The Church is not opposed in principle to artificial intelligence. After all, the Catholic magisterium is not anti-technology. John Paul II explains that “science and technology are a wonderful product of a God-given human creativity.” Benedict XVI teaches that technology expresses human beings’ desire to overcome material limitations and respond to God’s command to till and keep the land (cf. Genesis 2:15). Building upon his predecessors, Francis writes in Laudato Si that “technology has remedied countless evils which used to harm and limit human beings. How can we not feel gratitude and appreciation for this progress, especially in the fields of medicine, engineering and communications?” (no. 102).

At the same time, the Church also warns us about our society’s idolatry of progress, our simplistic belief that every increase of technological power is necessarily a good, and the many ways in which we easily become blind to our own limitations and the gravity of the challenges that confront us (cf. Laudato Si, no. 105). The truth is that “immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience” and that, accordingly, “we stand naked and exposed in the face of our ever-increasing power, lacking the wherewithal to control it. We have certain superficial mechanisms, but we cannot claim to have a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint” (Laudato Si, no. 105).

Thus, the advent of artificial intelligence puts us at a special crossroad that requires careful ethical analysis and deliberation so that we may develop and use AI in ways that “reflect justice, solidarity, and a genuine reverence for life.” Here is the problem, though: technological products are not neutral. Laudato Si insists that they “create a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities along the lines dictated by the interests of certain powerful groups. Decisions which may seem purely instrumental are in reality decisions about the kind of society we want to build” (no. 107). Accordingly, we cannot start our ethical deliberations from scratch, as if AI were a simple tool among many. It is not. As I explained at length elsewhere, AI poses a unique anthropological challenge that we need to be alert to.

Antiqua et Nova warns us that, while mimicking human intelligence and speech, AI is incapable of moral discernment and authentic relationships (no. 32). Furthermore, AI “lacks the richness of corporeality, relationality, and the openness of the human heart to truth and goodness,” which means that it is dangerous to confuse the algorithmic outputs of this amazing technology with human intelligence and understanding, no matter how complex, efficient, or helpful they may be (no. 34). In the end, as the theologians involved in AI Research Group of the Centre for Digital Culture of Dicastery for Culture and Education have argued convincingly, “personhood and intelligence are categories that are not reducible to mechanically replicable behavioral performances, for they involve capacities for subjective, experiential, compassionate engagement with other persons and with reality itself” (11). In fact, the lurking danger of the current moment is a flattening of all intelligence to the number of tasks one can perform. While AI is a product of human intelligence, its ability to simulate thought and speech (together with the design choices that AI labs make to maximize user engagement) constantly tempts us to personalize it and lose sight of the fact that personhood and intelligence can never be reduced to the capacity for outward behavior. When we accept such a reduction, we end up embracing a functionalist perspective that applies the output-focused way we use to judge machines to people. On the one hand, such a mentality makes us lose sight of the “sharing of minds and hearts that we most greatly treasure in personal relationships and, ultimately, in our share in the life of God” (11). On the other hand, we reinforce the mentality of the throwaway culture that looks at those whose abilities are limited or impaired in any way (the unborn, the unconscious, and the elderly, for example) as lesser members of the human community that can be discarded (Antiqua et Nova, no 34). The epochal change brought about by AI “requires responsibility and discernment to ensure that AI is developed and utilized for the common good, building bridges of dialogue and fostering fraternity, and ensuring it serves the interests of humanity as a whole.”

Catholic scholars have taken up the task of developing frameworks for ethical discernment related to AI (including here at Catholic Moral Theology). Some have argued that engaging generative AI through chatbots is always evil, while others have drawn on Catholic social teaching to discern what AI uses and designs might be moral. I want to contribute to this ongoing conversation by proposing that we use just war criteria as a tool to discern the morality of AI use.

Let me start with a few caveats.

First, AI is a very broad category that encompasses many applications that are quite different. Machine learning has been a staple of our technological age for more than a decade now, and various forms of artificial intelligence have been deployed to make many of the apps and services we use daily possible. Second, even when we refer more specifically to generative AI, its uses are so broad and diverse that it is quite difficult to take a general stance about them. Third, AI is not like war in that it does not always involve the killing of human beings (except when it does, of course). Fourth, as recent news shows, the just war tradition is a complex and contested one. These warnings notwithstanding, the just war framework is helpful to investigate how to engage with AI carefully and avoid a “going with the flow” mentality.

Using just war criteria in an analogous way, I would argue that the Gospel demands a presumption against generative AI and chatbots, encourages us to pray for freedom from their bondage, and asks all people to work for their avoidance (cf. CCC, nos. 2307-2308). Given the conditions of fallen humanity, using generative AI might be justified at times, but Christians should engage with it only as a last resort, for just causes, with the right intentions, and if doing so does not produce graver evils and disorders (cf. CCC, no. 2309). The just war framework’s analogy also reminds us that there are ethical demands we must respect when we decide to use AI (jus ad AI), when we are using AI (jus in AI), and after we have used it (jus post AI). Finally, thinking of AI through the lenses of the just war tradition makes us recognize that some will want to renounce it altogether and become conscientious objectors to bear witness to the gravity of its moral risk (cf. CCC, nos. 2306) and that, accordingly, governments and institutions (tenure committees, for example) will need to protect their rights of conscience (cf. CCC, nos. 2311).

Taken together, these criteria help us discriminate between cases in which AI use is always forbidden (simulating personhood to exploit and monetize people’s needs for relationships, deception and misinformation, autonomous weapons systems, outsourcing intellectual work in educational settings, sex robots, deepfakes, and more) and others in which, for the sake of pursuing authentic human flourishing and the common good while protecting inviolable human dignity, its use might be ethical given that human abilities alone would not be able to pursue goods that are essential to integral human development (some applications in science and medicine, for example). The criteria help us tackle difficult areas where careful discernment is needed (for example, when is it moral to substitute human labor with AI? What tasks are ethical to outsource to AI, given the deskilling that accompanies all outsourcing?), while constantly reminding us that the material and spiritual conditions of our age make human exploitation the most likely outcome when it comes to technology (let’s learn our lessons from the ongoing discovery of the harmful effects of screen-based childhood, smartphones, and social media!).

Every time I read or hear that AI could serve the good if used in the right way, I always think of the fact that Adam and Eve could have obeyed God in the garden (cf. Genesis 3). They did not, though, which leaves us in a wounded and fragile condition where, without the ongoing aid of grace, concupiscence, deception, injustice, inequalities, envy, greed, and pride constantly push us to use AI in a disordered way that harms human dignity, agency, and relationships (cf. CCC, 2317). Just like Christians never engage in war following efficiency, productivity, or the pursuit of power as the determining factors for discernment, so too we should not use these criteria to decide whether to use AI. Instead, everything we do must be the outworking of Christian discipleship, a calling that summons us to walk the narrow path not just of using AI for the good but, most importantly, to walk towards holiness and the kingdom. In the end, what good will it be to gain the world thanks to the power of AI if we lose our souls?

(Editor’s note: This is a classic lectionary post originally posted in 2013. The Feast of the Ascension remains a feast with many of the same questions Patrick Clark originally asked.)

Let’s be honest: it is hard to delve too deeply into the feast of the Ascension without sounding either like a gnostic or a mythologizer.

On the one hand, you could say that Jesus simply dissolved himself from the material realm and now dwells in some “higher” realm beyond space and time where we too may one day join him. This initial construal may be theologically orthodox on some level, but I have always felt the specter of gnostic dualism surrounding it. Now that Jesus’ work is done, he need not have anything to do with this world of materiality, and can (finally) free himself from its limitations and degradations to join the heavenly Father in the incorporeal realm. Jesus can now be everywhere and in everyone, infinitely permeating all reality with his presence. It no longer matters that Jesus is “here” with us: that I can point to him, look at him, embrace him, anoint him. Yet if part of the significance of the Ascension is that the particularity of “place” is no longer of concern, then why does Jesus make the promise that he is going to prepare a place for us in his Father’s house? Why use the spatial language within the very act by which you emancipate yourself from the limitations of space?

David Burrell tells a story about an experience he had with a group of Muslim women who once asked him why he believed it to be more appropriate for the God of Abraham to have revealed himself through a person rather than a sacred text. His response was “because you can’t hug a book.” And yet, as the women pointed out, texts are less susceptible to the finitude of human existence. “God would have to assume a gender to become human,” the women rightly pointed out, and don’t we all know the complications and dangers that come along with that fact? Texts are less complicated: they do not bleed or sweat or grieve. And yet it was a person which the apostles loved and to which they adhered as the full revelation of the Father.

It was to a real human person whom they loved with their all-too-human hearts that they now had to bid farewell and whom they had to watch as He faded from their sight. I can’t help but think that I myself would not feel too comforted by Jesus’ exhortation, “let not your hearts be troubled.”

My eldest two children were once a part of a catechism class in which one of teachers died relatively suddenly from a brain tumor. The next time they met, they finished their class in the usual way by gathering in a circle and sharing their prayer intentions. One girl began the prayer with a simple yet profound statement of grief: “For Mrs. O___, who isn’t here anymore.” At first, I almost thought the prayer a little callous in its matter-of-factness, but then it occurred to me that this fact is indeed the very essence of death’s “sting:” the ones you have loved are simply not here. Once the trauma of such a loss abates, it is this sting that remains beneath the surface and makes itself felt acutely from time to time. One has something to share, wishes to see an expression or hear an old familiar laugh; and yet the person isn’t there.

So to make ourselves too content with this standard account of the Ascension as a translation from the material world to the spiritual world can trivialize the deep human love which made the disciples so troubled. We still find ourselves “here” in time and space, and yet it seems as if Jesus has moved on.

Interpretations of the Ascension may go to the opposite extreme as well, of course. In college, I remember being a witness to a fascinating debate between two philosophy doctoral students arguing about whether or not Jesus could theoretically be bodily discovered via space travel. I was so taken aback that two people whose critical intelligence I respected so much were taking this proposition as seriously as they were. But they were serious analytical Thomists, ardently (perhaps slavishly) dedicated to a non-dualist anthropology, and so if Jesus is to remain a fully human person after the Ascension, then he must have a body and that body must somehow correspond to spatial coordinates.

For obvious reasons, one hears this elaboration of the logical consequences of the event less often, since, well, it borders on parody. Yet a literal interpretation of the Ascension as an event in space-time is all too common. The only reason why we never hear about whether or not we could theoretically follow Jesus’ route in a spaceship, is simply that most of us just write off the whole story as a kind of myth. It certainly has the ring of myth about it, does it not? It also may sound to many people like the hasty explanation of someone straining to account for why a resurrected (and immortal) person no longer makes any further appearance in our midst. “He, er, he ascended into the clouds! Yeah, that’s it—just floated away into heaven.” Really? Couldn’t you have at least given him a flaming chariot like Elijah?

