          Cultivating a healthy re­al­ism          Reviving di­a­logue          The ne­ces­sity of diplo­macy and mul­ti­lat­er­al­ism          Praying and hop­ing

CONCLUSION The Word be­came flesh One body in Christ The con­struc­tion site of our time The song of hope: the Mag­ni­fi­cat

INTRODUCTION

1. Humanity, cre­ated by God in all its grandeur, is to­day fac­ing a piv­otal choice: ei­ther to con­struct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and hu­man­ity dwell to­gether. Each gen­er­a­tion in­her­its the task of shap­ing its own era, of guid­ing his­tory to be­come a place where the dig­nity of every per­son is safe­guarded, jus­tice is pro­moted and fra­ter­nity is made pos­si­ble. Yet every era also runs the risk of cre­at­ing an in­hu­mane and more un­just world. Whenever hu­man­ity is in dan­ger of mar­ring its true iden­tity, we Christians lift our eyes to the Incarnate God, know­ing that it is “only in the mys­tery of the Word made flesh that the mys­tery of hu­man­ity truly be­comes clear.” [1] In Jesus Christ, this hu­man­ity in its grandeur be­comes the Way, the Truth and the Life, open­ing the path for each of us to grow to­ward full­ness.

2. Founded on Christ, the liv­ing stone, we ex­pe­ri­ence the pow­er­ful and mys­te­ri­ous ac­tion of the Holy Spirit, and we be­lieve that every au­then­tic hu­man ef­fort to co­op­er­ate with him for the good will be blessed by our heav­enly Father, in whom we place our hope. For this rea­son, we can dili­gently con­tribute to every ini­tia­tive that builds a more just world, and we can call oth­ers to col­lab­o­rate in pro­mot­ing the in­te­gral de­vel­op­ment of every hu­man be­ing. We wish to en­gage in di­a­logue with all men and women of our time, with whom we share in the events, ques­tions and as­pi­ra­tions of hu­man­ity. [2] Together with them, we seek to iden­tify new paths for the com­mon good and for pro­mot­ing a dig­ni­fied life for all. Indeed, open­ness to di­a­logue is an in­te­gral part of the Church’s vo­ca­tion be­cause, con­sti­tuted in Christ as “a sacra­ment… of com­mu­nion with God and of the unity of the en­tire hu­man race,” [3] she rec­og­nizes his­tory as the place where the Gospel chal­lenges and di­rects hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence.

3. In this spirit, Pope Leo XIII published his Encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, the 135 th an­niver­sary of which we cel­e­brate with deep grat­i­tude this year. With that doc­u­ment, my beloved pre­de­ces­sor gave im­pe­tus to the re­flec­tion on so­ci­ety, the econ­omy and pol­i­tics, which is now known as the “Social Doctrine of the Church.” When some ob­jected that the Church should not waste en­ergy on worldly mat­ters, but in­stead fo­cus on com­mu­ni­cat­ing the mes­sage of eter­nal life, Leo XIII responded with re­al­ism and wis­dom, say­ing that the procla­ma­tion of the Gospel can­not over­look the con­crete lives of peo­ple. [4] Many decades have passed since then, and the Magisterium, pas­tors, the­olo­gians and faith­ful have con­tin­ued to re­flect on so­cial is­sues in the light of the Gospel. Today, the Social Doctrine of the Church is a legacy of wis­dom, where we find prin­ci­ples for thought, cri­te­ria for dis­cern­ment and judg­ment, and con­crete guide­lines for ac­tion. Founded on Sacred Scripture and Tradition, and in en­gage­ment with the sci­ences, it helps us clearly in­ter­pret the chal­lenges of the pre­sent and iden­tify ap­pro­pri­ate ways for liv­ing out a clear Christian wit­ness, with joy and in ser­vice to the world. It is not an in­ert set of con­cepts, but a liv­ing cor­pus of truth that safe­guards and in­ter­prets hu­man­i­ty’s vo­ca­tion to a full and just life. I there­fore wish to add my own voice to this liv­ing tra­di­tion, in­vok­ing the help of the Spirit of wis­dom, who has dwelt in the world since its be­gin­ning (cf. Prov 8:22 – 31).

The res no­vae of our time

4. While Leo XIII spoke in his time of “new things” ( re­rum no­varum), to­day we can­not limit our­selves sim­ply to re­peat­ing his in­sight­ful teach­ings. Instead, we must ask God for the wis­dom to in­ter­pret the great trends of our time, par­tic­u­larly tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vances. In re­cent years, it has be­come in­creas­ingly ev­i­dent how rapidly and pro­foundly dig­i­tal­iza­tion, ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence (AI) and ro­bot­ics are trans­form­ing our world. Technology should not be con­sid­ered, in it­self, as a force an­tag­o­nis­tic to hu­man­ity. On the con­trary, it has formed part of our his­tory since the be­gin­ning as “a pro­foundly hu­man re­al­ity, linked to the au­ton­omy and free­dom of man.” [5] Over the cen­turies, tech­no­log­i­cal de­vel­op­ment has sig­nif­i­cantly im­proved the liv­ing con­di­tions of hu­man­ity. At the same time, each phase of progress has also re­vealed the am­bi­gu­ity of tools that can cause harm when not ori­ented to­ward the good. Today, how­ever, we find our­selves fac­ing a new sit­u­a­tion. The power and preva­lence of emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies are in­ter­wo­ven into the fab­ric of daily life, shap­ing de­ci­sion-mak­ing processes and deeply af­fect­ing the col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion: “Never has hu­man­ity had such power over it­self.” [6] New tech­nolo­gies open up a hori­zon ex­tend­ing in di­rec­tions that are imag­in­able but not yet fully pre­dictable. This com­pli­cates the as­sess­ment of their po­ten­tial im­pact and the long-term ef­fects they may have on both the dig­nity of in­di­vid­u­als and the com­mon good.

5. It now falls to us to face the chal­lenges of our time with clar­ity of thought and re­spon­si­bil­ity. It is nec­es­sary to es­tab­lish ad­e­quate reg­u­la­tory tools ca­pa­ble of up­hold­ing jus­tice and curb­ing the dis­tort­ing ef­fects of tech­no­log­i­cal power. Nevertheless, the is­sue is not lim­ited to reg­u­la­tion. As Pope Francis warned, we must re­al­is­ti­cally ask our­selves who holds this power to­day and how they use it: “It must also be rec­og­nized that nu­clear en­ergy, biotech­nol­ogy, in­for­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy, knowl­edge of our own DNA, and many other abil­i­ties which we have ac­quired… have given those with the knowl­edge, and es­pe­cially the eco­nomic re­sources to use them, an im­pres­sive dom­i­nance over the whole of hu­man­ity and the en­tire world.” [7] In the past, it was largely up to the State to guide and di­rect in­no­va­tion. Today, how­ever, the main dri­vers of de­vel­op­ment are pri­vate, of­ten transna­tional, par­ties that are en­dowed with re­sources and the ca­pac­ity to in­ter­vene that sur­pass those of many Governments. Technological power thus takes on an un­prece­dented, pre­dom­i­nantly “private” as­pect, which makes it even more chal­leng­ing to dis­cern, gov­ern and di­rect such power to­ward the com­mon good.

6. For this rea­son it is nec­es­sary to be­gin a shared dis­cern­ment process for iden­ti­fy­ing the spir­i­tual and cul­tural roots of on­go­ing trans­for­ma­tions. If we fo­cus only on con­tin­gen­cies, we risk let­ting the suc­ces­sion of emer­gen­cies dic­tate the di­rec­tion of our path. We are liv­ing through a rapid phase of tran­si­tion, a “change of era,” in which — while some are vy­ing for the fu­ture of new tech­nolo­gies and oth­ers ded­i­cate them­selves to re­flect­ing on the mat­ter — most peo­ple are watch­ing and wait­ing, ob­serv­ing from afar and merely hop­ing for the best. For this very rea­son, cru­cial ques­tions im­pose them­selves on our con­science and can no longer be avoided: Where are we go­ing? Toward what goal do we wish to ori­ent our­selves? What di­rec­tion should we choose as a peo­ple and as a hu­man com­mu­nity?

Two bib­li­cal im­ages

7. In or­der to an­swer these ques­tions and dis­cern how to nav­i­gate re­spon­si­bly the era of AI, I would like to bring to mind two scenes from the Bible: the con­struc­tion of the Tower of Babel (cf. Gen 11:1 – 9) and the re­build­ing of the walls of Jerusalem (cf. Neh 2 – 6). The story of Babel ap­pears in the Book of Genesis, at the ori­gins of hu­man­ity, im­me­di­ately af­ter the ge­nealo­gies of Noah’s sons. After set­tling in a plain in the land of Shinar, the peo­ple de­cided to build a city and a tower “with its top in the heav­ens” (Gen 11:4). Fearing be­ing scat­tered across the earth, they sought to guar­an­tee sta­bil­ity and power for them­selves, and above all to “make a name” for them­selves. It was an im­pres­sive feat: a sin­gle lan­guage, a sin­gle tech­nol­ogy, a sin­gle di­rec­tion. However, the pro­ject con­cealed a pro­found dan­ger. It was a pro­ject con­ceived with­out ref­er­ence to God, sup­ported by a uni­for­mity that elim­i­nated di­ver­sity and that chose ho­mog­e­niza­tion over com­mu­nion. When a city is built on pride and the claim to self-suf­fi­ciency, com­mu­ni­ca­tion breaks down, lan­guages are con­fused and peo­ple no longer un­der­stand each other. The re­sult is not unity, but dis­per­sion. Babel thus re­veals the lim­its of any ef­fort that, how­ever grandiose, arises from self-af­fir­ma­tion, sac­ri­fices hu­man dig­nity for ef­fi­ciency and as­pires to reach heaven with­out God’s bless­ing.

8. The Book of Nehemiah, in turn, opens at a time of great vul­ner­a­bil­ity in the his­tory of an­cient Israel. After the Babylonian ex­ile, a por­tion of the peo­ple re­turned to Jerusalem, but the city was still in ru­ins, the walls col­lapsed and the gates burned (cf. Neh 1 – 2). Nehemiah, a Jew in the ser­vice of the Persian King Artaxerxes, re­ceived news of the dis­as­trous state of his an­ces­tral city. Before tak­ing ac­tion, he fasted, prayed and in­ter­ceded for the peo­ple. He then asked the king for per­mis­sion to re­turn to Jerusalem and, upon ar­riv­ing, ex­am­ined the de­stroyed ar­eas in si­lence.  He did not im­pose so­lu­tions from above. He con­vened the fam­i­lies, as­signed each of them a sec­tion of the wall to re­build, lis­tened to their con­cerns, co­or­di­nated their ef­forts and ad­dressed any op­po­si­tion. The nar­ra­tive shows how the city is re­born, not through the ini­tia­tive of one man, but through the shared re­spon­si­bil­ity of all: men, women, priests, ar­ti­sans, heads of house­holds and young peo­ple all play a part. It is an un­der­tak­ing with God at the cen­ter, which re­builds re­la­tion­ships be­fore re­build­ing with stones. Thus, an­cient Jerusalem re­dis­cov­ers a com­mon lan­guage — not one of uni­for­mity, but one of com­mu­nion, namely the har­mony that arises when all per­sons as­sume their own role and rec­og­nize that their strength comes from the Lord.

9. In light of these two im­ages, the Holy Spirit chal­lenges us to­day re­gard­ing our re­la­tion­ship with tech­nol­ogy and the on­go­ing dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion. Scientific dis­cov­er­ies are tal­ents en­trusted to hu­man­ity so that they may bear fruit (cf. Mt 25:14 – 30). Technology has the power to heal, con­nect, ed­u­cate and pro­tect our com­mon home; but it can also di­vide, ex­clude and gen­er­ate new forms of in­jus­tice. In the ab­stract, tech­nol­ogy in and of it­self is not a so­lu­tion to hu­man­i­ty’s prob­lems, just as it is not in­her­ently evil. In prac­tice, how­ever, tech­nol­ogy is never neu­tral, be­cause it takes on the char­ac­ter­is­tics of those who de­vise, fi­nance, reg­u­late and use it. Therefore, the pri­mary choice is not be­tween a “yes” or “no” to tech­nol­ogy, but rather be­tween con­struct­ing Babel or re­build­ing Jerusalem; be­tween a power that claims to dom­i­nate the heav­ens and a peo­ple who work to­gether in the pres­ence of God to re­build the walls of fra­ter­nal co­ex­is­tence.

