I was born in Argentina and baptized like almost everyone I knew, yet the Church never shaped a day of my life. My country gave Rome a pope a few years ago and even that did not move me. I am the secular, faintly amused observer supposed to know better than to take the Vatican seriously. So, it is a little annoying to find myself writing this.

We are watching governments squint at AI, running around like headless chickens, and out of the institution we agreed was finished in the West, comes a familiar voice saying: hold up. Dismiss it as a fading empire, but it is not fading everywhere. Where the Church loses Europe it gains the global south fast, more than thirty per cent in Africa in a decade, precisely where the state has stopped showing up.

Go back to where that voice first spoke. In 1891 a pope (Leo XIII) wrote that an employer must not "misuse men as though they were things." He had almost no standing left: the papacy had just lost its territories and its armies. The factory owners of Manchester and Milan were not waiting on the Vatican but got the lecture anyway. The political programs that felt urgent that year are footnotes now. The sentence about men and things is not. That is the trick the institution keeps pulling: it speaks from weakness, and the words outlast whoever held the power.

The new pope chose this deliberately, taking the name of the Leo who met the first Industrial Revolution and signing his encyclical on the anniversary of Rerum Novarum, to the day. It says what you would expect: a person is not data, an end and never only a means. He has not found a new problem, only the old one in new clothing. That does not make the survivor a saint. The 1891 letter was not pure conscience either; it came at the high tide of socialism, when defending the worker was also a way of keeping him from Marx. The new encyclical has its own awkwardness: Leo XIV presented it beside Christopher Olah, a co-founder of Anthropic, one of the labs building the systems it warns about. Yet Olah is an atheist, and his is the company that refused to let the American military use its models, then watched a rival take the contract it walked away from. He came not to be blessed but to ask the Church to be the critic that corporate incentives cannot bend.

So where is everyone else who was meant to stand near the worker? The state was built so the little man need not depend on the charity of popes. Instead, it courts the people building the machines, not the ones about to be sorted by them. The stranger absence is on the left, which for two centuries was the worker and somewhere became a coalition of the credentialed, happier arguing about language than wages, until the average Joe found the party of the worker run by people who had never met one. When the serious people stop speaking to the abandoned worker, the demagogue is simply the one who bothered to show up.

Here the parallel strains and gets interesting. The steam engine reorganized how we worked; it did not propose to replace the worker as a kind of being. AI is sold differently: the pitch is that we are building minds, and that the human is a draft to be improved on. Leo XIV opens not with economics but with Babel, humanity building a tower to reach heaven and make a name for itself, closing the gap between creature and Creator by engineering. As a portrait of a civilization sure it can engineer past its limits while losing the ability to agree on what is true, it is uncomfortably on the nose. The offence is not that AI takes jobs, though it will, but the assumption that the human is a problem to solve rather than a thing to protect.

Which brings the strangest data point of all. The young are going back, not in the inflated way last year's now-withdrawn British "Quiet Revival" study suggested, but across the West, and not inside one church. The French bishops' conference reports adult Easter baptisms more than tripling in a decade, with eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds now the largest single bloc of converts. In North America the Barna Group finds the youngest churchgoers, many of them Protestant, attending more often than their grandparents. The denominations do not line up, which is the point: something older than any of them is pulling. They were told to assemble their own values from whatever was on offer, then looked at the offer and found it supplied almost entirely by companies, a feed tuned to hold their attention. We outsourced our morality to the market, and the market sold it back at a markup.

So let me grant the Enlightenment its victory. Keeping the altar out of the cabinet was right, and I would not undo it; a state that takes dictation from a priesthood is a worse state. What it forgot is the one truth its own politics runs on. Politics is storytelling, the business of selling a people a picture of themselves they can live inside, and our governments know this better than anyone.

So did the Church. It did not become the largest religion on earth by being correct, but by grasping earlier than anyone that people need a story large enough to stand under, and that whoever tells it owns the frame in which power is obeyed. It wouldn’t be the longest standing human-made institution in History if it didn’t understand this. Rome did not absorb a small eastern cult because it lost an argument; the story was useful, and it has outlasted the empire that bet on it by sixteen centuries. That hunger does not switch off because we built better institutions. It goes quiet in calm decades and roars back at the hinges of history, when one order is ending and the next has no shape. We are in exactly such a moment.

And the people who govern us, who know perfectly well that politics is narrative, have decided this story is best handled in a whisper. We are walking up to the oldest fantasy there is, the creature building the thing that makes it a creator, and the official posture is a risk framework and a soothing tone. I will defend the wall between church and state to the last.

What I cannot defend is the pretending, narrating a civilizational crossroads as though it were a software update while the only institution willing to say out loud that something enormous is happening is the one we were so sure we had retired. You are welcome to prove me wrong. But a liberal order that forgets people need a story does not abolish the need. It just hands the telling to someone else.