Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas turns out to be one of the most rigorous frameworks for information ethics published in 2026, in any genre — generating six specific requirements for RIM practice that go beyond what regulation alone can provide.
A 52-page, 245-paragraph document with 224 footnotes — addressed not only to Catholics but to "all men and women of goodwill." Issued on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, explicitly framing AI as the new industrial revolution.
The encyclical's organizing diagnostic. A Babel system concentrates control invisibly and optimizes for platform metrics. A Jerusalem system distributes governance transparently with community voice and traceable accountability. Most current AI-assisted RM systems are Babel projects — not because they are malicious, but because structural incentives push toward opacity and concentration.
The encyclical formally extends the universal destination of goods — that the earth's resources belong ultimately to all humanity — to include "patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure and data." Ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands. This reframes GDPR/FOIA compliance as moral obligation, not regulatory accommodation.
J.R.R. Tolkien appears in paragraph 213 of a papal encyclical — Pope Leo XIV quotes Gandalf: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know." Potter applies this to RM: the appeal of automated records management promises scale and efficiency — but what is the system optimizing for, and whose values are embedded in that optimization? The "fields that we know" — the systems, policies, and governance frameworks records managers directly influence — are the actual site of ethical responsibility.
These follow directly from the document's positions — not speculative extrapolations.
Entities and relationships extracted from the article. Colors: ■ article, ■ person, ■ org, ■ concept, ■ requirement, ■ doc.
12 steps — the six explicit requirements from the encyclical, plus six derived from the article's broader analysis of archival ethics, subsidiarity, and the Babel/Jerusalem diagnostic.
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