10. We must, then, avoid the “Babel syn­drome,” namely the idol­a­try of profit that sac­ri­fices the weak, a uni­for­mity that neu­tral­izes dif­fer­ences, and the pre­tense that a sin­gle lan­guage — even a dig­i­tal one — can trans­late every­thing, in­clud­ing the mys­tery of the per­son, into data and per­for­mance. The risk of de­hu­man­iza­tion — of build­ing a fu­ture that ex­cludes God and re­duces the other to a means — is an an­cient and ever-new temp­ta­tion that to­day takes on a tech­ni­cal guise. Instead, let us choose the “way of Nehemiah,” which high­lights the im­por­tance of work­ing to­gether to make the City of God a safe place for re­turn­ing ex­iles. Rebuilding to­day means rec­og­niz­ing that, pre­cisely from the plu­ral­ity of voices and vi­sions which, even though they some­times re­mind us of the con­fu­sion caused by the di­ver­sity of spo­ken lan­guages, a bright pos­si­bil­ity emerges. Indeed, this is the pos­si­bil­ity of build­ing to­gether, of trans­form­ing di­ver­sity into a re­source and of mak­ing lis­ten­ing and di­a­logue the com­mon ground upon which to cul­ti­vate jus­tice and fra­ter­nity. Within this shared task, Christians dis­cover their unique role of guid­ing ac­tions to­ward God so that, in his light, plu­ral­ism does not dis­si­pate into dis­or­der, but in­stead, through the prac­tice of syn­odal­ity, it be­comes the space in which hu­man­ity re­dis­cov­ers its solid foun­da­tions and its fi­nal end. In the Book of Revelation, John sees the New Jerusalem “coming down out of heaven from God” (Rev 21:2) as a gift for all hu­man­ity. And this vi­sion of grace is an in­vi­ta­tion for us Christians to work to­gether in or­der to fos­ter a peace­ful, just and dig­ni­fied life in com­mu­nity within to­day’s “cities.”

Building for the com­mon good

11. Building a city founded on the com­mon good im­plies, first and fore­most, build­ing on a firm re­la­tion­ship with God. It means rec­og­niz­ing that the truth of his love calls us to life “in all its full­ness” ( Jn 10:10) and com­mu­nion with him. Like Saint Augustine, we too can say, “You have made us for your­self, O Lord, and our heart is rest­less un­til it rests in you.” [8] Indeed, God has in­scribed in our hearts a de­sire for hap­pi­ness that em­braces all the di­men­sions of life. The Church, in di­a­logue with the men and women of our time, rec­og­nizes the ur­gent need to safe­guard and guide this as­pi­ra­tion to­ward its deep­est truth.

12. Secondly, build­ing for the com­mon good means ac­cept­ing the lim­its and weak­ness of hu­man­ity with­out con­sid­er­ing them an er­ror to be cor­rected. Today, the hu­man de­sire for full­ness of life is at risk of be­ing mis­led by de­ceit­ful goals, such as the prospect of a tech­nol­ogy that promises to free us from all weak­ness, and mod­els of well­be­ing that leave be­hind en­tire pop­u­la­tions. All too of­ten, we place our hope in un­lim­ited “upgrades,” in forms of progress that ex­ac­er­bate in­equal­i­ties, and in im­me­di­ate so­lu­tions in­ca­pable of heal­ing peo­ple’s wounds. As a re­sult, while some pur­sue the il­lu­sion of un­lim­ited self-as­ser­tion, many are de­prived of ba­sic ne­ces­si­ties. The Church re­minds us, with a firm yet hum­ble voice, that true ful­fil­ment is not achieved by elim­i­nat­ing weak­ness but through har­mo­nious growth. It is found where free­dom and re­spon­si­bil­ity are in­ter­twined with mu­tual care and true sol­i­dar­ity, and where progress is mea­sured by the dig­nity of each per­son and the good of all peo­ples.

13. Thirdly, build­ing a world in which every­one can flour­ish re­quires shared re­spon­si­bil­ity and courage. No one can sin­gle-hand­edly bear the weight of the chal­lenges the world is fac­ing, just as no one is so weak that they can­not play their part, for “power is made per­fect in weak­ness” (2 Cor 12:9). All are given their own sec­tion of the wall: sci­en­tists and re­searchers, en­tre­pre­neurs and work­ers, ed­u­ca­tors and leg­is­la­tors, civil so­ci­ety, pop­u­lar move­ments and faith com­mu­ni­ties. This is the logic of sub­sidiar­ity, which val­ues the co­op­er­a­tion be­tween gen­er­a­tions, peo­ples, dis­ci­plines and cul­tures as the best way for fos­ter­ing sta­bil­ity, pros­per­ity and peace. We should not be in­tim­i­dated by ten­sions or dif­fer­ences be­cause they can be­come cre­ative forces when guided by shared re­spon­si­bil­ity.

14. Finally, build­ing for the com­mon good re­quires an evan­gel­i­cal lan­guage. We must avoid hu­mil­i­at­ing or an­tag­o­nis­tic words, opt­ing rather for a clar­ity that sheds light and a frank­ness that un­locks new pos­si­bil­i­ties. We can­not con­done naïve en­thu­si­asms, nor fuel un­founded fears. Instead, let us es­tab­lish stan­dards for dis­cern­ment — the dig­nity of the hu­man per­son, the uni­ver­sal des­ti­na­tion of goods, the pref­er­en­tial op­tion for the poor, care for our com­mon home and peace — and let us trans­late these stan­dards into prac­tices such as re­spon­si­ble plan­ning, the as­sess­ment of hu­man and so­cial im­pact, the in­clu­sion of the most vul­ner­a­ble, the pro­mo­tion of dig­i­tal lit­er­acy and guid­ing re­search and in­dus­try to­ward jus­tice and peace.

Remaining hu­man

15. In the re­cent Ordinary Jubilee Year of 2025, we walked as pil­grims of hope and were blessed with many graces. Strengthened by these gifts, we can move for­ward with con­fi­dence to face the ar­du­ous tasks and de­mand­ing chal­lenges that lie ahead. In the era of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, when hu­man dig­nity is threat­ened by new forms of de­hu­man­iza­tion, ours is the press­ing duty to re­main pro­foundly hu­man. We must lov­ingly safe­guard the grandeur of hu­man­ity be­stowed upon us and re­vealed in its full­ness in Christ, the splen­dor of which no ma­chine can ever re­place. True progress al­ways stems from a heart open to oth­ers, an in­tel­li­gence will­ing to lis­ten and a will that seeks what unites rather than what sep­a­rates.

16. I ad­dress this heart­felt ap­peal to all the Catholic faith­ful, to all Christians and to all men and women of good­will. Let us not be afraid to get our hands dirty on the “construction site” of our time. Like Nehemiah, let us pray, plan wisely and work per­se­ver­ingly, plac­ing God at the fore­front of our ac­tions and the hu­man per­son at the cen­ter of our choices. Thus, the “rejected stones” — the poor, the sick, the mi­grants and the least among us — will be­come the cor­ner­stone, and a solid, wel­com­ing com­mon home will emerge on the earth, where love and faith­ful­ness will fi­nally meet, and right­eous­ness and peace will em­brace (cf. Ps 85:10). This is the bless­ing we im­plore from God; and the task that stands be­fore us is that of be­ing builders of com­mu­nion, rather than ar­chi­tects of Babel. We are to be ser­vants of the com­ing Kingdom, in­stead of lords of tow­ers des­tined for ruin. With the heart of a shep­herd and a fa­ther, I ask every­one to aban­don the con­struc­tion of yet an­other Tower of Babel and to join forces in build­ing up the com­mon good, so that hu­man­ity will never lose its beauty, and the world once again will come to rec­og­nize the hu­man heart as the place where God de­sires to dwell.

CHAPTER ONE

A DYNAMIC APPROACH FAITHFUL TO THE GOSPEL

17. In this first chap­ter, I in­tend to pre­sent syn­thet­i­cally how the Social Doctrine of the Church has taken shape in the re­cent Papal Magisterium and in the Second Vatican Council, in or­der to demon­strate its dy­namic char­ac­ter. Indeed, in each era the res no­vae re­quire that this teach­ing ad­dress his­tor­i­cal ques­tions in the light of re­vealed Truth. In this re­gard, ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, too, should not be con­sid­ered as merely yet an­other theme to be stud­ied or a cri­sis to be man­aged, but rather as a de­vel­op­ment that chal­lenges the cat­e­gories of Social Doctrine from within, call­ing for their fur­ther de­vel­op­ment in fi­delity to the Gospel.

18. This overview, how­ever, would not be very com­pre­hen­si­ble if, be­fore re­flect­ing on the con­tri­bu­tion of in­di­vid­ual popes and their most rel­e­vant doc­u­ments, we do not first clar­ify some fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples con­cern­ing the way in which the Church ex­ists in his­tory and re­lates to the world. Failing to do so would ex­pose Social Doctrine to the risk of be­ing per­ceived as an un­due in­ter­fer­ence in “worldly” mat­ters or as an ex­ter­nal code of ethics im­posed from above. In re­al­ity, it stems from a Church that walks along­side hu­man­ity, rec­og­niz­ing the au­ton­omy of earthly re­al­i­ties and the dis­tinc­tion be­tween ec­cle­sial and po­lit­i­cal com­mu­ni­ties. Indeed, it is for this very rea­son that she strives to serve the com­mon good.

A Church jour­ney­ing through hu­man his­tory

19. The Church is pre­sent in the world as a sign of unity for the en­tire hu­man fam­ily. She rec­og­nizes to­day’s ques­tions and chal­lenges as the cur­rent set­ting in which to carry out her par­tic­u­lar vo­ca­tion of lis­ten­ing, di­a­logue and ser­vice, and of be­ing re­spon­sive to every­thing con­cern­ing the lives of con­tem­po­rary men and women. This in­volve­ment in peo­ple’s lives helps the Church un­der­stand ever more clearly that her mis­sion has a his­tor­i­cal scope and en­tails a re­spon­si­bil­ity for the way in which so­cial re­la­tions are built. For this rea­son, she can­not con­sider her­self a stranger to the forces shap­ing so­ci­ety. On the con­trary, the Church ac­tively par­tic­i­pates in the processes by which so­ci­ety grows and is or­ga­nized, and she of­fers her own con­tri­bu­tion to the cre­ation of a more just and fra­ter­nal so­ci­ety. Pope Francis emphasized this his­tor­i­cal di­men­sion of the Church’s mis­sion: “No one can de­mand that re­li­gion should be rel­e­gated to the in­ner sanc­tum of per­sonal life, with­out in­flu­ence on so­ci­etal and na­tional life, with­out con­cern for the sound­ness of civil in­sti­tu­tions, with­out a right to of­fer an opin­ion on events af­fect­ing so­ci­ety.” [9]

20. The Church’s vo­ca­tion and duty to ac­com­pany hu­man­ity in the specifics of his­tory leads her to rec­og­nize that earthly re­al­i­ties pos­sess their own proper char­ac­ter and or­der. The Second Vatican Council expressed this prin­ci­ple with par­tic­u­lar pre­ci­sion in the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, whose six­ti­eth an­niver­sary we re­mem­bered and cel­e­brated with grat­i­tude on 7 December 2025: “If by the au­ton­omy of earthly af­fairs is meant that cre­ated things and so­ci­eties them­selves en­joy their own laws and val­ues… then the de­mand for au­ton­omy is per­fectly in or­der.” [10] This af­fir­ma­tion shows that cre­ation bears the im­print of an orig­i­nal good­ness that our hu­man out­look must pre­serve, cul­ti­vate and bring to ful­fil­ment. In this re­gard, the Church of­fers her­self in a way that helps to in­ter­pret re­al­ity in all its depth. She sup­ports with hum­ble firm­ness the choices that pro­mote the dig­nity of every per­son, the co­he­sion of com­mu­ni­ties and the good of all. The Church thus stands along­side the world with­out over­pow­er­ing it, so that the promise of jus­tice and peace that the Holy Spirit con­tin­ues to sus­tain in the heart of hu­man­ity may come to fruition in every hu­man en­deavor.

