Why the Center Cannot Hold:

Why the Center Cannot Hold: Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, and the Crisis of Civilization

Christendom and the Moral Order of Nations

G. K. Chesterton once remarked that “it is impossible to have a nation without Christendom; as it is impossible to have a citizen without a city.”¹ At first glance the statement appears exaggerated. Christendom, at least as a visibly unified civilization, had already disappeared long before Chesterton wrote those words. Nations plainly continued to exist, and some became more powerful than ever. Yet Chesterton was making something more than a historical observation. He was making a metaphysical one.

A nation is a people whose distinct identity can be affirmed precisely because it exists within a wider moral order that also affirms the legitimacy of other peoples. To affirm one’s own nation as a nation is already to affirm a wider order in which nations as such possess legitimacy. This is why Chesterton distinguished nationalism from tribal self-assertion. Nationalism, in his older sense, implied a “law of nations.” It meant that peoples possessed a rightful place within a larger moral order.

Christendom supplied that order. It united Europe without abolishing distinctions. France remained France, Poland remained Poland, England remained England, because each participated in a higher spiritual and civilizational reality that transcended them without destroying them. Christendom made plurality intelligible.

Once that higher order disappears, political life begins to oscillate between two unstable poles: empire and tribe. Either unity is imposed through administration, ideology, market power, military force, or some other techne, or society fragments into rival identities and competing grievances. The center cannot hold because the center was never merely procedural. It rested upon a theological and metaphysical order.

Babel, Jerusalem, and the Crisis of Modernity

Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical Magnifica humanitas gives this insight a new urgency. Although occasioned by artificial intelligence, the encyclical is ultimately about the human person and the conditions necessary for authentic human flourishing. The encyclical frames the modern crisis through the biblical contrast between Babel and Jerusalem. Babel represents unity without God.² Its builders possess a single language, a common technical capacity, and a unified direction. Yet their unity is one of self-assertion, animated by what Nietzsche would later exalt as der Wille zur Macht, rather than communion.³ They seek to make a name for themselves through power and coordination. Their project ends not in harmonious communion but in confused fragmentation.

Jerusalem, by contrast, is rebuilt through an ordered communion of distinct persons, offices, and responsibilities. Nehemiah directs and coordinates the work under legitimate authority, while families, artisans, priests, leaders, and laborers each contribute according to their respective roles. Unity is achieved neither through uniformity nor through the dissolution of order, but through the harmonious coordination of differentiated participation in a common good under God.⁴

This distinction between Babel and Jerusalem illuminates the predicament of modern civilization. Artificial intelligence is not merely another technology requiring regulation. It reveals with unusual clarity the spiritual and anthropological crisis already present within the modern West. We possess unprecedented powers of coordination, communication, prediction, and control, yet we increasingly lack agreement about what man is, what freedom is for, and what constitutes the common good. The crisis is therefore deeper than politics. It concerns the very structure of reality and the human person’s place within it.

The Metaphysical Grammar of Communion

At the heart of Leo’s diagnosis lies an implied foundation: reality is constituted by complementary principles that possess meaning only in relation to one another. This helps explain why the encyclical repeatedly insists that the principles of Catholic social doctrine must be received together rather than treated as competing alternatives. Modern civilization repeatedly severs these co-principles, absolutizing one while rejecting the other. Rather than a hoped-for liberation, the result is distortion. What appears throughout Catholic social doctrine is therefore not an arbitrary collection of teachings but the social expression of a deeper metaphysical order.

Classical Christian thought understood reality through complementary principles: form and matter, soul and body, unity and plurality, act and potency, person and communion.⁵ These are not competing forces within a zero-sum system. Each possesses meaning only in relation to the other. To isolate one from the other is not to preserve it but to deform it. The theological ground of this vision is the doctrine of the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are neither isolated individuals nor dissolving manifestations of a monadic unity. God is perfect unity in real distinction. The Trinity provides the archetype for this unity in distinction that marks all created reality; therefore, it is neither pure sameness nor chaos. Creation bears an analogical trace of this order. Reality is participatory and relational. Relation is therefore not merely an external connection among otherwise self-contained beings, but one of the ways finite beings are ordered toward fulfillment in communion. Things possess integrity through ordered participation in a larger whole.

These co-principles are not merely complementary but asymmetrical. Throughout the metaphysical structure of finite being, one principle frequently serves as actuality, form, end, or integrating measure, while the other remains the indispensable condition through which that actuality is received and expressed. This deeper metaphysical pattern is reflected most concretely in the human person, a seamless unity of body and soul.

