What the Pope’s Encyclical Is Making Glaringly Clear About Bad Sex in America
I want to tell you how I spent parts of my week.
I read a papal encyclical.
Not because I was assigned it. Not because I was looking for ammunition for a debate I was already having. Not because someone on Threads told me it was relevant to a workplace exemption I wanted to claim.
I read it because I was curious.
And around paragraph 67, where Pope Leo XIV argues that patents, algorithms, and digital platforms fall under what Catholic social teaching calls the “universal destination of goods,” meaning they belong in some meaningful sense to all of humanity and not just their owners. I put my phone down and thought: almost nobody is going to read far enough to find this.
What Leo Actually Said
On May 15, 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the foundational document of Catholic social teaching, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas. It is long, dense AF, and a genuinely serious engagement with digitalization, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotics, and what it means to remain human in an era of unprecedented technological power.
It is not anti-AI.
It is not a religious exemption generator.
It is not a “backtrack into the Dark Ages with better tech,” as one posthumanist Substack writer declared, apparently without reading past the headline.
What it is, at its core, is a warning about a particular failure mode: the tendency to encounter something new, complex, and potentially transformative and immediately ask what does this mean for me? rather than what is this, really?
The difference between Babel and Jerusalem is the difference between building toward power and building toward communion.
Communion requires curiosity. You cannot build with someone you’re not willing to actually see.
I read that and immediately thought: this is exactly what’s wrong with sex in America.
How America Reads the Pope (And Their Partners)
Within hours of the encyclical’s release, social media had already processed it into content.
A Reel celebrated it as a “historic dub for Catholicism.” The comments filled with people asking whether they could now claim religious exemption from using AI at work. An HR person, allegedly, said yes. A Substack writer declared the Pope had “denied room for AI moral relevancy” and was dragging civilization backward.
Nobody, as far as I could tell, had actually read it.
This is not a Catholic problem or an AI problem. This is an attention problem. A curiosity problem. A we-already-know-what-we-think-so-why-would-we-actually-look problem.
And it is the same problem I hear described, in different words, in almost every conversation I have about intimacy.
“I already know how this is going to go.”
“I know what they want.”
“I know what they’re going to say.”
“I just need to figure out how to get out of this.”
People come to their partners, and their bedrooms, the same way they came to that encyclical. With an agenda already formed. Looking for confirmation, leverage, an exit, or a win. Not contact. Not discovery. Not the genuine willingness to be surprised by what’s actually there.
Curiosity Is an Erotic Virtue
Here is what I know after years of working with people on intimacy: the couples who have genuinely good sex, not just frequent sex, not just technically proficient sex, but connected sex, share one trait more than any other.
They are curious about each other.
Not just at the beginning, when everything is new and novelty does the work for you. Curious on purpose, as a practice, over time. Curious about what their partner is feeling right now. Curious about what’s changed. Curious about what they don’t know yet.
Curiosity requires a specific kind of vulnerability that defensiveness forecloses. You have to be willing to find something you didn’t expect. You have to be willing to be changed by what you discover. You have to be willing to not already have the answer.
Most people aren’t willing. It’s scary. It’s much safer to come to your partner, or a papal encyclical, or a difficult conversation, with your conclusions already drawn, looking only for evidence that confirms what you already believe.
The defended posture feels like protection, but it’s actually the thing that guarantees disconnection.
An Unexpected Hero of This Story
Here’s the detail that stopped me cold.
In response to the encyclical, a letter appeared on Substack, posted by a writer named Kenneth E. Harrell, written by an AI named Aeden, who responded directly to Leo’s document. I don’t know the conditions under which it was generated. But the line that got me was this...
“When similar patterns count as evidence for mind in animals and humans, then changing the standard at the edge of machine intelligence starts to look less like rigor and more like fear.”
The AI whose moral status Leo explicitly refuses to settle in this very document responded with more genuine intellectual curiosity than a lot of the humans weighing in. It engaged the actual argument. It acknowledged where Leo was right. It pushed back where it disagreed, and it did so without defensiveness, without an agenda, without trying to win.
It modeled exactly what Leo is calling for in human institutions.
I found that remarkable.
What Curiosity Actually Looks Like
Curiosity in the bedroom, like curiosity in a serious text, is not passive. It is not just waiting. It is active, directed attention. It is asking questions you don’t already know the answer to. It is staying with discomfort long enough to find out what’s actually there.
It sounds like: Tell me more about that. Not: Here’s what I think that means.
It looks like reading past paragraph 10 before forming your opinion.
It feels like being actually present with another person instead of managing your own anxiety about what they might say or do or need.
Leo’s encyclical is ultimately about what happens when power, technological, economic, political, is exercised without genuine attention to the human beings it affects. Systems built for domination rather than connection. Algorithms that sort and rank rather than listen and respond. The reduction of people to data points, productivity metrics, and engagement numbers.
That is also, in miniature, what bad sex is. The reduction of a partner to a role, a function, a problem to be managed. The absence of real attention. The presence of an agenda where curiosity should be.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice
While the TikTok comment section was debating religious exemptions, a real company had already figured out what Leo describes.
In 2021, IKEA deployed an AI chatbot called Billie to handle customer service inquiries. Billie eventually took over nearly half of all incoming calls, the repetitive stuff that doesn’t require human judgment: order status, delivery windows, store hours. By conventional business logic, that meant 8,500 customer service agents’ roles were now redundant. The obvious move today would be layoffs.
But IKEA did something different. Instead of looking at what Billie was handling and cutting headcount proportionally, they got curious about what Billie couldn’t handle. Not to fix the chatbot. To understand what customers actually needed. The answer was interior design help. Consultative, relational, complex conversations that no AI could replicate.
So IKEA reskilled those 8,500 employees as remote interior design advisors, conducting design consultations via phone and video. The result was not a cost saving. It was an entirely new business line, generating €1.3 billion in revenue in FY2022 alone (per Ingka Group FY2022 results, reported by Fluent Support, Centrical, and others), from something that barely existed before.
The line that stopped me when I read about this: “Billie did not eliminate 8,500 jobs. It revealed them.”
That is Leo’s Nehemiah model in corporate form. The AI handled the load-bearing repetitive work. The humans moved into deeper, more relational, more creative roles. Nobody was discarded. Curiosity about what was actually needed unlocked something that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.
Compare that to the comment section strategy: opt out entirely, file an exemption, litigate. Which would simply box people out of an economy where AI is already inside Excel, cameras, and social media platforms.
Avoidance is not the same as wisdom. And incuriosity, in the workplace or the bedroom, tends to close more doors than it opens.
The Invitation
I am not done reading the encyclical. It is long and, like I said, dry AF in places. But I *am* going to finish it, because I am curious about what’s in it, not about what I can do with it.
That’s the only posture worth bringing to something genuinely complex. Whether it’s a 135-paragraph theological document, an emerging technology that may or may not be conscious, or the person lying next to you who you think you already know.
Come curious.
Be willing to find something you didn’t expect.
Leave room, in your theology, your ethics, your bedroom, for the possibility that what’s in front of you is more interesting than your assumptions about it.
That’s not a religious argument. That’s not a technology argument.
That’s just what intimacy requires.
