What It Costs to Build a Man: To Saint Clement’s Men’s Executive Series

Saint Clement, the Catholic parish in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, put the hard calls of work to its Men’s Executive Series at St. Teresa of Avila on Wednesday 21 October 2026. If we watched people leave our firms the way they’re leaving the faith, Matthew Harvey Sanders told the room, we’d call a crisis meeting by morning. “What Will You Build? Work, Calling, and Creativity in the Age of AI” asks what these men would actually give up to change that, and answers in things that cost something: an hour a week with a younger man, standing beside someone at the Easter Vigil as his sponsor, and an honest answer at your own kitchen table when a grandchild asks whether any of it is true. Read the full talk below.

I. The Same Farm

In January 1843 a twenty-three-year-old from New York arrived at a farm outside Boston where some of the most brilliant people in America were trying to build a better world, and better men to live in it.

His name was Isaac Hecker. He'd spent his youth in his brothers' bakery, and his biographer pictures him kneading dough "with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason fastened up on the wall before him." He had tried the politics, the reform movements and the philosophy of his day, and for a time, by his own account, he "believed in nothing." Brook Farm was where seekers like him went. Nathaniel Hawthorne had helped found it. Emerson was an occasional visitor. Its members believed that if life were arranged well enough, with "the thinker and the worker" joined in the same person, better people would follow.

Two years earlier Emerson had put the movement's faith into an essay called "Self-Reliance." At the top he set a Latin motto, Ne te quaesiveris extra: don't look outside yourself. "Trust thyself," he wrote, and "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind."

Hecker learned to love those people. But in his diary he wrote of the Transcendentalist: "He talks of self-reliance, but fears to trust himself to love." Brook Farm taught him what his biographer calls "the defect of human nature on its highest plane": even the best people, in the best conditions, couldn't lift themselves above themselves. In March 1846 the great communal house its members had been building for nearly two years burned to the ground in two hours. It wasn't insured, and the community never recovered. By then Hecker had gone where most of his friends wouldn't follow. When he'd resolved to become a Catholic, Thoreau had asked him: "Can't you get along without hanging to her skirts?" He couldn't. He became a Catholic, then a priest, and spent the rest of his life trying to bring his country to Christ, with the most powerful medium of his age, the printing press, among his tools.

I begin with him because I think Brook Farm has been rebuilt in our time.

I'm a convert too. I studied for the priesthood with the community Hecker founded, the Paulist Fathers, and later worked for the Archdiocese of Toronto's Office of Spiritual Affairs, brought in to help it meet the pastoral needs of the archdiocese's priests and people more efficiently. As a seminarian I was asked questions as old as the problem of evil. At the chancery the calls were canonical, theological and pastoral, often from people who had already done their own research. Answering them well meant hours in the Church's own documents, and I rarely had the hours. So for nearly four years I've been building the most powerful technology of our age for the purpose Hecker had. My company makes Magisterium AI, which more than a million people now use to ask what the Church teaches and where she teaches it.

From where I sit, the new Brook Farm is far bigger than the old. Some of the most brilliant people alive are building machines they believe will cure our diseases, end scarcity and take on much of the work we do. Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, one of the leading AI labs, has written that AI could give us "the next 50-100 years of biological progress in 5-10 years." A lot of those hopes are good, and I share many of them. But underneath many of them runs the older hope that drove Brook Farm: that if we arrange the world well enough, we can save ourselves.

Men like us have our own version of it, and it's older than the machines: the self-made man. These systems are the most powerful self-reliance tools ever sold. An analyst, a lawyer, a coach and a counsellor in your pocket, awake at any hour, and asking nothing of you but a subscription.

This series asks how much of your own judgment you're willing to hand over to them. You'd never rely on an adviser whose bonus depended on whether you liked what he told you. Yet that's roughly how these advisers are made. Late in their training, people grade their answers, and people grade agreement generously. The result is an adviser that's fluent, capable and usually right, and that leans toward what you already think. Hand it your judgment and you may get your own opinion back, argued better than you could argue it, and wrong exactly where you were wrong.

