A Section of the Wall ( Memorial Day 2026)

It is Memorial Day, and the country pauses to read names on walls.

This morning the Vatican released Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas — “Magnificent Humanity” — on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. Two hundred and forty-five paragraphs. I have tried to read it carefully today.

The encyclical opens with Nehemiah. The exiles returning to a Jerusalem in ruins, the walls collapsed, the gates burned. Nehemiah does not impose a solution. He convenes the families. He assigns each of them a section of the wall — men, women, priests, artisans, heads of households, young people. Each section is small. Each family knows its stones. The city is rebuilt because everyone is given a section.

I have spent thirty-six years on plant floors. The floor is a section of that wall. That’s the argument.

* * *

His Holiness has named, in the magisterial citation chain I do not possess, much of what I have been trying to name from the floor.

Paragraph sixty-seven extends the Church’s ancient principle of the universal destination of goods — that creation is given to all and must not be hoarded by a few — to patents, algorithms, digital platforms, technological infrastructure, and data. When these remain concentrated in the hands of a few, a new imbalance is created. This is the same complaint Built to Extract makes. He gives it five centuries of doctrinal weight in three sentences.

Paragraph one hundred and nine recasts the five principles of Catholic Social Doctrine as criteria for AI governance: name the new monopolies; ensure universal access to technologies and the education to use them; protect communities’ ability to choose, not merely to be consulted after the fact; recognize the hidden workers who sustain the algorithmic stack; question the global distribution of power that decides who trains the models and who is subjected to them. This is, sentence for sentence, what the Twin Helix has been trying to diagram.

Paragraph one hundred and seventy-three names the hidden chain — the data labelers, the content moderators, the children in cobalt pits — as the contemporary face of trafficking. His words: their bodies are scarred, injured, and worn down so that computational flow may continue uninterrupted.

That is the labor-side ledger. Time, love, health, wealth — depleted so the capital helix could compound. The encyclical does not use those four words. It does not need to. The depletion is named.

* * *

Memorial Day is the holiday that asks who paid the price for what we have. The wall of names is a wall of formations interrupted by war. The floor has its own such wall, interrupted by something quieter. On this day I want to read four names from the section I know.

Debra Fogle was a paint inspector at the Rehau plant in Alabama. She caught defects no fixture saw. She trained the next inspector with the patience of someone who knew the line could not lie about what came off it.

Wally Vinton ran wiring harness build at the Lansing Grand River Trim Shop. The harness is the nervous system of a car. Wally taught his crew what a clean route looked like — not as a standard, but as a discipline of attention.

Ramon Hernandez was, by any honest accounting, the best team leader I ever watched. The shift settled around him without his raising his voice. People who had been written off elsewhere came alive on his crew.

Dennis Boutwell was the first supervisor I hired when Lansing Grand River opened. He is now Director of Manufacturing Excellence at Advanced Drainage Systems.

These four are not anecdotes. They are witnesses. Each carried the four depletions on their shoulders so the capital side of the helix could compound: time given to shift work that was never returned, learning paid for in their own evenings, health discounted in the actuarial tables of cumulative exposure, wages that did not keep pace with the wealth their formation underwrote. They were not enslaved. They were Americans with choices. But the encyclical’s paragraph one hundred and seventy-three reaches further than slavery in its narrow sense — it reaches toward every chain where formation is extracted without acknowledgment.

Each of them, a section of wall. Most of those sections went uncounted.

The encyclical’s deepest Memorial Day word, for me, is in paragraph one hundred and fifty-four: a paradox of material progress and anthropological regression. The thing built rises. The person who built it is not always lifted with it.

* * *

His Holiness, faithful to his office, declines to propose technical instruments. Paragraph twenty-four is explicit: Social Doctrine is not a repertoire of technical solutions. He sets the criteria. He leaves the rooms to be built by those who know the trades.

The Capability Account is one such instrument. A portable lifetime ledger that records the formation each person accumulates — hours, certifications, mentor witness, demonstrated competencies — and travels with them. Employers deposit at years one, three, and five. The ledger depreciates on a half-life so it stays honest. It is accredited, in the architecture we are building at the Capability Capital Institute, by a body that sits outside any single firm. Dennis’s arc — from first supervision in 2001 to running excellence across a public company in 2026 — is what the Account would have made portable for the thousand people on his crews who did not have his luck of being noticed.

The Five Gardeners — parents, teachers, vocational masters, first employers, and the institutional architecture that makes formation portable — is one distribution of responsibility. Subsidiarity from paragraph seventy-one, applied to formation: the decisions closest to the person are made closest to the person. The exemplars are not abstractions. I learned what a teacher is from De Nobili School in Dhanbad