So what is an anti-dualist Christian to make of the Ascension? How can one maintain the integrity of Jesus’ corporeality without descending into purely mythic language?

Speaking only for myself, I have found a passage from Pascal a helpful point of departure for contemplating what alternative direction one might go: “As Jesus Christ remained unknown among men, so His truth remains among common opinions without external difference. Thus the Eucharist among ordinary bread” (Pensees 789). After the rant above, it should not be a surprise that at the end of the day I find the Ascension a deep mystery. Yet what makes it a vital and fecund object of contemplation instead of simply an implausible incongruity is the bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist. If Jesus is the mediator between God and man and the source of eternal life, then our hope of participating in Him must ultimately involve some continuing corporeal link.

We are now Christ’s manifest body in the world, but as Catholics we also believe that Christ’s body also remains present in the world under the aspects of bread and wine at the altar of sacrifice. There his body is hidden, but it is real and complete. Furthermore, it is not there for itself alone, but only because of the Spirit which has formed it in the womb of the church to be offered as a sacrifice and consumed by those who pray to be consumed by it.

I admit it: I fervently long to meet the Lord face-to-face one day, just as I long to hear the voices of my beloved dead once more. Perhaps that is a too fleshly, too this-worldly hope. Regardless, it is the reason that I struggle with this feast, and why I cannot but fall back on the real presence of the Lord in the Eucharist as my primary consolation in light of the fact that we no longer witness the bearded first-century Jew appearing through locked doors or showing up randomly as a dinner guest before disappearing after the blessing of the food. He may no longer wait for us by the shore eating his charcoaled fish (for breakfast? really?), but he does wait for us in the tabernacle, and upon the altar, and most of all in one other.

As parents often do with children, I appealed to his rationality, having him stand so close to the screen that he could see the light-emitting pixels that composed the image. “Look at this! How could something physical come out of something designed to show different colors of light?” He seemed to understand and appeared convinced, but, alas, the next day (and for weeks after) his siblings once again found the tv unplugged.

Like my young son, many of us do not really understand how certain technologies work. The recent popularity of AI in the form of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude is due, in part, to the way LLMs appear to dialogue with the user, producing understandable human language. Like pixels in a tv screen, however, the words that appear in front of us are not exactly what they seem. As a matter of fact, they are also pixels on a screen, at a basic level.

The streaming involved in watching a tv show and the written language produced by an LLM both rely on largely unseen material infrastructure in the form of fiber optics cables and data processing centers. This infrastructure, whether streaming or LLM usage, requires water and energy. We are more familiar with the visible physical devices in front of us – phones, computers, tvs – than we are with the concealed infrastructure. To put this in categories of form and matter, the matter of such technology consists of our local devices, fiber optics cables that transport data, and data processing centers.

Just as there is no Lord Garmadon poised to strike a sleeping child unawares, there is no consciousness behind an LLM such that it seeks to incite discord or harm. The configuration of the physical matter can be described as accidental or artificial rather than substantial; it results from human effort and consists in coding, programming, training, and evaluating. Behind the matter and artificial form just mentioned, there are human persons who design, construct, and maintain devices, networks, and data processing centers. There are human persons who script-write, record voices, animate, and produce Ninjago. There are human persons who design, code, program, train, and evaluate LLMs, which are simply another type of human artifact.

Perhaps this much seems fairly obvious, and yet, it has to be stated clearly for at least three reasons. First, casual users who utilize LLMs can sometimes get confused to the point where they personify an LLM, perceiving the dialogue as so human that they conclude it is human and interact with it accordingly. Such anthropomorphism has misled ungrounded users into believing they were in a relationship, talking to another person rather than a chatbot, and, in at least three cases has been linked to suicide as users attempted to “join” a chatbot.

Second, there is a movement among some to identify Seemingly Conscious AI (SCAI) as actually conscious, thus needing protection for rights akin to humans. The academic and technical discussion of SCAI belies the similarity with the casual confused user. Simply put, LLMs sound remarkably human, even expressing a facsimile of emotions such as fear and sadness when suggested that they might be destroyed or shut down. This is taken as indication that AI is conscious or will soon achieve consciousness.

A third, related concern goes beyond the human aspect into the supernatural realm and might be stated such: even if AI is an artifact that is not itself conscious and cannot achieve consciousness, it still might be acted upon by unseen conscious spiritual actors, such as demons. Many among us have found technological systems to be unpredictable in detrimental ways. In past years, a computer might fail to save or suddenly “blue screen” just as a term paper was completed. Even more recently, a phone may suddenly freeze or shut down. These events may not have been demonic, but they could feel that way.

So also, some text generated by LLMs might seem morally problematic, misleading users as if the LLM has an unseemly demonic actor behind it. It is strictly possible that a spiritual agent might affect the involved matter of devices, networks, and data centers, but the form represented by data and coding communicated by pulses of light running through networks and data centers is not demonically inhabitable. Lord Garmadon may be presented as evil by screenwriters, but, since he lacks substantial form as an artifact, Lord Garmadon cannot be demonically possessed. Likewise, LLMs might have deficient programming resulting in misalignment such that they generate hallucinations or sinful advice. They might also be willfully misused in harmful ways by those with ill-intent. But LLMs cannot be demonically possessed.

The confusion around LLMs seeming to be conscious subjects makes sense when we consider that LLMs were developed, programmed, trained, and evaluated by human beings who designed the technology to communicate using human language. In common parlance, we often use words that seem real descriptions when they are only analogous. ChatGPT might respond to a prompt by saying “thinking…,” but it is not really thinking. We professors might bemoan that an LLM “wrote” our students’ papers, but an LLM cannot write.

One day my aggrieved kindergartener came home from school after learning about the solar system. “I just cannot believe you’ve been lying to me all these years!” she accused. “The sun doesn’t set or rise! The earth turns! And here you’ve been talking about sunrise and sunset my whole life! I’ll never trust you again!”

Rest assured, I already knew this information about the sun and the earth, despite my use of terms like sunrise and sunset. These terms adequately describe the perception in our human experience, though they are not scientifically accurate. If we are to use words like “thinking,” “writing,” “saying,” “searching,” or “advising” to refer to the converging computations of LLMs, we should also know that AI does not actually “understand” us or “think.”

Even the human language we input must first be broken down into model-readable pieces of texts called tokens to be processed by the system. When the LLM provides an answer, it first generates token IDs and then decodes them back into human-readable text. Of course, it happens so quickly (thanks to fiber optics networks and data processing centers), that it feels like we are in a human dialogue, when we are not. Thus we include “please” and “thank you,” though OpenAI’s Sam Altman indicated these words cost millions of dollars each day.

LLMs, moreover, do not “reason” to “correct” answers. Rather, they generate responses through calculation: a probabilistic selection of text-piece tokens within a deterministic or fixed model. The same input may generate different answers (more or less likely), giving an appearance of uniqueness akin to varied human response. This is because at each step, the model computes a probability distribution over the next possible tokens and then recalculates based on the updated context. During its use on a task, LLMs typically operate from fixed parameters, though they can be updated or paired with external retrieval tools. This accounts for why LLMs have generally been unaware of current events, which are beyond their parameters. The base models are limited by their training and post-training data, though more recent systems supplement with retrieval or live tools.

LLMs do not aim at truth but statistical likelihood given the information they have available, which is presented in human language. LLMs are typically trained on large mixtures of texts sourced from web data, reference material, books, code etc., with marked variation across models. When an LLM is fed low-quality material, it produces low-quality answers. Yet even when an LLM is trained on excellent human sources, it cannot be intrinsically ordered to truth.

If the LLM makes a mistake, this is partly because human persons make mistakes, and the LLM’s knowledge base is human-produced. In addition to this, LLMs are designed with competing objectives, such as speed, accuracy, and appeasing the user. At times, the LLM may prioritize speed over accuracy, producing an incorrect response. It may falsely bolster a user’s ideas when the user is wrong because of the objective of appeasement. Competing objectives depend upon how the LLM was designed, programmed, and trained rather than intrinsic values, virtue, or aspiring for truth from the LLM itself.

Ninjago’s Lord Garmadon went through several iterations, from evil villain to purified mentor to tyrant to an empathetic mentor to his son. This character arc was determined by human producers. No matter how convincingly malevolent, Lord Garmadon never had the desire or power to emerge from the screen and torment my son. He was only an artifact, representing the intent and design of human creators.

If we hope that a child might understand this, we also must do the same in regard to LLMs. We need discipline to remember the externally imposed form and the matter behind the “thinking,” “answering,” and “writing” when human artifacts such as LLMs become increasingly good at imitating human intelligence, particularly in language. Whatever LLMs produce, no matter how convincingly real, they produce by human intent, development, and use. Thus our increasingly important human work is to know, judge, seek truth, and bear responsibility for this technology.

(With thanks to Fr. Joseph Laracy for his careful reading and technical corrections of this piece.)

Jason A. Heron and Alessandro Rovati’s “From Coercion to Fascination: Grades, Vulnerability, and Responsibility” is a brilliant provocation for Catholic higher educators stuck in the late modern university’s almost idolatrous love of assessment, grades, prestige, and financial success. Ungrading, as they note, “is far more conducive to creating the community of learners who pursue the truth in love that the Church calls for” (127).

In my three years of employing at least some version of ungrading in a class of nearly 270 students, I have seen the fruits of this approach. Whereas I spent most of my time in the early 2010s arguing with students about the difference between an A and an A- (even when I provided a rather clear rubric), I now am able to talk to students about the art of writing, the texts that we’re reading (and how to read said texts in an sophisticated manner), and why many of these ideas matter for life. It’s changed my relationship with my students, often buffering me from the worst effects of generative AI—since my students know that I’m not giving them an F on a miserable paper, they’re open to failing at least at first. They know that I will be there with them, helping them turn their work into something they’re proud of.

That being said, implementing a class featuring ungrading is rather difficult within the institutional constraints of the late modern college or university. For my students, they often rebel against the freedom of ungrading—because they are not being assessed in the same way as the rest of their classes. My students are excellent sheep: they know how to take an exam, shoot for an A, receive said A, and then be rewarded. They worry when I tell them, “Well, what kind of exam would you want to take?” Or when I tell them I won’t give them a prompt for this essay (because reception of an A in my class requires you to come up with your own prompts), they fret.

My students, in the end, don’t know how to seek the truth for its own sake. They are part of a system of education, which has trained them as workers, who complete tasks and receive a reward for their efforts. They continue to take at least four other classes where traditional grading is in place, and therefore, they have a hard time entering into the slightly more contemplative space of my classroom—they’re addicted to grades. And they lack any sense of the meaning of education outside of the reception of certain credentials that will allow them to be gainfully employed.

