The Pope Is Not a Post-Liberal: On Magnifica Humanitas, John Paul II, and the Personalist Common Good

What some conservative Catholics are missing about the encyclical

The camps are already forming. Already, careful readers of Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas are seeking to claim the encyclical as their own, to find in it authority for positions they have long held. I have in mind particularly the post-liberal Catholic right. Some in that camp argue that the encyclical should be read through Neo-Scholastic metaphysics, which is a synthesis of Aristotelian essentialism and Thomistic transcendence. They use this essentialism to argue that liberalism is too individualistic and therefore incompatible with the common good. Finally, they cite the encyclical’s question, “Where are we going? Toward what goal do we wish to orient ourselves?” as a call to organize society for the essentialist common good that scholastic metaphysics articulates.

The encyclical does speak of human nature. It does invoke the common good. It does ask toward which end society should be ordered. For those who have concluded that liberal constitutionalism, with its procedural agnosticism about human flourishing and its protection of zones of individual autonomy, is inadequate to the moral gravity of our moment, the Pope’s language seems to offer exactly what they seek: a substantive framework for ordering society toward genuine human goods, grounded in metaphysics rather than mere preference.

But this reading mistakes the invocation of the tradition for the use of the tradition in a particular register. When Leo XIV speaks of the common good, he is not speaking in the register of the Neo-Scholastic revival that Leo XIII inaugurated in 1879. He is speaking in the register of John Paul II. And that distinction opens onto a fundamental disagreement about what the common good is, how it relates to the person, and what political authority can legitimately do in its name.

Wojtyła’s Place in the Framework

To understand what is actually happening in Magnifica Humanitas, we must begin with John Paul II. And to understand John Paul II, we must understand a figure most readers have never encountered: Max Scheler, the German phenomenologist who shaped the Saint when he was the philosopher Karol Wojtyła. Wojtyła accepted that Aquinas gave a metaphysical account of what a person is, but a poor account of how a person experiences himself as a subject. Scheler provided what was missing: a phenomenological description of lived experience, of how the human being knows himself from within.

Scheler was one of the earliest phenomenologists after phenomenology was intiated by Husserl, but unlike Husserl, he focused his attention on ethics, emotions, values, and the person. His central claim was that values are not invented by human minds but discovered through perception. We perceive values similar to the way we perceive colors. For example, love is not merely a feeling, it is a way of disclosing high value. Moral life begins with the direct experience of value. For Wojtyła, living through the horrors of Nazi and Soviet occupations of Poland, this was enormously attractive. He had seen what happened when modern philosophy could speak of objective moral order but seemed blind (even hostile) to how freedom, responsibility, love, suffering, and conscience are actually lived. Phenomenology, especially Scheler’s version, offered the hope of illuminating these experiences from within in a way scholasticism could not.

But Wojtyła was not satisfied with phenomenology alone. He eventually concluded that Scheler’s ethics, for all its brilliance in describing experience, lacked the traditional metaphysics of Aquinas that was embraced by the Church. He concluded that phenomenology described appearances, and Thomism explained being. Wojtyła argued that Thomas Aquinas tells us what the person is; Max Scheler helps us understand how the person experiences himself. We need both insights, held in tension, to have an adequate account of human personhood.

This synthesis is the foundation of everything that follows. It is neither classical Thomism nor existentialism. It is a distinctive personalism—one that insists on the irreducibility of subjective experience while grounding that experience in objective human nature; one that affirms freedom and responsibility as constitutive of the person while refusing to treat the person as a self-creating subject; one that sees the person as ordered toward communion with others and with God, yet never subordinated to those relationships as a mere part is subordinated to a whole.

This is the framework that animates The Acting Person (1969), Redemptor Hominis (1979), Centesimus Annus (1991), and now, I would argue, Magnifica Humanitas (2026).

The Transformation of the Common Good

Here is where the argument becomes crucial, because Wojtyła does not reject the scholastic conception of the common good. He transforms it from within.

The classical Thomistic tradition begins from metaphysics and political order. The common good is understood as the good of the whole community, a shared good superior to merely private goods. The political community exists to secure conditions under which human beings can flourish according to their nature. This is fundamentally correct, Wojtyła insists. But twentieth-century political experience—particularly the catastrophes of Marxist collectivism and nationalism—revealed a vulnerability in how this idea could be interpreted and deployed.

