The Church's Mission in the Age of AI
Matthew Harvey Sanders, CEO of Longbeard, delivered the following speech on Friday, December 5, 2025, at St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Soho Square, London. The speech was the The Guild of Our Lady of Ransom's Advent Lecture. You can watch his address via the video below or read the transcript that follows.
It is a profound honor to be with you tonight at St. Patrick's.
This church has stood in Soho Square for centuries, witnessing the changing tides of London—from the anti-Catholic riots of the 18th century to the bustling, cosmopolitan energy of the modern city. It has been a sanctuary, a refuge, and a beacon. It is fitting, then, that we gather here to discuss a new tide—one that is rising faster and with more force than perhaps any cultural shift we have seen since the Industrial Revolution.
We stand today at a "Digital Rubicon."
For the last thirty years, we have lived in the Age of Information. It was an age defined by search engines, by the democratization of data, and by the ability to find things.
But that age is over.
We are now rapidly transitioning into the Age of Artificial Intelligence—the age of automated reasoning. We are moving from a world where computers retrieve information to a world where computers generate ideas, simulate logic, and act as agents in our daily lives.
The question before us tonight is not whether we should cross this river. We are already in the water. The question is: who will write the code that governs the other side?
I stand before you not as a theologian, nor as a philosopher. I leave the deep metaphysical distinctions to the scholars who are far more learned than I. I am a builder. My job, and the mission of my crew at Longbeard, is to take the high ideals of our faith—the dignity of the human person, the demands of the common good, the nature of the soul—and translate them into code.
And as a builder, I am here to tell you that the blueprints being used by the secular world to build this new age are fundamentally flawed. They are building a tower of Babel, designed for utility, for profit, and for a counterfeit transcendence.
But we are here to discuss a different set of blueprints. We are here to talk about the "Golden Path"—a vision for technology that elevates the human person rather than replacing him, that fosters communion rather than isolation, and that ultimately points not to a digital cloud, but to the creator of the universe.
Tonight, I want to equip you. I want to dispel the fog of confusion that surrounds terms like "LLM" and "generative AI." I want to look squarely at the "Dark Path"—the existential cliffs we face regarding work, meaning, and truth.
But most importantly, I want to share with you the concrete work we are doing at Longbeard—with Magisterium AI, Vulgate AI, the Alexandria Digitization Hub, and our newest initiative, Ephrem—to build a "Cathedral of Truth" in the digital expanse.
Part I: The Anatomy of the New Machine
To understand our mission, we must first demystify the machine.
There is a tendency, even among the faithful, to view Artificial Intelligence as a kind of magic—a mysterious black box that operates beyond our comprehension. This breeds fear.
But we are a people of faith and reason. We do not fear the tools we create; we order them to the good.
So, what is this technology that is sweeping the globe? And make no mistake, it is sweeping the globe.
Consider this: it took Facebook ten months to reach one million users. It took ChatGPT just five days.
By next year, it is estimated that 19 out of every 20 customer interactions in the business world will be AI-assisted.
We are seeing adoption rates in North America climb to over 80%. This is not a wave; it is a rising tide that is touching every shore.
But what is it?
Essentially, a large language model, or LLM, is a recipe that requires three ingredients.
First, you need Architecture. This is the software structure, the neural networks designed to mimic, in a crude but effective way, the connectivity of the human brain.
Second, you need Data. An AI model is only as good as the diet it is fed. It learns to speak and answer questions by analyzing the patterns in the information it consumes.
Third, and perhaps most critically right now, you need Compute. This is the raw horsepower—the warehouses full of GPUs processing billions of operations per second.
And this is where the story has changed dramatically in just the last twelve months.
For a long time, we thought the only way to make AI smarter was to make it bigger—to feed it more data and build bigger server farms. We called this "Pre-Training Scaling". It gave us models that were like smart high schoolers —capable, but prone to error.
But we have unlocked a new frontier. Engineers call it "Test-Time Scaling" or "Long Thinking".