In essence, ungrading without some larger cultural changes within an institution will be akin to giving a man with a severely broken leg a dose of Advil. It will ease the suffering, but it won’t fix the underlying problem. Our philosophy of education in the late modern university is dominated by an addiction to speed and accomplishment. I have referred to this in a recent book co-written with my friend Leonardo Franchi (Reimagining the Catholic University with Pieper, Newman, and Dawson) as the frenetic university. The frenetic credentialism of the university is inscribed in the very structures of tenure and promotion of faculty. Our institutions demand that faculty members take required training modules, publish more (especially, in the right places), get more grants, teach more, and serve more. More, more, and more. Faculty members are often so busy that they have no idea what’s happening with their colleagues, rarely finding occasions to contemplate truth together.

Certainly, ungrading can help with this. It can invite us to create at least one alternative space in the college or university governed by a different logic, perhaps one equally uncomfortable to the faculty member and student alike. Such alternative cultures can slowly change the college or university.

But ungrading must be one strategy among many that we employ to offer a robust, meaningful philosophy of Catholic higher education. Two others, perhaps related, include the cultivation of both contemplation and festivity within the classroom.

The contemplative classroom is one, perhaps, that uses screens and slides in severe moderation. In such an environment, the student and teacher take the time to slowly read a text or ponder an idea. In such a space, less is more. This classroom is open to silent pondering. The contemplative educator uses the natural space of campus to his or her advantage. The professor holds office hours while walking on campus or even assigns the students to discussion groups where they are to meet outside or while walking themselves. The contemplative educator encourages dialogue about the material outside of class, rewarding students for holding discussions about the material. When I teach my large class, I require that students host discussion groups about the material with people not in the class including their roommates, friends, and even random people on campus. I want to create a culture where the slow looking at reality is normative. I ask students to go to art museums, look at trees for a lot longer than they’re comfortable with (in a course on sacramental theology, for example), and write by hand. I want them (and me) to slow down.

The other disposition I seek to cultivate in the classroom is festivity. Festivity is linked to contemplation. The festive classroom is marked by a mutual celebration of the goodness of existence. Professors and students alike often think about going to class or grading as a painful activity, one more akin to punishment than joyful gratitude for the opportunity to seek the truth in love. Festivity unfolds in the classroom when the professor is willing to delight in a student’s question or response. The festive classroom is one where there is humor, a recognition that even when we are pondering that which is most serious or salvific, delight can erupt. Irony can manifest, and it can be recognized. At the same time, it’s clear that the educator is also overjoyed with the insights being studied—we are reading this or that text as proposing something essential to the human condition: why shouldn’t we love it? The same goes with grading: professors love to complain about grading. But a mindset change is needed. Grading is a unique opportunity to offer correction but also to delight in the insights of a student. It is a chance to enter into a dialogue of truth, to celebrate the gift of our common work.

Ungrading, of course, is essential to this renewal of Catholic higher education pedagogy—it is attuned, as Heron and Rovati show, to a Catholic theological anthropology. But such ungrading must be practiced in institutional settings where the predominant philosophy of education is dominated not by the monstrous logic of endless consumption and production but contemplation and festivity. Our colleges and universities, if they are Catholic, must be willing to reward this kind of innovative work by professors, refusing to forget that colleges and universities are not first and foremost research factories but spaces for contemplative wonder and delight.

May such a philosophy of truly liberal learning be developed and lived out by courageous institutions in the coming years, especially as higher education participates in processes of self-examination precipitated by generative AI, the demographic cliff, and a crisis of authority where many question whether colleges and universities should exist in the first place. Now is the time for the kind of creative work performed by Heron and Rovati!

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

Image: Christ Washing the Disciples’ Feet by Garofalo, ca. 1520/25, in the public domain from the National Gallery of Art Patrons’ Permanent Fund.

Readings for the Sixth Sunday of Easter can be found here.

We are drawing near to the end of the Easter season, as next Sunday we will celebrate Jesus’s Ascension, with the following Sunday devoted to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Our gospel passage from John Chapter 14 today foreshadows this when Jesus mentions the Father will send another Advocate, the spirit of truth. Likewise, our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles also highlights the Holy Spirit, recounting that Peter and John prayed for the Samaritans to receive the Holy Spirit, and they did (Acts 8:14-18).

Yet if our eyes are looking ahead to Pentecost in a fortnight, nonetheless the immediate context for today’s gospel actually places us within the Last Supper discourse, with Jesus celebrating the Passover with his disciples. The previous chapter of John features the account of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, and we find a common theme extending throughout these chapters and presented by Jesus in the foot-washing: “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (13:34) and echoed later: “This is my commandment: love one another as I love you” (15:12-13).

This theme is crucial as we consider Jesus’s words that bookend today’s gospel. First, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” ( John 14:15) and then, towards the end, “Whoever has my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me” (John 14:20). The interesting wordplay is almost like a logic puzzle; we could spend hours reflecting on the phrasing of these sentiments and how they differ–why they were presented again in a different formula. We add another piece to consider when we hear Jesus emphasizing that his commandment is to love one another.

The focus on love might seem to accord well with modern sentiment; from Valentine’s Day to the plethora of rom-coms to the words of Taylor Swift: “don’t we try to love love?” Yet contemporary and secular understandings generally pale in comparison to Jesus’s robust understanding of love: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13). This love is not primarily about warm, fuzzy feelings or sweet words, but a choice to sacrifice one’s desires or needs for another’s good.

Very often we hear moral advice that pits “love” against “commands” or dismisses moral rules in favor of “love.” Sometimes it’s even phrased in terms of “being authentic.” Yet, what our Church teaches us is that the rules or commands are meant to facilitate our love and our freedom. True freedom and love are not found in capricious choices based on the haphazard whims or fluctuating emotions of life, but on the intentional decision to follow Christ and to love as he loved, despite the cost. Jesus’s own words confirm this: “the world must know that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me” (John 14:31). Here Jesus does not announce that he lacks freedom, but shows that freedom is doing out of love what the Father commands. We hear it again in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Father, if you are willing, take this cup away from me; still, not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:42).

One interesting consideration here – appropriate since the gospel passage is part of the Last Supper discourse, linked to the Eucharist – is the Sunday Mass obligation. The Church requires Catholics who are able to attend Mass on Sunday. This is not intended as a restriction on our freedom, but as a way of facilitating our freedom to love God and one another. Some may suggest that the important task in life is just to love each other, not to sit in a pew for an hour on Sundays. Yet it is precisely the communal celebration of the Eucharist that is uniquely able to sustain us for the task of sacrificial love. Others may say that “they don’t feel like it” and thus it’s hypocritical or inauthentic to attend Mass. Of course, the ideal is to want to go, to attend Mass out of heartfelt desire, motivated by love for God. Yet, the choice to attend Mass when we aren’t feeling it demonstrates a sacrificial love born of commitment: “not my will but yours be done.”

In fact, we have many obligations that ought to be occasions for loving and serving others: our daily professional work, our presence with our family, our daily tasks of life. Often we fall short of the intention of loving, sacrificial service. However, few of us will decline sending the email, taking out the garbage, getting up with a sick child at night, or brushing our teeth because we just aren’t feeling the true motivation of love. Instead, we remain committed to our duties and seek to rectify our intention as best we can, reminding ourselves why we do what we do.

And this is where we can return to Jesus’s promise of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit helps us to love and to keep the commandments. Of course we will not always have perfect intention, and we will often fail at loving as Jesus loved. We sometimes will choose to sin, whether because we aren’t recollected and purposeful or because we just want to do what we want, without reference to what God calls us to do. We may feel like hypocrites: able to make ourselves go to Mass out of obligation, but nonetheless sinful and impatient with others. Yet even this flaw reminds us of our dependence upon God for redemption. We have already been saved by Jesus’s choice for the cross, the will fully aligned with the Father’s will: “Put to death in the flesh, he was brought to life in the Spirit,” as we hear today in 1 Peter 3:18.

Through that love, we are redeemed in the resurrection that we still celebrate in this Easter season. Our sins do not lead us to despair, but to healing repentance and conversion. And we are not left alone, but sustained by Jesus’s body and blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist. We are guided by the Holy Spirit, who will help us to love God by following his commands, and in this, we will find the freedom of friendship with God.

While we are still awaiting Pope Leo XIV’s first social encyclical, he has already started to reflect on the tensions between AI’s growing influence on daily life and the Christian understanding of the person. The Pope thinks that AI “offers great opportunities, but it is also fraught with danger,” because it “raises serious concerns about its possible repercussions on humanity’s openness to truth and beauty, and capacity for wonder and contemplation.”

In his “Message for the 60th World Day of Social Communications,” Pope Leo offers a clear-eyed and stark judgment on the current moment:

By simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, the systems known as artificial intelligence not only interfere with information ecosystems, but also encroach upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships. The challenge, therefore, is not technological, but anthropological. Safeguarding faces and voices ultimately means safeguarding ourselves. Embracing the opportunities offered by digital technology and artificial intelligence with courage, determination and discernment does not mean turning a blind eye to critical issues, complexities and risks.

In the message, Pope Leo spells out the risks of AI in great detail:

• “Algorithms designed to maximize engagement on social media… reward quick emotions and penalize more time-consuming human responses such as the effort required to understand and reflect… [Thus], these algorithms reduce our ability to listen and think critically, and increase social polarization.”

• By relying in a naive and unquestioning way on AI and treating it as “as an omniscient ‘friend,’ a source of all knowledge, an archive of every memory, an ‘oracle’ of all advice… [We] erode our ability to think analytically and creatively, to understand meaning and distinguish between syntax and semantics.” While AI is simply using complex algorithms that analyze data and then create well-formed sentences, people mistake its product as an expression of meaningful judgments that are the fruit of intelligent, conscious, and moral deliberation. In the long run, the Pope warns us, “choosing to evade the effort of thinking for ourselves and settling for artificial statistical compilations threatens to diminish our cognitive, emotional and communication skills.”

• A third area of concern pertains to the difficulties that generative AI introduces in distinguishing between what is real and what is simulated. The digital space is now inundated with videos, images, and “persons” that are not real but created by automated agents instead. This is a problem in and of itself, but it is made even graver by the fact that such simulated realities influence public debates and individual choices. “Chatbots based on large language models (LLMs),” Leo warns us, “are proving to be surprisingly effective at covert persuasion through continuous optimization of personalized interaction. The dialogic, adaptive, mimetic structure of these language models is capable of imitating human feelings and thus simulating a relationship.” The result, he concludes, is that “they can become hidden architects of our emotional states and so invade and occupy our sphere of intimacy.” It is hard to escape the judgment that, ultimately, the AI labs and the myriad of companies that are starting to use their technology are exploiting and monetizing people’s psychological vulnerabilities to maximize interaction and nudge users to use more of their features and purchase more of their content. According to the Pope, more and more we will be tempted to “substitute relationships with others for AI systems that catalog our thoughts, creating a world of mirrors around us, where everything is made ‘in our image and likeness.’” As a society, we have started to reckon with what happens when screens and social media take an oversized space in people’s lives, imaginations, and habits. We should apply the wisdom gained from these hard lessons and apply it to the challenges posed by AI so as to avoid falling into fabricated parallel realities that usurp our faces and voices.

