How the Church’s Magisterial Document on How Language Corrodes Thought Became a Case Study in Language Corroding Thought
I. The Cornell Study
Cornell researchers built something they called the “Corporate Bull[••••]Receptivity Scale.” Four studies. Over a thousand office drones. The finding was brutal and hilarious: the more someone claims to find corporate jargon “insightful,” the lower they score on analytical thinking, cognitive reflection, and plain old fluid intelligence.
These people literally cannot tell the difference between AI-generated word salad and actual quotes from Fortune 500 CEOs. They rate their bosses as “visionary” and “charismatic” at rates that would make a cult blush. And here’s the dark part—the part that should keep HR up at night: the jargon-lovers get promoted. Because the people doing the promoting speak the exact same dead language. It’s a closed loop. The competent ones who actually ship work get sidelined while the fluent bullshitters rise. Self-perpetuating mediocrity, dressed in PowerPoint.
Makes me think of the reactions I saw online this week.
II. The AI Entrainment Parallel
Now watch the same mechanism at work with cheap AI. People who mainline the free AI models and seek deep truths from it start thinking in the model’s register. The model spits out fluffy abstraction, the user nods sagely and calls it “deep,” then feeds it back in. The loop closes. Density of abstraction gets mistaken for depth of thought. Same cognitive failure as the Cornell subjects.
The alignment problem isn’t just about values. It’s linguistic. Human and machine drift together toward the same hollow register—vague, portentous, and ultimately content-free.
Side note: USCCB talk
I think here, dear reader, an opportunity for a whole other article on whether this is precisely what has happened with apparatchiks who devour AmChurch pastorality and unity jargon. Particularly the loss of intelligence among them. But back to our point here.
III. The Encyclical — A Masterclass in Self-Indictment
Enter Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, dropped May 2026. Forty-two thousand words. Yes, 42,000! (Not even your wordy author here dare go to that length!). Seventy-two pages. The subject? How the “technocratic paradigm” and algorithmic opacity degrade human thought and dignity.
Written in… the technocratic paradigm.
Just look at the chapter titles. They read like they were generated by the very systems the document claims to fear:
- “A Dynamic Approach Faithful to the Gospel”
- “Integral Human Development”
- “Ecology of Communication”
- “Culture of Power”
- “Preventive Ethical Verification”
- “Shared Discernment Process for Identifying the Spiritual and Cultural Roots of Ongoing Transformations” (coincidentally, this is perhaps my favorite for delivering the irony)
The document that diagnoses the disease of abstract nominalization is the disease. A mathematician pope writing a UN sustainability report about why UN sustainability reports are bad. The irony is so thick you could cut it with a thesaurus.
IV. What Encyclicals Used to Be
Compare this new cloud of platitudes to the old ones.
Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII, 1891) defined socialism so precisely that actual socialists, leadership of the communist party even, adopted the Church’s own language to describe themselves. They said it defined them better than they could themselves. Surgical. Every sentence had an edge.
Quadragesimo Anno (Pius XI, 1931) mapped Catholic social doctrine with the cold precision of a structural engineer. No atmosphere. Just architecture.
The bar was higher. The readers were made smarter.
The tongue of Christ is described in Apocalypse as a sword—sharp, two-edged, dividing soul from spirit. Magisterial language used to be a cutting instrument. Now it’s a weighted blanket. Every concrete problem gets wrapped in a three-word slogan. Every attack is softened into a “reflection.” Every claim is hedged into a “discernment process.” The sword became a participation trophy.
V. The Francis Inflection Point
Pope Francis (“Frank,” as some call him) didn’t invent the problem, but he sure as heck industrialized it. He was to platitudes what Henry Ford was to the assembly line. Page count went up. Precision went down. The encyclical stopped being a scalpel and became a pressure washer of platitudes.
The language shifted from definition to vibe. Less “this is what X actually is,” more “we must reflect on the spiritual and cultural roots of the ongoing transformation of the integral ecology of…” You know the drill.
The Church’s magisterial voice got sucked into the same gravitational pull that drags corporations into the same hollow register. “Dynamic.” “Integral.” “Ecology of.” “Culture of.” “Civilization of.” It’s NGO-speak with incense.
VI. The MEGA Thesis
Make Encyclicals Great Again isn’t a partisan slogan. It’s a diagnostic one.
The Church runs the world’s oldest and most successful idea distribution network that has now degraded into jargon. The new encyclical is both the product and the self-congratulatory quality-control report. The irony is structural, not accidental. Institutions that depend on language to convey truth are the most vulnerable to language corrupting truth.
The people who love the jargon don’t just use it—they get promoted, they hire more like themselves, the feedback loop closes. That’s literally what the Cornell study found. That’s literally what’s happening in the Church and the Vatican.
VII. The Deeper Point
The sword of Out Lord’s tongue given to the Church has become a weighted blanket of jargon.
When magisterial language loses its edge, it doesn’t just fail to cut. It confuses the reader into thinking they’ve been cut. The real danger isn’t that people will read Magnifica Humanitas and think “this is profound.” The danger is that they’ll read it and feel something—some warm, vague spiritual residue—without ever having formed an actual thought.
Christ said, “I bring not peace, but a sword.”
The modern encyclical says, “I bring not clarity, but a discernment process.”
No. We need MEGA! Make Encyclicals Great Again!
P.s. don’t even get me started on synodality….
This article, MEGA: Make Encyclicals Great Again is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
https://bellarmineforum.org/mega-make-encyclicals-great-again/
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