"Magnifica Humanitas" Conference: A Dialogue on Pope Leo XIV's First Encyclical
On June 19, on the shore of the Strait, in the Quistelli Aula Magna, Monsignor Lucio Ruiz, secretary of the Dicastery for Communication of the Holy See, the Vatican correspondent for Tg2 Enzo Romeo and the university professors Carlo Morabito and Massimiliano Ferrara will speak.
A few weeks after its publication, Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical became the subject of a public debate in Reggio Calabria: the Archdiocese of Reggio Calabria-Bova and the Università Mediterranea organized a meeting to examine the issues addressed by Magnifica Humanitas , the encyclical "on the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence" that the Holy Father signed on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum , and which the Holy See presented on May 25.
The event will take place on Friday, June 19th, at 5:30 p.m., in the Aula Magna "A. Quistelli" of the Università Mediterranea. The event is open to the public and admission is free.
Magnifica Humanitas is the first encyclical in the history of the Church entirely devoted to the ethical, social, and cultural implications of artificial intelligence. In 245 paragraphs, Leo XIV reinterprets the principles of the Church's social doctrine—the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, social justice—in light of a technological transformation that the Pontiff interprets as a decisive feature of contemporary change. At the heart of the document remains the dignity of the human person, taken as the fundamental criterion for guiding technological progress and evaluating its consequences.
The meeting in Reggio will open with greetings from the Rector of the Università Mediterranea, Professor Giuseppe Zimbalatti. The discussion will be introduced and moderated by Dr. Enzo Romeo, a Vatican journalist for TG2-Rai, who, over the course of a long career in public service, has covered the pontificates from John Paul II to that of Pope Prevost.
The other speakers, with expertise spanning diverse aspects of the encyclical's themes, are: Professor Massimiliano Ferrara, Professor of Mathematics for Economics, Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning at the Università Mediterranea, who will bring the perspective of trustworthy artificial intelligence; Professor Carlo Morabito, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the same university and president of the International Neural Networks Association, will contribute his experience in the field of neural architectures; and Bishop Lucio Adrian Ruiz, Secretary of the Dicastery for Communication of the Holy See and Professor of Digital Communication at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, will offer participants the Church's perspective on digital culture and the challenges it poses to the ecclesial community.
The closing remarks will be delivered by the Metropolitan Archbishop of Reggio Calabria-Bova, His Excellency Monsignor Fortunato Morrone.
The initiative, jointly promoted by the Università Mediterranea and the Archdiocese of Reggio Calabria-Bova, responds to the desire to translate the encyclical's concerns into an opportunity for dialogue, engaging the academic world and the public around questions that now permeate everyone's daily lives. The collaboration between the Archdiocese and the Università Mediterranea, whose faculty includes researchers at the forefront of artificial intelligence, offers the citizens of Reggio Calabria the opportunity to contribute to a debate that Pope Leo XIV wished to address to all, believers and non-believers alike, with the understanding that the future of technology is, first and foremost, a question that concerns the future of humanity.