21. Recognizing that God up­holds the free­dom of men and women in the un­fold­ing of his­tory, the Second Vatican Council affirmed the dis­tinc­tion be­tween the ec­cle­sial com­mu­nity and the po­lit­i­cal com­mu­nity, em­pha­siz­ing that each must op­er­ate with full au­ton­omy. The Church’s pres­ence in the world is also ex­pressed through her re­la­tion­ship with civil so­ci­ety and pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions. By en­gag­ing with these en­ti­ties, the Church ac­knowl­edges the value of so­cial and po­lit­i­cal re­al­i­ties and hon­ors their spe­cific re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, sup­port­ing every­thing that fos­ters the well­be­ing of in­di­vid­u­als and strength­ens the fab­ric of so­ci­ety. The Church does not claim to as­sume the func­tions be­long­ing to the State. On the con­trary, she es­teems those who serve the com­mon good, and she firmly ac­knowl­edges the re­spon­si­bil­ity that civil in­sti­tu­tions hold within so­ci­ety. At the same time, the mis­sion en­trusted to the Church prompts her to ad­dress the real suf­fer­ing of the men and women of our time. This close­ness does not stem from an in­tent to sup­plant civil in­sti­tu­tions, much less from an im­plicit crit­i­cism of their work. Rather, it stems from evan­gel­i­cal char­ity, which im­pels the Church to draw near to the wounds of hu­man­ity when­ever they sur­face with greater sever­ity. When the Church in­ter­venes, she does so fol­low­ing the ex­am­ple of the Good Samaritan, with dis­cre­tion and close­ness, aware that what arises from ur­gent ne­ces­sity can­not be­come the norm, nor re­place the in­sti­tu­tional re­spon­si­bil­i­ties proper to the civil com­mu­nity.

22. Starting from this twofold ac­knowl­edg­ment — the au­ton­omy of earthly re­al­i­ties and the dis­tinc­tion be­tween ec­cle­si­as­ti­cal and po­lit­i­cal spheres of com­pe­tence — al­lows for a clearer un­der­stand­ing of the di­rec­tion that the Second Vatican Council set for the Church in her re­la­tion­ship with the world. Gaudium et Spes reminds us that “it is the task of the whole People of God, par­tic­u­larly of its pas­tors and the­olo­gians, to lis­ten to and dis­tin­guish the many voices of our times and to in­ter­pret them in the light of God’s word, in or­der that the re­vealed Truth may be more deeply pen­e­trated, bet­ter un­der­stood and more suit­ably pre­sented.” [11]  Listening to the “many voices” is no mere so­ci­o­log­i­cal ex­er­cise, but in­stead re­quires spir­i­tual dis­cern­ment. Guided by the Spirit, the People of God come to rec­og­nize in cul­tural and so­cial trans­for­ma­tions both the signs of the pres­ence of Christ, who comes and guides his­tory to­ward its ful­fil­ment, and those aber­ra­tions that ob­scure his face. In this way, the es­sen­tial core of re­vealed Truth is not al­tered, but made ex­plicit and adopted as a liv­ing stan­dard for guid­ing con­crete choices, in­spir­ing paths of per­sonal and com­mu­nal con­ver­sion, pro­mot­ing struc­tural re­forms and sup­port­ing new forms of evan­gel­i­cal wit­ness in pub­lic life. History is thus un­der­stood as one of the places in which the Church al­lows her­self to be taught by the Spirit about the hu­man­iz­ing power of the Gospel; and she learns to de­velop her own teach­ing at the ser­vice of the dig­nity of every per­son and the good of all peo­ples.

The wis­dom of the word of God in di­a­logue with the hu­man sci­ences

23. The Church re­gards all who sin­cerely seek “truth, good­ness and beauty” as com­pan­ions on the jour­ney, and con­sid­ers them as “precious al­lies” [12] in de­fend­ing the dig­nity of every per­son and in car­ing for cre­ation. Adopting the pas­toral ap­proach of the Second Vatican Council, which in­vites us to lis­ten, dis­cern and in­ter­pret the signs of the times, and en­light­ened by the wis­dom of the word, the Church is not afraid to en­counter hu­man knowl­edge. Indeed, the word of God pro­vides re­li­able stan­dards for es­tab­lish­ing paths of jus­tice and open­ing ways of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and peace among peo­ples. When it comes to ap­ply­ing these stan­dards to the com­plex sit­u­a­tions of our time, the con­tri­bu­tions of phi­los­o­phy and of the hu­man and so­cial sci­ences is es­sen­tial. These dis­ci­plines help us un­der­stand and an­a­lyze cul­tural, eco­nomic and po­lit­i­cal dy­nam­ics more deeply.  Saint John Paul II recalled that the Church wel­comes the con­tri­bu­tions of the so­cial sci­ences in or­der “to draw from them con­crete in­sights that help her carry out her mag­is­te­r­ial of­fice.” [13] A di­a­logue with such kinds of knowl­edge does not di­min­ish the power of the Gospel. On the con­trary, it makes it pos­si­ble to iden­tify with greater clar­ity what gen­uinely fos­ters the lives of in­di­vid­u­als and com­mu­ni­ties. Following this per­spec­tive, Pope Francis emphasized that when deal­ing with many spe­cific ques­tions, the Church does not claim to of­fer “a de­fin­i­tive opin­ion,” [14] but rec­og­nizes the im­por­tance of lis­ten­ing to sci­en­tific re­search and of en­cour­ag­ing a se­ri­ous and hon­est de­bate among ex­perts while wel­com­ing a di­ver­sity of opin­ions.

24. Nourished by this fruit­ful di­a­logue be­tween the Gospel and hu­man knowl­edge, the Church has pro­gres­sively de­vel­oped her Social Doctrine, cul­ti­vat­ing in his­tory a wise pat­ri­mony marked by the­o­log­i­cal and an­thro­po­log­i­cal co­her­ence rooted in the Christian un­der­stand­ing of the per­son. Precisely be­cause this pat­ri­mony arises from faith and a cor­re­spond­ing vi­sion of re­al­ity, it does not amount to a reper­toire of tech­ni­cal so­lu­tions or an eco­nomic or po­lit­i­cal model to be set against oth­ers.  Instead, it be­longs to a dif­fer­ent or­der, [15] namely that of the prin­ci­ples that guide the in­ter­pre­ta­tion of events and sus­tain an evan­gel­i­cal un­der­stand­ing of his­tor­i­cal processes and the choices these en­tail. Herein lies the proper func­tion of Social Doctrine, which does not claim to sup­plant the re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of pol­i­tics or in­sti­tu­tions, but of­fers it­self as a foun­da­tion for col­lec­tive dis­cern­ment, help­ing to rec­og­nize and pro­mote what­ever serves the dig­nity of per­sons, the vi­tal­ity of com­mu­ni­ties and the com­mon good.

Social Doctrine as a shared dis­cern­ment

25. Understanding that the truth is a gift to be shared, not a pos­ses­sion to be mo­nop­o­lized, frees the Church from the temp­ta­tion of seek­ing forms of pres­ence based on power. In or­der to re­dis­cover the evan­gel­i­cal ap­proach of a gen­tle procla­ma­tion of truth that is not im­posed, Saint John Paul II invited us to ex­am­ine hon­estly the times when ac­qui­es­cence was given to “intolerance and even the use of vi­o­lence in the ser­vice of truth.” [16] In this same vein, I too have reaf­firmed that the Church “does not claim to pos­sess a mo­nop­oly on truth,” [17] be­cause truth is not a ter­ri­tory to be de­fended, but a good to be shared. For his part, Pope Francis expressed this same per­spec­tive in his strik­ing phrase, “time is greater than space.” [18] What mat­ters most is not oc­cu­py­ing po­si­tions of power or de­fend­ing cul­tural strong­holds, but ini­ti­at­ing good processes and en­abling them to ma­ture.  In this way, the truth of the Gospel is not im­posed from above, but grows over time within the con­crete in­ter­weav­ing of lives, com­mu­ni­ties and cul­tures. This is not a truth that fears di­ver­sity, but in­stead wel­comes and guides it. It does not elim­i­nate con­flicts, but trans­forms them, re­unit­ing that which his­tory tends to scat­ter. This con­cept can also be il­lus­trated by the im­age of a mul­ti­fac­eted poly­he­dron, [19] in which the one truth of the Gospel is re­flected from dif­fer­ent an­gles.

26. This at­ti­tude of open­ness to truth, which is at the same time both one and di­verse, pro­foundly ex­presses the catholic­ity of the Church, for she em­braces the en­tire hu­man fam­ily yet is also im­mersed in the con­crete sit­u­a­tions of peo­ples and cul­tures. The Second Vatican Council reminds us that, in virtue of this very catholic­ity, “each part con­tributes its own gifts to other parts and to the en­tire Church.” [20] In this way, the Church grows as a whole and as in­di­vid­ual com­mu­ni­ties thanks to a mu­tual ex­change and to shared ef­forts to­ward an ever fuller com­mu­nion. It fol­lows, then, that the People of God are not only gath­ered to­gether from many peo­ples, but are also in­ter­twined through dif­fer­ent func­tions, vo­ca­tions, cul­tures and tra­di­tions, each be­ing called to sup­port and en­rich one an­other. From this per­spec­tive, Saint Paul VI acknowledged that, given the great va­ri­ety of his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tions, it is un­re­al­is­tic to think that the Church’s Social Doctrine can pro­pose a sin­gle re­sponse that is valid in all con­texts. [21] For this rea­son, he in­vited each Christian com­mu­nity to in­ter­pret the re­al­ity in its own coun­try with clar­ity and re­spon­si­bil­ity. The fruit­ful ten­sion be­tween the uni­ver­sal­ity of the Church’s mis­sion and her lo­cal roots is an in­trin­sic as­pect of her life, for she en­com­passes the whole world, while ad­dress­ing the spe­cific is­sues of each con­text as the real set­ting in which the Gospel takes shape.

27. In light of what has been said so far, the Church’s Social Doctrine can be seen more au­then­ti­cally. It is not a hand­book of prin­ci­ples and norms to be ap­plied, but a process of shared dis­cern­ment. It is born from the en­counter be­tween the eter­nal truth of the Gospel and the ques­tions of his­tory. It al­lows it­self to be chal­lenged by the signs of the times, and draws nour­ish­ment from the con­tri­bu­tions of sci­ence, cul­ture and hu­man ex­pe­ri­ence. Therefore, when the dig­nity of our broth­ers and sis­ters is vi­o­lated, when pol­i­tics fails to ad­dress the tragedies of hu­man­ity, when the econ­omy turns against the per­son or sci­ence over­steps the lim­its of its com­pe­tence, [22] the Church — to­gether with other Christian de­nom­i­na­tions and be­liev­ers of other re­li­gions — must make her voice heard, not in or­der to dom­i­nate, but to pro­mote com­mu­nion. Understood in this way, Social Doctrine be­comes a the­ol­ogy of com­mu­nion in his­tory, a his­tory in which the Word made flesh con­tin­ues to be pre­sent through di­a­logue, mem­ory and prophecy.

The de­vel­op­ment of Social Doctrine from Leo XIII to the pre­sent

28. Having out­lined the way in which the Church is pre­sent in his­tory and en­gages in di­a­logue with the world, I would now like to con­sider the de­vel­op­ment of Social Doctrine in the Magisterium, which has re­sponded to the ma­jor so­cial trans­for­ma­tions from the nine­teenth cen­tury to the pre­sent day. Naturally, I can­not do jus­tice to the full rich­ness of this teach­ing, whose fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples are pre­sented in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church and have been fur­ther ex­am­ined by re­cent Magisterial teach­ing. Nor can I sys­tem­at­i­cally ex­plore every­thing that has been de­vel­oped in the Encyclicals of my late ven­er­a­ble pre­de­ces­sors, es­pe­cially in Laudato Si’and Fratelli Tutti. Nevertheless, I will em­pha­size some es­sen­tial points in or­der to show how the pre­sent text stands in con­ti­nu­ity with that tra­di­tion. I would also like to stress how, within this tra­di­tion, the un­chang­ing core of re­vealed truths re­gard­ing the hu­man per­son and so­ci­ety is con­stantly in­ter­twined with a re­newed ca­pac­ity for lis­ten­ing to his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tions and for re­spond­ing to con­tem­po­rary is­sues. I will now re­view some of the sig­nif­i­cant stages of this de­vel­op­ment, be­gin­ning with the pe­riod in­au­gu­rated by the Encyclical Rerum Novarum.

