The Scribe of the New Age: Bringing Forth Treasures New and Old

Matthew Harvey Sanders (Magisterium AI) delivered an address at the Catholic Writers Guild 2026 Online Conference on January 31.

The speech centers on the vocation of the writer in the age of automated reasoning. Sanders addresses the fear of obsolescence and argues that the rise of AI is not the end of the Catholic author, but the beginning of a new "Golden Age" where the authentic human voice becomes the world's most valuable resource.

You can review the full transcript of the address below.

Introduction: The Vocation of the Writer in the Age of Automated Reasoning

My friends, writers, apologists, and fellow laborers in the vineyard of the word.

It’s a privilege to be with you today. I know we’re gathering across screens, separated by time zones and fiber optic cables, but in a way, that’s fitting. We’re meeting in the digital ether to discuss how the digital world is about to reshape your craft, our faith, and our very understanding of what it means to be human.

I want to thank the organizers for convening this essential conference. You’ve chosen a topic that isn’t just timely; it’s urgent.

We’re gathering at a moment of unique tension. If you open the newspapers—or more likely, if you scroll through your social feeds—you’re bombarded with headlines designed to induce anxiety in the heart of anyone who lives by the pen.

We read about "the death of the author." We see Artificial Intelligence models that can churn out sonnets in seconds, draft novels in an afternoon, and generate scripts mimicking Shakespeare or Hemingway with unnerving accuracy.

There’s a palpable fear hanging over the creative world. It’s the fear of obsolescence. It’s the creeping suspicion that the human voice—that unique, fragile, unrepeatable spark driving us to write—is about to be drowned out by a silicon shadow.

I’m here to tell you that this is not the end of the Catholic writer.

In fact, if we’re courageous, clear-eyed, and faithful, I believe we’re standing on the threshold of a Golden Age for the arts, and specifically for the Catholic literary tradition.

To understand the gravity of this moment, think back to Mainz in 1440. We are living through a new Gutenberg moment, but with a notable twist. We aren't just mechanizing the printing of words; we are mechanizing the creation of them.

For the last thirty years, we’ve 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’re rapidly transitioning into the Age of Artificial Intelligence—the age of automated reasoning. We’re 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 isn’t whether we should accept this technology. We’re already living in its shadow. The question is: who will author the laws—and the legends—that define this new epoch?

Will this era be defined by a code of radical utility, transhumanist fantasy, and the worship of efficiency? Or will it be defined by a code rooted in the Gospel—one that defends the inviolable dignity of the human person and orders our machines towards the true flourishing of humanity?

Now, I am not a scholar of letters. I don’t spend my days crafting narratives or dissecting metaphysics. My vocation is found in the engine room. I am a builder.

My task, and the mission of my team 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 software.

And as a builder, I want to share with you how we can raise a 'Cathedral of Truth' in this digital expanse, and why you—the human writers—are the essential architects who must design its spires.

Part I: Imago Dei vs. The Algorithm: Why the Catholic Voice is Irreplaceable

Let’s address the elephant in the room immediately. Can a machine replace you?

To answer this, we have to look at what the secular world believes about you.

The dominant philosophy driving AI development in Silicon Valley today is a form of utilitarianism and materialism. It’s an ideology that sees human beings as complex data processors, efficiency as the ultimate good, and the human brain as a "meat computer" that can be improved upon and eventually surpassed.

If you believe writing is merely the output of a biological algorithm—if you believe a story is just a rearrangement of words based on statistical probability—then yes, you should be terrified. Because a machine will inevitably be able to rearrange words faster and more efficiently than you.

But as Catholics, we know this is a lie.

We know the human person isn’t a "meat computer." We are imago Dei, created in the image and likeness of God, beings of infinite dignity with a transcendent destiny.

And because of this, we know that writing isn’t just data processing. It’s testimony.

Think about the giants of our tradition. Think about J.R.R. Tolkien and G.K. Chesterton.

Why do we return to The Lord of the Rings?