Because the spiritual soul is the form of the body and orders human life toward truth, love, and communion, principles arising more directly from the spiritual dimension of the person possesses a certain priority as ends, while those associated with individuation, particularity, and material existence remain necessary conditions for their realization. Thus, truth orders love, love guides freedom, and communion perfects individuality.⁶ Yet this priority does not negate the complementary principle. Rather, it preserves the proper order by which both attain their fulfillment. The Christian tradition therefore seeks neither the absorption of one principle into the other nor their separation, but their harmonious integration according to the order inscribed in creation itself.⁷

The key to understanding Catholic anthropology and social doctrine is that the common good is never in opposition to personal communion. It is the social form of communion itself. Persons cannot achieve fulfillment in isolation, nor are they absorbed into a collective whole. Rather, they flourish through participation in every aspect of life that authentically unites them to others while preserving their distinct dignity and responsibility. Catholic social doctrine is rooted in a vision of reality that resists reduction to a set of policy preferences. The Church’s social principles are intelligible only because they arise from a prior, Trinitarian understanding of the human person, communion, and the common good.

Social doctrine presupposes this theological vision and the metaphysical account of reality that flows from it. Its principles are not detachable political preferences capable of indefinite rearrangement. They are mutually implicating truths grounded in the nature of the human person and the common good. Magnifica humanitas states explicitly that solidarity, subsidiarity, social justice, the common good, and the universal destination of goods must be understood together in their complementarity.

This point is decisive because solidarity and subsidiarity must not be mistaken for Catholic accounts of political left and right ideologies. They are co-principles, in W. Norris Clarke’s formulation. Each loses its meaning when severed from the other. As the common good toward which social life is ordered, solidarity possesses a certain teleological priority, while subsidiarity preserves the concrete persons, families, associations, and communities through which that common good is actually pursued and realized. The universal destination of goods affirms that creation is ordered to the good of all, while private property entrusts persons and families with the stewardship through which that shared good, and their own fulfillment, is best realized because it maximizes the participation of persons and increases the opportunities for concrete acts of love.

Solidarity without subsidiarity tends toward collectivism. Persons, families, churches, voluntary associations, schools, and local communities become increasingly absorbed into administrative structures that displace their proper responsibilities. Subsidiarity without solidarity tends toward fragmentation and isolation. Economic and political life become dominated by private power, while intermediary institutions weaken and the vulnerable are left exposed.

The same pattern appears elsewhere. When private property is severed from the universal destination of goods, it degenerates into possessive individualism. When the universal destination of goods is severed from private property, it degenerates into coercive collectivism. Freedom severed from love dissolves into self-creation and the deformation of the person. Authority severed from truth becomes domination. Nation severed from Christendom becomes tribe. Universality severed from particularity becomes empire.

When Co-Principles Are Severed

Modern political ideologies repeatedly pursue one pole while rejecting the other as a threat to their preferred vision. Yet because these co-principles derive their meaning from their relation to one another, the rejection of one inevitably destroys the other. What replaces it is not the authentic co-principle but a deformed substitute that expands beyond its proper limits and becomes destructive. This dynamic helps explain the otherwise puzzling convergence of radical individualism and expanding technocratic control within contemporary society.

Modern progressivism often exalts autonomy in matters of identity and self-definition while simultaneously extending administrative systems of regulation and ideological enforcement. This appears contradictory only if one assumes that radical autonomy produces strong and self-sufficient persons. In practice, detached individuals become increasingly dependent upon centralized systems to secure recognition, regulate social relations, adjudicate conflicts, and stabilize communal life.

The body itself becomes central to this conflict because it confronts the modern will with givenness. Sexual identity is not merely one political issue among others. It has become decisive because the human body testifies that freedom is not self-originating. The contemporary struggle over sex and identity therefore reflects a deeper struggle over whether human nature possesses intelligible form.

The same logic appears in the economic sphere. Market absolutism detaches property and exchange from solidarity and the common good. Economic life becomes increasingly impersonal as economic power consolidates in ever larger institutions, farther removed from families, local communities, and intermediary associations. Persons are treated primarily as producers, consumers, or units of labor within systems ordered chiefly toward efficiency and accumulation. Family life, local community, and civic trust weaken under these pressures.

Artificial Intelligence and the Machinic Person

Magnifica humanitas is particularly perceptive on this point because it recognizes that technological power now frequently belongs to private actors whose influence exceeds that of many governments. This danger is easily missed when concern about power is focused almost exclusively on the state. Private technological systems increasingly shape communication, labor, visibility, memory, commerce, and public discourse itself. This may appear to enlarge freedom. Yet when private technological systems are governed chiefly by profit and efficiency, they can form users to experience themselves as isolated, dependent, and anxious, even while promising connection and empowerment.

Artificial intelligence intensifies this condition because it operates at the level of mediation. It does not merely add tools to human life; it increasingly structures how persons encounter reality. Systems governed principally by efficiency, profit, or ideological conformity inevitably tend to reshape the human person according to those same criteria.