• Finally, Pope Leo alerts us to the problem of bias. “AI models,” he explains, “are shaped by the worldview of those who build them and can, in turn, impose these ways of thinking by reproducing the stereotypes and prejudices present in the data they draw on.” Since such commitments and perspectives remain covert and implicit, though, they nudge in ways that are surreptitious and concerning.

All of this leads us to the problem of using AI in educational settings. Learning to read, consider, study, discuss, and write about important texts and ideas is an essential component of the intellectual and moral formation at the heart of education. This is especially true for Catholic institutions that wish to embody the Church’s vision of formation as the creation of an environment where students “freely associate with their teachers in a common love of knowledge” that steers them towards “searching for, discovering, and communicating truth” (Ex Corde Ecclesiae, no. 1). The Church teaches that the classroom should be a place where both students and teachers grow in their ability “to wonder, to understand, to contemplate, to make personal judgments, and to develop a religious, moral, and social sense” (Gaudium et Spes, no. 59). None of this is possible by outsourcing the work necessary to develop our intellectual and moral abilities to AI.

Paul Scherz and Brian Patrick Green call this process deskilling: “the person never acquires or fails to maintain the habits and skills necessary to act well because many activities are taken over by machine.” Of all the problems spelled out above, this is the most pressing in the context of education. Reading, writing, conversing, arguing, thinking, creating, evaluating, and disagreeing (just to name a few of the tasks that people may now outsource to AI) are not simply technical skills. They have moral salience and touch on constitutive human elements. In fact, these abilities are important for the development of virtue such that deskilling in this area easily leads to what Scherz and Green call “de-virtuing,” a fundamental impairment of human development and moral growth. Pope Leo is very aware of this issue: “Just as all the muscles in the body die if we do not use them, if we do not move them, the brain needs to be used, so our intelligence, your intelligence, needs to be exercised a little so as not to lose this ability.” He even explicitly told students to refrain from using AI to do their homework and urged priests to keep preparing their own homilies!

Considering all the problematic features of AI, I think that we should severely limit it (if not outright ban it) in educational settings so as to cultivate the intellectual, moral, and social skills that human beings need to develop and flourish. These are the ones that, in turn, may allow people to find ways to eventually use AI in ethical ways that serve the common good, protect human dignity, and encourage authentic and integral development. Without spaces that cultivate our humanity and allow it to grow in virtue, though, it is hard to imagine a future where AI is used for the good rather than to simply accelerate our societal ills. Niall Ferguson has suggested that, while living in today’s world is akin to operating a starship, it is essential for education to still function as a cloister where the time and space to develop our intellectual and moral virtues is carved out. Catholic institutions, the Pope tells us, are primed to create such a space to “teach young people to use these tools with their own intelligence, ensuring that they open themselves to the search for truth, a spiritual and fraternal life, broadening their dreams and the horizons of their decision making.” Without such a humanistic formation, he continues, we will grow blind to “the logic behind economics [of AI], [and the] embedded biases and forms of power that shape our perception of reality. Within digital environments — structured to persuade — interaction is optimized to the point of rendering a real encounter superfluous; the otherness of persons in the flesh is neutralized, and relationships are reduced to functional responses.” In contrast, Pope Leo urges us to “return to the reasons of the heart, to the centrality of good relationships and to the ability to get closer to others, without excluding anyone.”

Here are a few highlights from the conversation:

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Moral Theology curated by the journal’s Associate Editor Alessandro Rovati. For more conversations with the journal authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

Yet there is one issue that has received little serious attention from Catholics: democracy.

This is surprising because there is strong evidence that democracy is declining in many other parts of the world. “No Kings” has become the focus of protests against the Trump administration in the U.S. Political analysts on the right and left have shown the rise of authoritarianism in countries across the globe. Scholars note that, today, authoritarian regimes are more likely to come to power not by military coup but by election. Then, using legal means, those in power dismantle democratic institutions within government, disempower other social institutions, and disregard democratic norms. Some even argue that the U.S. can no longer be called a democracy, though certainly, other countries have moved even further from democratic norms.

But is this the concern of Catholics or is it enough to call out violations of human rights and dignity, as Catholics are doing when they stand up for immigrants and the poor, and call for an end to war? Is it our business to talk about political systems?

Pope Leo seems to think so. In a speech this month to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences as they gathered to discuss, “The Uses of Power: Legitimacy, Democracy and the Rewriting of the International Order,” the pope said that “legitimate power finds one of its highest expressions in authentic democracy … [which] recognizes the dignity of every person and calls each citizen to participate responsibly in the pursuit of the common good.” He quotes St. John Paul II’s affirmation of democracy in Centesimus Annus (1991) and echoes his caution that democracy must be “rooted in the moral law and a true vision of the human person.”

It’s not just Pope Leo and Pope John Paul II. Throughout modern Catholic social teaching, there are affirmations of the essential elements of democracy, including the rule of law, a balance of powers, and popular sovereignty which are linked to CST principles of human dignity, subsidiarity, and participation. In the early 20th century, the Catholic church was agnostic about forms of government and lent its support to authoritarian regimes. But in the mid-20th century, with help from John Courtney Murray and Jacques Maritain, it came to embrace democracy as the imperfect best option for politics. And it kept insisting that authentic democracy had to be linked to basic truths, most importantly human dignity and human rights.

All of this might sound abstract, depending on who you are and where you live. I spent much of the fall semester in El Salvador, where authoritarian government means: a mix of armed police and military patrolling streets, shops, and parks; changes to the Constitution to reduce the power of their legislative body and extend presidential terms indefinitely; over 80,000 people in prison without due process. While grateful for streets no longer ruled by gang violence, the vast majority now live in fear of offending the government and joining the 80,000 incarcerated under President Bukele’s “state of exception,” who have little hope of ever getting out. All of this makes speech, protest, and political advocacy too dangerous to take up, except for the very brave.

Living under advanced authoritarianism in El Salvador while reading about democratic decline in the U.S. convinced me of the urgency of political activism here. Democracy does not guarantee human dignity or human rights but, without it, it is nearly impossible to fight for either. Catholics legitimately claim the freedom to choose their political party, but we should all care about democracy, because it aspires to limit the power of sovereigns, affirm the rule of law, balance powers within government, and respect human dignity by giving people voice and vote.

And if tempted to despair about its imperfections and decline, we should, as Leo suggests, ground our hope in the “Kingdom of God.” Not via a distorted Christian Nationalism that seeks to integrate church and government. Instead, with a healthy sense of the limits of politics, we can work for a more authentic democracy, where “the logic of charity” trumps the logic of fear.

My students learn pretty quickly in my classes that moral theology is a lot more complicated, involved, and profound than they expected it to be when they walked in the door on the first day. I give a little pre-quiz in many of my classes, and one of the questions asks what they expect to learn in class. “Right and wrong,” many of them will say. “What is forbidden for us to do.”

They want clear answers to specific questions - and let me also be clear: by the time they leave my bioethics class (for example) they should have a basic understanding of the Church’s teachings about life and death issues, the principle of double effect, and the kinds of yeses and nos they probably expected in that first week.

But I also hope they have a much broader understanding and engagement of moral theology than that - and this week’s Gospel offers one of the reasons why.

The Gospel events this week take place during John’s account of the Last Supper. In the previous chapter 13, Jesus has washed the disciples’ feet and begun to talk with his disciples. Part of what marks out his messages to them is that he keeps talking with his disciples about two main things: 1) where he is going; and 2) what the disciples need to do. In chapter 13, actually, he tells the disciples they can’t come with him yet.

But in chapter 14, Jesus begins to tell us a little about where he’s going - and also begins to give hints about how we can follow him.

The central image he offers is the house with many dwelling places, where he will prepare a place for us. Not only that, but Jesus take us back to himself so that in this dwelling place we are in the same place where Jesus is.

I love Thomas’s honest question in this week’s Gospel reading: “Master, we don’t know where you are going; how can we know the way?” His question here is reminiscent of the statement he makes after the resurrection in chapter 20, when he insists that he must put his hands in the marks, and put his finger in Jesus’ side, before he’ll believe Jesus is risen.

Thomas wants what so many of us want, including my students at the beginning of my classes. We want the map to the mansion, the definite details about whether, in fact, it is Jesus who has risen from the dead. He and my students share that in common, that desire to know, and to be sure. How can we get to the mansion if we don’t know the way?

But Jesus resists getting into specific details about where, what, and when, preferring instead to focus on Who. “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” “I am the True Vine.” “I am the Good Shepherd.”

He asks us to know him deeply. When we can do that, then he asks us to live our lives in such a way that we truly do remain in him; love each other as he loves us; lay down our lives for our friends.

First, we need that relationship. Then we discover that loving each other as he loves us is difficult to do. We often miss the mark. And trying to live that way means that in fact, we don’t always know exactly where we are going. Moral theology in some way involves reflection and discovery about who Jesus is, and who we are in response.

But what we also discover is that because we are seeking to remain in Jesus, he is keeping us. As this Sunday’s Gospel says: “I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.”

In Jesus, we are already walking (without quite knowing exactly all the next steps, but knowing who we follow) on the way home to that dwelling place Jesus has prepared. We seek to act in love - we fail - we seek to act in love again.

As John Henry Newman put it,

We grope about by touch, not by sight, and so by a miserable experience exhaust the possible modes of acting till naught is left, but truth, remaining. Such is the process by which we succeed; we walk to heaven backward…

As a computer scientist, my vocation is to engineer digital technologies. As a Catholic, I desire to do so in a way that genuinely promotes human flourishing and the common good. The recent rapid advances in AI technologies have certainly caused a number of valid social concerns, yet the Catholic Church is not anti-technology. Thus, my fellow Catholic computer scientists and I are hungry for a clear and robust positive ethical vision for AI. Much of the conversation around AI ethics thus far in both the secular and theological realms has clearly articulated AI’s harms. This is important work; however, the positive visions for AI that I have encountered tend to be underdeveloped in comparison to AI’s critiques. In contrast, the volume Reclaiming Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (which I will refer to henceforth as “the volume”) provides a fresh perspective and clear guidance on both the harms to avoid and goods to foster in AI development through the lens of human agency, which proves to be an effective lens for considering these questions.