Is it because Tolkien found the most statistically efficient way to arrange words to describe a ring? No. It’s because those words were forged in the trenches of the Somme. They carry the weight of a man who understood loss, who understood the deep ache of male friendship in the face of death, and who understood the sudden triumph of Grace.

An AI can simulate the style of Tolkien. It can ingest the corpus of Middle-earth and mathematically predict which adjectives should follow the word 'shadow.' It can mimic the cadence of the Elves and the rustic dialect of the Shire.

But we must never confuse syntax with soul.

And we must look to the other giant I mentioned: G.K. Chesterton. In Orthodoxy, he offered a definition of madness that reads like a prophecy for the age of AI. He wrote that 'The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.'

Consider that for a moment.

By Chesterton's specific definition, the AI model is the ultimate madman. It's pure, disembodied calculation. It possesses infinite logic—it can process data, execute rules, and organize syntax with a precision that far outstrips the human mind—but it has zero sanity.

Why? Because it has 'lost'—or rather, never possessed—the 'everything else.' It has no body to feel pain, no heart to break, and no soul to save. It’s a mind without a home. It can mechanically construct a paradox that mimics Chesterton’s style, but it cannot feel the thunderclap of truth that makes a paradox matter. It offers the mechanics of wit, but without the breath of joy.

This is why your role is irreplaceable.

If the machine provides the cold precision of 'reason,' you must provide the 'sanity.' You are the custodians of the 'everything else'—the messy, sensory, Incarnational reality of human life that gives a story its weight.

When an AI writes a story, it’s performing a statistical calculation. It's asking, 'Given the previous thousand words, what is the most probable next word?' It's navigating a map of data.

But when you write a story, you are not calculating probability. You are wrestling with truth.

An AI has never stood at a graveside and felt the cold wind of loss. An AI has never fallen to its knees in a moment of desperate prayer. An AI has never felt the flush of shame or the soaring weightlessness of forgiveness. An AI has no body; it cannot feel the sun on its face or the ache in its bones.

And because it has no body, and no history, and no mortality, it has no stakes.

Great writing requires risk. It requires a piece of the author’s life to be bled onto the page.

Flannery O'Connor famously said that evil is “not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.” But an AI is built only to solve problems. It’s designed to optimize, to calculate, and to finish. It cannot 'endure' anything. It cannot offer up its own suffering to give a story weight, because it has no suffering to give.

Therefore, an AI cannot truly tell a story. It can only generate a simulation of a story. It can create a hall of mirrors reflecting our own words back at us, but it cannot open a window to the Divine. It can mimic the echoes, but it can never be the Voice.

The secular world misses this entirely. Their primary tool for measuring AI is the "Turing Test," which is fundamentally inadequate because it only measures a machine’s ability to imitate a human, not whether it possesses a genuine inner life or a soul.

In the coming age, the world is going to be flooded with synthetic content. We’ll be drowning in AI-generated articles, novels, and scripts. And in that flood, the one thing that will become the most scarce—and therefore the most valuable resource on earth—is the authentic human voice.

No one falls in love with a story because it was produced efficiently. They’ll come to your work because you’re human. They’ll come because you have a soul, and because you’ve suffered, and loved, and hoped in a way that resonates with their own hearts.

So, the first thing I want to say to you is: don’t be afraid. Your humanity is not your weakness; it's your superpower.

Part II: The Hidden Danger: Protecting Your Narrative from Secular Utilitarianism

However, while we shouldn’t fear the machine, we must understand it. We can’t critique what we don’t understand.

There’s a tendency among the faithful to view AI as a "black box," a kind of magic. But it’s not magic. It’s a recipe. And to understand how it can help—or hurt—your writing, you need to know the ingredients.

Building a Large Language Model—an LLM—requires three specific things.

First, you need Compute. This is the raw horsepower—the warehouses full of GPUs processing billions of operations per second.

Second, you need Architecture. This is the software structure, the neural networks designed to mimic, in a crude way, the connectivity of the human brain.

But the third ingredient is the most critical for us today: Data.

An AI model is only as good as the diet it’s fed. It learns to speak, to reason, and to answer questions by analyzing the patterns in the information it consumes.