Imagine you ask a student a difficult math problem. If they blurt out the answer immediately, they might get it wrong. But if they stop, take a breath, and "think" through the steps before speaking, their accuracy skyrockets.
We are now teaching AI to do exactly that. We are moving from simple "Chatbots" to "Reasoners".
These models can pause. They can generate thousands of possibilities, evaluate them, discard the bad ones, and deliver the best one.
The result is an explosion in capability that is frankly hard to comprehend.
On benchmarks for advanced mathematics and graduate-level science, we have seen scores rocket from barely 20% to nearly 90% in the span of a single year.
Google's AI lab called DeepMind, headquartered here in London, recently produced an AI that achieved a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad. An astonishing feat.
We are witnessing the birth of systems that can solve problems that stump actual PhDs. We are moving rapidly from Level 1 "Chatbots" to Level 2 "Reasoners," and we are already staring down the barrel of Level 3 "Agents"—systems that can not only think but take action for you.
This is why the "Data" ingredient matters more than ever.
If we have machines that can reason at a superhuman level, that can "think" for minutes or hours before they act, we must ask: What are they thinking about? What premises are they using? What moral framework guides that reasoning?
The secular models—the ones driving this revolution—have ingested the entire internet. They have read Shakespeare and Scripture, yes. But they have also consumed every Reddit thread, every conspiracy theory, and every expression of moral relativism available online.
When these powerful new "reasoning" models think, they do so using the statistical average of the internet. They reason with the logic of the crowd.
We realized early on at Longbeard that if we wanted an AI that could truly serve the Church in this new era of "Long Thinking," we couldn't just use the secular ingredients. We had to change the diet. We had to build something trained not on the noise of the world, but on the "Signal" of the Truth.
Part II: The Existential Cliff and the Crisis of Meaning
Why does this matter? Is this just a niche concern for theologians or tech enthusiasts?
No. The stakes are much higher. We are facing what some call the "Existential Cliff."
For decades, we were told that automation would come for the "blue-collar" jobs—manual labor, trucking, manufacturing. We were told that "creative" and "intellectual" work was safe.
We were wrong.
Generative AI is coming for the "white-collar" jobs first. It is coming for the paralegals, the accountants, the copywriters, and yes, even the software engineers.
The ability of these systems to generate text, code, and reasoning is creating a seismic shift in the economy.
Now we are seeing the convergence of "brains" and "bodies."
As we perfect the "brains"—the Large Language Models that can reason and plan—we are downloading them into the "bodies" of humanoid robots.
Companies are already deploying robots that can learn manual tasks not by being programmed line-by-line, but simply by watching a human do it once.
When this technology matures—and it is maturing rapidly—it will circle back to the blue-collar sector with devastating efficiency.
When the truck drivers, the warehouse workers, and the laborers realize that the promise of "safe manual work" was a mirage, we face a risk that goes beyond economics.
We face the risk of a profound societal backlash—of "pitchforks in the streets."
This brings us to one of humanity's deepest problems in this moment.
We are building the most powerful technology to have ever existed, yet we lack a clear, collective vision of what a "better world" in the Age of AI and Robotics is actually supposed to look like.
My old boss, Cardinal Thomas Collins, used to say:
"If you know where you're going, you'll be more likely to get there."
Right now, Silicon Valley does not know where it is going. They are focused on speed, not destination. They are building a Ferrari engine, putting it in a go-kart, and cutting the brakes, but they haven't looked at the map.
To understand why they are driving so fast without a map, we must look at the engine itself. We must distinguish between the tools of the past and the minds of the future—the difference between Artificial Narrow Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence.
For the last twenty years, we have lived with Narrow AI. This is intelligence that is brilliant but brittle. It is Deep Blue beating Kasparov at chess. It is an algorithm that can spot a tumor on an X-ray better than a doctor but cannot make a cup of coffee or carry on a conversation. Narrow AI is a tool; it has what psychologists call "crystallized intelligence"—it knows facts and patterns within a rigid, specific domain.
But that is not what is being built today. The goal of OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic is Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI.
