MAGNIFICATA HUMANITAS: A Novel

Bol

A literary thriller in the tradition of Robert Harris's Conclave and Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.The morgue technician closed the door behind him. The room was cool, regulated, lit at sixty percent. Adriana's hands were on the edge of the gurney on either side of the body. She did not touch the face.Dr. Adriana Bustamante is forty-four, Peruvian, and an Ordinary Academician of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. On a Thursday in July, in a morgue at Frascati, she stands at the body of Fabián Della Fonte, her closest professional friend, dead at fifty-six of an acute cardiac event. The Italian Forensic Medical Office closes the case. The funeral is on Saturday. By the tenth night Adriana has opened the three boxes Fabián's widow has left in her entryway, and what she finds in them is the shape of a clandestine faction within the Vatican that has been editing the drafts of Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical on artificial intelligence and human dignity that the Holy Father will sign in May.Across the seven months that follow, Adriana convenes with two others on the Janiculum: Cardinal Augusto Mendoza of La Paz, who has known the Pope since their years in Chiclayo, and Padre Stefano De Angelis SJ, who has known Adriana since her first year in Rome. The three of them carry the operation under absolute discipline through the cold Roman winter, against the architecture of the Consilium Lucis and its financial vehicle the Fondazione Lumen Operationis, toward the World Economic Forum's Davos session on AI governance in late January, where a five-company technology consortium will announce its framework alongside the encyclical the consortium believes the encyclical authorizes. Adriana is the figure who will read the encyclical otherwise. The Pope is the figure who will decide.Magnificata Humanitas is a literary thriller about an institution that cannot publicly thank the woman who saved it, about an encyclical that is real and the faction that is not, and about the cost of a service that the Church will not name. The encyclical at the centre of the novel is the actual Magnifica Humanitas presented by Pope Leo XIV in the Sala Stampa della Santa Sede on the twenty-fifth of May 2026; the institutional architecture of the Holy See and the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences is real; the Consilium Lucis is not. See the Author's Note for the full disclosure of the boundary between fictional and real in this novel.Also available in Spanish and Italian.

Amazon

Pagina's: 244, Paperback, Independently published