News Fix # 50: Faith in the common good isn't enough to get us there.

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When I wrote about the virtues of brevity last Tuesday, Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas was next on my reading list. On the hunt for a paper copy of the encyclical letter that day, Sarah Hulett, editor extraordinaire, NewsFix reader, and my dear friend texted me, “43,ooo words, TOO LONG?”

The Catholic Church knows a thing or two about the pageantry of legitimacy. The length of the encyclical is part of what signals a serious and considered argument by Pope Leo. I think it delivers. The argument I put to you here is longer than I would like, because I am quoting liberally from that source material. It is still 3,300% shorter than the encyclical.

This papal letter both is and is not about AI, and those particular aspects of the communication have been well covered. My reflections here will not focus on AI because I think the Pope's larger point is more important. I read him as telling us that to confront the future—including but not limited to AI—takes careful discernment, strong theory, and a compelling vision of the common good grounded in respect for humanity rather than devotion to efficiency and production. He is asking us not to react but to confront.

This directive is largely grounded in Catholic social teaching, a radically beautiful worldview aspiring to the common good but grounded in individual human dignity that “is neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified.”

I was raised Catholic, but am largely critical of the church as an institution. It's social teachings are not quite enough, in my opinion, to redeem its legacy of harm or institutionalized patriarcy. And yet these particular teachings have tremendous value to me, and I hold them close. The Pope uses these teachings in his writing here to great effect.

“Building a world in which everyone can flourish requires shared responsibility and courage,” he writes, and then follows it a few lines later with this insightful truth, “No one can single-handedly bear the weight of the challenges the world is facing, just as no one is so weak that they cannot play their part.” To quote another Chicagoan, Darryl Holliday, “Don't just engage, equip!”

We each have an individual responsibility to make human flourishing more possible; we can equip ourselves and others. But this encyclical is about institutional responsibility as much as it is about individuals, and the Pope singles out corporations, governments, nation states, universities, and journalism, among others, as needing to take action.

Can the news—an institution many of us spend much of our time inside—decide to engage toward this goal of human flourishing? Or will we just continue to cover how this flourishing, for both humans and the larger natural world, is becoming increasingly difficult?

There are three lessons I think the news can take from this encyclical to get on the side of flourishing. These lessons don't require strict hierarchies or abundant resources—things the Catholic Church relies on and the news does not.

Shore up our theory

The news is an imperfect but important institution with the power to do considerable good or harm. And yet we don't have much in the way of theory—an idea of why the news exists and what it should do—to ground us.

“Each generation inherits the task of shaping its own era, guiding history to become a place where the dignity of every person is safeguarded, justice is promoted, and fraternity is made possible.”

This is the second sentence of the encyclical, and already we know exactly where we are going. We are being called to safeguard dignity, promote justice, and make fraternity possible. Pope Leo then goes backwards, showing us how the theory and doctrine of the church have guided him toward making this call and what the concepts of dignity and justice mean to him.

News has very few (do we have any?) shared frameworks we can rely on when trying to make principled decisions about the future. Individual newsrooms have guidelines and mission statements, and some tools like a theory of change. But how much do we feel we can really ground ourselves in these? In the absence of strong frameworks, we run the risk of anchoring to anything that feels coherent, like market values, capitalism, or outdated professional norms like objectivity. Worse, lacking any framework to rely on, we run the risk of defaulting to short-term and reactive decision-making about how to navigate even the most existential concerns.

Where's our common good?

We do not have a clear idea of what journalism in the public interest looks like. Not because we don't understand journalism, but because we haven't articulated what a view of the public interest or the common good looks like.

Pope Leo relies on a vision of the common good from Vatican II in the 1960's: “the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily.”

He goes on to say that the common good “is not the sum total of individual benefits, nor the intersection of their particular interests; it is a greater good that belongs to everyone, and it can only be achieved, nurtured, and protected by our collective efforts.” This is not overly prescriptive, but it is instructive.

He adds important backstop to prevent ideas of the common good from being used as cover for abuse, domination, or eugenics, saying, “the promotion of the common good can never be separated from respect for the right of peoples to exist, to preserve their own identity and to contribute their unique qualities.”

Actions speak louder than words, of course. The Catholic Church has formalized the subjugation or the exclusion of people whose “unique quality” is that they are women, LGBTQ+, or both. Journalism's pursuit of the common good may be as imperfect as the Church's, but that should not prevent us from trying to define it.

We do have Chicago

I think it matters that Pope Leo hails from the second-best city in the Midwest.

He grew up somewhere proud of its working class and where people with differences live in proximity. Perhaps that is why he is so comfortable in this encyclical extolling the virtues of:

• organizing: “The Church’s social teaching emphasizes that solidarity is both a principle and a virtue,”
• labor rights: “persons have a fundamental value that takes precedence over capital and profit,”
• diversity: “People of God are not only gathered together from many peoples, but are also intertwined through different functions, vocations, cultures and traditions, each being called to support and enrich one another,” and
• productive disagreement: “It is clear that there are many ideological and practical differences among people, as well as differing interests and frequent disagreements, but that does not mean it is impossible to engage in dialogue to establish a set of basic agreements that enable the creation of a shared vision, upon which everyone can move forward together.”

Chicago also has one of the healthiest, most human-centered, and responsive local news ecosystems in the entire county. I leave you with the full text of Pope Leo's call for “cultivating a healthy realism,” which might as well be called a prayer for journalism.

We are in need of a healthy realism that avoids both political idealism and cynicism. There is a kind of idealism that, in order to preserve its own worldview, tends to choose facts selectively, distorting and renaming them. Its proponents eventually, inhabit a reality constructed to fit their own convictions. Conversely, there is also a debased form of realism that confuses observation with resignation, arguing that since force prevails, it will always prevail. Authentic realism does not give up on changing the world; indeed, it starts by clearly identifying interests, fears, constraints and power dynamics, precisely in order to determine what can be achieved, and the measures needed to achieve it. It does not reduce politics to morality; neither does it surrender to violence. Instead, it seeks viable paths for making peace more than a mere word, through credible institutions, verifiable guarantees, patient negotiations, conflict prevention and the protection of civilians.

Take care until next time, when I'll have my reporting on the Supreme Court's Callais decision and the future of accountability.