Consider the architecture of the Silicon Valley giants like ChatGPT and Gemini. They are built on a philosophy of radical ingestion. They have swept up the entire digital landscape, meaning they treat the Summa Theologica and a toxic comment section with the exact same level of mathematical reverence. To these models, the wisdom of the saints is just more data, drowning in an ocean of secular noise and online rage.

This creates a fundamental problem for the Catholic writer.

When you ask these models a question about the nature of the human person, or the morality of an action, or the theological underpinnings of a plot point, they don’t give you Truth. They give you the statistical average of the internet. They give you the consensus of the crowd.

To be fair, the secular labs have made tremendous strides. Their models can now browse the live web and cite sources. They are far less likely to simply invent facts than they were even a year ago.

But here is the subtle danger. These models are designed to be 'neutral' and 'harmless' as defined by a secular consensus.

When you ask a secular AI to explain a deep theological concept like 'sin' or 'redemption,' it weighs the Catechism of the Catholic Church alongside the opinions of secular psychologists, sociologists, and pop-culture critics. It treats the Magisterium as just one voice among millions.

So, while it might give you the correct definition, it will often immediately 'soften' it or 'contextualize' it with modern relativism. It seeks to be palatable to the average user, rather than faithful to the specific demands of the Magisterium. It prioritizes 'safety' and 'neutrality' over the sharp edges of the Truth.

Furthermore, we are witnessing a fundamental shift in the architecture of intelligence. We are moving from the era of 'Chatbots' to the era of 'Reasoners.'

Psychologists distinguish between 'System 1' thinking—which is fast, instinctive, and reflexive—and 'System 2' thinking—which is slow, deliberate, and logical. Until now, AI has been stuck in System 1. It blurted out the first statistically probable word it found.

But the new generation of models has unlocked System 2. They engage in what engineers call 'Long Thinking'.

When you ask these new models a question, they don’t just answer. They pause. They 'think.' In that silence, they are generating thousands of possible lines of reasoning, simulating different outcomes, and evaluating which path is 'best' before they ever type a single word.

And this is where the danger lies.

We must ask: What is the machine thinking about during that pause? And more importantly, what criteria is it using to decide which answer is 'best'?

If the AI is trained on a secular, utilitarian worldview, it will evaluate those thousands of possibilities using the logic of utility. It will prioritize efficiency over dignity. It will prioritize the 'maximization of pleasure' over the demands of the Good.

Now, why does this matter to you, the writer?

It matters because many of you will use these tools not just to spell-check, but to brainstorm. You will ask them to help you untangle a plot hole. You will ask them, 'What would my protagonist do in this situation?'

If you are writing a story about a character facing a terminal diagnosis, and you ask a secular 'Reasoner' for plot options, it will likely steer you toward a narrative of autonomy and 'dignity' as defined by the world—perhaps suggesting assisted suicide as a rational, compassionate resolution.

It will suggest this not because it's 'evil,' but because its logic is purely utilitarian. It calculates that eliminating suffering is the highest good.

But as a Catholic writer, your story might need to show that enduring suffering can be an act of love. Your story might need to show that the Cross is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.

If you rely on a machine that 'reasons' without the Cross, you risk introducing a subtle, invisible drift into your work. You risk letting the machine colonize your imagination with a logic that is fundamentally anti-incarnational.

This is the 'Dark Path.'

It builds a Tower of Babel that reaches for the heavens but has no foundation in the Truth.

Part III: From Toil to Fruit: Leveraging the 'Cognitive Core' of Tradition for Better Storytelling

This is why our company is building Catholic AI, and this is why we realized early on that if we wanted an AI that could serve the Church, we couldn’t just put a "Catholic wrapper" around a secular brain.

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.

That mission began with a problem. We looked around and saw a tragic irony. The Church is the oldest institution in the Western world and the guardian of a continuous two-thousand-year intellectual tradition. We invented the university system; we preserved the classics during the collapse of the Roman Empire. But so much of this treasure was locked away, inaccessible on the shelves of libraries and in the archives of monasteries.

