“Quo vadis, humanitas?” – “Humanity, where are you going?”. This is the question placed at the centre of the new document published today by the International Theological Commission (ITC) at the conclusion of a five-year period of work. Unanimously approved during the 2025 plenary session, the document is intended to mark the 60th anniversary of the Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes (1965–2025) and to foster dialogue in a cultural setting marked by the “recent acceleration of technological development” and by artificial intelligence which – as the Pope recalls – “pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour”. The text is not aimed at condemning technology, but at fostering discernment. The ITC acknowledges the importance of scientific and technological innovations, yet warns of the risk that certain perspectives on the future of humanity may generate not an exceptional human being, but rather “forms of exception to authentic humanity”.
Transhumanism and posthumanism
A central part of the document is devoted to dialogue with transhumanism and posthumanism, presented as “different perspectives in understanding human nature and the future of humanity”. Transhumanism maintains that the human being can and should use the resources of science and technology to overcome the biological limits of the human condition, even to the point of envisaging an “individual immortality supported by technology”. Posthumanism pushes this logic further: it calls into question the specificity of the human form and makes “the boundary between the human and the machine entirely fluid”. According to the Commission, both currents often share a negative assessment of the human condition as it is.
From this perspective, the theologians speak of a “resentment towards real life”, which cannot constitute an adequate basis for thinking about human progress.
Within these trends, the document also recognises the features of what Pope Francis has described as “neo-Gnosticism”: a “merely interior” salvation that claims to free the human being from the body, from the cosmos and from history. The ITC identifies four recurring problematic elements: the attempt to radically reinvent human identity; an “individualistic and elitist” perfectionism that makes the present human condition superfluous; the risk of new social fractures between an “enhanced” humanity and one destined for exclusion; and a generally negative view of religious experience, regarded as an obstacle to progress. In this framework, the document warns that knowledge “without substance, limits, bonds or moral sense” can become “a threat to the true good of humanity”.
Transhumanism and posthumanism
Transhumanism is a philosophical and cultural movement that advocates the use of technologies to overcome the biological limits of the human being, even to the point of envisaging the indefinite extension of life and “individual immortality supported by technology”.
Posthumanism, by contrast, calls into question the centrality of the human form and proposes a vision in which the boundary between man, machine and environment becomes increasingly fluid, thus ultimately making “the boundary between the human and the machine entirely fluid”.
Vocation, identity, drama
The document does not confine itself to criticism but proposes a positive reading of the human condition articulated around four categories. The first is “integral development”: every conception of progress must be oriented towards a “personal and social horizon, measured against the common good”. The second is “integral vocation”. “Human life is vocation”, the Commission recalls, citing Pope Francis, and this call precedes every human response. The third category is “identity”, described as “a gift and a task”: not a static reality but a dynamic process built through our relationships, our corporeality, our belonging to a people and our relationship with God. The fourth is the “dramatic condition” of existence.
The process of shaping our personal identity unfolds within history and passes through limits, suffering, sins and failures, in a dialogue between human freedom and divine freedom.
The document affirms that the tensions that run through the human experience find their fulfilment in Christ: “there can be no ‘trans’ or ‘post’ that the newness of Christ has not already integrated in advance”. The text concludes by turning its gaze towards the poor. Technological development, the ITC observes, tends primarily to favour those who already possess power and resources, with the risk that the most vulnerable may become “collateral damage, swept away without mercy”. For this reason – as Pope Leo XIV recalls in Dilexit te – “with His love poured out to the end”, Christ “confirms the dignity of every human being”, a dignity that admits no exceptions and no selective enhancements.