Under communism and fascism, people spoke constantly of “the common good,” yet actual persons were sacrificed to abstractions: the State, the nation, the race, the class, historical progress. The language of the common good became a justification for treating persons as means to larger ends. The person became important chiefly insofar as he contributed to the social order. The community eclipsed the person.

This is where Wojtyła’s phenomenological insight becomes decisive. He asks a question that classical scholasticism rarely formulated explicitly: What does the common good look like from the standpoint of the acting person? That is a very different question from “What objective order of goods perfects the community?”

For Aquinas, then, the emphasis is largely on the order of goods. For Wojtyła, the emphasis becomes participation. A community is not genuinely ordered to the common good unless persons can participate in it as subjects. The common good is not merely peace, prosperity, social order, or justice. It is also the shared conditions that allow persons to realize themselves through free and responsible action. It is the network of institutions, practices, and relationships through which persons become capable of truth, judgment, love, and self-gift together.

This reframes the concept. The scholastic formula was roughly that the person exists for the common good. Wojtyła argues that however sound the traditional account may be, it can be misunderstood or misused. His reformulation is that the common good exists for the flourishing of persons in communion. The person is never subordinated to be a mere instrument. The common good is the good of the community within which personal fulfillment becomes possible.

An insight into understanding this distinction is Wojtyła’s ontological concept of participation. Participation is not the common place meaning. For Wojtyla it means more than simply being included in a community or having a role within a social order. It is more Platonic, where the fulfillment of the individual is a result of participation in communion with the community. In his sense, participation means being genuinely able to freely choose to give oneself for others while remaining a subject (experiencing the value of others) rather than becoming an object for manipulation by the state. The common good is the social order that creates conditions for me to experience charitable love (caritas) with others, to take responsibility for them, and to exercise judgment. It the possibility of loving and being loved, not merely the conditions under which these things are managed or administered.

In practice, this means that the common good demands that the State protect the fulfillment of persons through living out the moral choices and doing the work of giving oneself to others. There are no short-cuts. Suppose a government could use advanced artificial intelligence to eliminate misinformation, reduce crime, optimize economic outcomes, and nudge citizens toward healthy and virtuous behavior. A number of contemporary post-liberals might find this genuinely attractive if it produced substantive goods and restored a sense of shared purpose. Wojytla, and Pope Leo XIV would immediately ask different questions: What happens to responsibility? What happens to judgment? What happens to participation in the formation of conscience? If virtue is produced by management rather than appropriated through freely chosen actions, genuine participation has been lost. The outcome may be better while the person becomes less. That is the fundamental personalist concern. And it is the concern animating Magnifica Humanitas.

Leo XIV and the Encyclical

Now read the encyclical with this framework in mind, and its structure becomes clear. The document opens not with Aquinas but with Augustine. The cor inquietum, the restlessness of the human heart, is the first theological gesture. “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” This is the Wojtyłan move stated in Augustine’s language. The person is constitutively ordered toward an absolute that exceeds every finite system, every political order, every technological arrangement. No algorithm, no administrative determination of the common good, no matter how rationally grounded in human nature, can finally satisfy the human person, because the human person is constitutively restless. The encyclical’s central metaphor is the tension between Babel versus Jerusalem. Babel is depicted as a city of technological achievement and ambitious scale. But it is also the city of “uniformity that neutralizes differences” and “the pretense that a single language, even a digital one, can translate everything, including the mystery of the person, into data and performance.” Babel is sinful, but not simply because of technology. It’s sin is to allow the technology to reduce of the person to what can be treated as an object that can be measured, optimized, and administered. It is the pretense that the irreducible mystery of the person can be translated into determinate data points. This objectification leads to treating the person as a means to achieve the ends of the state.

Jerusalem, by contrast, is rebuilt “through the shared responsibility of all: men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households and young people all play a part.” Each person rebuilds a section of the wall, not as a cog in a machine but as a co-responsible, participating subject. This is more like Wojtyła’s political vision. The common good is not achieved through a command from above but by the shared participation from below; not by authoritative administration but through the freely give quotidian acts of devotion, kindness, and gift of the self that are the means of authentic participation. The state does not make people morally fulfilled, but morally fulfilled people make the state good.

Moreover, the encyclical explicitly states that the Church “does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth.” A Neo-Scholastic or post-liberal reading of the common good would require exactly such a monopoly on truth. The authority to determine through reason, working from human nature, what the common good consists in. The Pope’s refusal of this monopoly is not a retreat from the common good. It is a refusal to reduce the common good to something determinable and administrable.

