Much commentary on Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, centres on its critique of AI.
But that is just part of his overarching warning about how we engage with technology. The core of the pope’s message is that while tech opens up many opportunities, it can keep us from living full and flourishing lives.
Or living at all.
Recent academic research has suggested that one reason for the dismayingly swift decline in fertility around the globe is that piece of tech that we all carry in our pocket, the mobile phone.
Nathan Hudson and Hernan Moscoso-Boedo, two economists at the University of Cincinnati, published a widely-read paper in April which examined fertility around the world and the rollout of 4G mobile networks in the US and UK.
“Teen fertility collapsed almost everywhere in the world starting around 2007.
This is a striking fact,” they observed. “Countries with very different healthcare systems, welfare regimes, abortion laws, religious traditions, recessions, and demographic trends all saw similar breaks in the same window.
“Whatever caused it was something global – something that arrived in roughly the same form in all of these places at roughly the same time.”
And that something was the mobile phone.
Between 2007 and 2024, the birth rate among American women 15-19 fell by 71 per cent, 20-24 by 43 per cent, and 25-29 by 23 per cent, but amongst women 30-34 by only 1 percent.
The authors believe that as socialising moved from in-person interaction to social media, there was less opportunity for and interest in romance.
Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch crunched the numbers for other countries as well.
In the US, UK and Australia, birth rates declined sharply after 2007, the year that Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone.
In Mexico and Indonesia the decline began around 2012, the year mobile phones came on the market. In Iran, Egypt and Senegal, the same phenomenon occurred around 2015.
The phone was to social health what COVID was to medical health.
Global fertility has been declining for decades, so mobile phones are not the only reason for the baby drought.
There are housing costs, changing gender roles, delaying motherhood, environmental toxins, declining religious fervour, media influences, and women entering the workforce, among other reasons. Economists are baffled.
But it does seem that mobile phones have accelerated the decline by eroding the quality of our relationships.
Which is at the heart of Pope Leo’s critique.
“The dignity inscribed in each of us by the Holy Spirit can also be seen in our capacity to reflect critically, choose and love freely, and form authentic relationships,” he writes in Magnifica Humanitas.
“Let us cultivate relationships! In an era that favours speed and fragmentation, the human person still yearns to receive care and recognition from attentive minds, kind words and hands capable of tenderness,” he tells us.
And towards the end of this magnificent document, he pleads with his readers not to pretend that digital projections of ourselves are real.
“I invite everyone to cherish places and times where physical presence remains crucial, such as shared meals, Christian community gatherings, time spent with the lonely and serving the poor.
“These are signs of a humanity that continues to believe that every person’s body is a dwelling place of God and a temple of the Holy Spirit. It is precisely this covenant between glory and fragility that becomes the criterion for evaluating the anthropological models offered by contemporary culture.”
With a length of 42,000 words, Magnifica Humanitas is probably too long for most people to read. But if there is one resolution that we can all draw from Pope Leo’s inspiring document, it is treasure and cultivate face-to-face relationships.
Mobile phones are a great tool, but they can freeze our friendships.
And globally, as social scientists have observed, they could be leading to a demographic winter.
