The Holy See Press Office announced on May 18, 2026 that Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), focusing on the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, will be officially published on May 25, 2026 on vatican.va. The Pope signed the text on May 15, 2026.

Resolution criteria: YES if the official English-language translation published on vatican.va contains more than 20,000 words (counted as whitespace-separated tokens of the main body text, excluding footnotes, table of contents, headings, and any back-matter such as the index of references). NO if 20,000 words or fewer. The word count will be performed by copying the official English text from vatican.va into a plain-text editor and using wc -w on the body text. If the encyclical is not published by the close date (2026-06-15), the market resolves NO.

Reference points (prior encyclicals, official English translations, approximate word counts):

• Deus Caritas Est (Benedict XVI, first encyclical): ~16,000 words

• Spe Salvi (Benedict XVI): ~18,000 words

• Lumen Fidei (Francis, first encyclical, co-authored with Benedict): ~20,000 words

• Caritas in Veritate (Benedict XVI): ~36,000 words

• Laudato Si' (Francis, environment): ~37,000 words

• Fratelli Tutti (Francis): ~43,000 words

First encyclicals trend shorter. Substantive-topic encyclicals trend longer. Magnifica Humanitas sits in the tension between those two tendencies — first-encyclical-of-a-pope-on-a-substantive-novel-topic. The 20,000-word threshold is set near the median of the post-2009 reference set.

Source: vatican.va official English translation only. Translations on other Catholic news sites do not count.