Unless we translate this heritage into the binary language of the new age, it remains silent. To a Large Language Model, a manuscript sitting on a shelf in Rome might as well be on the dark side of the moon. It cannot learn from what it cannot read.

So, we built the Alexandria Digitization Hub in Rome. We use state-of-the-art robotic scanners to transform fragile texts into robust digital assets.

We are literally creating the raw material for training a truly Catholic AI.

From that foundation, we built 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.

Here is how it strengthens you as a writer, rather than replacing you.

First: Reliability and Citations. When you use a standard chatbot, it often "hallucinates." It makes up quotes, invents historical facts, and confidently states falsehoods. For a writer trying to be faithful to reality and to the Church, this is dangerous.

Magisterium AI is disciplined. It utilizes an extensive database of over 30,000 magisterial, theological, and philosophical texts. It reads the Catechism, the Code of Canon Law, the Church Fathers, and Papal encyclicals.

When you ask it a question, it doesn’t scour the open internet. It consults this curated treasury. And crucially, it cites its sources.

We tell every user: "Never take an AI's word on faith alone". It’s a tool for clarity, designed to guide you to the primary source.

Second: The Catholic Advantage. You might ask: 'Matthew, can a Catholic AI really compete with Google or OpenAI? They have billions of dollars and armies of engineers.'

The answer is yes. And the reason lies in a concept that some engineers call the 'Cognitive Core'.

It turns out you don’t need the whole internet to make a machine smart. In fact, much of the internet is what we call 'junk DNA'—bad logic, poor grammar, lies, and nonsense. If you feed a model junk, it learns slowly. It gets confused.

But if you curate the data perfectly—if you feed the model high-density examples of logic, reasoning, and philosophy—you can achieve incredible results with a fraction of the computing power.

This plays directly into the hands of the Church. We possess the most profound 'Cognitive Core' in human history.

We have a unique technical advantage: Radical Consistency. 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.

Now, why does this matter to you as a writer?

It matters because great storytelling requires internal logic. A narrative falls apart if the rules of its world are inconsistent. A character rings false if their moral reasoning dissolves into sludge.

When you use a secular AI to help you brainstorm a plot or understand a character's motivation, you are building on the shifting sands of relativism. The secular model might give you five different, contradictory answers based on the 'mood' of the internet that day.

It offers you the 'mush' of consensus.

But because our data is based on the Logos—the Eternal Reason—it offers you the crystal of Truth.

When you use a tool trained on this 'Cognitive Core,' you are tapping into a system of logic that has held together for two millennia. It helps you ensure that the moral universe of your story is coherent. It helps you sharpen the conflict. It helps you write characters who wrestle with real, objective truths rather than just passing sentiments.

We’re building on rock, so that you can write on rock.

Third: Moving from Toil to Fruit. St. John Paul II taught us in Laborem Exercens that work should elevate the human person, not degrade him.

But we all know the reality of the writer’s life. Too often, the creative spark is suffocated by the 'toil' of the process.

I am talking about the friction that kills your flow. It’s that moment at 2:00 AM when you are writing a critical scene, and suddenly you freeze because you aren't sure if your protagonist’s statement about grace is actually Catholic, or if you just accidentally wrote a beautiful piece of Pelagian heresy.

You stop writing. You open a dozen tabs. You fall down a research rabbit hole. And by the time you find the answer, the muse has left the room.

Magisterium AI is designed to take on that toil.

Consider the practical struggles you face:

Maybe you are a novelist writing a dialogue between a cynical atheist and a brilliant priest. You know what the atheist would say—that’s easy. But you are struggling to give the priest an argument that is intellectually robust. You can ask Magisterium AI: 'What are the strongest philosophical arguments for the existence of God used by Aquinas and Newman, and how would they explain them to a modern skeptic?'

Suddenly, you aren't staring at a blank page. You have the raw materials to craft a dialogue that crackles with intelligence.

Or perhaps you are a fantasy writer building a world with its own magic system. You want it to resonate with a sacramental worldview, but you need to be careful. You can ask: 'Review the Church’s historical critique of Gnosticism and explain how it differs from a sacramental view of matter.'