The first stages of the Church’s Social Doctrine

29. What we now call the “Social Doctrine of the Church” is not a spon­ta­neous prod­uct of the mod­ern age. Instead, it is the fruit of re­ceiv­ing and struc­tur­ing a long tra­di­tion of ec­cle­sial re­flec­tion on life in so­ci­ety, rooted in Sacred Scripture, the Church Fathers and the the­o­log­i­cal and le­gal de­vel­op­ments of the Middle Ages and mod­ern era. Although the ex­pres­sion “Social Doctrine of the Church” was coined by Pius XII in 1950, [23] its con­tent be­gan to take shape as an or­ganic cor­pus of so­cial teach­ing with Leo XIII’s Encyclical Rerum Novarum. Confronted with the “new things” of his time — the con­flict be­tween cap­i­tal and la­bor, the ques­tion of the work­force, and eco­nomic and so­cial trans­for­ma­tions — Leo XIII did not limit him­self merely to ac­knowl­edg­ing the un­rest, but saw these sit­u­a­tions as an area for the Church’s pas­toral mis­sion. He ex­posed them to rig­or­ous dis­cern­ment, il­lu­mi­nat­ing their causes and pos­si­ble so­lu­tions in the light of the Gospel and an in­te­gral vi­sion of the hu­man per­son cre­ated in the im­age of God. Saint John Paul II regarded this ap­proach as a “lasting par­a­digm” [24] of Social Doctrine: an ex­em­plary prac­tice through which the Church, when faced with his­tor­i­cal changes, ex­er­cises her right and duty to ex­am­ine so­cial re­al­i­ties, make pro­nounce­ments about them and in­di­cate paths for find­ing just so­lu­tions. In this way, the peren­nial con­tents of the faith and an­cient ec­cle­sial wis­dom find ex­pres­sion in a liv­ing doc­trine that re­mains faith­ful to the Gospel while grow­ing in re­sponse to the “new things” of every era.

30. Leo XIII’s Encyclical Rerum Novarum constitutes a mile­stone in the de­vel­op­ment of the Church’s so­cial teach­ing. The doc­u­ment places the dig­nity of work and of work­ers at the fore­front of its re­flec­tion; af­firms the right to a fair wage for one­self and one’s fam­ily; rec­og­nizes that per­sons have a fun­da­men­tal value that takes prece­dence over cap­i­tal and profit; de­fends pri­vate prop­erty along with its in­dis­pens­able so­ci­etal role; es­teems work­ers’ as­so­ci­a­tions; and pro­poses forms of co­op­er­a­tion be­tween the dif­fer­ent com­po­nents of so­ci­ety as an al­ter­na­tive to the men­tal­ity of class strug­gle. It is not sur­pris­ing, then, that Pius XI defined it as the “ Magna Carta” [25] of Christian so­cial ac­tion. In Rerum Novarum, the Church’s an­cient wis­dom re­gard­ing the hu­man per­son and life in so­ci­ety took on a new form ca­pa­ble of re­spond­ing to the in­dus­trial age and of­fer­ing the first ma­jor sys­tem­atic frame­work for the Social Doctrine that would be fur­ther de­vel­oped in the fol­low­ing decades. While many of the his­tor­i­cal con­di­tions de­scribed by Leo XIII have changed, at least two in­sights re­main highly rel­e­vant to­day: the pri­macy of hu­man la­bor over any mind­set fo­cused solely on fi­nance or pro­duc­tiv­ity — with the con­se­quent at­ten­tion to the peo­ple and fam­i­lies most sus­cep­ti­ble to ex­ploita­tion — and the in­sep­a­ra­ble link be­tween pro­claim­ing the Gospel and pur­su­ing a more just so­cial or­der. Rerum Novarum thereby con­tin­ues to re­mind us that there is no au­then­tic evan­ge­liza­tion that does not also af­fect the struc­tures of hu­man so­ci­ety.

31. Pius XI’s Encyclical Quadragesima Anno was pub­lished in 1931 on the for­ti­eth an­niver­sary of Rerum Novarumat the height of a ma­jor global eco­nomic cri­sis, mark­ing a fur­ther step in the Church’s so­cial teach­ing. Rather than lim­it­ing it­self to ad­dress­ing the “workforce ques­tion,” it broad­ened its fo­cus to en­com­pass the over­all struc­ture of the eco­nomic and po­lit­i­cal or­der. The Encyclical denounces the con­cen­tra­tion of eco­nomic power in the hands of a few; crit­i­cizes both un­lim­ited com­pe­ti­tion and col­lec­tivist pro­jects that un­der­mine the free­dom and re­spon­si­bil­ity of the in­di­vid­ual; strongly af­firms the work­ers’ right to as­so­ci­a­tion; and re­it­er­ates the re­quire­ment that wages be pro­por­tion­ate not only to per­for­mance, but also to the needs of work­ers and their fam­i­lies. Within this frame­work, Pius XI systematically for­mu­lated the prin­ci­ple of sub­sidiar­ity, which was to be­come one of the cor­ner­stones of Social Doctrine. According to this prin­ci­ple, what­ever can be car­ried out by in­di­vid­u­als, fam­i­lies, in­ter­me­di­ary or­ga­ni­za­tions and lo­cal com­mu­ni­ties should not be car­ried out by higher-level au­thor­i­ties. Alongside these con­tri­bu­tions, in var­i­ous in­ter­ven­tions of his Magisterium — from the Encyclicals Non Abbiamo Bisogno and Mit Brennender Sorge to Divini Redemptoris —  Pius XI clearly re­called the so­ci­etal role of pri­vate prop­erty and de­nounced forms of to­tal­i­tar­i­an­ism that de­mean the dig­nity of the per­son, sti­fle life in so­ci­ety, ex­alt the State above its just value and dis­crim­i­nate ac­cord­ing to race. At least three in­sights of his so­cial teach­ing re­main par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant to­day: the aware­ness that in­jus­tice con­cerns not only in­di­vid­ual be­hav­ior but also eco­nomic and in­sti­tu­tional struc­tures; the im­por­tance of the prin­ci­ple of sub­sidiar­ity, which calls for the strength­en­ing of the fab­ric of as­so­ci­a­tions and com­mu­ni­ties while avoid­ing fur­ther cen­tral­iza­tion of power; and the link be­tween the dig­nity of work, fair re­mu­ner­a­tion and the gen­uine pos­si­bil­ity for fam­i­lies to lead a dig­ni­fied life.

32. In the tragic con­text of the Second World War, and the years of re­con­struc­tion that fol­lowed, the teach­ings of Pius XII made a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the de­vel­op­ment of Social Doctrine. This is par­tic­u­larly true of his Christmas ra­dio mes­sages, in which he out­lined the frame­work of an in­ter­na­tional or­der based on jus­tice, peace and the recog­ni­tion of hu­man dig­nity. In these mes­sages, the Pope proposed a di­a­logue with so­ci­ety based on an ap­peal to nat­ural law un­der­stood as a set of ob­jec­tive prin­ci­ples that pre­cede the in­ter­ests of in­di­vid­u­als and States, and which must reg­u­late both the in­ter­nal life of na­tions and their mu­tual re­la­tions. Pius XII also at­trib­uted a de­ci­sive role to pro­fes­sional as­so­ci­a­tions, la­bor unions and the var­i­ous in­ter­me­di­ary or­ga­ni­za­tions in the eco­nomic and so­cial or­der. He rec­og­nized these or­ga­nized forms of so­ci­ety as an es­sen­tial safe­guard for civil equi­lib­rium and for pro­tect­ing the com­mon good. He af­firmed the need for a sound rule of law for guard­ing against the abuse of power, and he rec­og­nized democ­racy as a means for en­sur­ing the proper ex­er­cise of au­thor­ity. At the same time, he warned against any at­tempt to base law on util­ity or force, re­call­ing that an in­ter­na­tional or­der gov­erned by the ad­van­tage of the strongest ex­poses weaker peo­ples to op­pres­sion and fun­da­men­tally un­der­mines trust be­tween na­tions. Finally, Pius XII identified pro­found eco­nomic im­bal­ances be­tween coun­tries as one of the fac­tors fu­el­ing con­flicts. [26] Three guide­lines re­main par­tic­u­larly sig­nif­i­cant for our own times, cur­rently marked by new forms of global power and grow­ing in­equal­i­ties: the need for law to take prece­dence over in­ter­ests; the aware­ness that eco­nomic dis­par­i­ties are a breed­ing ground for ten­sion and vi­o­lence; and the ne­ces­sity of a net­work of as­so­ci­a­tions ca­pa­ble of me­di­at­ing be­tween the in­di­vid­ual and the State. These guide­lines con­tinue to pro­vide im­por­tant cri­te­ria that en­able Social Doctrine to in­ter­pret the dy­nam­ics of glob­al­iza­tion and pro­mote a more just and peace­ful in­ter­na­tional or­der.

The years of the Second Vatican Council

33. A new phase in the Church’s so­cial teach­ing be­gan with Saint John XXIII, who placed a greater em­pha­sis on the global di­men­sion of so­cial is­sues and the lan­guage of rights. In Mater et Magistra, he pre­sented the Christian faith as a light ca­pa­ble of unit­ing heaven and earth. He re­called that, while the Church’s pri­mary mis­sion is the sanc­ti­fi­ca­tion and procla­ma­tion of eter­nal goods, she does not ne­glect the con­crete needs of peo­ple’s daily lives, and is con­cerned with every au­then­tic hu­man good. [27] Based on this uni­fied vi­sion of hu­man­ity, John XXIII emphasized that so­ci­etal life re­quires a bal­ance be­tween the ini­tia­tive of cit­i­zens and groups — who are called to or­ga­nize them­selves and work to­gether — and the ac­tion of the State, which must co­or­di­nate and pro­vide sup­port with­out sti­fling the free­dom and re­spon­si­bil­ity of in­di­vid­u­als. Hence, he drew at­ten­tion to fair re­mu­ner­a­tion for work, worker par­tic­i­pa­tion and the grow­ing dis­par­i­ties be­tween coun­tries. A few years later, in Pacem in Terris, John XXIII addressed for the first time not only the faith­ful, but also all peo­ple of good will, or­gan­i­cally link­ing the dig­nity of the per­son to the recog­ni­tion of fun­da­men­tal rights and du­ties, and propos­ing a di­rec­tion for so­ci­ety — at the in­ter­na­tional level too — based on truth, jus­tice, love and free­dom. [28] In the pre­sent day, which is marked by wide­spread con­flict and new forms of global in­ter­de­pen­dence, the fol­low­ing as­pects of his thought re­main par­tic­u­larly sig­nif­i­cant: the uni­ver­sal per­spec­tive of his ap­peal; his ref­er­ence to hu­man rights as a shared frame­work; and his con­vic­tion that last­ing peace re­quires in­sti­tu­tions and re­la­tions be­tween peo­ples that are in­spired by the dig­nity of every per­son.