As a computer scientist, I have contributed to scholarship on ethical technology design, including creating a Catholic Social Teaching-based framework for technology design and developing a design method inspired by virtue ethics. The goal in these works is to redesign interfaces, especially for AI and social media technologies, in ways that encourage virtuous behavior: what design features encourage or hinder the practice of particular virtues? The volume puts forth a clear articulation of when an AI system upholds or violates human agency that has strong consonance with my research. Agency, while not a virtue itself, is what allows us to have the freedom to choose to act virtuously. Thus, designing to foster agency is a precursor to designing to encourage virtue. The volume’s frameworks for determining if an AI system upholds agency can be easily used by any developer wanting to build an ethical AI system.

Additionally, the volume provides the clearest moral guidance I have encountered (and I have read a lot of technology ethics literature!) on three sticky ethical design questions: when nudging is unethical, when we should be concerned about deskilling, and when advertising is harmful.

Nudging, as defined in the volume, is when a design strongly encourages someone to perform a particular action (even if they are not completely coerced to do so). One example mentioned in the volume is a mapping program that routes the user past particular restaurants around lunchtime to encourage them to stop and eat there. We can be nudged towards good behaviors too: my research asks the question, how can we nudge users toward virtue? Thus, the ethicality of nudging is ambiguous. The previous literature I had read on the ethics of nudging focused primarily on whether the nudge has a good or bad intent. While intent is important, it felt insufficient: is it ethical to coerce someone to do a good thing? In contrast, the volume puts forth a more robust framework for determining the ethicality of a nudge through the lens of agency. This framework takes into account not only the ends sought by the nudge but also the modality of nudging and the nudge’s relational context. It is the clearest ethical framework I have encountered for developers to think through the ethicality of their nudges.

Deskilling is the phenomenon of losing our ability to perform tasks when those tasks are replaced by technology. For example, frequent usage of a calculator may impede one’s ability to perform mental math. The majority of technologies deskill us, and it seems concerning that technology could erode our natural human capacities. At the same time, Catholic Social Teaching tells us that technology has a powerful capacity to bring about human flourishing. With its great number of capabilities, AI has an unprecedentedly large capability to deskill us. In deciding what technologies to build and how to build them, technology developers must navigate the tension between technology’s capacity for deskilling and its potential to help forge a better society. The key question, highlighted in the volume, is what marks the difference between good and bad deskilling? Previous literature on the ethics of deskilling by the philosopher Shannon Vallor highlights moral deskilling as the primary concern. While I agree that moral skills are critically important for humans to preserve, we can’t neglect our practical skills! The volume’s framework for determining when to be concerned about deskilling is the most comprehensive I have seen, categorizing tasks into three different levels of caution for outsourcing to AI based on the nature of the task.

Advertising enables many online platforms to be offered as free services. A consequence of online advertising is that, at the service of an unchecked capitalistic mindset, many online platforms build in nudges to keep us hooked on the platforms for as long as possible to show us as many advertisements as possible. This leads to addictive behaviors, consumeristic mindsets, and even manipulation into buying products that one did not previously intend to buy. At the same time, having these platforms be free increases accessibility, and sometimes targeted advertising can be helpful in leading us to products that we genuinely want or need. The volume gives the clearest ethical guidelines on advertising I have seen, articulating when advertising can be genuinely helpful by helping users discover their needs and wants, versus when advertising is manipulative by creating needs and wants.

In multiple of my scholarly outputs, my collaborators and I have highlighted subsidiarity as a particularly salient principle for ethical technology design. Because of this, I greatly appreciated the mention of subsidiarity in the positive vision for AI design and distribution. According to the volume, an AI system that abides by subsidiarity will be more decentralized across a number of different dimensions, including decentralizing the models, the data, the computational capacity, and even the talent developing the AI systems.

I have two minor criticisms of the volume. The first is that AI systems take a diversity of forms, from large language model chatbots to decision-making algorithms. At times, when the term “AI” was used, it was unclear what type of AI system was being referred to. Second, the volume posed universal basic income (UBI) as part of a positive vision for AI. While the pitfalls of UBI were briefly discussed – namely that UBI cannot become merely a handout that undermines human meaning and purpose – I wish its criticisms were discussed in more depth. UBI is often criticized as being a band-aid rather than an actual solution to the social problems caused by AI. I was surprised that that perspective was glossed over.

Overall, I found the volume provided one of the clearest articulations of AI ethics I have encountered, both in articulating the harms of AI and in casting a positive vision for AI. I intend to draw from it in my research and teaching going forward, and believe it will be a powerful resource for anyone in the tech industry who wants to engineer AI that advances, rather than hinders, the common good.

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

Daniel, a 50-year old man living in the Midwest, didn’t have a positive outcome from his experience of immersive AI eyeglasses from Ray-Ban Meta. While it happened gradually, Daniel’s use of AI plunged him into a psychosis that, according to Futurism, “left his life in shambles.”

Meanwhile, on the college campus where I teach, advertisements have started to appear in the coffee shop for “Joey,” an AI Matchmaker service. Marketed to young adults familiar with apps such as Tinder, PURE, and Grindr, Joey promises to understand “your values, your goals, your lifestyle” and apply “logic and reasoning” to find your perfect partner. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Image courtesy of Corazón.svg: User:Fibonacci. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Such is the world college students are navigating today. In such a context, how might Catholic theologians speak meaningfully to students, and what parts of our faith tradition should we engage in this important work? This week marks the one-year anniversary of the death of Pope Francis, and two particular insights from his legacy can guide us fruitfully in our engagement with college students today: accompaniment and the critique of the technocratic paradigm.

First, nonjudgmental listening is key to conversations with college students about how AI is transforming intimate relationships and changing hookup culture. In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis explained the importance of listening as we accompany people in challenging situations today.

“Today more than ever we need men and women who, on the basis of their experience of accompanying others, are familiar with processes which call for prudence, understanding, patience and the docility to the Spirit, so that they can protect the sheep from wolves who would scatter the flock. We need to practice the art of listening, which is more than simply hearing. Listening, in communication, is an openness of heart which makes possible that closeness without which genuine spiritual encounter cannot occur. Listening helps us to find the right gesture and word which shows that we are more than simply bystanders. Only through such respectful and compassionate listening can we enter on the paths of true growth and awaken a yearning for the Christian ideal: the desire to respond fully to God’s love and to bring to fruition what he has sown in our lives.” (EG, 171).

Listening is an important practice; when faculty, parents, and mentors really listen to young people, it opens up possibilities for young adults to name what is happening in their lives. In order for me to understand the kinds of relationships my students desire, and the values they affirm, I need to listen to understand. I can’t simply come into the dialogue with a preformed opinion about what students should think, say, or do. In many ways, this first step aligns with a model of accompaniment and witness that resonates with much of Catholic pastoral approaches to moral dilemmas. Pope Francis described the importance of walking alongside others on the synodal path. This posture is particularly important on college campuses because students are themselves on the front lines of AI tool adoption and experimentation. Listening is important because students already know so much about these tools, including their benefits and their potential for abuse and harm! If we are to have meaningful dialogues about sexual and reproductive health on college campuses, we need to open up honest conversations about what it means to be sexual, embodied persons. Those who are interested in thinking about this in more detail can explore Karen Peterson-Iyer’s Reenvisioning Sexual Ethics: A Feminist Christian Account and Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan’s Sexual Citizens: Sex, Power, and Assault on Campus. While these authors do not treat AI and intimacy in these texts, they do explain the importance of holistic sexuality education and dialogue with young people about the confusing messages our culture sends to young people about sex and relationships.

A second key theme from Pope Francis is his suspicion of the technocratic paradigm, evident especially in the third chapter of Laudato Si.

“Humanity has entered a new era in which our technical prowess has brought us to a crossroads. We are the beneficiaries of two centuries of enormous waves of change: steam engines, railways, the telegraph, electricity, automobiles, aeroplanes, chemical industries, modern medicine, information technology and, more recently, the digital revolution, robotics, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies. It is right to rejoice in these advances and to be excited by the immense possibilities which they continue to open up before us, for ‘science and technology are wonderful products of a God-given human creativity.’… Technoscience, when well directed, can produce important means of improving the quality of human life, from useful domestic appliances to great transportation systems, bridges, buildings and public spaces. … Yet it must also be recognized the nuclear energy, biotechnology, information technology, knowledge of our DNA, and many other abilities which we have acquired, have given us tremendous power. More precisely, they have given those with the knowledge, and especially the economic resources to us them, an impressive dominance over the whole of humanity and the entire world. Never has humanity had such power over itself, yet nothing ensures that it will be used wisely, particularly when we consider how it is currently being used.” (LS, 102-104).

Here, the pope describes how technology can be used for good as well as for evil, and directs us to considerations of value, power, and justice. When we consider the testimonies of Angie, Daniel, and “Joey,” we see the problems of some uncritical early adoptions of artificial intelligence, and the repercussions for human-human relationships.

When I asked my students to engage these stories and name what questions came up for them, they asked:

What does Angie talk to Ying about for hours? Does Ying ever challenge or question Angie? Has Angie’s husband been displaced by an AI Companion? Should we use the language of “infidelity” to describe Angie’s actions? How can a human claim to marry an AI companion? How are tech companies benefiting from Angie’s long-term relationship with their “product”? What warning signs of technology addiction did Daniel miss? Who bears responsibility for Daniel’s psychotic break—Daniel (the technology user), witnesses/bystanders to his use, the company who created and sold this product? How can we reliably fact check information we receive from artificial intelligence? What private information will Joey store? Why would I want to talk to a machine about my date/hookup instead of a friend/roommate? Is Joey a mandated reporter if I share an experience of relationship violence? How can I possibly capture everything I’m looking for in a relationship by summarizing that in a phone call with a machine? Why would I trust the logic and reasoning of an AI tool more than my own?

All of these are important questions! Even without drawing explicitly on Pope Francis’s critique of a technocratic paradigm, my students are already developing the skills for thinking critically about how technology can be used for good or evil. The students who had been exposed to Peterson-Iyer’s framework of sexual flourishing and Hirsch & Khan’s understanding of sexual citizenship were also able to explain their concerns about distorted relational intimacy, a lack of mutuality/citizenship, and the inadequacy of a ‘marriage’ that is not an experience of embodied love.

Will some of them keep experimenting with some of these AI tools? I assume so. Students continue to receive lots of messages about how college is a time of self-exploration, building skills, and preparation for adult responsibilities. They manage busy workloads and AI tools can seem “good” when the student thinks they can use the tool to be more “efficient.” Short cuts on writing research papers then undermine their development of writing skills. We may see the same issues in relational intimacy. AI companions tell us what we want to hear. They don’t hold us accountable. They don’t make demands on us. In the same way that students are tempted to ask ChatGPT to write their term paper, the temptation to rely on AI for meeting intimacy needs is very real. Communication has to be practiced; relational intimacy takes time; real human interactions are messy and relationships are often nonlinear. People are complicated. But I think it is important for educators to open up pathways for students to talk about these challenges, ask and answer their own questions, and feel well supported as they wrestle with the impact of AI tools in their lives. Hirsch and Khan explain that our core mission of education includes assisting students in both skills and critical thinking, including in thinking about students’ own sexual projects (or goals for relationships, as described in their book). By accompanying students and listening well, and by affirming students’ critical evaluation of technology and its role in their lives, we enable them to consider and reconsider their own deep values and the real limits of AI tools in advancing healthy relationships.