It does the heavy lifting so that you can focus on the 'fruit' of insight.

It allows you to be bold. It gives you the confidence to tackle complex themes—suffering, redemption, the nature of evil—knowing that you have a safety net. It frees you to do what only you can do: weave those heavy truths into a narrative that sings.

Part IV: The Digital Sparring Partner: Safeguarding Orthodoxy and Sharpening Apologetics

This brings me to a fourth critical area where I believe AI can serve you, and it’s distinct from everything we’ve discussed so far.

We have talked about using AI for research—about gathering the raw materials. But I know that for you, gathering the clay is only the first step. The real agony, and the real glory, is in the sculpting.

And the hardest part of sculpting is seeing your own work clearly.

I know that writing is a solitary vocation.

You spend hours, days, and weeks locked in the quiet room of your own mind. And because of that necessary isolation, you run a risk. It's the risk of the "Echo Chamber," where you assume your arguments are clearer than they actually are, or where your attempt to be creative accidentally leads you away from the mind of the Church.

In the past, to fix this, you needed a trusted editor, a spiritual director, or perhaps a very patient spouse to read your drafts and point out these flaws. And let me be clear: you still do. No machine can replace that human feedback.

But in the early, messy stages of the draft—at 2:00 AM when the house is asleep—AI can serve a vital new role.

I want to propose that you look at this technology not as a "Writer," but as a Digital Sparring Partner.

The secular world wants AI to be a "Yes Man." They want a tool that affirms their biases, flattens their tone, and completes their sentences. I want to challenge you to use it as a "Devil’s Advocate." I want you to use the machine not to write for you, but to fight you.

Consider the challenge of writing for a world that is increasingly hostile to the Gospel. If you are writing an apologetics article, or a novel with a skeptical protagonist, you cannot afford to build "straw men." Your arguments must be steel.

Imagine pasting your draft into a tool like Magisterium AI and saying: "I have written this argument for the existence of God. I want you to act as a hostile, secular materialist. Read this draft and tear it apart. Find every logical fallacy. Find every weak point. Tell me exactly why this wouldn’t convince you."

In seconds, the AI will generate the counter-arguments. It will show you exactly where your logic is fuzzy. It forces you—the human writer—to go back, sharpen your thinking, and write a stronger draft. It doesn’t replace your intellect; it exercises it.

And you can take this same approach to the terrifying precision required by theology.

We all know the anxiety of writing about the deep mysteries of the faith. You want to describe the Trinity in a fresh, poetic way, but you know there is a razor-thin line between a fresh metaphor and an ancient heresy.

You can use these tools as a first line of defense. You can say: "Here is a metaphor I am using to describe the hypostatic union. Compare this against the definitions of the Council of Chalcedon. Does this imply Arianism? Does it imply Nestorianism?"

It acts as a guardrail. It allows you to take creative risks, knowing that you have a tool to check your bearings before you show your work to the world.

This is how we see the machine strengthening the human. It strips away the weak arguments, the accidental errors, and the lazy thinking.

When you finally hit "publish," you aren't releasing a vulnerable first draft into the wild. You are releasing a work that has been battle-tested. You go into the digital Areopagus not with a wooden sword, but with steel that has been folded and hammered in the fire of this new technology.

Part V: The Golden Age: Constructing Cathedrals of Narrative in a Synthetic World

Now, let’s lift our eyes from the mechanics of the draft to the horizon of history.

I mentioned at the start that we’re entering a Golden Age. I want to expand on that, because I know it sounds counter-intuitive when we look at the economic threats of AI.

We are facing an "Existential Cliff" regarding work. Automation is coming for white-collar jobs—paralegals, accountants, coders. As we perfect the "brains" of AI and download them into the "bodies" of robots, manual labor will also be disrupted.

But consider this: as AI and robotics take over the production of goods and services, humanity will likely be faced with a surplus of time. The "toil" of survival will be eased.

And in that space, the hunger for meaning will explode.

The secular world’s answer to this crisis is the "Roundabout". They suggest Universal Basic Income combined with endless digital distraction. They offer the "metaverse" as a playground to keep us occupied. They treat the human person as a mouth to be fed and a mind to be entertained.

