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The Annotated Encyclical · Magnifica Humanitas

An annotated reading of Pope Leo XIV's encyclical *[Magnifica Humanitas — On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/encyclicals/documents/20260515-magnifica-humanitas.html) (15 May 2026), from the Hugging Face [society & ethics](https://huggingface.co/society-ethics)* community.

Concept & text: Margaret Mitchell · Design & build: Avijit Ghosh · Review: Ian J Reynolds & Yacine Jernite

The encyclical names the solutions, but only at the level of principle. The detail lives in the research scholarship and media reporting that have spent years on these problems. So we connected the two.

The full text is presented (Introduction → Conclusion, all 245 sections, footnotes intact). Where the Pope's argument touches AI — concentrated in Chapter Three (his treatment of AI), Chapter Four (truth, work, freedom) and the AI passages of Chapter Five — a highlighted passage opens a highlight note: a short take plus links to the peer-reviewed papers, books and standards that work it out in detail.

  • —31 annotations across the AI chapters
  • —95 linked works — every one checked to exist with correct authors, venue and a working link
  • —Works authored by HF researchers, or that underpin HF tools (Model Cards, Dataset Cards, the BLOOM carbon study, data governance), carry a 🤗 HF tag
  • —8 languages — the reading is available in the same languages the Vatican publishes the encyclical in (English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Arabic), with a built-in table of contents and a language switcher

Languages

The encyclical body and the interface are translated; the highlight notes and the works they cite stay in English (a caveat banner says so on non-English pages — help improving the non-English experience is welcome). The body text in each language is the official Vatican translation, fetched from vatican.va by fetch_translations.py into encyclical.<lang>.txt; the §1–245 section numbers and footnote numbers are identical across languages, which is how each translation is aligned to the English structure. Interface strings live in ui_strings.json.

All eight languages are embedded in the single index.html and switched client-side (no page navigation), so it works inside a private Space. You can also deep-link a language with ?lang=it (it, es, fr, de, pt, pl, ar); otherwise it follows your saved choice, then your browser language, then English. Arabic renders right-to-left.

Why from Hugging Face?

The encyclical's call to open technology “to discussion and debate” and to treat data “as a common or shared good” is, in many ways, the open-source ethos. This is an attempt to read it at the intersection of what the encyclical says directly about AI and what our community has long argued.

Build

Static Space. index.html is generated — never edit it by hand. It is a single self-contained page holding all languages, produced by build.py from:

  • —encyclical.txt and encyclical.<lang>.txt — the full source text per language (Introduction → Conclusion + footnotes)
  • —the SOURCES and A (annotations) tables in annotations.py
  • —ui_strings.json — the translated interface strings
  • —template.html — markup, styling and client JS (HF design system: Source Sans 3 / IBM Plex Mono, the HF palette, repo-card patterns)

To rebuild after editing:

bash
python3 build.py            # rewrites the single index.html (all languages embedded)

To refresh the official translations from vatican.va (rarely needed):

bash
python3 fetch_translations.py   # regenerates encyclical.<lang>.txt

Contributing

PRs are very welcome — especially new references and annotations. You don't touch HTML; you edit the SOURCES and A (annotations) tables in annotations.py. See [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md) for the full walkthrough. In short:

  1. 1.Add a source to the SOURCES dict in annotations.py (title, authors, year, venue, working URL). Tag it "hf":1 if it's by an HF researcher or underpins an HF tool.
  2. 2.Attach it to an annotation in the A list by adding its key to that annotation's src=[...], or add a new annotation with a verbatim anchor (an exact phrase from the encyclical text) plus a short take.
  3. 3.Run python3 build.py and open space/index.html to check it.

Please verify every link resolves and the metadata is correct before opening the PR — the whole point of this Space is that the citations are trustworthy.

Notes & disclaimer

An independent, community reading for educational and discussion purposes. Encyclical text © Dicastero per la Comunicazione — Libreria Editrice Vaticana; quoted here under fair use with a link to the complete official text. Annotations and commentary are the responsibility of the contributors, not of the Holy See. Inclusion of a work is not endorsement by its authors of this particular reading.

Built with Hugging Face and Claude Code.