The defining characteristic of AGI is Fluid Intelligence.
Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve novel problems—problems you have never seen before. It is the capacity to reason, to adapt, to generalize, and to transfer learning from one domain to another.
We are building machines that possess this fluid capability. We are building systems that don't just execute commands, but learn how to learn.
And this brings us to a concept that accelerates the timeline beyond what many can imagine: Recursive Self-Improvement.
Once an AI system possesses fluid intelligence and mastery over code, it no longer needs a human engineer to improve it. It can read its own source code, identify inefficiencies, and rewrite itself to be smarter. Then, that smarter version can write an even smarter version. Ad infinitum.
We enter a feedback loop—an "Intelligence Explosion" as Leopold Aschenbrenner puts it.
We move from human-led research to automated AI research.
This is not linear progress; it is exponential. It means the gap between "human-level" intelligence and "super-intelligence" might not be measured in decades, but in months or even days.
We are not just building a tool; we are igniting a chain reaction.
Now, you might ask: "If this technology poses such a risk to our social fabric and human purpose, why don't we just stop? Why don't we pause?"
It is a reasonable question.
In fact, many of the leading researchers in the field have asked for exactly that.
Recent surveys suggest that the average AI engineer believes there is a roughly 40% chance that this technology leads to catastrophic, civilizational destruction.
Think about that.
If a structural engineer told you one evening there was a 40% chance the bridge you drive to work on every day could collapse, would you drive across it the next day?
Of course not. We would insist the bridge be closed until it's made safe.
Yet, in Silicon Valley, they are not closing the bridge. They are adding more lanes and driving faster.
Why has the AI "Pause Movement" failed? It has failed because of the harsh reality of geopolitics.
We are locked in a prisoner's dilemma, specifically between the United States and China.
Both superpowers view AGI as the ultimate strategic asset. The nation that achieves superhuman fluid intelligence first will likely dominate the global economy and possess military superiority for the next century.
We must be clear-eyed about the state of the board: the American advantage is not guaranteed. In fact, many experts now believe China has a strong chance to reach AGI first.
While we debate regulations, they are rapidly closing the algorithmic gap; recent reports indicate that leading Chinese models have achieved near-parity with American labs, effectively neutralizing what was once our greatest edge.
They have become the undisputed global leaders in open-source AI, dominating the development landscape while we retreat behind closed doors.
Furthermore, they possess distinct infrastructure advantages that we cannot easily replicate.
While our power grids struggle to keep up with the voracious energy demands of data centers, China is aggressively expanding its power capacity—particularly in nuclear and renewables—specifically to fuel this intelligence revolution.
They can harvest data at a scale and depth that Western privacy laws would never permit, feeding their systems a diet of information we cannot match.
Even the "chip gap"—our supposed firewall—is closing rapidly as they innovate around sanctions and develop domestic alternatives.
The logic in Washington and Beijing is identical: "If we slow down, the other side will speed up. If we pause for safety, they will race for supremacy."
So, the race is on. The brakes have been cut. We cannot count on governments to stop this acceleration.
This brings us to the deeper, darker ideology fueling this race. It is not just about economics; it is about anthropology. The dominant philosophy quietly guiding much of Silicon Valley is Transhumanism.
At its core, transhumanism is a modern form of the ancient Gnostic heresy. It views the human body not as a temple, but as a cage—or in their terms, as obsolete "meatware."
It views our biological limits not as conditions for humility and love, but as engineering problems to be solved.
The "Dark Path" of transhumanism dreams of a future where we merge with machines. They speak of "upgrading" humanity. They dream of uploading our consciousness to the cloud or an android to achieve a counterfeit form of digital immortality. They offer us a future where we are liberated from the "burden" of being human.
This is a direct assault on the Incarnation.
We believe that God became man. He took on flesh. He sanctified the human body.
Our finitude, our vulnerability, our need for one another—these are not bugs in the code; they are features of our design. They are the cracks through which grace enters.
If we combine the Economic Cliff—where human labor is devalued by automation—with the Transhumanist Cliff—where the human body is devalued by ideology—we face a crisis of meaning unlike anything in history.