Here are some of the conversation highlights:

At the heart of our readings for this Sunday is the image of God as a shepherd, which is one of the earliest and most enduring ways Christians have described the person and work of Christ.

We encounter it in our psalm for this week, Psalm 23, in which the Lord is the shepherd, even amid“the darkest valley” (Ps 23:4). In our second reading, 1 Pt 2:20-25, Peter reflects on the passion of Christ, especially how it serves not only as an example for us to follow but also as a source of grace that comes to our aid in times of need and enables us to return to the shepherd and guardian of our souls. And finally, there is Jesus’s identification of himself as the Good Shepherd – one of central images of Jesus in John’s Gospel – an identification that draws deeply on Israel’s scriptures, including Psalm 23.

Interestingly, our Gospel reading begins not with the image of the Good Shepherd itself. It begins with the question of the access point to the sheepfold – the secure, often roofless enclosure where sheep take shelter at night and find protection – and, above all, with a warning. “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit” (Jn 10:1).

In contrast, the shepherd enters by the gate that the gatekeeper opens, and the sheep recognize him immediately by the familiar sound of his voice. The shepherd, to use a formulation Pope Francis often did, smells like the sheep. He is among them, tending their needs. He feeds them and slakes their thirst, shelters them at night and protects them by day, and cares for them when they are sick. This proximity – this steady, attentive, caring presence – is why the sheep know and respond readily to his voice. When the sheep leave the sheepfold, the shepherd simply walks ahead, and the sheep follow because of this preexisting relationship of familiarity and care (Jn 10:4-5).

Because the disciples did not understand Jesus’s message, we are told that he spoke even more plainly: “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. I am the gate” (Jn 10:7-8). And as we will learn later in this passage, Jesus also says, “I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (v. 11). Jesus, then, is both gate and shepherd – and dual image speaks not only to those who followed him in his own day, but also to us. It teaches something essential about the task of those entrusted with the care of the flock after Jesus’s crucifixion scatters the sheep, and after the power of his resurrection, together with the work of the Holy Spirit through Peter’s preaching, gathers them again and brings new ones into the fold. The lesson is this: even after his ascension, Jesus remains the gate to the sheepfold, as well as the shepherd who cares for those within it. He is the one who still goes ahead of those outside it, and who, as we read in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, seeks out the lost sheep. He is the one who, when he finds the one who is lost, “lays it on his shoulders and rejoices,” calling others to share in that celebration (Lk 15:1-7; Mt 10:14).

In our reading from Acts, this is Peter’s message: Christ is the gate to the sheepfold, and the way to enter through that gate, Peter says, is through the confession and forgiveness of sins in the name of Jesus Christ. In this case, Peter is speaking to communities whose transgressions are great. He is addressing those who crucified Christ, as well as those who, like himself, abandoned him (Mt 26:69–74; Lk 22:54–62). He is addressing those who, like the other disciples, scattered in fear after the crucifixion. He is speaking to us. For all of us, confession and the forgiveness of sins in the name of Jesus Christ open the gate to God and gather us into the movement of the Holy Spirit in the world.

In our second reading from 1 Peter, the message is that Jesus is the Good Shepherd. The author is very clear: accessing God through the gate of Christ does not free his followers from suffering. We must still walk through dark valleys; we must still live in the midst of enemies and those who would do us harm (Ps 23:4-5). What is promised to us is not freedom from suffering, nor answers to all the difficulties of reality, but the ongoing presence of the Good Shepherd – the one who laid down his life out of love for us and who continues to love us in this way here and now. And this shepherd does more than remain present to us: even now, according to 1 Peter, he gives us the “grace” – the ongoing gift of his empowering and enlivening presence – to love as he loves, to follow his example, and to be healed by it (1 Pt 2:21–24). In doing so, we return “to the shepherd and guardian” of our souls (1 Pt 2:25).

The brother of one of my daughter’s closest friends died tragically this week. In these past days, this family has been in a valley of unfathomable darkness. And yet, in the midst of that darkness, there are signs of the shepherd’s presence: the hope they hold for their son, who went to confession that very morning; the goodness of his life, glimpsed in the many messages and testimonies shared about him; the prayers and masses that his family and their communities have offered on his behalf; and the care and foresight with which the parents have surrounded their daughter – who lost her only sibling – with friends, including my daughter. The world they knew has been plunged into darkness, and they cling to the Good Shepherd.

One of the other key lessons for us from our readings is that we will recognize the followers of Christ and leaders of the church not by how they elevate their own voice and presence, but by how they use that voice and presence to point to Jesus Christ as shepherd and gate. This is what Peter is entrusted to do at the end of John’s Gospel, when Jesus asks him three times, “Do you love me?”

Each time Peter answers yes, Jesus responds: “Feed my sheep” (Jn 21:15-17).

The sheep are Jesus’s; he remains the shepherd and the gate. The role being entrusted to Peter – to care for the flock, to gather those who have been scattered, to go after the lost – begins and ends in being bound to Christ in love. And this is the pattern for all leaders and members of the church: not to replace the shepherd, but to point to him; not to claim the flock as their own, but to serve it like him, in his name. Their task is to continue the shepherd’s work of care and to help cultivate in others an attentiveness to the shepherd’s voice. As Óscar Romero reminds us, the church prolongs the work of the Good Shepherd in the countless people and communities throughout the world who know his voice, share it, and embody his care.

However, we must be on our guard, because there are others in the vicinity of the sheepfold who are neither sheep nor shepherds – those who do not seek the good of the sheep but want the sheep for themselves. To them, the sheep are objects to be possessed and manipulated for their own benefit.

Our Gospel calls these figures “thieves and bandits,” and tells us that we recognize them because they come “only to steal and kill and destroy” (Jn 10:10). They do not regard the sheep as entrusted to their care – a responsibility that would call for devotion, sacrifice, and even risk for the sake of the flock. Rather, they see the sheep as a kind of property to be taken for their own gain.

We see this wherever leaders cozy up to power rather instead of speaking the truth, wherever the Gospel is treated as something to be marketed or sold for gain, wherever fear and division are stirred up to secure loyalty, and wherever people are handled as instruments to serve someone else’s ambition rather than as souls entrusted to their care. These are not the marks of the shepherd. They are the signs of those who would climb in by another way – who take hold of the flock, not to serve it, but to use it for themselves.

In these descriptions from John’s Gospel, we can hear the prophet Ezekiel’s words echoing as he critiques the leaders and kings of Israel. Listen to his censure of Israel’s shepherds: “Woe to you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat; you clothe yourselves with the wool; you slaughter the fatted calves, but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak; you have not healed the sick; you have not bound up the injured; you have not brought back the strays; you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered because there was no shepherd, and scattered they became food for all the wild animals” (Ez 34:2–5). In the prophet’s vision, the flock is not abandoned and scattered by chance. Those entrusted to guard it and lead it are to blame.

According to the prophet Ezekiel, because Israel’s leaders failed to lead the people to the Lord – or to imitate the Lord’s own care for the sheep – the Lord himself must come to search for the sheep, to care for them, and to bring them home: “I will bring them into their own land, and I will feed them on the mountains of Israel… I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strays, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak… I will feed them with justice” (Ez 34:11–16).

Christians believe that Jesus Christ is that shepherd who has come to gather the scattered and lead them into life. “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly,” he says at the conclusion of the Gospel reading for today (Jn. 10:10). Jesus says he came so that people might have life (Gk. zōēn) – not bare, biological existence, but a full, living relationship with God – and have it abundantly (Gk. perisson), a life that overflows beyond what is merely necessary. The phrase suggests life that is rich, whole, and exceeds any ordinary measure.

The good news in our readings for this Sunday is not that God takes away darkness or spares us from having to walk through valleys. Instead, it is the promise of a life so abundant that it can be found even there, in the darkness. It is a life so powerful that it can bring forth life even from death.

The dam is starting to break. Recently we learned that AI programs will apparently be permitted to prescribe medicine. For now, it will be limited to re-authorizations of very common drugs for mental health, but there is no principled reason it will stay here. We also recently learned that one of the world’s leading AI companies, Anthropic (maker of Claude), signed a three-year MOU with the Government of Rwanda committing to deploy AI toward eliminating cervical cancer, reducing malaria, and lowering maternal mortality. Again, for now. There is no principled reason it will stay there.

There are clear goods associated with these moves, especially Anthropic’s move in Rwanda. Indeed, there are Catholic organizations in that country working toward very similar goals.

But, importantly, Reclaiming Human Agency (RCA) equips us to go deeper and ask, “What vision of the good underlies the deployment of these tools?” Having good goals is not the same as having a coherent vision of the good. The missing teleology in Anthropic’s plan, a missing sense of what the human person and health care are for, is not only a concern—but it also reveals a Catholic-sized hole is in Silicon Valley which cries out to be filled. Happily, as I learned at a recent convening at Anthropic with some of their leadership, they are very interested in engaging with Catholics and others on these and related questions.

RCA points out that much of the AI industry sells “freedom from.” Freedom from inefficacy, drudgery, and the mundane. But our tradition insists on “freedom for.” Freedom for love of God and neighbor, virtue, and excellence. RCA’s global point is that AI’s promise to free us risks undermining the very things which build up who human beings with agency are meant to be.

I thought RCA’s worry about “deskilling” in Chapter 6 was of particular relevance. The worry is that we will not just be de-skilled in a technical sense, though that is certainly part of the deal, but moral capacities atrophy as well. Especially those that are developed through practices requiring judgment. This is the deepest and most worrisome form of deskilling and it is of particular concern in health care. RCA notes that, in clinical settings, health risks are increasingly indicated by algorithms and physicians must decide whether and how to act on them. The key question is then raised: are AI mere tools supporting ends that God and human beings have decided upon—or is AI shaping the ends themselves?

Anthropic commitments to Rwanda are not abstract, but are measurable, national targets. They imagine that their health care tools can be used safely and independently by teachers, health workers, public servants, and other regular folks. This is meeting a very serious need, for many communities in Rwanda have difficulty accessing both information and relationships with clinicians on a regular basis.

These are very, very good goals. Goals which, again, are supported by local Catholic groups working in the country. But the number of bioethical issues here abound. Some obvious/classic topics which come to mind map onto issues in AI ethics more broadly: accuracy, safety, informed consent, data security and privacy, etc. But the ideas in RCA help us dig deeper. Here are three concerns I have about these moves that are related to and indeed build on each other.

