A Voice From Nowhere

Summary

A Voice From Nowhere 24 July 2026 The Holy See has had a website since 1995, but the day Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical went up was the first time I saw it being linked to from outside the niche Catholic circles. The link to the encyclical made rounds on X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, and Reddit, and it was the first ever “.va” link published to lobste.rs. I was surprised to see it was upvoted. People seemed to have actually read it. And they seemed to argue about it in good faith. I suspect that if you had told a room of engineers fifteen years ago, a time when Dawkins was still a frequent sight on airport shelves, that one day they’d be reading a Catholic encyclical and mostly nodding along, you’d have been at best met with polite disbelief. Papal encyclicals, over the centuries, became documents that garner interest not just internally, from Catholic theologians and clergy. They became serious works of moral philosophy read and discussed outside the Catholic or even Christian circles. As such, besides being a source of magisterial teaching for Catholics, they have to stand on their own merits as addressed to “all people of good will.”1Marginnote mh21Pope Leo XIV. Magnifica humanitas. Libreria Editrice Vaticana 2026; § 2 ↩ The first time I saw this with my own eyes was with the publication of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’. While the subject of that one was not of particular interest to me, it sparked widespread action and over time diffused into many initiatives. Outside of the many strictly Catholic institutions it permeated, it was quoted during UN panels on ecology and cited in serious climate change papers2Marginnote ls2McCallum, M. L. Perspective: Global country-by-country response of public interest in the environment to the papal encyclical, Laudato Si’. Biological Conservation 2019; pp. 209–225 ↩ published in multidisciplinary journals. The election of Pope Leo was a deeply personal event for me. I was born during the pontificate of John Paul II, whose legacy sti...