34. The Second Vatican Council marked a turn­ing point in the Church’s un­der­stand­ing of her­self in the con­tem­po­rary world. In the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, the Council presented the im­age of a Church that is close to hu­man­ity, en­gaged with the world and com­mit­ted to re­flect­ing on the con­crete re­al­ity of his­tor­i­cal sit­u­a­tions, rather than ab­stract con­cepts. The text ad­dresses the ma­jor is­sues of mar­riage and the fam­ily, eco­nomic and so­ci­etal life, the po­lit­i­cal com­mu­nity, war and peace. It in­sists that eco­nomic and in­sti­tu­tional struc­tures are just only to the ex­tent that they serve the in­te­gral de­vel­op­ment of the per­son and pro­mote the re­spon­si­ble par­tic­i­pa­tion of all. [29] The im­por­tance of this con­cil­iar doc­u­ment for the Social Doctrine of the Church lies not only in hav­ing opened up hori­zons for the­matic re­flec­tion, but also in its method of dis­cern­ment that in­vites us to in­ter­pret his­tor­i­cal changes guided by the Gospel and hu­man ex­per­tise. This ap­proach re­veals that di­a­logue with the world is not a tac­ti­cal choice for the Church, but a con­crete ex­pres­sion of her mis­sion be­cause the Gospel, like leaven, is ca­pa­ble of trans­form­ing the struc­tures of so­ci­ety from within and forg­ing paths to­ward a greater hu­man­ity. The Declaration Dignitatis Humanae can be in­cluded in the same con­text. Here, the Council rec­og­nized that re­li­gious free­dom is a fun­da­men­tal right grounded in hu­man dig­nity that must be guar­an­teed by law so as to pre­vent peo­ple from be­ing forced to act against their con­science or im­peded from seek­ing and pro­fess­ing the truth both pri­vately and pub­licly. [30] This prin­ci­ple is highly rel­e­vant to­day and con­tin­ues to pro­vide Social Doctrine with de­ci­sive cri­te­ria for pro­tect­ing in­di­vid­u­als and build­ing plu­ral­is­tic and peace­ful so­ci­eties.

35. During the Pontificate of Saint Paul VI, an un­der­stand­ing of peace emerged that was not re­duced to the mere ab­sence of war, but took shape within the scope of in­te­gral hu­man de­vel­op­ment. In Populorum Progressio, he de­scribed de­vel­op­ment as a tran­si­tion from less hu­mane to more hu­mane liv­ing con­di­tions. He fur­ther un­der­stood it as a process that con­cerns “each per­son and the whole per­son,” [31] that is every di­men­sion of the per­son and all peo­ple with­out ex­cep­tion. For this rea­son, Paul VI could af­firm that de­vel­op­ment un­der­stood in this way is in re­al­ity “the new name for peace,” [32] be­cause it aims to erad­i­cate the roots of in­jus­tice and con­flict and cre­ate op­por­tu­ni­ties for a more dig­ni­fied life for all. The es­tab­lish­ment of the Pontifical Commission Iustitia et Pax should also be seen in this light as an at­tempt to give sta­ble form to this in­sight at the ec­cle­sial and in­ter­na­tional lev­els, while bear­ing in mind the grow­ing gap be­tween rich and poor coun­tries and the need for poli­cies that gen­uinely pro­mote more hu­mane liv­ing con­di­tions for all.

36. In Octogesima Adveniens, writ­ten on the oc­ca­sion of the eight­i­eth an­niver­sary of Rerum Novarum, Paul VI applied this per­spec­tive to postin­dus­trial so­ci­ety, marked by ur­ban­iza­tion, new forms of poverty and rapid cul­tural changes that called into ques­tion the fu­ture of in­di­vid­u­als and com­mu­ni­ties. Paul VI believed that al­though the Gospel was pro­claimed, writ­ten and lived out in a his­tor­i­cal and cul­tural con­text very dif­fer­ent from our own, its mes­sage was not “outdated.” [33] Instead, it of­fers a vi­sion of the hu­man per­son, re­la­tion­ships, au­thor­ity and the com­mon good that is still ca­pa­ble of guid­ing eco­nomic, po­lit­i­cal and cul­tural choices to­day. In other words, the Gospel re­mains rel­e­vant be­cause it pro­vides the cri­te­ria for rec­og­niz­ing what hu­man­izes or de­hu­man­izes and what lib­er­ates or op­presses in ever-chang­ing sit­u­a­tions. For the Social Doctrine of the Church, Paul VI’s most de­mand­ing legacy is pre­cisely this: as long as there are peo­ple in the world who are ex­cluded from the de­vel­op­ment be­fit­ting hu­man dig­nity, the Christian com­mu­nity can­not be con­tent with a the­o­ret­i­cal procla­ma­tion of peace. Rather, be­gin­ning where peo­ple are mar­gin­al­ized, it must al­low the Gospel to pass judg­ment on those eco­nomic and po­lit­i­cal struc­tures which — as John Paul II would later re­mind us — can be­come ver­i­ta­ble “structures of sin.” [34] As a re­sult, no per­son or peo­ple will be treated as ex­pend­able in the processes of de­vel­op­ment.

The re­cent Magisterium

37. The rich so­cial teach­ing of Saint John Paul II lies at the cross­roads of the cri­sis of the great ide­o­log­i­cal sys­tems of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury and the on­set of eco­nomic glob­al­iza­tion. His Encyclical Laborem Exercens, writ­ten ninety years af­ter the pub­li­ca­tion of Rerum Novarum, opened up a new av­enue for re­flec­tion on work. It pre­sents fair wages as the con­crete means of ver­i­fy­ing the just­ness of the en­tire so­cioe­co­nomic sys­tem be­cause they re­veal whether the worker is treated as a per­son or merely as a cost of pro­duc­tion. [35] Work is not con­sid­ered sim­ply as a prob­lem to be dealt with or a means of gen­er­at­ing in­come, but a fun­da­men­tal good for the per­son, a prin­ci­ple of eco­nomic ac­tiv­ity and the key to the en­tire so­ci­etal ques­tion. Through work, hu­man be­ings bring their free­dom, cre­ativ­ity and ca­pac­ity for co­op­er­a­tion into play, con­tribut­ing to the cul­tural and moral el­e­va­tion of so­ci­ety. [36] In light of this, the var­i­ous kinds of job in­se­cu­rity, frag­mented ca­reer paths and au­toma­tion must not be eval­u­ated solely in terms of ef­fi­ciency, but in re­la­tion to the dig­nity of the worker, the right to suf­fi­cient re­mu­ner­a­tion and the gen­uine pos­si­bil­ity of par­tic­i­pat­ing in so­ci­ety.

38. With his Encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, mark­ing the twen­ti­eth an­niver­sary of Populorum Progressio, John Paul II reexamined the scourge of un­der­de­vel­op­ment. He ac­knowl­edged the fail­ure of nu­mer­ous at­tempts to ac­cel­er­ate the eco­nomic de­vel­op­ment of poor peo­ples and to as­sist them in the process of in­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, not­ing the per­sis­tent and in­deed widen­ing gap be­tween the world’s North and South. [37] He also de­nounced the eco­nomic, fi­nan­cial and com­mer­cial mech­a­nisms that, man­aged by the strongest economies, struc­turally fa­vor their own in­ter­ests while sti­fling weaker economies, and he asked that they be sub­jected to se­ri­ous eth­i­cal, not just tech­ni­cal, scrutiny. [38] In this con­text, sol­i­dar­ity was un­der­stood as a con­crete, shared re­spon­si­bil­ity among in­di­vid­u­als, peo­ples and na­tions — a form of so­cial friend­ship or po­lit­i­cal char­ity ori­ented to­ward the “civilization of love” pro­posed by Paul VI. [39]

39. On the cen­te­nary of Rerum Novarum, the Encyclical Centesimus Annus offered a re­flec­tion on the col­lapse of the Soviet sys­tem and the rise of democ­racy and the mar­ket econ­omy. Saint John Paul II reiterated Pius XII’s mes­sage that the Church val­ues democ­racy in­so­far as it guar­an­tees the ef­fec­tive par­tic­i­pa­tion of cit­i­zens, en­ables them to elect and peace­fully re­place their lead­ers and pre­vents power from be­ing mo­nop­o­lized by small elite groups mo­ti­vated by par­tic­u­lar or ide­o­log­i­cal in­ter­ests. [40] Likewise, the Church rec­og­nizes the pos­i­tive po­ten­tial of the mar­ket and pri­vate ini­tia­tive only if they re­main sub­or­di­nate to the moral law and are guided by the prin­ci­ple of sol­i­dar­ity, with­out sac­ri­fic­ing the most vul­ner­a­ble to the ra­tio­nale of profit. [41] This adds a par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant legacy to the Social Doctrine of the Church. The af­fir­ma­tion of the link be­tween the dig­nity of work, sol­i­dar­ity among peo­ples, a crit­i­cal as­sess­ment of democ­racy and the mar­ket econ­omy con­tin­ues to pro­vide cri­te­ria for eval­u­at­ing new forms of ex­ploita­tion, ex­clu­sion and crises in po­lit­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion.

40. In his so­cial Encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict XVI sought to re­assess and ex­pand the con­cept of de­vel­op­ment pre­sented in Populorum Progressio, in­ter­pret­ing it in light of glob­al­iza­tion. He noted that such de­vel­op­ment should trans­late into “real growth, of ben­e­fit to every­one and gen­uinely sus­tain­able.” [42] That is, eco­nomic progress that is truly in­clu­sive and re­spect­ful of the lim­its of cre­ation. He reaf­firmed, how­ever, that in wealthy coun­tries new kinds of poverty were emerg­ing as well as un­prece­dented forms of ex­clu­sion, while, in poorer re­gions, small mi­nori­ties lived in con­sumerist af­flu­ence along­side sit­u­a­tions of de­hu­man­iz­ing poverty. [43] In ad­di­tion, he ob­served that the new global eco­nomic and fi­nan­cial sys­tem, marked by a vast mo­bil­ity of cap­i­tal and means of pro­duc­tion, had re­duced the po­lit­i­cal power of States and their abil­ity to in­flu­ence eco­nomic processes. [44] For this rea­son, Benedict XVI reiterated that eco­nomic ac­tiv­ity can­not claim to solve so­cial prob­lems sim­ply through the ex­pan­sion of a com­mer­cial men­tal­ity, but must be or­dered to­ward the com­mon good, for which the po­lit­i­cal com­mu­nity bears its own ir­re­place­able re­spon­si­bil­ity. [45]

41. Benedict XVI placed char­ity at the cen­ter of his analy­sis, stat­ing that it “is at the heart of the Church’s Social Doctrine,” [46] pro­vided that it is al­ways united with truth. He also noted with con­cern that there is a ten­dency to dis­miss moral rel­e­vance pre­cisely within the so­cial, le­gal, po­lit­i­cal and eco­nomic fields. The orig­i­nal­ity of his con­tri­bu­tion lies in show­ing that de­vel­op­ment, jus­tice, in­sti­tu­tions and the mar­ket are not neu­tral re­al­i­ties, but spaces where char­ity in truth must find his­tor­i­cal ex­pres­sion. This teach­ing is es­pe­cially rel­e­vant to­day in light of grow­ing in­equal­i­ties, pres­sures in the fi­nan­cial mar­kets, the en­vi­ron­men­tal cri­sis and a lack of trust in pol­i­tics. It stands as an in­vi­ta­tion to eval­u­ate every model of de­vel­op­ment on its abil­ity to be in­clu­sive and sus­tain­able, to re­build the re­la­tion­ship be­tween eco­nom­ics and pol­i­tics on the com­mon good, and to ac­knowl­edge the crit­i­cal and gen­er­a­tive role of char­ity in pub­lic life.

42. Pope Francis’ social teach­ing de­vel­ops along the lines of Gaudium et Spes, which in­vites us to view his­tory through the lens of hu­man hopes and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, and to bring them into di­a­logue with the Gospel. This ap­proach emerges with par­tic­u­lar clar­ity in Evangelii Gaudium, where he states that the Christian procla­ma­tion has an in­trin­sic so­cial di­men­sion and calls for a Church ca­pa­ble of lis­ten­ing to the cry of the poor, mi­grants and vic­tims of new forms of slav­ery. Francis’ in­sis­tence on a syn­odal Church, a Church that “walks to­gether,” that seeks to read the signs of the times in the light of the Gospel and al­lows her­self to be evan­ge­lized by the poor with whom she shares his­tory, also fits into this per­spec­tive. [47]

43. In Laudato Si’, Francis provided the first sig­nif­i­cant sys­tem­atic treat­ment of the en­vi­ron­men­tal cri­sis in a so­cial Encyclical, demon­strat­ing that it is not an iso­lated is­sue, but rather the eco­log­i­cal as­pect of the con­tem­po­rary so­cio-eco­nomic cri­sis. His pro­posal for an in­te­gral ecol­ogy com­bined care for our com­mon home with the pref­er­en­tial op­tion for the poor, and strongly af­firmed that “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor” [48] can­not be sep­a­rated. In this light, the uni­ver­sal des­ti­na­tion of goods was brought to the fore­front, along­side the cri­tique of a tech­no­cratic par­a­digm that seeks to re­duce every­thing to an ob­ject to be dom­i­nated; the de­fense of hu­man la­bor threat­ened by the mind­set of waste; and the need for in­ter­gen­er­a­tional jus­tice. Finally, he ad­vo­cated for gen­uine di­a­logue be­tween those work­ing in the fields of pol­i­tics and fi­nance, so that nei­ther would be­come self-ref­er­en­tial.

