Magnifica Humanitas and the Psychology of a World Built for Peace

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, arrived in late May 2025 as something the modern moment did not expect: a sustained, theologically grounded argument that the world's drift toward normalized conflict is not merely a diplomatic failure but a threat to the integrity of the human person. The document warns against "a world in a permanent state of belligerence" more dangerous than the Cold War era, precisely because the Cold War, for all its terror, preserved a collective awareness that global conflict had to be avoided at all costs. That awareness, the encyclical suggests, has eroded.[^1]

The conditions of peace are not simply political. They are anthropological.

What the Encyclical Actually Claims

Leo XIV does not name any specific conflict, which is itself a deliberate rhetorical choice. The abstention from particulars forces the reader toward the general principle rather than the partisan application. Where the postwar international order made peace the organizing logic of global governance, war has since been "revived as an instrument of international politics, while the very ethical principles that had previously limited its use are being eroded."[^1]

The most commented passage holds that "the 'just war' theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated."[^1] The pope preserves "the right to self-defense in the strictest sense" and is not arguing for unqualified pacifism. He is arguing that the conceptual architecture of just war, developed in a pre-nuclear world, cannot bear the moral weight placed on it today. "Ever since the entrance into the nuclear age," he told one journalist, "the whole concept of war has to be reevaluated."[^2]

The Person at the Center

The human being is not reducible to behavior, neurochemistry, or social role. The person is a unity of body, soul, intellect, will, and relational capacity, oriented toward transcendence and capable of genuine moral agency. That conviction has direct implications for how one reads Magnifica Humanitas.

Chronic conflict, whether at the geopolitical scale or in the lived environments of individuals and families, degrades the conditions under which persons can exercise their full humanity. Sustained exposure to hostility narrows the window of tolerance, diminishes trust, and corrodes the social capital on which resilience depends.[^3]

The encyclical's call for dialogue over armament is a call for the restoration of the conditions that make human development possible. Leo XIV is explicit: "I always believe that it's much better to enter into dialogue than to look for arms and to support the arms industry, which gains billions and billions of dollars each year, instead of sitting down at the table solving our problems and using money to solve humanitarian issues, hunger in the world."[^2]

The resources consumed by the arms economy are resources unavailable for education, healthcare, and poverty reduction — investments the science of wellbeing identifies as foundational to population-level mental health.[^4]

Resilience Is Not Adaptation to Violence

One persistent misreading of resilience conflates it with adaptation. If a person endures chronic stress without collapsing, the narrative sometimes concludes that resilience has been demonstrated. The Catholic understanding challenges this at its root. Resilience is not the capacity to survive a degraded environment. It is the capacity to recover, grow, and move toward the fullness of one's vocation as a person.[^5]

The encyclical is not asking anyone to cope better with a world in permanent belligerence. It is naming that world as a pathological condition that demands structural change. The therapeutic alliance, at its best, holds both registers simultaneously: healing the individual in the present moment, while recognizing that persons are embedded in environments that either support or undermine their flourishing.[^6]

The Courage to Imagine Peace

Faith traditions carry a resource secular frameworks struggle to replicate: the ability to hold suffering and hope in the same frame without collapsing either. Theological hope is not optimism. It is a reasoned confidence in a good that is real but not yet fully manifest.

The pope does not pretend the world is not violent. He names the violence with clarity. What he refuses is the conclusion that violence is the permanent, unavoidable condition of human affairs. That refusal is itself a psychological intervention. Learned helplessness develops when repeated exposure to uncontrollable negative events produces the generalized belief that one's actions cannot affect outcomes.[^7] A document that insists on the continued possibility of peace, and models serious moral reasoning about how to pursue it, functions as a counter-narrative to that helplessness.

How does the environment of public life shape interior life? What are the anthropological costs of normalized conflict? What does genuine resilience require — not just at the level of the individual, but at the level of the culture that forms that individual?

Magnifica Humanitas does not resolve these questions. It sharpens them. And the work of building a more demanding world begins with the clarity to name the present one honestly and the courage to refuse its most diminishing assumptions.

Notes and Sources

[^1]: Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (Vatican City: Dicastery for Communication, May 2025). All encyclical quotations are drawn from the official Vatican text.

[^2]: Pope Leo XIV, press remarks to journalists aboard the papal plane, May 2025, as widely reported. See, e.g., Catholic News Agency and Vatican News coverage of the pope's in-flight press conference, May 2025.

[^3]: Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (New York: Viking, 2014); Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog (New York: Basic Books, 2006). Both works document the narrowing of adaptive capacity under chronic threat and relational disruption.

[^4]: World Health Organization, World Mental Health Report: Transforming Mental Health for All (Geneva: WHO, 2022). The report identifies poverty, inequality, and underinvestment in social infrastructure as primary structural determinants of population-level mental health outcomes.

[^5]: Ann S. Masten, Ordinary Magic: Resilience in Development (New York: Guilford Press, 2015). Masten's foundational work distinguishes resilience as a dynamic process of positive adaptation rather than mere endurance of adversity.

[^6]: Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), §§ 1700–1715, on the dignity and vocation of the human person; see also the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004), §§ 132–159, on the integral development of the person within community.

[^7]: Martin E. P. Seligman, Helplessness: On Depression, Development, and Death (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1975); subsequent research summarized in Seligman, Learned Optimism (New York: Knopf, 1991). The learned helplessness model demonstrates that perceived uncontrollability of negative events generates generalized motivational and cognitive deficits.