The secular world's answer to this crisis is the "Roundabout." They suggest a world of Universal Basic Income combined with endless digital distraction. They offer the "metaverse" as a playground to keep us occupied while the machines do the "real" work. They offer AI companions to simulate the relationships we are too isolated to build in reality.
This is a recipe for despair.
It treats the human person as a mouth to be fed and a mind to be entertained.
This is where the mission of the Church becomes absolutely critical. The antidote to the Dark Path is not just "better regulation" or "ethical guidelines." It is Formation.
We must offer the world a "Golden Path", but people will only choose it if they have the intellectual, spiritual, and human formation to recognize the difference between the counterfeit and the real.
We need men and women who are so grounded in their identity as sons and daughters of God that when the world offers them a life of leisure in a virtual reality, they have the strength to say "No."
We need people formed in virtue who understand that true flourishing comes from sacrifice, from service, and from real communion with others.
This is why Evangelization is the single most important task of the AI age.
If the Church fails to evangelize—if we fail to form hearts and minds in the truth of the Gospel—the world will default to the Dark Path.
It is the path of least resistance. It is the path of comfort.
Without the light of faith, the "hollow substitutes" of the transhumanist vision will be irresistible to a world starving for meaning.
If AI takes away the "toil" of our work, it must be so that we can focus on the "fruit". But only a formed conscience knows the difference. Only a formed soul knows that the fruit of life is love, not consumption.
Our mission is not just to build "safe AI." It is to build saints who can live in an AI world without losing their souls.
We cannot be passive observers. We, as Catholics, standing shoulder to shoulder with all people of good will, have a duty to educate ourselves about this technology.
We cannot critique what we do not understand.
We must learn the language of this new age so that we can meaningfully contribute to the conversation about how it should be rightly ordered.
We need men and women who are so grounded in their identity as sons and daughters of God that they can look at a robot or a super-intelligence and say, "You are a tool. I am a person. You serve me, so that I may serve God."
If we fail to evangelize this space—if we fail to provide the vision of where we are going—the world will default to the Dark Path of least resistance. But if we succeed, we can build a world where innovation leads not to obsolescence, but to a renaissance of the human spirit.
To do this—to successfully navigate the Age of AI and build that 'Cathedral of Truth'—we must first secure our intellectual foundation. We need to give the world the map that Cardinal Collins spoke of, and that map is the Deposit of Faith, the accumulated wisdom of two thousand years.
But for this wisdom to guide the digital age, it must first be visible to the digital eye.
Part III: Digitizing the Patrimony — The Alexandria Hub
This brings me to the foundation of our work.
To build a Catholic AI, we needed Catholic data.
When we looked around the digital landscape, we saw a tragedy. The Catholic Church is the oldest institution in the Western world. We are the guardians of 2,000 years of intellectual treasure.
We invented the university. We preserved the classics during the Dark Ages. We have the most profound "Cognitive Core" of reasoning in human history.
But where was this data?
Much of it was locked away. It was sitting on dusty shelves in monasteries, in the basements of universities, and in archives right here in Great Britain. It was trapped in analog formats—paper, vellum, and parchment. It was invisible to the digital eyes of the future.
If we did not digitize this wisdom, the AI models of tomorrow would simply not know it existed. Augustine, Aquinas, the Desert Fathers—they would be reduced to statistical noise, drowned out by the volume of modern secular content.
So, we launched the Alexandria Digitization Hub.
Located in Rome, this project is a partnership with the Pontifical Gregorian University and piloted with the Pontifical Oriental Institute. We have deployed state-of-the-art robotic scanners—machines that are tireless, gentle, and incredibly fast. They turn the pages of ancient manuscripts and rare books, converting them into digital text at a pace no human could match.
But this is not just about taking pictures of books. It's about understanding them.
We feed these scans into Vulgate AI, our processing engine. Vulgate uses advanced optical character recognition and semantic analysis to turn those images into searchable, structured data. It creates a "vector map" of Catholic thought. It links a concept in a 12th-century homily to a canon law decree from the 20th century.