44. Faced with the break­down of the so­cial fab­ric, a “world war be­ing fought piece­meal,” in­di­vid­u­al­is­tic glob­al­iza­tion and the im­pact of the pan­demic on com­mu­nity ties, Francis, in Fratelli Tutti , sought to re­vive the dream of a hu­man­ity that opts for so­cial friend­ship and uni­ver­sal fra­ter­nity. He pro­posed a cul­ture of en­counter, a “better pol­i­tics” ca­pa­ble of seek­ing the com­mon good, paths of rec­on­cil­i­a­tion and a world that en­sures “land, hous­ing and work for all.” [49] Finally, in Dilexit Nos, he showed that these sig­nif­i­cant so­cial en­deav­ors can­not be sep­a­rated from a per­sonal re­la­tion­ship with Christ. Turning to the word of God, he re­minded us that the truest re­sponse to the love of the heart of Jesus is con­crete love for our broth­ers and sis­ters, and af­firmed that “there is no greater way for us to re­turn love for love.” [50]

Interpreting his­tory in the light of faith

45. Considering this his­tor­i­cal overview, it is clear that the Church’s Social Doctrine is not the re­sult of a pro­ject de­vised at a desk, but rather the prod­uct of a pa­tient process in which each pon­tiff — to­gether with the Second Vatican Council — made a unique con­tri­bu­tion in light of the “new things” of each par­tic­u­lar era. In re­sponse to the chal­lenges of their time, each one in­ter­preted his­tor­i­cal changes ac­cord­ing to the Gospel, bring­ing to light dif­fer­ent as­pects of a sin­gle her­itage: the dig­nity of the per­son, the value of work, the uni­ver­sal des­ti­na­tion of goods, sol­i­dar­ity and sub­sidiar­ity, care for cre­ation and the cen­tral­ity of peace and fra­ter­nity. The re­sult is a har­mo­nious, though not al­ways lin­ear, de­vel­op­ment that is marked by dif­fer­ent em­phases, pro­gres­sive in­sights, and, at times, changes in per­spec­tive that do not break with what came be­fore, but al­low its im­pli­ca­tions to ma­ture. If to­day we can speak of a cor­pus of shared prin­ci­ples and cri­te­ria, it is be­cause this faith-based in­ter­pre­ta­tion of his­tory has never been in­ter­rupted, re­main­ing ever open to the chal­lenges posed by each gen­er­a­tion.  It is to the great prin­ci­ples of Social Doctrine, which di­rect the dis­cern­ment of be­liev­ers in their per­sonal and pub­lic lives, that I now wish to turn our at­ten­tion, in or­der to grasp more ef­fec­tively their in­ter­nal co­her­ence and ca­pac­ity to guide our times.

CHAPTER TWO

FOUNDATIONS AND PRINCIPLES OF THE SOCIAL DOCTRINE OF THE CHURCH

46. The Social Doctrine of the Church is a liv­ing re­al­ity, in di­a­logue with his­tory, cul­tures and sci­ences. At the same time, it en­shrines a core set of un­chang­ing truths. For this rea­son, it can be con­sid­ered a form of wis­dom that is ca­pa­ble of guid­ing the per­sonal and so­ci­etal lives of be­liev­ers even to­day. In this sec­ond chap­ter, I would like to fo­cus on some of the foun­da­tions and prin­ci­ples of the Church’s Social Doctrine that will help us to in­ter­pret the “new things” of our time, par­tic­u­larly in view of the in­her­ent dig­nity of the hu­man per­son. In or­der to pro­tect the hu­man per­son in the age of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, I be­lieve that to­day we must once again re­flect on the com­mon good, the uni­ver­sal des­ti­na­tion of goods, sub­sidiar­ity, sol­i­dar­ity and so­cial jus­tice. I am con­vinced that a har­mo­nious re­la­tion­ship be­tween these prin­ci­ples re­quires that they be con­sid­ered col­lec­tively, so that it be­comes clear how they re­late to and com­ple­ment each other.

47. In of­fer­ing these re­flec­tions, my hope is, first and fore­most, to help the lay faith­ful and peo­ple of good­will re­dis­cover their duty of im­ple­ment­ing the above-men­tioned prin­ci­ples in their daily lives, fam­ily re­la­tion­ships, work and in­volve­ment in so­ci­ety. Thus, they will let them­selves be in­spired by the aim of em­body­ing God’s love in the con­crete events of life. At the same time, I would like to en­cour­age aca­d­e­mic in­sti­tu­tions and uni­ver­si­ties to give fresh im­pe­tus to these prin­ci­ples, and to ap­ply them in a way that will be rel­e­vant and ef­fec­tive in ad­dress­ing the dig­i­tal rev­o­lu­tion. In this way, the­o­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal en­quiry will be able to fur­ther ex­plore and sup­port the Church’s pas­toral jour­ney, and con­tribute to the Magisterium’s task of en­light­en­ing the con­sciences of the faith­ful and guid­ing their ef­forts to make the life of our so­ci­eties more just and fra­ter­nal.

The foun­da­tions of Social Doctrine

The hu­man per­son: im­age of the Triune God

48. The Church’s Social Doctrine brings us to the very heart of our faith: the mys­tery of the liv­ing God, re­vealed in Jesus Christ, who, as a com­mu­nion of Persons — Father, Son and Holy Spirit — is love it­self in re­la­tion­ship, ex­pressed in the mu­tual gift of self and in shar­ing with the world. [51] As the Council re­called, hu­man per­sons are called to com­mu­nion with God and “can fully dis­cover their true selves only in sin­cere self-giv­ing.” [52] Indeed their deep­est vo­ca­tion is to en­ter into the Trinitarian dy­namic of love re­ceived and shared.

49. If the mys­tery of God as Love is the source of Social Doctrine, we see its most con­crete ex­pres­sion in the face of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word. By be­com­ing man, the Son of God en­ters our his­tory and takes on hu­man flesh, bring­ing with him the love that unites him to the Father and the Holy Spirit. In him, “the mys­tery of hu­man­ity truly be­comes clear” [53] be­cause his hu­man­ity is com­pletely free, open to oth­ers, ca­pa­ble of build­ing healthy and beau­ti­ful re­la­tion­ships and com­mit­ted to the to­tal gift of self. Those who be­lieve in him are en­gaged in the great work of re­newal that be­gan with the mys­tery of his pas­sion, death and res­ur­rec­tion, and they co­op­er­ate in build­ing up the Kingdom of God, learn­ing to em­brace all men and women as broth­ers and sis­ters, chil­dren of one Father. In this way, both the procla­ma­tion of the Gospel and Christian life, guided by the ac­tion of the Holy Spirit, tend to bring about so­cial con­se­quences in the world. [54]

50. At the heart of the Christian un­der­stand­ing of the hu­man per­son lies the great bib­li­cal af­fir­ma­tion that men and women are cre­ated in the im­age and like­ness (cf. Gen 1:26 – 27) of the Triune God. Created for re­la­tion­ship, every hu­man per­son is planned and willed by God to en­ter into com­mu­nion with him, with oth­ers and with cre­ation. Human dig­nity does not de­pend on a per­son’s abil­i­ties, wealth or po­si­tion in life, nor on the right or wrong choices made; in­stead, it is a gift that pre­cedes and tran­scends each per­son, en­dowed by God as an ex­pres­sion of his un­fail­ing love. For this rea­son, the hu­man per­son al­ways re­mains the “way for the Church” [55] and the heart of every au­then­tic path of in­te­gral hu­man de­vel­op­ment. [56]

The equal dig­nity of all hu­man be­ings

51. Saint John Paul II stated that, “this height­ened sense of the dig­nity of the hu­man per­son and of his or her unique­ness, and of the re­spect due to the jour­ney of con­science, cer­tainly rep­re­sents one of the pos­i­tive achieve­ments of mod­ern cul­ture.” [57] This state­ment fol­lows the line al­ready laid out by the Second Vatican Council, which had noted a grow­ing recog­ni­tion of the sub­lime dig­nity of all per­sons, their su­pe­ri­or­ity over ma­te­r­ial things and their uni­ver­sal and in­vi­o­lable rights and du­ties. [58] It is im­por­tant to en­sure that this growth in ap­pre­ci­a­tion of hu­man dig­nity is not ob­scured by the pres­sure of new ide­olo­gies or very pow­er­ful in­ter­ests in to­day’s world. Among these ide­olo­gies, I con­sider par­tic­u­larly in­sid­i­ous the one that sug­gests that every per­son must earn or jus­tify his or her own worth, to the point of at­tribut­ing greater value to those who are more ef­fi­cient or ef­fec­tive. From this per­spec­tive, per­sons end up be­ing re­duced to a means of achiev­ing re­sults, a re­source to be used and ex­ploited, and are no longer rec­og­nized as a proper end in them­selves who should never be in­stru­men­tal­ized. The value of per­sons, how­ever, does not de­pend on what they achieve or pro­duce. There are rights that ap­ply to every­one sim­ply by virtue of be­ing hu­man, and no hu­man power can le­git­i­mately deny or ar­bi­trar­ily limit them. [59]

52. When we speak of dig­nity, we do not al­ways use the word in the same way. Sometimes we re­fer to moral dig­nity, namely the way in which a per­son di­rects his or her choices and ac­tions. At other times, we think of so­cial dig­nity, which refers to a per­son’s liv­ing con­di­tions and the con­crete re­spect re­ceived from so­ci­ety. In other cases, we re­fer to ex­is­ten­tial dig­nity, mean­ing the way in which a per­son per­ceives his or her own worth and the value of life. These as­pects of dig­nity can be en­hanced or di­min­ished. In ad­di­tion to these no­tions, there is also the more pro­found and im­por­tant level of on­to­log­i­cal dig­nity. This is the dig­nity that be­longs to every hu­man be­ing sim­ply by virtue of ex­ist­ing, of hav­ing been willed, cre­ated and loved by God. [60] No sin, fail­ure, hu­mil­i­a­tion or ex­clu­sion can di­min­ish the pro­found value of a hu­man life that God has willed and called into be­ing. [61]

53. The fun­da­men­tal dig­nity of each per­son, there­fore, is nei­ther ac­quired nor earned, nor does it need to be jus­ti­fied. The re­cent Declaration Dignitas Infinita of­fers a sum­mary of the Church’s think­ing on this sub­ject: “Every hu­man per­son pos­sesses an in­fi­nite dig­nity, in­alien­ably grounded in his or her very be­ing, which pre­vails in and be­yond every cir­cum­stance, state, or sit­u­a­tion the per­son may ever en­counter” [62] — in other words, al­ways and with­out ex­cep­tion. The dig­nity of every hu­man be­ing can be de­scribed as in­fi­nite, as Saint John Paul II stated, [63] for two rea­sons: first, be­cause the love of God, who calls us to friend­ship with him, is in­fi­nite; and sec­ond, his love is ab­solutely un­con­di­tional, in the sense that, even if we search end­lessly, we will never find any­thing that can erase or deny it.

The supreme value of hu­man rights

54. The Church grate­fully ac­knowl­edges that “the move­ment to­ward the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and procla­ma­tion of hu­man rights is one of the most sig­nif­i­cant at­tempts to re­spond ef­fec­tively to the in­escapable de­mands of hu­man dig­nity.” [64]  In this re­gard, Saint John Paul II stated that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, pro­claimed by the United Nations on 10 December 1948, re­mains one of the high­est ex­pres­sions of the hu­man con­science of our time. [65] It is “a mile­stone on the long and dif­fi­cult path of the hu­man race.” [66] For this rea­son, from the Christian per­spec­tive, hu­man rights are not an ex­ter­nal ad­di­tion to the per­son, but an ex­pres­sion of in­trin­sic hu­man dig­nity, which the in­ter­na­tional com­mu­nity is called to pro­tect and pro­mote.