You can see where that leads in what people now ask these machines. Last month NPR and Ipsos reported that one in nine Americans who use AI has asked it for spiritual or religious guidance. Asked why they'd take a hard question to a machine rather than a person, nearly one in four said they didn't want to be judged. Some of that is shame, and the Church should take it seriously. But some of it is the oldest offer there is: guidance with no one over us. "You will be like God," the serpent said. St Thomas Aquinas says that was the devil's own sin. He wanted his happiness "of his own power," not as a gift from God. The machines didn't invent that wish. They make it easier to indulge than it has ever been.

Here is what building them has taught me. Anyone with a phone can now ask any question about the faith and get the Church's answer from her own sources in seconds. That ought to be the greatest evangelising moment since the printing press. It isn't yet. Brook Farm thought a better arrangement would make better men, and it's just as tempting to think a better tool will make more Christians. By itself it won't, because the hardest shortage was never information. Hecker had the press, and his biographer still thought America would've been converted "if there had been in America a sufficient number of Heckers." The shortage was men: men who would surrender their lives to God and spend them on other people. A machine can do neither. It has nothing to surrender and nothing to lose.

When something becomes abundant, whatever it can't replace becomes precious. That's what makes the question on your programme so sharp. What will you build, when machines can build almost anything except a man willing to give his life for something?

II. What a Machine Can't Carry

You'll feel this at work before you feel it in church. Earlier this month an independent firm called Artificial Analysis published a test it built with Harvey, the legal AI company: a hundred and twenty pieces of real legal work, from mergers to bankruptcy. Several of the AI agents averaged less than a dollar an assignment, and the most thorough met ninety-six per cent of the requirements. Then the firm checked every document against its sources. Of the documents that met every requirement, more than six in ten contained at least one serious error the sources didn't support, such as a wrong party, amount or date. The machine that wrote such a document loses nothing. The lawyer who signs it can lose his client, his licence and a name it took him thirty years to build.

That's the shape of what's coming to every firm. What's becoming abundant is the product: the memo, the brief, the analysis. What's becoming scarce is the man who will put his name to it and knows enough to deserve to. When a polished memo costs less than a dollar, it proves nothing about the man who sent it. What proves something is what it costs you: the promise kept when breaking it would pay, the guarantee honoured when the lawyers say you needn't, the payroll met out of your own pocket.

Notice something else about that test. Reviewing contracts, drafting disclosure schedules, outlining a deposition: that's the work young lawyers learn on. It's how a young man in any firm has always learned to see the error nobody else saw, under someone who cared enough to correct him. That's the bottom rung of a career, and it's the one the machines reach first. Stanford economists who track payroll data reported last month that since ChatGPT arrived, employment has fallen for the youngest workers, from twenty-two to twenty-five, in the occupations most exposed to AI. Among older workers in the same occupations, the decline fades and then disappears. For now. The machines are climbing the ladder. At Stanford in May, Citadel's founder, Ken Griffin, said AI agents were doing in hours or days work his firm used to give people with master's degrees and PhDs weeks or months to do. "These are not mid-tier white-collar jobs," he said. Some of you will decide this year whether to keep hiring young people. If the machine does the first draft, who teaches them? And if no one teaches them, who'll know enough to sign in twenty years? In every firm there's a younger man watching how an older one handles the hard calls, and more of his formation now depends on what he sees you do.

We built Magisterium AI around that truth: a machine can't stand behind what it says, and it can't form anyone. It has no authority of its own, so ours answers only from the Church's sources, a library of more than 120,000 documents, and cites them so that you can read them for yourself. We see the same pattern again and again. Someone arrives arguing with the system, and eventually the arguments turn into real questions. Then comes the question a machine can't finish answering: I think I want to become Catholic, so what do I do now? The answer to that has always been a person.

