The Pope answered a question that has haunted modernity since the Enlightenment: Can you believe in God and in progress at the same time?
The question Leo XIV posed at his general audience on September 23 seems rather simple: what is the value of human activity in the world? And still, in all its apparent straightforwardness, this is the question that has divided Western culture for two centuries, and the Catholic tradition’s answer to it has been mostly misunderstood by both sides.
The audience continued Leo’s catechetical series on the documents of the Second Vatican Council, specifically the third chapter of Gaudium et Spes — the 1965 pastoral constitution that attempted, for the first time in the history of the Church, to address the modern world on its own terms. The chapter is titled “Man’s Activity Throughout the World,” and it addresses what the Council Fathers recognized as the defining cultural challenge of their moment: the widespread assumption, produced by the success of modern science and technology, that human progress and Christian faith are in competition.
The diagnosis: A false rivalry
Leo opened by noting the historical context with precision. Less than four years after the close of the Council, on the night of July 20-21, 1969, a human being set foot on the Moon for the first time. The achievement was real, extraordinary, and it fed a cultural narrative that was already well established: that human beings, through reason and technique, had mastered nature sufficiently to make the hypothesis of God unnecessary. Belief in God, in this reading, was a crutch for those who had not yet learned to stand on their own.
The Pope named this position with the term borrowed from the French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, who participated in the Council: “the drama of atheist humanism.” De Lubac’s diagnosis, made in his 1944 book of the same name, was that the post-Christian humanisms of the 19th and 20th centuries — Marxism, Nietzscheanism, Comtean positivism — had not liberated the human person by removing God from the picture. They had destroyed, he argued, the foundation on which human dignity rested. “By denying the relationship with God,” Leo said, “one also loses the possibility of affirming the transcendent value of the human person.”
This is the core of the argument, and it is worth dwelling on it. The claim is not that atheists are bad people or that secular humanists are insincere in their defense of human dignity. The claim is structural: that the philosophical move of removing God from the picture does not leave human dignity intact. It removes the ground on which dignity stands. If the human person is not made in the image of a personal God who wills each person into existence and loves them unconditionally, then the dignity we attribute to persons, the argument goes, becomes a convention — a useful social fiction, perhaps, but not a claim about what persons actually are. And conventions, as the 20th century demonstrated with catastrophic regularity, can be revised.
The Catholic answer: Progress as vocation
Against the narrative of rivalry between faith and progress, Gaudium et Spes — and Leo reading it — proposes something more interesting than a simple inversion. The Council does not say that progress is dangerous or that Christians should be suspicious of it. It says that progress is a human vocation, rooted in the divine image. The human being was created to cultivate and develop the world — the same intuition Leo drew on earlier this year when he noted that the Hebrew verbs of Genesis 2:15 — abad and shamar, to till and to guard — describe a relationship with creation that is active, skilled, and responsible.
Christians, Gaudium et Spes states, “can justly consider that by their labor they are unfolding the Creator’s work, consulting the advantages of their brother men, and contributing by their personal industry to the realization in history of the divine plan” (n. 34). The achievements of human reason and technique are, in this reading, “a sign of God’s greatness and the fulfilment of his mysterious design.”
Leo illustrated this with a liturgical image that is both simple and precise. At Mass, “the fruit of human work, represented by bread and wine,” is placed on the altar “to be transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ.” The Offertory is a theological and anthropological statement through and through: human labor — the grain grown and harvested, the grapes pressed, the bread baked — is offered to God and returned transformed. The work of civilization is not left outside the church door. It comes in, and it is transfigured.
The condition: Charity
There is, however, a condition. For progress to be genuinely human, Leo says, it must be “animated and guided by charity” — and by this he means something specific: the improvement of the conditions of life for all, “in particular for the most disadvantaged.” This is where the address connects most directly to the tradition Leo consciously invokes by his very name.
When Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum in 1891, the question he was addressing was not so different from the one his namesake raised on Wednesday in St. Peter’s Square. Industrial capitalism had produced an extraordinary expansion of productive capacity and material wealth — and had produced, simultaneously, a working class living in conditions the encyclical described, without euphemism, as degrading. The machinery of progress was working. The question was, and still is: for whom?
Leo XIII’s answer was that progress detached from the moral order — from justice, from the dignity of the worker, from the obligations of solidarity — was not genuine progress but its counterfeit. A century and a third later, Leo XIV is making the same argument at a higher level of technological intensity. Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on artificial intelligence, extended the Rerum Novarum intuition to the digital age: “It is not acceptable to entrust to artificial systems decisions that are lethal or, in any case, irreversible.” There is no algorithm capable of making the immoral morally acceptable. And no amount of computational power changes the fundamental question: does this serve the dignity of every person, or only the interests of some?
De Lubac’s shadow
De Lubac was one of the principal architects of the theological renewal — the nouvelle théologie — that shaped the Second Vatican Council, and his 1944 book on atheist humanism remains one of the most penetrating analyses of modern culture ever produced by a Catholic theologian. His argument was that the 19th century’s great secular humanisms — which promised to liberate the human person from religious tutelage — had, in each case, ended by crushing the person they claimed to liberate: Marx’s collective swallowed the individual; Nietzsche’s Superman required the sacrifice of the weak; Comte’s religion of humanity produced, in its political expressions, a suffocating technocracy. The pattern was consistent: remove the transcendent, and the immanent inflates until it colonizes everything.
Leo’s audience on Wednesday was, among other things, a reminder that this analysis remains live. The contemporary posthuman and transhuman versions of the post-Christian humanisms De Lubac diagnosed are more technologically sophisticated than their 19th-century predecessors, but the structural move is the same: the claim that human autonomy requires emancipation from God, and that progress is its own justification. The Catholic answer — articulated at Vatican II, developed in six decades of social teaching, and restated on Wednesday under an autumn sun in St. Peter’s Square — is that this move does not liberate the human person. It leaves the human person without a ground.
“The bread of knowledge”
Leo closed with an image that connects the theological argument to the social doctrine it implies. “The Second Vatican Council invites us to share the bread of knowledge and know-how, so that every person and every people may develop their potential, and together, with God’s help, we may build a better future.” The image is Eucharistic, but also deeply political. Knowledge and technique that remain in the hands of the few — that serve the enhancement of the powerful at the expense of the most vulnerable — are not genuine progress. They are, in the tradition’s language, a sin against solidarity.
This is the Catholic position on progress, and it has been consistent since 1891: not suspicion of human achievement, but insistence that achievement be measured by what it does for those who benefit least from it. Leo XIV, speaking from the tradition of an order that runs schools and hospitals in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the world, is not making an abstract theological point. He is restating the oldest question in Catholic social thought: Who is this progress for?