55. Human rights are in­vi­o­lable, since they are “inherent in the hu­man per­son and in hu­man dig­nity.” [67] Consequently, they are uni­ver­sal and in­alien­able. [68] Precisely be­cause they are grounded in the com­mon dig­nity of every man and woman, they have prac­ti­cal con­se­quences and le­gal ef­fects, for “it would be vain to pro­claim hu­man rights if, at the same time, every­thing were not done to en­sure the duty of re­spect­ing them, re­spect by all, in all places and for all.” [69] Among these rights, the first is the right to life, from con­cep­tion to its nat­ural end, [70] with­out which it is im­pos­si­ble to ex­er­cise any other right. When this fun­da­men­tal right is de­nied — as in the cases of in­duced abor­tion, killing of the in­no­cent and eu­thana­sia — we are faced with choices that the Church con­sid­ers gravely wrong. [71]

56. Looking at our own time, we can­not ig­nore the fact that the pro­tec­tion of hu­man rights has been ex­posed to two par­tic­u­larly se­ri­ous dan­gers. The first is that these rights are de­clared in a purely for­mal sense, while tech­no­log­i­cal progress con­tin­ues along­side covert or overt vi­o­la­tions of hu­man dig­nity. The sec­ond, which is in fact the root of the first, is the in­abil­ity to rec­og­nize the foun­da­tion of their uni­ver­sal­ity, since we have aban­doned “the search for the solid foun­da­tions sus­tain­ing our de­ci­sions and our laws.” [72] Pope Francis urged us not to un­der­es­ti­mate this last is­sue. He pointed out that when rea­son se­ri­ously ex­am­ines hu­man na­ture, it is ca­pa­ble of dis­cov­er­ing val­ues that ap­ply to every­one, since they de­rive from hu­man na­ture. If this task of in­quiry were aban­doned, it is con­ceiv­able that rights con­sid­ered un­touch­able to­day might, in the fu­ture, end up be­ing ques­tioned or de­nied by those in power, per­haps af­ter hav­ing ob­tained only an ap­par­ent con­sen­sus from pop­u­la­tions that are fright­ened or ma­nip­u­lated. [73]

57. Along with a greater aware­ness of the value of every hu­man per­son and their rights, recog­ni­tion of mi­nor­ity rights has also grown. Yet, there is still a long way to go to en­sure that the rights of a great many, namely women, are equally and gen­uinely guar­an­teed through­out the world. It is a fact that “doubly poor are those women who en­dure sit­u­a­tions of ex­clu­sion, mis­treat­ment and vi­o­lence, since they are fre­quently less able to de­fend their rights.” [74] It is, there­fore, not enough to state sim­ply that men and women have equal dig­nity and rights; it is nec­es­sary that this be re­flected in con­crete de­ci­sions, such as in laws, ac­cess to em­ploy­ment, ed­u­ca­tion, so­cial and po­lit­i­cal re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, and the way so­ci­ety lis­tens to and val­ues wom­en’s con­tri­bu­tions. As long as this gap per­sists, we can­not say that so­ci­ety truly and fully rec­og­nizes that women have the same dig­nity as men.

58. It is in­di­vid­u­als that mat­ter, each and every per­son, to­gether with their fam­i­lies. Social move­ments, com­mu­nal ide­olo­gies and grand po­lit­i­cal procla­ma­tions in fa­vor of a pop­u­la­tion are worth­less un­less they lead to the flour­ish­ing of per­sons — men and women — with their in­alien­able rights. Similarly, it is not enough to ex­tol in­di­vid­ual free­dom or pri­vate en­ter­prise if we then al­low a mul­ti­tude of peo­ple to con­tinue liv­ing with­out de­cent work, pro­tec­tions or ac­cess to ba­sic ne­ces­si­ties.

The prin­ci­ples of Social Doctrine

The prin­ci­ple of the com­mon good

59. Recognizing that every man and woman pos­sesses an in­alien­able dig­nity, to­gether with rights that no hu­man power can be­tray or nul­lify, re­quires us to shape the way we live to­gether, in­clud­ing our eco­nomic and po­lit­i­cal choices, and the makeup of our cities. From this arises the first ma­jor prin­ci­ple of Social Doctrine that I wish to high­light: the com­mon good. We can de­scribe it as the so­cial ex­pres­sion of the dig­nity rec­og­nized in every per­son. When Benedict XVI referred to the non-ne­go­tiable val­ues that the Church must al­ways de­fend, he in­cluded among them “the pro­mo­tion of the com­mon good.” [75] For a Christian, go­ing be­yond the nar­row con­fines of one’s own in­ter­ests and com­mit­ting one­self, within the lim­its of one’s abil­ity, to the com­mon good is a non-ne­go­tiable value, as is the pro­mo­tion of life.

60. The Second Vatican Council affirmed that the com­mon good con­sists in “the sum to­tal of so­cial con­di­tions which al­low peo­ple, ei­ther as groups or as in­di­vid­u­als, to reach their ful­fill­ment more fully and more eas­ily.” [76] This de­f­i­n­i­tion pro­vides us with a valu­able ini­tial ref­er­ence point, be­cause the com­mon good can­not be re­duced to a mere list of con­di­tions or in­sti­tu­tions. It is not the sum to­tal of in­di­vid­ual ben­e­fits, nor the in­ter­sec­tion of their par­tic­u­lar in­ter­ests; it is a greater good that be­longs to every­one, and it can only be achieved, nur­tured and pro­tected by our col­lec­tive ef­forts. We can say that so­cial ac­tion reaches its full­ness when it is di­rected to­ward this shared good, just as a per­son’s moral ac­tion finds its ful­fill­ment in the choice of the true good. [77]

61. In this sense, we can say that the whole is “greater than the sum of its parts” [78] and that, for this very rea­son, “the mere sum of in­di­vid­ual in­ter­ests is not ca­pa­ble of gen­er­at­ing a bet­ter world for the whole hu­man fam­ily.” [79] Indeed, it is an il­lu­sion to think that sim­ply pur­su­ing one’s own progress with­out car­ing for oth­ers is suf­fi­cient for con­tribut­ing to the good of all. This view ig­nores the in­her­ent and spe­cific value of the com­mon good, which is the re­sult of an “interdependence” [80] that cre­ates a net­work of so­cial good that ex­pands and has an im­pact on peo­ple. The com­mon good is a “plus,” the re­sult of in­ter­ac­tion and mu­tual in­flu­ence that con­nects var­i­ous ac­tions, ini­tia­tives, ef­forts and de­ci­sions. If we were to add up the in­di­vid­ual goods, we could not ex­plain the ex­is­tence of this “plus” that tran­scends them and, at the same time, en­riches them.

62. It is the pur­suit of the com­mon good that gives life to a peo­ple, un­der­stood not as a mere col­lec­tion of in­di­vid­u­als, but as a liv­ing re­al­ity in which peo­ple learn to rec­og­nize that they them­selves are in­ter­con­nected and jointly re­spon­si­ble for the res pub­lica. In this sense, every per­son con­tributes to the build­ing up of one’s peo­ple through “a slow and ar­du­ous ef­fort call­ing for a de­sire for in­te­gra­tion and a will­ing­ness to achieve this through the growth of a peace­ful and mul­ti­fac­eted cul­ture of en­counter.” [81] Working to­gether for the com­mon good means hav­ing a shared vi­sion. It is clear that there are many ide­o­log­i­cal and prac­ti­cal dif­fer­ences among peo­ple, as well as dif­fer­ing in­ter­ests and fre­quent dis­agree­ments, but that does not mean it is im­pos­si­ble to en­gage in di­a­logue to es­tab­lish a set of ba­sic agree­ments that en­able the cre­ation of a shared vi­sion, upon which every­one can move for­ward to­gether.

A new study pub­lished in Nature’s Humanities and Social Sciences Communications jour­nal has con­firmed what many work­ers have qui­etly hoped for: com­pa­nies can switch to a four-day work week and not only sur­vive, but thrive.

The re­search tracked 15 Australian com­pa­nies that tri­alled the 100:80:100 model be­tween 2022 and 2024.

The model is sim­ple: work­ers re­ceive 100% of their pay, work 80% of their pre­vi­ous hours, and com­mit to main­tain­ing 100% of their pre­vi­ous out­put.

The re­sults were strik­ing.

14 of the 15 com­pa­nies chose to con­tinue with the four-day week af­ter the trial ended.

Not a sin­gle one re­ported a drop in pro­duc­tiv­ity.

Six com­pa­nies saw pro­duc­tiv­ity ac­tu­ally in­crease.

The rest said out­put stayed roughly the same.

These firms op­er­ated across a wide range of in­dus­tries, from prop­erty man­age­ment to pub­lish­ing and health tech­nol­ogy, which makes the find­ings harder to dis­miss as a niche ex­per­i­ment.

How the Study Was Conducted

The re­search team, led by Professor John Hopkins of Deakin University, spent two years con­duct­ing in-depth in­ter­views with com­pa­nies that had for­mally adopted the 100:80:100 model.

Interviews took place be­tween early 2023 and late 2024.

Each com­pany was free to de­fine pro­duc­tiv­ity on its own terms.

Some mea­sured rev­enue and profit.

Others tracked pro­jects com­pleted on time, staff turnover rates, ab­sen­teeism, or a met­ric called “net pro­moter score,” which gauges how likely cus­tomers are to rec­om­mend a busi­ness.

This flex­i­bil­ity was in­ten­tional.

Rather than im­pos­ing a sin­gle per­for­mance bench­mark, the re­searchers al­lowed each com­pany to mea­sure what mat­tered most to them.

That de­sign choice re­flects some­thing im­por­tant: what suc­cess looks like dif­fers by in­dus­try, and a rigid, one-size-fits-all mea­sure­ment would have made the find­ings less ap­plic­a­ble to the real world.

One com­pany had al­ready been run­ning the four-day model for nearly eight years by the time re­searchers in­ter­viewed them.

One firm did aban­don the trial, though the re­searchers noted that tim­ing played a sig­nif­i­cant role in that de­ci­sion, as the com­pany was al­ready go­ing through a pe­riod of ma­jor in­ter­nal change.

Findings From the Study

The head­line find­ing is clear: not one com­pany re­ported a pro­duc­tiv­ity loss.

Six of the 15 com­pa­nies said pro­duc­tiv­ity had ac­tu­ally gone up since mak­ing the switch.

The re­main­ing nine said it stayed about the same.

Those might sound like mod­est num­bers, but con­sider what they mean in prac­tice.

If you give your em­ploy­ees a full ex­tra day off each week, main­tain their salaries, and your out­put ei­ther stays the same or im­proves, the busi­ness case is dif­fi­cult to ar­gue against.

Burnout emerged as a ma­jor theme in the find­ings.

Six com­pa­nies ex­pressly said that re­duc­ing burnout, rather than boost­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity, was their pri­mary mo­ti­va­tion for adopt­ing the shorter week.

That dis­tinc­tion mat­ters.

A 2025 sur­vey by Beyond Blue found that one in two Australian work­ers cur­rently ex­pe­ri­ences burnout, with young peo­ple and par­ents iden­ti­fied as the groups most at risk.

One CEO of a medium-sized health tech­nol­ogy firm told re­searchers she judged the tri­al’s suc­cess by track­ing lev­els of “attrition,” “absenteeism,” and “people tak­ing sick days and men­tal health days be­cause they’re burnt out.”

Another CEO at a fi­nan­cial ser­vices firm put it plainly: her com­pany had been en­cour­ag­ing clients to live their best lives, and it felt wrong to hold em­ploy­ees to a dif­fer­ent stan­dard.

“As we grap­ple with high work­place burnout, and so­ci­etal chal­lenges about what to do with the pro­duc­tiv­ity gains we’re pre­dicted to get from AI, a four-day work week could be an in­ter­est­ing part of both those con­ver­sa­tions,” said study lead Prof John Hopkins of Deakin University.