We are effectively expanding the "Catholic dataset."
We are ensuring that the entire intellectual tradition of the Church—her philosophy, her theology, her social teaching—is available to train the next generation of intelligence.
We are building the digital equivalent of the medieval scriptorium. Just as the monks of old preserved the Scriptures by copying them onto parchment, we are preserving the mind of the Church by encoding it into silicon.
This is not just preservation; it is preparation. We are preparing the "food" for a Catholic intelligence.
Part IV: The Shield and the Guide — Magisterium AI
The first fruit of this labor is Magisterium AI.
Many of you may have used it. For those who haven't, Magisterium AI is what we call a "compound AI system." But I prefer to think of it as a digital librarian and a shield against confusion.
Unlike a standard chatbot like ChatGPT, which can hallucinate and make things up, Magisterium AI is disciplined. When you ask it a question, it does not scour the open internet. It consults a specific, curated and growing database of over 29,000 magisterial and theological documents.
It reads the Encyclicals, the Decrees of Councils, the Catechism, and the Code of Canon Law.
And crucially, it cites its sources.
This is vital. We tell every user: "Never take an AI's word on faith alone."
Magisterium AI is not an oracle. It is a tool. It points you back to the primary texts. It says, "Here is what the Church teaches, and here is where you can read it for yourself."
I often find myself wondering what St. Paul the Apostle would have made of this.
Here was a man who spent his life traveling the known world, writing letters by candlelight, desperate to form the early Christians in the mind of Christ. He understood that knowledge of the truth was essential for maturity in the faith.
If you could show St. Paul a tool that instantly distills the insights of every Pope, every Council, and every Saint who followed him—a tool that helps a struggling soul work through a challenge by applying the wisdom of two millennia—I believe he would have marveled.
He would have seen it not as a replacement for the Holy Spirit, but as a lens to focus the light of Tradition, helping us to, as he wrote, "be transformed by the renewal of your mind."
We designed Magisterium AI to be an "Off-Ramp," not a "Roundabout."
Many secular AIs are designed to keep you engaged. It wants you chatting for hours. It is a roundabout that keeps you circling in the digital world.
Magisterium AI is an off-ramp. Its goal is to give you the truth—clearly, accurately, and with charity—so that you can get off the screen.
We want you to get the answer you need for your homily, your lesson plan, or your personal struggle, and then go back to the real world.
And the impact of this approach has been profound.
Today, by the grace of God, Magisterium AI is the number one answer engine for the Catholic faith in the world. It's being used in over 165 counties and communicates in over 50 languages.
We receive emails constantly at Longbeard—testimonials that have brought some on our team to tears.
We hear from people who came to Magisterium AI with deep prejudices against the Catholic faith. They would never step foot in a parish. They would never knock on a rectory door. But they felt safe asking a computer the hard questions. They came looking for contradictions; they came looking for a fight.
But because the AI answered with the radical consistency of Church teaching—because it answered with logic, history, and truth—their defenses began to crumble.
In fact, we just hired a young software developer from Brazil who went through this exact process. He was not Catholic. He started using the tool to challenge it. But after many long conversations with the system—digging into the nature of the Eucharist, the authority of the Pope, the role of Mary—he realized the Church might actually be right.
He wrote to us recently to say that he has entered the OCIA process. He is becoming Catholic.
And now, he is writing code to help us build the very tools that helped save him.
We are seeing priests use it to source insights from the Doctors and Fathers of the Church. We are seeing catechists use it to explain complex doctrines.
But most importantly, we are seeing the skeptics find a path home.
We are moving from "toil" to "fruit." We are taking the drudgery out of research so that the faithful can focus on the insight, and the seeker can find the Truth.
But Magisterium AI is just the beginning. It is a research tool. To truly secure our future, to truly empower the faithful in the Age of AI, we need something more. We need agency.
