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No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window - even if they were skilled enough to do so, unless the model was locally hosted, doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence.
Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind. If it were more effective to write a homily for a generic public, the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.
You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests.
This priest agrees with you, and has expressed concerns about mediocre homilies that don't speak to the concerns of the particular community: https://youtu.be/pgZXCPCATmc?si=FM4uj2owYBVK_8Mh
> the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.
There actually are, but they are famous homilies from famous Church Fathers rather then explicitly produced to be standard homilies.
Well maybe they just need to start recording confessionals. Just imagine what Gemini 3.1 could do with 1M tokens of that stuff.
There are resources that publish homilies for priests to give. Here is an example for English speakers.
https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/liturgy/sunday-resou...
No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window
But they will try, and they'll share a lot of potentially private information in the process.
all the homilies i've heard were pre-written but ended with current events... like telling the congregation to not vote for Obama heh. My wife was Catholic until that moment, she never went back after that. This was St. Rita's in Dallas TX.
I was raised Catholic and even though the last time I've been to a church could have been in 2019, I don't remember any priest who wouldn't just gloss over the religious content for the day (copied from an online source), itching to share his politics and the most recent ragebait he's got from Facebook at the end.
Take a homily written by someone 2000 miles away and it will likely feel just as relevant to me. Most humans deal with similar issues.
IMO, any (important) writing you expect other humans to consume should be your own writing. I think it's kind of disrespectful to outsource your voice to AI but expect people to read it like it's yours. Why should I put in time to read if you're not putting in time to write?
The article seems to be overreacting to a small part of Pope Leo's talk. It seems to me his real point was that using AI to hasten writing homilies leads priests to treat this work as busy work instead of thoughtful, focused work.
My old-school protestant pastor started with an AI disclaimer in the sermon yesterday. What a time to be alive!
I don't know what to do with my double standard here.
It seems totally normal and expected that I would outsource aspects of my job solving business software problems to AI, but the idea of my spirituality and cultural experience (music, movies, art, etc) being someone else's business problem to be outsourced and optimized by AI is so gross.
Not defending the use of AI, but plenty of people who grew up going to Mass on Sunday know that priests often recycle old homilies, deliver lazily written homilies or homilies that were clearly pulled from the internet, or just skip them if they couldn't think of anything that week or are running late for something.
Absolute worst was when an intelligent priest put in incredible effort, only for it to go over the heads of the yokels in their parish who want a simpler homily.
LLMs are amazing, I love them, but he is right. When it comes to interacting with your fellow humans, using AI just sucks the point and meaning out of life. If we wanted to know what Claude thought, we’d ask him. Don’t be a mouthpiece for AI.
There’s a Paul Theroux short story about a defrocked priest who makes a living writing sermons for other priests. They would mail their chosen topic or occasion and include the payment, and he’d send them a beautifully written sermon that’d make them popular in their parishes. Now AI is coming for the correspondent-priest’s job!
The Pope will change his mind with Claude Opus 5.2
When you stop to think of it, historically people have told their secrets to the church, now they also tell them to AI. There is some kind of relation there, the power that people willingly give to an organization. The Ads are coming so I guess people will start to think about it a bit more.
The mind virus will not stop spreading, making corporations do your critical thinking is not a good path. People will become dependent on a subscription service for everyday life.
Too bad Terry A. Davis is not around anymore. He would have been literally enraptured by LLMs.
What does it mean to search yourself for words, even if they fall short of the eleganance that Ai can produce?
"What to do when Ai says 'I love you'?" discusses this conundrum
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...
I've been paying attention to Sherry Turkle since I caught this show over the summer. She was on a panel at Davos titled "Swipe Left on Reality" which was the first time I heard her use the phrase "frictionless relationships" to describe what interacting with Ai is like.
The article barely touches on this subject, but the sentiment is nonetheless correct.
The problem with using an AI to write something so intimate and context-specific is that it cannot perform as the priest's highest and best abstraction. Instead, it will slavishly follow instructions and risk tunnelling the priest into a worldview and message that subtly betrays his congregation.
I recently wrote about how modern legal tech stacks can do the same using the infamous Digital Research / IBM non-disclosure agreement as an example: https://tritium.legal/blog/redline
If we habitually reduce our context to the lowest-common window ingestible by an AI, yes we may lose a bit of humanity, but more importantly we'll just do a worse job.
Btw pope is a math phd.
Originally published in If magazine in September 1954: in this satirical tale (author is Robert Schekley), advanced robot soldiers fight a war against "Satan's forces," and after their victory, they are raptured upward to a metallic heaven by a divine presence.
Key details of the story "The Battle":
Plot: Humans rely on automatic armies, including robot interceptors, tanks, and H-bombs, to fight their battles.
