Thought for the Day

3rd June 2026

‘Everything that appears as a “limit” – incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability – tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship.’ Arresting words, which challenge our ingrained modern assumptions that life and fulfilment are all about limitless ‘progress’ towards a perfect, problem-free world. They are taken from Pope Leo XIV’s recent Encyclical (papal open letter) ‘Magnifica Humanitas’. I find them deeply challenging, because they question our usual way of looking at life. No less challenging is the more positive sentence: ‘We must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them.’ It is a long document and much of the publicity greeting it has focused on its warnings about Artificial Intelligence (AI). But Pope Leo is not opposed to AI as such. For him, technological advance is to be welcomed if it enhances the good possibilities in human life. His warning is about letting AI, and other technologies, uncritically take control of our lives, instead of us making them serve human well-being. The modern buzzword is ‘efficiency’. Of course we need greater efficiency in many areas. But to make efficiency the be-all and end-all in every enterprise turns it into a false god, destructive of what it means to be human – the capacity to love and be loved, compassion, care for the needy and exploited. Above all, valuing human beings not as means to an end but, created by God in his own image, having inherent worth and dignity.

Was Jesus, as we see him in the gospels, obsessed with efficiency?

Keith Clements