Part V: The Vision for Sovereign AI — Ephrem
This brings me to the heart of what I want to share with you tonight. The future of AI cannot just be about massive, monolithic brains in the cloud owned by three or four global corporations in Silicon Valley.
If we allow that to happen, we enter a new form of feudalism. We become "digital serfs," tilling the land of data for the benefit of the "technocratic oligarchy."
We feed them our data, they train their models, and they sell it back to us, while dictating the moral parameters of the system.
That is not acceptable.
The Church teaches the principle of Subsidiarity—that matters should be handled by the smallest, lowest, or least centralized competent authority. Decisions should be made as close to the family and the individual as possible.
We need to apply subsidiarity to Artificial Intelligence.
We are building a new path called Sovereign AI. And the vessel for this vision is a project we call Ephrem.
Ephrem is the world's first Catholic-aligned SLM—a Small Language Model.
Now, in the tech world, "Small" does not mean "stupid." It means specialized. It means efficient. And most importantly, it means portable.
The vision for Ephrem is that it will not live on a server farm in Virginia. It will live with you. It will run on your personal computer, your laptop, or a dedicated device in your home.
Think of the character JARVIS from the Iron Man films. JARVIS wasn't a search engine. He was a personal agent. He knew Tony Stark. He knew his schedule, his health, his projects, his values. He protected him.
We want Ephrem to be that for the Catholic family.
Imagine a system that aggregates all your personal data—your calendar, your emails, your health records, your financial documents—but keeps it all locally, in your home.
You own the data. You control the intelligence.
No corporation is spying on it. No advertiser is mining it.
But Ephrem is not just a filing cabinet. It is a Gateway and a Shield.
There will always be a need for the massive "Super-Intelligence" models in the cloud for heavy tasks. If you need to cure cancer, or model climate change, or write a complex software application, you might need the raw power of a GPT-5 or a Gemini 3.
But you should not have to expose your soul, or your identity, to those machines to use them.
Ephrem is designed to run inference with those larger models.
Here is how it works:
Let's say you have a complex question. You ask Ephrem. Ephrem looks at the request and says, "I need more firepower for this." Ephrem then anonymizes your request. It strips away your name, your location, your identity. It sends the raw query to the cloud model, retrieves the answer, and brings it back to you.
But before it shows you the answer, Ephrem acts as an Alignment Filter.
This is the "Shield." Ephrem compares the answer from the secular cloud against the "Catholic dataset"—the 2,000 years of wisdom we have digitized.
If the secular model returns an answer that is biased, utilitarian, or contrary to human dignity, Ephrem flags it. It says, "This is what the world says, but here is what the Church teaches."
It might say, "The cloud model suggests that suffering is meaningless and should be eliminated at all costs. However, the Catholic tradition teaches that suffering can be redemptive and united to the Cross."
It empowers you. It allows you to engage with the digital world without being consumed by it. It restores your sovereignty.
This is the ultimate application of the "Golden Path." It uses technology to protect human agency, not to erode it.
Part VI: The Catholic Advantage
Now, you might ask a practical question: "Matthew, this sounds great, but can the Church really compete? Google and OpenAI have billions of dollars. We are... well, we are the Church."
I will tell you something that is becoming increasingly clear in the halls of advanced AI research. The era of believing that "bigger is always better" is ending.
We are witnessing a shift toward what AI luminaries like Andrej Karpathy call the "Cognitive Core."
It turns out that you don't need the entire internet to train a model to be smart. In fact, the internet is full of "junk DNA"—bad logic, poor grammar, lies, and nonsense. If you feed a model junk, it learns slowly.
But if you curate the data perfectly—if you feed the model high-density examples of logic, reasoning, philosophy, and clear language—you can achieve incredible results with a fraction of the computing power.
And this plays directly into our hands.
The Church possesses the most high-quality, high-density, consistent dataset in human history.
Our data is Radically Consistent. The teaching on the nature of God in the Didache of the first century resonates perfectly with the writings of Benedict XVI in the twenty-first. The logic of Aquinas is rigorous. The moral reasoning of Alphonsus Liguori is precise.