Whatever future capabilities such systems may acquire, the more immediate danger is that human beings will increasingly be treated as machinic: collections of preferences, data points, risks, outputs, and behavioral patterns to be managed and optimized. This is why truth is politically indispensable. A society cannot endure on procedure alone. Democratic life presupposes that truth is more than preference and that the common good is more than the temporary equilibrium of competing interests. Once truth is reduced to narrative, utility, or administrative consensus, political life becomes a struggle for control over the mechanisms by which reality is interpreted and communicated. This logic is already becoming dominant in contemporary political and social discourse.

The consequences are now evident throughout the West. Institutions lose legitimacy while bureaucratic administration expands. Public discourse becomes increasingly tribal even as technological systems become increasingly centralized. The family weakens while the state and market absorb functions once carried by local communities and intermediary institutions. Digital technologies promise universal connection yet intensify isolation and social fragmentation.

The Afterlife of Radical Individualism

It must not be supposed that the tribalism that still exists is a waning remnant of the premodern world. It promises to be the afterlife of radical individualism. Human beings cannot live as isolated wills. When family, Church, nation, and shared moral order weaken, persons seek belonging elsewhere. If genuine communion disappears, tribal identities emerge in its place.

The resulting tribes can become ruthless in protecting their own hegemony, especially when their unity is supplied less by shared loves than by ideology. This is evident across political, economic, and cultural movements that define themselves by opposition to rival accounts of social order.

Chesterton recognized this danger when he warned against peoples becoming enclosed within their own self-understanding. A nation must be rooted and particular, but it cannot become merely esoteric or self-enclosed. It must remain intelligible within a wider moral order. This is why Chesterton’s observation about nation and Christendom remains relevant. The question this presents for the West is whether any civilization can preserve genuine plurality without a transcendent source of unity.

The modern West has attempted several substitutes: markets without morality, rights detached from the human nature that grounds them, democracy without truth or virtue, technology without wisdom, and diversity without shared ends. Each attempts to preserve fragments of the Christian inheritance while severing them from the metaphysical order that once gave them coherence. Without the transcendent Source of unity, the very plurality modernity prizes loses the principle that allows difference to remain ordered rather than antagonistic.

Recovering the Center

The Christian proposal is not nostalgic. It is realistic. In Magnifica humanitas, Leo gives renewed urgency to a warning that has grown steadily clearer across recent papacies and became especially insistent under Francis: the technological question is finally an anthropological and spiritual question. Artificial intelligence has intensified this older crisis and made it far more difficult to postpone. We must accept that the human person is not pure will, consumer, data point, or administrative subject. Man is created in the image of the Triune God. He is embodied, relational, ordered toward truth, capable of communion, and responsible for others. His dignity transcends the state, the market, and the machine.

Only such a vision can explain why freedom need not destroy authority, why communion need not erase personhood, why nations need not become idols, and why technological progress must remain subordinate to human dignity.

The center cannot hold where the center is denied. And the center is not moderation, procedural neutrality, or managerial compromise. The center is reality itself: a created order participating analogically in the God who is perfect unity in real distinction. Babel remains a permanent temptation, and modern technology has made it newly plausible. Yet Jerusalem remains possible as well. In invoking Jerusalem, Leo is not proposing the theocracy that modern sensibilities fear. He is urging the patient rebuilding of common life under God.

That rebuilding will require more than regulation, though regulation will be necessary. Regulation will serve human flourishing only if it begins from the good of the human person and the common good, subordinating lesser goods such as profit, convenience, efficiency, and pleasure to the dignity of the person. Market forces and human ingenuity have their proper place, but they cannot deliver human flourishing when severed from truth, wisdom, and the common good. Rebuilding and the wisdom to implement workable regulation will require the recovery of the metaphysical grammar by which persons, families, communities, and nations can remain distinct without becoming enemies and united without being absorbed. Catholic social doctrine provides the most complete expression of this grammar.

Chesterton was right. Without Christendom, the nation becomes unstable because the very meaning of nationhood depends upon a higher order of belonging. More fundamentally, every social order becomes unstable when the complementary principles that constitute reality are severed from one another and from the transcendent source that gives them their unity. Pope Leo XIV extends the warning to the technological civilization of our own age. Without God, our towers will not reach heaven. They will only scatter us again, and this time the scattering will be amplified by powers Babel could never have imagined.

Deacon David H. Delaney, PhD is Director and Senior Fellow at Mother of the Americas Institute. He is incardinated in the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter. He is the author of Viri Dignitatem: Personhood, Masculinity, and Fatherhood in the Thought of John Paul II (Emmaus Academic, 2023).