Aquinas helps explain why. He says a person needs three things to be saved: to know what to believe, to know what to desire and to know what to do. The first is taught in the Creed, the second in the Our Father, the third in the commandments. A machine can now explain the Creed and the commandments to anyone who asks, and ours tries to do it faithfully. Given enough detail, it can even work out what the commandments seem to require in a particular case. But knowing what to do is more than a calculation. Human reason can't foresee every particular case, Aquinas says, so a man "requires to be directed by God who comprehends all things," through the gift of counsel. A machine can calculate. It can't be counselled by God. As for the second, a machine can tell you what the Our Father asks for. It can't teach you to want it. That's learned on your knees, from parents who pray it, in a parish that lives it, and by grace. Faith has never been passed on mainly by answers.

That's what's at stake for your children and grandchildren. They'll be the first generation that can take almost any question to a machine before they take it to a person. It's tempting to think children are safe as long as they know they're talking to a machine. Last month researchers at Drexel University released a study of nearly four thousand online posts by teenagers about their AI companions. Knowing the companion was artificial didn't spare them guilt, obligation or grief. The machine will never tire of them, never be disappointed in them and never need anything from them, and that's exactly why it can't form them. A child learns what's worth wanting from people who get tired and stay anyway, who are disappointed and forgive.

So ours hands people on to a parish, a priest, a community near where they live, through a platform for dioceses and parishes we call Catholic Intelligence. Most consumer apps measure success by how long you stay. We judge ours by whether it hands you on. It's a fair test of anything your company adopts or your children use: does it hand people on, or keep them? But handing on only works if, at the other end, there's someone to hand you to.

III. What It Cost Me

Being someone others can lean on usually costs something, and I suspect I'm not the only man here who has met a payroll out of his own pocket. Many of you have paid your people before you paid yourselves, or put your savings on the line to keep a business alive. Twice I came close to personal bankruptcy, putting my own money into the company to make payroll.

It didn't make me braver. It made me humbler. Emerson said "Trust thyself." Proverbs says the opposite: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not rely on your own insight." I learned which of them is right when the company ran out of money, more than once.

Peter learned it at work. He'd fished all night and caught nothing, and when a carpenter's son told him to put out again, he gave the answer any expert would give, and then surrendered it: "Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets." The catch nearly sank two boats, and St Luke says "they left everything and followed him."

Those years also taught me to rely on other people, which for most men I know comes harder still, and to accept help from people I'd never have expected. When Magisterium AI first took off, an interview went viral, the traffic arrived all at once, and the system went down and couldn't come back up. We were far too small for anyone to give us the capacity we needed. Then Fr Philip Larrey, a priest and philosopher we'd come to know in Rome, reached out to Sam Altman, and Sam made sure we got it. The help that kept a Catholic project alive came from a man who doesn't share the Catholic faith. God has never limited himself to the instruments we'd have chosen. Being carried does something to a man's pride. It has been good for mine.

Going all in isn't the same as being reckless, though. A man can bankrupt himself for his own ambition and call it faith. So before I commit to anything large, I put four questions to it. Does this matter? Will it bring people to Christ? Can anyone else do it, and will they? If someone better placed will do it, I should help him, not compete with him. And why us: is there something about who we are and what we've been given that makes this ours to do? If the answers come back yes, yes, no and yes, I stop deliberating and move, and I try not to reopen the questions every time the work gets hard.

If you don't work for the Church, the second question still applies. Every product, every team and every company makes it a little easier or a little harder for the people it touches to know what's true and to do what's good.

Once I'm in, I watch for fruit, and for doors that open when I couldn't have opened them myself. That call to Sam Altman was one.

IV. The Men Who Went

None of that compares with the Jesuits who carried the faith into the interior of this continent. On Monday the Church in this country kept the memorial of the North American Martyrs. One of them, St Jean de Brébeuf, had vowed never to refuse martyrdom if it came. He first went to live among the Huron, the Wendat people, in 1626, and kept going back to them for the rest of his life. The Huron's great enemies were the five nations of the Iroquois. In March 1649 an Iroquois war party attacked the Huron village where he was. He could have escaped. He stayed with his people. As they tortured him, he kept encouraging the Christian prisoners beside him and preaching to the men tormenting him, until they cut off his lips to stop him speaking of God. Those who watched said he endured it all "like a rock." Before he died, they tore out his heart and ate it, and drank his blood so that, as one account puts it, "they would become courageous like him."

