Opinion: The Sacred and the Silicon Valley

If there is something I never expected to read, it was the Pope’s opinion on artificial intelligence and its use within the Church. So when Pope Leo XIV advised priests of his diocese not to outsource homilies to artificial intelligence, the instruction read almost like a parish bulletin caught between two worlds. Except it wasn’t a parish bulletin.

It was the leader of the world’s oldest continuously operating institution drawing a line in the sand between human faith and machine output, and doing so with a sermon that might as well have been delivered in the language of a startup pitch. 

From an initial impression, this directive appears straightforward: don’t let a chatbot draft your Sunday reflections. Vatican News reported the Pope’s words as pastoral guidance delivered in dialogue with clergy of the Diocese of Rome, warning against the temptation “to prepare homilies with artificial ...