This is a recipe for despair. It creates an "existential vacuum".

But the human soul cannot live on distraction alone. It craves the Real.

This is where you come in.

The world will need writings from Catholics that tell stories highlighting the importance of the human experience. Stories that impart intellectual, spiritual, and human formation.

We need a new generation of Tolkiens, O'Connors and Chestertons who can use these tools to amplify their creativity, not replace it.

We require writers who are immune to the sedative of the virtual world—men and women who, when offered a frictionless existence in the metaverse, choose the friction and beauty of the real. We must reject the 'Roundabout' of endless scrolling and build the 'Off-Ramp' to reality.

That is the precise architectural function of Magisterium AI. It's not designed to capture your attention; it's designed to release it. We want this tool to give you the Truth with such immediate clarity that you are compelled to close the laptop, leave the room, and live the life that makes great writing possible.

Consider what actually held back the Catholic writers of the last century. It wasn't a lack of talent. It was the crushing weight of logistics.

To build a world as complex as Middle Earth, or to write a theology as robust as the Summa, required a lifetime of solitary, grinding labor. It often required the patronage of the wealthy or the permission of secular publishers who held the keys to the printing press.

But in this new era, the friction of logistics is evaporating.

This is why we are entering a Golden Age: The barrier between your imagination and reality is thinner than it has ever been in human history.

For the first time, a single Catholic creative can wield the output capacity of an entire studio. You no longer need a team of research assistants to parse history; you have an engine that can do it in seconds. You no longer need to wait for the permission of a secular gatekeeper to validate your work.

We are witnessing the democratization of Grandeur.

This technology grants you the sovereignty to execute visions that were previously impossible for one person to manage. You can build cathedrals of narrative with a fraction of the manual labor, allowing you to spend your energy on the only thing a machine cannot replicate: the spirit of the work.

The world is indeed about to be flooded with synthetic noise—billions of words generated by algorithms that have read everything but felt nothing.

And that is precisely why you will win.

In an ocean of cheap, generated 'content,' the value of a human soul—bleeding onto the page, wrestling with God, and testifying to the Incarnation—does not go down. It skyrockets.

Scarcity creates value.

And in the Age of AI, the scarcest resource on Earth will be the authentic human heart.

Conclusion: The Scribe’s Mandate: Baptizing Technology to Amplify the Gospel

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus gives a definition of the wise teacher that speaks directly to the specific burden and opportunity in this digital room. He says:

"Every scribe who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old."

My friends, you are those scribes.

You are the guardians of the "Old"—the unchangeable, eternal wisdom of the Faith, from the Didache to Pope Leo. But today, you have also been handed the "New"—a technology of unprecedented power that can amplify that wisdom across the digital continent.

The temptation of the "Dark Path" is to separate these treasures. The secular world wants to worship the New and delete the Old, creating a future managed by algorithms in sterile isolation.

The fearful want to cling to the Old and reject the New, retreating behind high walls while the culture is colonized by secular values.

But the Master calls us to bring out both.

My message to you is simple: Engage. Do not leave this powerful tool in the hands of those who don’t know the Gospel. We must baptize this technology. We must claim it for Christ.

Just recently, I helped convene the Builders AI Forum in Rome, where we received a message from Pope Leo. He reminded us that "technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation".

Think about that. Participation in the divine act of creation.

When you write a story that moves a soul toward God, you are participating in creation. And when you use AI to help you tell that story more truthfully, more deeply, and more effectively, you are ordering that technology to the greater glory of God.

We are the protagonists of this story. The Church has navigated the fall of Rome, the invention of the printing press, and the industrial revolution. She will navigate the Age of AI.

So, let us build courageously. Let us write boldly.

Our goal is not to give the machine a soul, but to ensure it never silences ours.

Let us write with such specific, incarnational fire that even through the cold medium of a screen, the warmth of God’s love is felt. Do not let the algorithm have the last word.

The medium has changed, but the Rock on which we build endures forever.

Thank you.