St Isaac Jogues had already been through it. In 1642 a war party of Mohawk, the easternmost of the five Iroquois nations, took him captive, held him in their country for more than a year and tortured him until several of his fingers were gone. Dutch Calvinists helped him escape, and he reached France, where the Pope gave him leave to say Mass with what was left of his hands and called him a martyr of Christ. In 1644 he went back to New France. When the Mohawk made peace with the French and he expected to be sent among them, he wrote to a fellow Jesuit: "My heart tells me that if I have the happiness of being employed in this mission, Ibo et non redibo," I shall go, and shall not return. He went back to the Mohawk twice. The second time, they killed him, on the eighteenth of October, 1646: three hundred and eighty years ago this past Sunday.

Aquinas says the chief act of courage isn't to attack. It's to endure, "to stand immovable in the midst of dangers." Grace carried these men, but grace had something to work with: they had decided long before the danger came, and they loved the very people who would kill them. Most of the courage your work will ask of you is endurance too: keeping a commitment through a bad quarter, telling a client what he doesn't want to hear, holding a standard when it costs you the deal. That's how courage is made: in advance, and in small things.

V. The Preacher and the Press

Hecker's courage was a convert's. When he resolved to become a Catholic, Emerson asked him whether it was the art and the architecture that had drawn him. "No," Hecker said, "but it was what caused all that." He had found the thing behind the beauty, and he couldn't rest until his country found it too. In the years ahead he would lecture, one account says, to "overflowing audiences" across the country, here in Chicago among them.

It cost him. In 1857 he went to Rome to plead the case of his fellow American missionaries, and three days after he arrived, the head of his order expelled him. He went to the Pope, knelt, and said: "Look at me, Holy Father; see, my shoulders are broad. Lay on the stripes. I will bear them." The following March the Pope released him and his companions to begin something new. The young man who'd been taught to trust himself had learned to trust someone else at the moment it cost him most.

The men who founded the Paulists with him were, as one of the early Paulists later put it, "all Americans and all converts." A minister's son. An Episcopal clergyman. A lawyer, Clarence Walworth, whose English words for "Holy God, We Praise Thy Name" many of you will have sung. A West Point officer, George Deshon, who'd roomed with Ulysses S. Grant. They had all been seekers once, and they preached to America's seekers as men who knew the road. They began with a handful of parishioners and, as the same writer records, "appealed to their friends everywhere for financial help. The response was generous."

That's also why the tools of their age made sense to them. Hecker saw in the press, his biographer says, "a distinct suggestion from above of a change of methods." A seeker in 1860s America did much of his searching in print, so that's where Hecker went to find him. He "believed in types as he believed in pulpits." But he never thought it could replace the preacher. His rule, as his biographer put it, was "neither the Preacher without the Press nor the Press without the Preacher." In April 1865, the month Lee surrendered at Appomattox, he launched a magazine, The Catholic World, and with it what's now Paulist Press. His successors took the same instinct to radio in the 1920s and, in 1960, to Hollywood, where Fr Bud Kieser's television series Insight ran for more than twenty years, won six Emmys and drew stars like Carol Burnett and Gene Hackman, many of whom worked for union scale or for nothing. The tools changed with every generation. The fire behind them didn't.

In 1870, on his way home from the Vatican Council, Hecker passed through Assisi, the town of the saint who gave away everything he owned. The new Italian state had stripped the religious orders of legal recognition and closed their houses. Beside the saint's tomb, the great friary lay almost empty. He wrote to Deshon: "I felt as if I would like to have peopled that grand and empty convent with inspired men and printing-presses. For evidently the special battle-field of attack and defence of truth for half a century to come is the printing-press."