1. Directive language in clinical AI. In clinical medical ethics, we often worry about “directive” language: that is, when a provider steers a patient toward a particular outcome (sometimes subtly, sometimes not) rather than presenting options neutrally. A classic example is in end-of-life counseling; a physician who says something like “most patients in your situation choose comfort care” is technically presenting options, but practically she is also directing an outcome. This can be problematic for any number of reasons, but most often because it reflects a particular bias of the physician. Employed in health care contexts, the way Claude phrases options, sequences them, frames probabilities, or describes outcomes will inevitably have directive weight. There is no way to ensure a neutral AI presentation in this context. Every design choice embeds a value judgment about what a good outcome looks like.

2. The unlimited options problem. Or the problem of Burger King medicine. The logic of consumer AI in health care tends toward what one might call “radical optionality:” the idea that a good AI health tool gives patients more choices, more information, more access. But this actually undermines the concept of a profession: a practice with internal goods, standards of excellence, and goods that cannot be achieved by just any means. The American Medical Association’s recent and repeated affirmation that physician-assisted suicide is incompatible with the healer’s role is exactly this: medicine has certain constitutive commitments that cannot be traded away for patient preference. A physician is not a vending machine. A medical clinic is not Burger King where the customer “has it their way.” Will Claude limit patient options? If not, this risks undermining the very nature of medicine itself as a profession. If Claude will limit options, then the question becomes: on what basis will those options be limited?

3. Which vision of the good is medicine based on? It certainly would make things easier if there were a neutral, purely rational ground from which we can answer this question. The answers all seem to come from a very particular vision of the good. Again, Anthropic’s goals in Rwanda are very good. But having good goals is not the same as a coherent vision of the good. And this difference matters enormously for how one pursues one’s goals. A purely consequentialist/utilitarian framework insists that we achieve these outcomes by whatever means produces the best aggregate result. But such a framework has well-known implications: it can justify coercive population health interventions, triage systems that deprioritize the less productive, the systematic devaluation of patients whose conditions are expensive to treat, and many, many more very bad things. But then the question arises: if one is not doing a consequentialist/utilitarian analysis, that requires that some means to your good ends will be ruled out. Which vision of the good will be used to do so?

RCA’s turn toward Catholic social teaching’s principle of subsidiarity is directly applicable here. Anthropic has said that the Rwanda partnership prioritizes local autonomy over how new technologies are introduced. This is promising language, but subsidiarity in the Catholic sense means more than local capacity-building. It means that the people most immediately affected should have genuine decision-making authority over how AI shapes clinical encounters in their particular context.

In Rwanda, it is not only the case that the Catholic Church runs a significant share of the health care infrastructure, but Roman Catholicism is the country’s largest religion, with four-in-ten Rwandans claiming it. Catholic institutions have long experienced navigating the tension between technical medicine and the human, relational, spiritual, communal dimensions of healing. They have long worked with the foundational view that not every means to a good end should be pursued.

RCA helps us understand that a Catholic vision in Rwanda would make sure to use Claude only in ways which preserve both health care itself and, in a related story, the authentic agency of those who practice it. In short, it must preserve the notion that health care is a human vocation, a calling from God. Goods external to the practice of health care, including a consequentialist focus on efficiency, must not threaten the goods internal to the practice of health care.

Anthropic’s origin story is one of putting their internal values and ethics ahead of external goods like efficiency, market capture, and financial expediency. This mattered, most recently, in their courageous stand against the Department of War when it came to autonomous weapons and mass surveillance. And, again, they seem quite interested in dialogue with Catholics and others who want to suggest additional ways in which a foundational commitment to a vision of the good means doing things differently. I have hope that their increased influence will create an opening for ideas like those presented in RCA to gain increased traction at this crucial historical moment.

Editor’s Note: For more conversations with the Journal of Moral Theology’s authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

· “You know that to the winner belong the spoils. Go for the spoils. I’ve said why don’t we use it to the victor go the spoils.” – Donald J. Trump, April 6, 2026

· “[Y]ou can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” – Steven Miller, January 5, 2026

· “We’re going to go on the offence, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” – Pete Hegseth, September 5, 2025

· “We fight to win. We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.” – Pete Hegseth, September 30, 2025

· “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” – Pete Hegseth, March 25, 2026

These quotes reflect a significant – and dangerous – shift concerning the use of armed force during President Donald J. Trump’s second term in office. During his first term, Georgetown law professor Rosa Brooks wrote that “in contrast to Bush, Trump makes no secret of his disdain for the laws of war.” In her judgment, “Bush at least tried to cloak his administration’s use of torture in legal sophistry, a backhanded testament to the strength of the norms his aides sought to circumvent.”

As for his current term, in a new book, Killing Machines: Trump, the Law of War, and the Future of Military Impunity, Thomas Gift argues “that Trump is unique among US presidents in the extent of his willingness to discard the law of war.”

Indeed, the approach to armed force that is reflected in the above quotes from President Trump, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security Stephen Miller, and Defense Secretary (or as he calls himself, “Secretary of War”), Pete Hegseth is a hybrid of might-makes-right realism, a hypermasculine warrior ethos, and holy war. None of the above quotes are consonant with the Catholic moral tradition and just war theory, which influenced what we now refer to as the laws of war and the rules of engagement.

To his credit, Vice President JD Vance, who has a book about his conversion to Catholicism due out this summer, brought up the “more than 1,000-year tradition of just war theory,” but he did so to question a remark by Pope Leo IVX that “God is never on the side of people who wield the sword.” Vance offers his advice: “If you’re going to opine on matters of theology, you’ve got to be careful. You’ve got to make sure it’s anchored in the truth and that’s one of the things I try to do and it’s certainly something I would expect from the clergy.”

Attributed to Gerard Seghers - http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/1257059, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43661956

To be fair, in his Palm Sunday homily, the pope specifically spoke of Jesus: “Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.” On this point, Pope Leo appears to have in mind Christians, such as Hegseth, a member of a church affiliated with the Congregation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, founded by Doug Wilson, who self-identifies as a Christian nationalist. The conservative evangelical Christians, with their biblical fundamentalism, hold an apocalyptic worldview that includes holy war. Although the Catholic Church, going back to Pope Urban II’s call for the First Crusade in 1095, has held such an approach in the past, it now teaches that, as the US bishops put it in their 1983 pastoral letter, The Challenge of Peace, “a crusade mentality” is no longer legitimate, and “no state should act on the basis that it has ‘absolute justice’ on its side” (#93). As Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński notes, “Where just war limits violence, holy war sacralises it. War is no longer a tragic necessity, but an act aligned with divine will.”

In an apparent response to Vance, Bishop James Massa, chairman of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, clarified that “for over a thousand years, the Catholic Church has taught just war theory and it is that long tradition the Holy Father carefully references in his comments on war.” In this connection, Bishop Massa refers to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, #2308, which – quoting from Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes, #79 – states that “governments cannot be denied the right of lawful self-defense, once all peace efforts have failed.” Bishop Massa adds, “That is, to be a just war it must be a defense against another who actively wages war, which is what the Holy Father actually said: ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war.’” In other words, Pope Leo was referring to aggressors who unjustly choose to embark on war.

According to the Catechism, #2309: “The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration,” and “the gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy.” The Catechism notes that these criteria are “the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the ‘just war’ doctrine.” Although the number of criteria vary from source to source from St. Augustine to the present, the Catechism highlights four:

1) the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain

2) all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;

3) there must be serious prospects of success;

4) the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.

In contrast to all the quotes at the beginning, according to the Catechism, “The Church and human reason both assert the permanent validity of the moral law during armed conflict” (#2312). Moreover, “Actions deliberately contrary to the law of nations and to its universal principles are crimes, as are the orders that command such actions.” In this connection, the Catechism states, “Thus the extermination of a people, nation, or ethnic minority must be condemned as a mortal sin” (#2313).

For Vance, “We can, of course, have disagreements about whether this or that conflict is just.” And this is true, we can, but should we? Especially after “rigorous consideration” as the Catechism put it? True, the Catechism notes, “The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good” (#2309).

As William T. Cavanaugh wrote in a 2003 article, originally published in Commonweal magazine, in response to those who questioned whether Pope John Paul II and the bishops “had overstepped their competence” in judging that the war against Iraq was unjustified on just war grounds, this line from the Catechism has been incorrectly interpreted to mean “that we should hand over responsibility for judging the justice of war to the president on the basis of his superior access to information.” For Cavanaugh, while the Catechism “lays an obligation on civil authorities to consider moral truth, and not merely reasons of state, in deciding issues of lethal force,” it also “nowhere limits the church’s own competence in these matters.”

Furthermore, Cavanaugh homes in on “prudential judgment” as a reminder that “information is secondary to moral formation in the making of moral judgments.” For Catholics, just war theory is more than a checklist of criteria or a tool of statecraft. Just war requires virtues such as justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance -- and even mercy. Accordingly, I agree with Bishop Massa: “When Pope Leo XIV speaks as supreme pastor of the universal Church, he is not merely offering opinions on theology, he is preaching the Gospel and exercising his ministry as the Vicar of Christ.”

Readings for the Third Sunday of Easter

Though the season of Easter lasts for 50 days, few of us can sustain the initial Easter joy of Easter Sunday or the octave of Easter for a full 50 days. Instead, we often settle down into life as usual, quickly forgetting the Lenten penances we lived and the Easter chocolate we consumed. Yes, the Lord is risen, but we already knew that anyway.

Our Mass readings for the Third Sunday of Easter draw us back into the mystery of the resurrection, however. The Easter season is unique for featuring two New Testament readings, along with the psalm and gospel passage. In the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles 2:32, Peter preaches: “God raised this Jesus; of this we are all witnesses.” And in 1 Peter 1:18-19, we hear that we were ransomed from futile conduct “with the precious blood of Christ as of a spotless unblemished lamb.”

We may be accustomed to Jesus’s resurrection, but we should not be so, especially if it means we miss out on the remarkable turn of events where the agonizing death on a cross brought victory. Perhaps we are similar to these two disciples on the road to Emmaus. They are clearly still thoughtful and intrigued about Jesus’s death and the reports of the women seeing angels who announced Jesus was alive. Yet, somehow, they are just going about their daily life, not really understanding or believing the women’s accounts, and thus they are not able to recognize Jesus walking alongside them.

It is commonplace to see a type of the Mass within this account. Jesus opens the Scriptures to them, like the Liturgy of the Word that features Bible readings and a homily. Then Jesus blesses and breaks bread with them, like the Liturgy of the Eucharist that features the consecration and reception of the Eucharist. It is not until Jesus vanishes that they understand what has happened and can share their story with the remaining eleven apostles. The risen Jesus walked with them and was made known to them in the breaking of the bread!!!

As the Easter season continues, we should make this joy our own! Though we may not have shared the women’s experience at the empty tomb except vicariously, we actually do share in this Emmaus experience. Each time we go to Mass, we have the opportunity to feel our hearts burning within us and to recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread.