What Most People Get Wrong About This Model

Here is the part that tends to get lost in the con­ver­sa­tion.

Most peo­ple hear “four-day work week” and imag­ine com­pa­nies tak­ing a leap of faith, cross­ing their fin­gers, and hop­ing pro­duc­tiv­ity does not col­lapse.

The re­al­ity is quite dif­fer­ent.

The 100:80:100 model is not sim­ply about cut­ting a day.

It is about forc­ing com­pa­nies and their em­ploy­ees to look hon­estly at how time is ac­tu­ally be­ing spent.

Unnecessary meet­ings get cut.

Tasks that could be au­to­mated or del­e­gated get re­as­signed.

Work that was never that valu­able gets elim­i­nated en­tirely.

The re­sult is that em­ploy­ees are not cram­ming five days of work into four.

They are do­ing four days of gen­uinely fo­cused, higher-qual­ity work.

This is a cru­cial dis­tinc­tion, and it ex­plains why con­cerns about pro­duc­tiv­ity of­ten prove un­founded.

The fear that work­ers will sim­ply burn through five days of tasks in a com­pressed time­frame is rooted in a mis­un­der­stand­ing of how the model ac­tu­ally works.

Companies us­ing this ap­proach re­struc­ture their work­flows be­fore the shorter week be­gins.

Australia is not alone in see­ing this play out.

In 2024, 45 German com­pa­nies tri­alled the four-day model, and the ma­jor­ity were small or medium en­ter­prises.

Financial per­for­mance dur­ing the trial showed no sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence from the year be­fore, which re­searchers in­ter­preted as ev­i­dence of pro­duc­tiv­ity gains since the same out­put was be­ing de­liv­ered in fewer hours.

In the United Kingdom, more than 200 British com­pa­nies have per­ma­nently adopted the four-day week with­out re­duc­ing pay, span­ning in­dus­tries from tech star­tups to char­i­ties.

How the Study Applies to Real Life

The prac­ti­cal ques­tion for most work­ers and man­agers is not whether the data is com­pelling.

It is whether the model is ac­tu­ally work­able in their spe­cific in­dus­try or role.

The Australian study pro­vides some use­ful in­sight here.

Client-facing or­gan­i­sa­tions han­dled the tran­si­tion dif­fer­ently from non-client-fac­ing ones.

Instead of all staff tak­ing the same day off, many com­pa­nies in client-heavy in­dus­tries stag­gered days off across the team, en­sur­ing clients al­ways had some­one avail­able.

That flex­i­bil­ity is cen­tral to why the model held up across such dif­fer­ent busi­ness types.

It is also why the con­ver­sa­tion can­not be re­duced to a sim­ple yes or no.

A law firm and a soft­ware de­vel­op­ment stu­dio will im­ple­ment a four-day week very dif­fer­ently.

A call cen­tre and a pub­lish­ing house have com­pletely dif­fer­ent rhythms.

The re­search sug­gests that the most suc­cess­ful adop­tions in­volve co-de­signed so­lu­tions where em­ploy­ees and lead­er­ship fig­ure out to­gether what re­struc­tur­ing ac­tu­ally looks like.

One of the more for­ward-look­ing threads in the re­search in­volves ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence.

As AI tools con­tinue to au­to­mate repet­i­tive tasks and boost in­di­vid­ual out­put, the ques­tion of what work­ers do with those pro­duc­tiv­ity gains be­comes ur­gent.

The four-day week is one an­swer: let peo­ple re­claim some of that time rather than sim­ply adding more tasks to the same work­day.

Prof Hopkins specif­i­cally named this as a rea­son the con­ver­sa­tion mat­ters right now.

The as­sump­tion that tech­nol­ogy al­ways means do­ing more with the same num­ber of hours is worth ques­tion­ing.

The Criticism Worth Taking Seriously

The case for the four-day week is strong, but it is not with­out le­git­i­mate push­back.

Some re­searchers note that the ben­e­fits ob­served in short-term tri­als may not hold long-term.

There is a real pos­si­bil­ity that the pro­duc­tiv­ity gains seen in tri­als are partly dri­ven by the nov­elty ef­fect, where em­ploy­ees work harder be­cause they are aware they are be­ing ob­served or be­cause the change feels ex­cit­ing and new.

There is also the ques­tion of in­dus­tries where a four-day model is struc­turally harder to im­ple­ment.

Healthcare, emer­gency ser­vices, lo­gis­tics, and hos­pi­tal­ity do not run on fixed sched­ules in the same way a knowl­edge-work busi­ness does.

Any pol­icy con­ver­sa­tion about short­en­ing the work­ing week needs to reckon hon­estly with those sec­tors, not pre­tend they do not ex­ist.

Scheduling com­pli­ca­tions are real, par­tic­u­larly for client-fac­ing busi­nesses and teams spread across dif­fer­ent time zones.

The re­search also ac­knowl­edged that in­di­vid­ual com­pa­nies, not a re­search team, de­fined what pro­duc­tiv­ity meant, which makes di­rect com­par­i­son be­tween com­pa­nies dif­fi­cult.

None of this un­does the ev­i­dence.

But it does sug­gest the con­ver­sa­tion needs to be more nu­anced than sim­ple cel­e­bra­tion.

The Bigger Picture

What makes this Australian study par­tic­u­larly valu­able is not just the find­ings.

It is what the find­ings re­veal about the as­sump­tions un­der­neath how most of us work.

The five-day, 40-hour week was not handed down as a law of na­ture.

It was a labour move­ment achieve­ment, stan­dard­ised in the 20th cen­tury as in­dus­tri­al­i­sa­tion scaled up.

The con­di­tions of work have changed dra­mat­i­cally since then.

Knowledge work, re­mote col­lab­o­ra­tion, and AI-assisted tasks have trans­formed what a pro­duc­tive hour ac­tu­ally looks like.

The 15 Australian com­pa­nies in this study ef­fec­tively ran a live ex­per­i­ment on that as­sump­tion, and the data came back in favour of change.

Not one of them re­ported falling be­hind.

Most of them ei­ther held steady or im­proved.

And 14 of 15 chose not to go back.

That is not a fluke.

That is a sig­nal worth pay­ing at­ten­tion to, whether you are a man­ager won­der­ing if your team could han­dle it, an em­ployee hop­ing your com­pany will con­sider it, or a pol­i­cy­maker think­ing about what the fu­ture of work should ac­tu­ally look like.

The con­ver­sa­tion is no longer the­o­ret­i­cal.

It is al­ready hap­pen­ing.

The only ques­tion left is who joins it next.

References and Further Reading

Nature: Four-day work week study, Deakin University

The Conversation: 15 Australian com­pa­nies switched to a four-day work week

Positive News: The re­sults of the world’s largest four-day week trial

Beyond Blue: Workplace Burnout Survey 2025

Nicolas Seriot

Computation > Jira is Turing-Complete

Building a Minsky Machine in Atlassian Automation 22nd May 2026

Engineering folk­lore holds that Jira (Atlassian’s pro­ject-track­ing tool) is Turing-complete. Existing claims point vaguely at au­toma­tion fea­tures with­out ex­hibit­ing a re­duc­tion. This ar­ti­cle sup­plies a proof, with setup in­struc­tions and ex­e­cu­tion trace.

Mapping the Computational Model

A Minsky reg­is­ter ma­chine needs only two un­bounded coun­ters and a fi­nite set of la­beled in­struc­tions:

INC r; goto S

DEC r; if r == 0 goto S else goto S’

Or, in plain English:

in­cre­ment reg­is­ter R, then goto some state S

decre­ment reg­is­ter R, if R == 0 goto zero-state S, else goto nonzero-state S’

A Minsky pro­gram that adds reg­is­ter A into reg­is­ter B looks like:

1. DEC A; if A == 0 goto 3 else goto 2 2. INC B; goto 1 3. HALT

Minsky proved this model Turing-complete (1967). Exhibiting it in Jira’s au­toma­tion lan­guage there­fore es­tab­lishes the re­duc­tion. Here is how the model maps onto Jira:

The Epic’s sta­tus en­codes the cur­rent in­struc­tion. Automation rules in­spect the linked-is­sue counts and de­cide the next sta­tus. INC and DEC are im­ple­mented as is­sue cre­ation and dele­tion on the ap­pro­pri­ate linked-is­sue type. Conditional branch­ing is im­ple­mented as a JQL-conditioned rule.

Implementing Addition

Here is a min­i­mal work­ing im­ple­men­ta­tion us­ing one Epic, five linked is­sues, and one Automation rule per in­struc­tion state (Space Settings > Automation).

1. Create Workflow

Create a Jira Workflow with sta­tuses ini­tial state BACKLOG, then TODO, DEV and PROD. Any state can tran­si­tion to any other.

Create an Epic in sta­tus BACKLOG.

2. Create Rule for TODO

DEC A; if A=0 halt, else goto DEV.

Trigger: Epic sta­tus changed to TODO.

If at least one linked Bug ex­ists: delete one Bug, tran­si­tion Epic to DEV.

Else: tran­si­tion Epic to PROD (halt).

3. Create Rule for DEV

INC B; goto TODO.

Trigger: Epic sta­tus changed to DEV.

Create a new Task, link it to the Epic.

Transition Epic to TODO.

Both rules have “Allow rule to trig­ger other rules” en­abled.

The screen­shot be­low shows the two rules wired into the Epic’s work­flow.

4. Init Registers

Link 2 Bugs (A=2) and 3 Tasks (B=3) to the Epic.

5. Bootstrap the Machine.

Transition the Epic to TODO to start the cas­cade. Five tran­si­tions:

(2,3) TODO → (1,3) DEV → (1,4) TODO → (0,4) DEV → (0,5) TODO → (0,5) PROD

Recorded on a real *.atlassian.net in­stance.

The Epic lands in PROD with 0 Bugs and 5 Tasks linked. We’ve just added 2 + 3 = 5.

Fibonacci in Three States

The re­duc­tion above suf­fices to prove Turing-completeness. In ad­di­tion to that, Jira’s au­toma­tion lan­guage can sim­plify Minsky op­er­a­tions. Convert Issue Type changes an is­sue’s type in­stantly: Bug → Story, Story → Task, and so on.

CONVERT is ex­press­ible as DEC + INC. It does­n’t ex­tend Jira’s com­pu­ta­tional power, but it shrinks the dis­patch table dra­mat­i­cally for any move-loop, mak­ing non-triv­ial pro­grams tractable.

Fibonacci as (A, B) → (B, A+B) col­lapses to three states with three reg­is­ters (A=Bug, B=Task, C=Story), us­ing TODO, QA (add it to the work­flow), and DEV as the three in­struc­tion states:

TODO: if any linked Task ex­ists: CONVERT Task → Story INC Bug tran­si­tion to TODO else: tran­si­tion to QA

QA: if any linked Bug ex­ists: CONVERT Bug → Task tran­si­tion to QA else: tran­si­tion to DEV

DEV: if any linked Story ex­ists: CONVERT Story → Bug tran­si­tion to DEV else: tran­si­tion to TODO

Initial state A=1, B=1, C=0. The se­quence 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, … ap­pears in B (Task count).

Unlike the ad­di­tion ma­chine, the Fibonacci ma­chine has no halt state. It runs un­til Jira Cloud’s chain-depth cap of 10 trig­gers, at which point the op­er­a­tor re-trig­gers the Epic to con­tinue. A sin­gle sta­tus edit restarts the cas­cade.

The re­duc­tion still holds, the hu­man just sup­plies the next clock tick. Jira Data Center ex­poses the same as au­toma­tion.rule.ex­e­cu­tion.time­out and re­lated, con­fig­urable prop­er­ties.

Conclusion

Jira’s au­toma­tion lan­guage can en­code a two-counter ma­chine given un­bounded is­sue cre­ation and rule ex­e­cu­tion. Every phys­i­cal com­puter is fi­nite, so Jira Cloud’s fi­nite quo­tas do not re­fute the con­struc­tion. Under that stan­dard con­ven­tion, Jira is Turing-complete.

So, if com­plex Jira au­toma­tions feel like pro­grams, it is be­cause they lit­er­ally are.