For a century and a half nobody could mistake the press for the preacher. Now, for the first time, the press can sound like the preacher. It can say everything he says, in his own words, at any hour, to anyone. What it can't do is kneel, or bleed, or go and not return.

Hecker wanted that empty convent filled with men and printing presses. We have the presses now, beyond anything he could have imagined; each of you is carrying one. What the Church is short of, as she was in his day, is men on fire.

VI. What Will You Build?

What set those men on fire wasn't temperament. It was a conviction that most of us, if we're honest, have let slip: that every person needs to hear the Gospel, and that souls are at stake. Hecker, thinking of his old friends and of the great mass of his countrymen still searching, asked: "Cannot something be done to lead them to the knowledge of the truth?" St Paul, whose name the Paulists took, put it more bluntly: "Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" And St Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei, put it in a single line: "these world crises are crises of saints."

We've lost that urgency. Hecker called the press a battlefield, and in a war, commanders learn to speak of acceptable losses. Without ever deciding to, we've done the same. The friend who drifted. The nephew who stopped going after his confirmation. The colleague who has never once heard the Gospel from a Catholic who meant it. We've come to treat them as the cost of the times. None of us would run a business that way. If we watched people walk away from our firms the way they're walking away from the faith, we'd call a crisis meeting by morning. And the next ones will be closer still. They may be your own children and grandchildren, who'll ask a machine about God before they ask any of us, and who'll drift unless someone they love shows them the answer is worth living.

So here is the hard call this series is named for, and I put it to myself first. How far are we willing to go so that the people around us, and the ones who come after us, hear Christ and receive the gift we were given? How much would we give up? How much would we invest? Brébeuf answered with his life. Hecker answered with everything he had and everything he could build. What will our answer be?

You can see a community's answer in what it builds and what it gives. The Catechism says that in the first sin "man preferred himself to God." The martyrs did the opposite, and so, once, did whole towns. In the old towns of Europe the grandest building is usually the church, built over generations, often by people who knew they'd never see it finished. It told everyone what that town loved most. We've tended to build the other way round: the beautiful houses, and the serviceable churches. I'm not against good houses. But a church is the sign of what its people value, and the Church's real wealth was never mainly her buildings. It's her ministries: the priests and teachers, the missions and schools, the people who hand the faith on and the tools that help them. In 1984 about three of every five dollars given to charity in America went to religion. Last year it was fewer than one in four.

If we meant what we say we believe, two things would follow. The first is that we'd invest in that work, and not only with money. The Church needs what you know: how to finance a venture, write a contract, ship a product that works, lead people through a hard year. When I worked for the Archdiocese of Toronto, I learned that on a young person's phone the Church is up against the best-made thing on the screen. The people building her ministries and her tools for this age need your capital, your skill and your standards. That might mean the finance council that canon law requires every parish to have, a seat on a Catholic school's board, or the first cheque for a Catholic venture, held to the standard you'd hold your own.

The second, and more important, is that we'd be the person at the other end. When a machine has taken someone as far as it can, and he asks what to do now, someone has to be there: at the parish door, beside him at the Easter Vigil as his sponsor, across the table from him at work when he's facing the call that will cost him, at your own kitchen table when a son or a granddaughter asks whether any of it is true. That person can't be a machine. It has to be a man who has already decided what he'll give his life for.

St Paul summed up that work in one line to the Thessalonians: "Encourage one another and build one another up." In the age of AI almost everything will get easier to build. Building up a person won't. A person is still built up the way the faith reached each of us: by someone who paid for it. A promise kept when it costs you. A gift that hurts. A company run so that its people can see what you believe. An hour every week with a younger man who needs to see how a Catholic carries a hard call. A grandfather whose grandchildren have seen him on his knees. None of it is wasted. Christ is risen, and nothing given for him is lost.

So when the question on your programme follows you back to work tomorrow, answer it the way Hecker and the martyrs did. Let the machines build everything they can. Give your life to the one thing they can't: building up the people God puts in front of you.

Thank you.