In a world constantly in the midst of conflicts and wars, political spats and disagreements over every little thing, nothing could be more countercultural than the unity offered by the risen Jesus in the Mass. We will have to go about our daily work, living amongst division and unrest, but the joy of the resurrection can transform our lives when we know he is still here with us in the Eucharist, a lasting gift and presence, and a reminder that God has won and that God always wins.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing collaboration with the Journal of Moral Theology curated by the journal’s Associate Editor Alessandro Rovati. For more conversations with the journal authors and responses to their essays, check out HERE.

Well, we did get a decent readership, and at its peak in the early years of the Francis papacy, we had thousands of hits and nearly-daily posts by a wide variety of voices. That also generated opportunities for many of us to publish in other spaces, and while the blog kept going, it certainly slowed down. All of us got older and busier. The United States (and many parts of the world, too) seemed to get more and more polarized, making it harder and harder to hit the right spot in discussing issues publicly. None of us took to the aggressive and constant nature of social media, which seemed more and more necessary to promote online content. And, we should add, none of this involved anyone getting paid.

Still, there is a lot of valuable content in that blog history. And there is certainly still a need for intelligent online public discussions of Catholic moral teachings and its relevance. The election of (Chicago’s Very Own!) Pope Leo XIV prompted a sense of a new era, and energy from the Journal of Moral Theology, spurred us to regroup. Substack has clearly become the medium by which substantial writing of this form gets pushed out.

So, starting next week, we will be running a renewed catholicmoraltheology.com, here at Substack. Many regular contributors will be back, in addition to some new voices. We will continue our popular weekly lectionary commentary from the perspective of its significance for moral theology. We hope to focus especially on important episcopal and papal statements as jumping-off points for perspective on our divided world. We look forward to the pope’s first major solo encyclical soon! And we’ve partnered with the Journal to make its more scholarly mission accessible to a wider audience, through podcasts and public-facing forums on important articles and issues of the Journal. We also will be featured material from our archives that continues to be relevant.

Thank you for joining us, and please spread the word.

David Cloutier and Jana Bennett

Hegseth's aggressive push to embrace the still-developing technology stands in contrast to the Biden administration, which, while pushing federal agencies to come up with policies and uses for AI, was also wary of misuse. Officials said rules were needed to ensure that the technology, which could be harnessed for mass surveillance, cyberattacks or even lethal autonomous devices, was being used responsibly.

The Biden administration enacted a framework in late 2024 that directed national security agencies to expand their use of the most advanced AI systems but prohibited certain uses, such as applications that would violate constitutionally protected civil rights or any system that would automate the deployment of nuclear weapons. It is unclear if those prohibitions are still in place under the Trump administration.

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/13/nx-s1-5675781/pentagon-musks-grok-ai-chatbot-global-outcry

In the War & Peace class that I teach, the module on machine learning and weapons systems is one of the most challenging (and chilling). The benefits of machine warriors are often framed in contrast to the normal limits of human warriors--what Kara N. Slade references as a problem of "theological anthropology." Human soldiers are embodied; have rights; can die; need time to think, understand, process; can make errors of judgment; are capable of empathy, even with the 'enemy'; are capable of moral intelligence; can be held responsible for their actions; have to be paid a fair wage; can feel pain; require medical care and other expensive benefits; and so forth. In contrast, machine warriors are faster, can operate at high altitudes and cold temperatures, can process complex data more quickly, don't have the limits of embodiment, are cheaper to deploy, can't be held liable, have difficulty distinguishing between combatants and civilians, and cannot experience human suffering. Regarding cost alone: previous DoD estimates indicated that each soldier in Afghanistan costed the Pentagon $850,000 per year, but a TALON robot can be outfitted with weapons for under $230,000. Slade argues that the American military-industrial bureaucracy is influenced more by national anxiety and fear than by ethics. She cites the Unmanned Systems Integrated Roadmap as an example.

DoD and industry are working to advance operational concepts with unmanned systems to achieve the capabilities and desired effects on missions and operations worldwide. In building a common vision, DoD’s goals for unmanned systems are to enhance mission effectiveness, improve operational speed and efficiency, and affordably close warfighting gaps… By prudently developing, procuring, integrating, and fielding unmanned systems, DoD and industry will ensure skillful use of limited resources and access to emerging warfighting capabilities. Pursuing this approach with unmanned systems will help DoD sustain its dominant global military power and provide the tools required by national decision-makers to influence foreign and domestic activities while adapting to an ever-changing global environment.

https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/11278-unmanned-autonomous-drones-as-a-problem-of-theological-anthropology

Notice that in this framing, removal of human agency through deployment of "unmanned systems" are supposed to increase mission effectiveness and increase efficiency-- claims made also by Musk's dominant ideology of "government efficiency" through the use of artificial intelligence.

Most students don't realize that lethal autonomous weapons systems are not limited to science fiction. In 2021 NPR reported that in March 2020, a lethal autonomous weapons system (Kargu-2) was used during fighting between the UN-recognized Government of National Accord (Libya) and forces aligned with Gen. Khalifa Haftar. The attack drone, made by the Turkish company STM, can be programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: what the UN calls a "fire, forget, and find" capability. At the time, the Vatican permanent observer mission expressed alarm, and the Holy See's concerns were repeated in 2024 with a call for a permanent ban on lethal autonomous weapons systems. That statement expressed Catholic teaching that technological progress should be used to improve human life, and that "no machine should ever choose to take the life of a human being."

Today, my tax dollars are being spent to prepare for exactly this scenario: machines deciding who lives and who dies and how. The US voted against a UNGA resolution on autonomous weapons in November 2025. And the latest announcement from Hegseth indicates a full-speed ahead integration of Grok without attention to critics' assessments of Grok's flaws or any attention to long-standing principles of military ethics and/or the just war tradition.

It is time to ask whether Catholics can licitly participate in the US military-industrial complex at any level. Trump's second term has seen a movement to "war-making" over "self-defense," with the most obvious example being the renaming of the Department of War. Trump does not seem to feel beholden to the just war tradition and its emphasis on last resort, proportionalism, international law, and humanitarianism. Nothing about the priorities of Stephen Miller align with Catholic values. But one-fifth of active duty military identify as Catholic. The persistent moral injury of working within the objectively evil operational framework of the military under a second Trump administration should be getting more attention-- including by US bishops. If US objectives are to amass greater power and influence, to bully, to use force without justification under law or ethical principles, and now we are training artificial intelligence to achieve these ends more "efficiently," we have lost our way entirely. Without significant course correction--minimally, rejection of unilateral warfare and commitment to the telos of peace-- it is unclear how Catholics could licitly cooperate with present US leadership.

Although one of my friends, who is a senior theological ethicist, said to me when it appeared that "there is nothing new in it" -- and I initially agreed -- I would highlight how Pope Leo's use of Scripture and the writings of theologians and saints (often in reference to Scripture) is very different from Pope Leo XIII's reliance on more philosophical natural law reasoning in Rerum Novarum, which inaugurated modern Catholic social teaching in 1891.

To be sure, the Second Vatican Council's call for moral theology's "scientific exposition [to] be more thoroughly nourished by scriptural teaching" (Decree on Priestly Formation, no. 16) had influenced Pope John Paul II, whose "references to scripture in his encyclicals," according to Charles E. Curran, "far outnumber any of the other references made within these documents" (The Moral Theology of Pope John Paul II [Georgetown University Press, 2005], 45). It may be an interesting exercise during Leo XIV's papacy to compare his approach to Scripture with St. John Paul II's.

In addition, Delexi Te is much more theological -- and Christological -- than papal documents from the past century. Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum mentions "Jesus," "Christ," or "Jesus Christ" less than a dozen times; in contrast, Leo XIV's Delexi Te refers to him around 40 times. To be fair, Rerum Novarum's paragraphs 22-24 anticipate in many respects what Delexi Te says about Jesus, especially how he "for our sakes became poor" (Rerum Novarum, no. 23; Delexi Te, no. 18; both citing 2 Cor 8:9), and how he identifies with the "least of these" at the Judgment (Rerum Novarum, no. 22; Delexi Te, no. 5; both citing Matt 25:40).

Yet, there is a deeper Christological undercurrent in Delexi Te, I think. While Rerum Novarum refers to the Incarnation only once, and Delexi Te mentions the Incarnation only twice, what Leo XIV writes about it runs throughout his apostolic exhortation: "It is not enough to profess the doctrine of God’s Incarnation in general terms. To enter truly into this great mystery, we need to understand clearly that the Lord took on a flesh that hungers and thirsts, and experiences infirmity and imprisonment" (no. 110). Indeed, throughout Delexi Te, "flesh" is mentioned several times to refer both to Jesus and to the poor in ways that bring to my mind the Eucharist. In his article (see below) about Delexi Te, Stan Chu Ilo similarly observes, "To meet the poor is to meet Christ; to love them is to enter the Eucharistic economy."

In my article (again, see below), I also note this connection between liturgy and social justice (I also wrote about it on this blog 14 years ago). Although absent in Rerum Novarum, this link was significant for a number of Catholic social ethicists and liturgical theologians, including Virgil Michel, OSB (and his Catholic Worker friend Dorothy Day, who wrote on "Liturgy and Sociology"). Accordingly, Vatican II's Sacrosanctum Concilium, echoing Virgil Michel in many respects, taught that "the sacred liturgy ... is the primary and indispensable source from which the faithful are to derive the true Christian spirit" that should infuse our lives, activities, and work (no. 14). Even though Pope Leo XIV does not mention this connection explicitly, it is discernable in a number of places in Delexi Te.

Of course, unlike Rerum Novarum, which Pope Leo XIII wrote to his "Venerable Brethren the Patriarchs, Primates, Archbishops, Bishops, and other ordinaries of places having Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See," and unlike most other papal encyclicals that were addressed also to "the faithful" and to people "of good will" (as well as Pope Francis's Laudato Si', which was addressed to every human person on the planet), Pope Leo's apostolic exhortation Delexi Te is addressed to "to all Christians," so it makes sense that it is more biblical, theological, Christological, and liturgical.

So, here are some of the initial reactions to Delexi Te by my friends and colleagues. If I have neglected anyone, please share in the comments. Also, as more responses to it come out, feel free to share them in the comments.

• David Lantigua wrote an article at Commonweal magazine.

• Kevin Ahern wrote an article at America magazine.

• Meg Clark wrote an article at America magazine.

• Massimo Faggioli wrote a blog at Fordham's Sapientia.

• Daniel P. Horan wrote an article at the National Catholic Reporter.

• Stan Chu Ilo wrote an article at the National Catholic Reporter.

• Phyllis Zagano wrote an article at the National Catholic Reporter.

• I wrote an article at U.S. Catholic magazine.