Throughout the document, the Pope emphasizes subsidiarity not as a principle for distributing power downward from a center, but as the recognition that persons and communities have primary responsibility for their own flourishing. He affirms pluralism as constitutive rather than as a defect to be overcome. He insists on the autonomy of earthly realities and the distinction between ecclesial and political community as foundational. He speaks repeatedly of dialogue, participation, responsibility, shared discernment, and co-construction of the social order.

And in the footnotes Leo XIV cites John Paul II relentlessly. Not as one voice among others, but as the major architect of how the Church now understands the person, work, dignity, democracy, and the common good. Redemptor Hominis, Laborem Exercens, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Centesimus Annus, Veritatis Splendor—these are not incidental references. They are the philosophical scaffolding on which the entire encyclical stands.

What is Leo XIV doing? He is extending John Paul II’s personalist anthropology into the age of artificial intelligence. He is taking the Wojtyłan synthesis of Thomistic metaphysics and phenomenological personalism and applying it to the question of technological power. And in doing so, he is answering the question “Where are we going?” not with a determinate post-liberal social order, but with account of what the person is, what the person needs, and what kinds of institutions and relationships allow the person to flourish as a subject rather than be reduced to an object.

Why This Matters Now

The post-liberal reading is seductive because it captures something real in the encyclical, the Pope’s affirmation of human nature, human goods, and the common good against liberal proceduralism. The post-liberal is not entirely wrong. But he is fundamentally mistaken about what kind of common good the Pope is affirming.

The post-liberal wants the common good to be the objective social order the community pursues, and wants authority to promote it effectively. He reads passages about human nature and asks: “What social structures best promote virtue?” Wojtyła and Leo XIV are asking a different question: “What social structures allow persons to become virtuous through their own responsible action?” One question leans toward paternalism and administration. The other requires genuine participation.

This is why the encyclical can simultaneously affirm human nature and real human goods (which pleases the post-liberal) and emphasize participation, discernment, shared responsibility, and co-construction (which the post-liberal reads as merely decorative rather than as the point of the whole argument).

Here is the hard truth: The post-liberal cannot claim the encyclical as authorization for his project. Not because the Pope denies that human beings have a real nature and real goods. Not because the Pope rejects the common good. But because the Pope insists that the common good cannot be realized through the administrative subordination of persons to a determinate social order—even a just and virtuous one. The common good requires that persons remain subjects, that they exercise responsibility for their own becoming, that they participate in the construction of the social world rather than be managed within it.

This is not procedural liberalism. Liberalism treats the common good as negotiation among preferences. This is something different—something that takes human nature and human goods with utmost seriousness while refusing to let either authority or technology substitute itself for the person’s own encounter with truth, goodness, and responsibility.

What the Encyclical Asks of Us

This new social doctrine of the Church demands that we resist the temptation to build systems that optimize for imposed moral outcomes while diminishing genuine participation in the common good. It demands that we ask, of every institutional proposal, “Does this produce good results?” but “Does this form persons capable of shared responsibility? Does this allow people to remain subjects? Does this protect the conditions under which conscience can be formed and exercised?”

It demands that we place subsidiarity at the foundation of how we think about power, not as a compromise but as a principle. It demands that we recognize that the person exceeds every system that tries to contain her, and that no amount of administrative improvement can substitute for the person’s own moral agency.

It demands, finally, that we stop asking “What is the common good that authority should impose?” and start asking “What are the conditions under which persons can participate together in the construction of a truthful and just civic life?” The first question leads to administration. The second leads to something harder and more demanding: genuine political and social participation.

This may be why Magnifica Humanitas feels simultaneously critical of liberalism and uncomfortable with post-liberal proposals. The encyclical is operating from a different anthropological center. The person is not primarily a chooser, as in liberalism, nor primarily a member of an ordered whole, as in some post-liberal accounts. The person is a subject called to communion. Everything else follows from that premise.

The post-liberals have diagnosed something real about liberal individualism. But they have misread the cure the Pope offers. The cure is not the administrative determination of a substantive common good. The cure is the recognition of the person as an irreducible subject, whose dignity and agency must be protected not by procedural neutrality but by genuine participation in the shared construction of social life.

That is the vision Magnifica Humanitas actually advances. That is what Leo XIV is teaching. And that is why the Pope is not a post-liberal, and why the encyclical cannot be claimed as warrant for post-liberal projects—no matter how virtuous those projects might be.