Welcome back to Seamus Popery. I'm Joe Heschmaier, and I want to talk about the fight over

just war that's being fought right now in the aftermath of Pope Leo's new encyclical.

I want to start a little bit of context. On Memorial Day, Pope Leo released Magnifica humanitas

on safeguarding the human person and the time of artificial intelligence. It's being called the Pope's encyclical on

AI, but that's a little bit like calling Rarum Navarum Leo the 13th, encyclical on the Industrial

Revolution. The reality in both cases is about something much bigger than that. It's about all of the

ways that the dignity of the human person made in the image of God is being threatened today. And so one of the ways that the dignity of the human person made in the image of God is being threatened today.

And so one of the ways that Leo addresses this is what he calls the normalization of war.

Leo argues that our current media and digital landscape promotes fragmentation,

and that we now live in an age of algorithms which reward conflict,

and that the result of all of this is that we live in an age marked by increasing polarization, resentment, and propaganda. I think

many people share those critiques. But this then leads Leo to say this critical passage that has been very controversial.

Quote, it is in this context that humanity is slipping into a violent culture of power

where peace no longer appears as a responsibility to be taken on, but as a fragile interval

between conflicts. Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest

sense, it is important to reaffirm that the just war theory, which has all too often been used to

justify any kind of war, is now outdated. All right, so to say that those words have been

controversial would be a bit of an understatement.

Pope Leo has gotten a lot of pushback and not just from human beings, actually.

The Catholic philosopher Michael Pekolic announced that within a few minutes after its release,

he says he had read the new encyclicals in entirety because he can speed read,

but then because he saw what he claimed were many problems in new encyclical's entirety because he can speed read. But then because he saw

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