Because our data does not contradict itself—because it is based on the Logos, the Eternal Reason—it is incredibly efficient for training AI.
We can train a Small Language Model like Ephrem to be highly intelligent, deeply reasoning, and theologically accurate, without needing a billion-dollar data center.
We have a technical advantage because we have the Truth.
The secular world is trying to build logic on the shifting sands of relativism. We are building on rock.
Part VII: Launching a Thousand Ships
Our mission at Longbeard is not just to build these products for ourselves. We are not trying to be the "Google of the Church."
We want to be the infrastructure. We want to be the shipyard.
We have opened up our API—the interface that allows other software to talk to our brain. We want to enable Catholic entrepreneurs, dioceses, schools, and apostolates to build their own tools on top of Magisterium and Vulgate.
We want to see a thousand ships launch from this harbor.
Imagine a specialized app for Canon Lawyers, built on our data but tailored for the tribunal. Imagine an app for Catholic schools that helps students learn Latin using the Vulgate. Imagine a mental health app that combines the best of modern psychology with the wisdom of the Desert Fathers, helping people navigate anxiety with spiritual depth.
We are already seeing this. The Hallow app, which many of you use for prayer, uses Magisterium AI to power its chat feature. When a user asks Hallow a question about the faith, it is our engine that provides the faithful answer.
This is the ecosystem we are building. A "Cathedral of Truth" where the digital stones are living and active.
Conclusion: Do Not Be Afraid
I want to close by returning to the fears I mentioned at the start.
The fear of the "Existential Cliff." The fear of obsolescence. The fear that machines will replace us.
It is easy to look at the capabilities of AI and feel small. It is easy to feel like we are being swept away by a tsunami of silicon.
But we must remember who we are.
We are not machines. We are not "meat computers." We are sons and daughters of God. We are the only creatures in the universe willed by God for our own sake.
An AI can generate a sonnet, but it cannot feel the heartbreak of love. An AI can write a theology paper, but it cannot pray. An AI can simulate empathy, but it cannot offer a sacrifice. An AI can calculate the optimal path, but it cannot choose the Good.
The "dark path" of the world wants us to forget this. It wants us to merge with the machine, to upload our minds, to seek a digital immortality.
The "Golden Path" is the path of the Incarnation. It affirms that matter matters. That the body matters. That the sacraments matter.
Our mission in the Age of AI is not to retreat. It is not to hide in the catacombs and wait for the storm to pass. Our mission is to baptize this technology. To claim it for Christ.
Just last month, I had the privilege of helping convene the Builders AI Forum in Rome. We received a message from Pope Leo that perfectly crystallized this mission. He reminded us that we should not view our work with suspicion, but with a sense of sacred responsibility.
He wrote that "technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation".
Think about that for a moment.
"technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation".
When we write code that serves the truth, when we build systems that protect human dignity, we are participating in the divine act of creation. As the Holy Father noted, every design choice we make "expresses a vision of humanity".
He challenged us to ensure that our intelligence—whether artificial or human—"finds its fullest meaning in love, freedom and relationship with God".
That is our marching order.
We must build the tools—like Magisterium, like Ephrem—that protect our families and empower our evangelization.
We must digitize our memory so that the wisdom of the past can light the way for the future.
We must assert our sovereignty, refusing to be enslaved by algorithms of utility.
And we must do it with joy.
We are the protagonists of this story. The Church has navigated the fall of Rome, the invention of the printing press, the industrial revolution, and the nuclear age. We will navigate the Age of AI.
In this Age of Automated Reasoning, let us never forget the Source of all reason.
An AI can calculate, but only a soul can contemplate.
The world offers us 'artificial' intelligence; we offer the world the 'Logos'—the Divine Reason that became flesh.
So, do not be afraid to enter this arena. We go equipped with the ultimate Truth.
Let us build courageously, ensuring that every line of code we write and every system we deploy becomes a signpost, pointing the digital wanderer back to the Real, back to the True, and back to the God who dwells among us.
Thank you.
photographs courtesy of St. Patrick's Catholic Church