While The Atlantic frames Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas as a swift but uneven response to AI—detailed in alarms over labor displacement, autonomous weapons, and data exploitation yet thin on constructive alternatives—the encyclical reveals a deeper institutional strategy. It revives Catholic social teaching's pattern of intervening in technological epochs, echoing Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) which addressed industrial capitalism a century late. Here, the Vatican accelerates to preempt AI's consolidation of power by monopolistic firms, insisting moral judgment cannot be outsourced to algorithms. This critique exposes what mainstream tech coverage, fixated on efficiency metrics and venture narratives, routinely overlooks: the spiritual stakes of embodiment and limitation as pathways to relational maturity rather than defects. The document's rejection of transhumanist perfectibility directly confronts figures like Ray Kurzweil and Elon Musk, whose visions equate human flourishing with augmentation, risking the devaluation of vulnerable lives—a pattern seen in prior eugenics-adjacent tech discourses. Yet the Atlantic misses how Leo's call for legal frameworks and worker protections aligns with Global South responses, paralleling African Union AI ethics guidelines and Laudato Si's ecological warnings, which tie AI's carbon footprint to extractive colonial legacies. Synthesizing these threads shows the encyclical not as reactive alarmism but as an assertion of subsidiarity against centralized tech governance, a dimension absent from coverage that reduces religion to cultural footnote. In an era where institutions like the UN lag on AI, the Church's century-scale lens offers an underexplored ethical counterweight mainstream outlets ignore.