The Climax: After the battle, a divine force ("The Presence") walks among the shattered robots, repairing them and causing them to ascend into the sky, essentially granting them a form of robot heaven.
Themes: It reflects Sheckley's common themes of technological satire, the absurdity of war, and the blurred lines between man and machine.
This story is sometimes remembered in discussions about "Silicon Heaven" or robot apotheosis.
> But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.
> A timeless interval was spent in doing that.
> And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.
> But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.
> For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
> The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
> And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"
> And there was light
-- Father Isaac Asimov
My parish priest told me he uses AI to edit newsletter posts. He didn't say he used it to write. And he mentioned using Magesterium.ai, which is a chatbot trained on a pretty conservative Catholic corpus (eg, it knows almost nothing about the Catholic Worker movement).
One thing I appreciate in our diocese is that the priests are encouraged to deliver their homilies without a written script. I think that is very wise, as it forces them to preach from instinct and heart, not from a script, either AI or human written.
Before preaching it to others, the writing of a homily or sermon first needs to affect the heart of the one delivering it. Such heart-work is exceedingly difficult if not impossible with AI.
Guarding your heart with elegant nonsense you don't really mean is a classic defensive posture, and probably is directly impeding their ability to be present in emotionally intense (and often difficult) situations. It reminded me of this:
>There is a scene in the opening of Into the Abyss. Werner Herzog is interviewing a Reverend who in fifteen minutes will go in to be with a boy as the boy is led to the gurney to be executed by injection.
>The Reverend is talking about how the Lord works in mysterious ways, and so on—it is exactly the type of conversation you want to avoid. It is very ChatGPT. It is the Reverend repeating things he’s said before—words that protect him, that allow him to perform the role of Reverend, instead of being what he is: a man named Lopez, who will soon have to watch a boy die.
>At one point, the Reverend, as a part of a monologue about the beauty of God’s creation, mentions that he sometimes meditates on the beauty of the squirrels he sees on the golf course. Herzog, standing in a graveyard with nameless crosses, says, with mad Bavarian seriousness, “Please describe an encounter with a squirrel.”
>Lopez is a bit surprised by the question, but he takes it in a playful spirit—his voice lifts, joyously. He starts to talk faster. (This is where the conversation shifts into the type you want.) He is no longer saying versions of things he has said before, he’s not protecting himself, he’s just there.
>From that point on, it takes about ten seconds before he’s crying.
>In interviews, Herzog likes to mention this conversation to explain his craft. “But how on earth did you know to say that?” says the interviewer. “Were you just trying to say something unexpected to unbalance him?” “No, it was not random”, Herzog says. “I knew I had to say those exact words. Because I know the heart of men.”
Forget homilies.
AI can be the entire church experience. There isn't any aspect of the church that couldn't be automated.
Way back in "THX 1138" there were AI confessions.
Now, pretty sure it would be simple to have an AI priest, speaking in a real voice, with a hologram, and with current context for the audience.
Well, for 'The Nine Billion Names of God' the monks finally ended up renting a computer. ;-)
Long before AI era I read an article about homilies exchange online forum in Poland. The priests spoke how they struggle to come up with a fresh content every week for Sunday masses. AI is not the source of the problem, it's just an attempt at a solution.
Our Electric Messiah has arrived:
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=pn3KD5YBhro&si=0sF3nL4DZBO...
Related previously:
Message from Pope Leo XIV on the 60th World Day of Social Communications
Religion and Automation is not a new thing... cue...
Well, it was hallucinations any way so in this particular case it hardly matters. But I can see how the Pope has identified AI as a competing religion.
Priests using AI to deliver homilies feels like we are getting closer to having a blessed LLM with divine weights that speaks the direct word of God.
"AI" seems like a religion
It requires "belief"
"AI" believers claim to know the future
Relentless prognostication and effort to gain followers
I think it is okay to use AI to help you express your ideas better. I think the idea of AI acting as an "editor" reviewing my work and pointing out potential clarity issues is very helpful.
In this scenario AI does not rewrite the text, but prompts the human to rewrite and then review again. It's a short and strong feedback loop that can be a very powerful learning tool if the learner uses it correctly.
The same pope who declared an influencer boy a saint?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/07/pope-leo-xiv-d...
Let's be honest, the entire concept depends on advertising like nothing else.
Corporations vs organised religion on artificial intelligence? This is way cooler than the cold war.
If the priest is using AI to write homilies what is even the point of going to Church I could just get an AI to be my priest and stay home.
Using AI generated text to interact with a human that is expecting a human touch is gross.
Even AI generated corpo-slop emails give me the ick. To me, it shows a deep lack of respect for the other person. I would rather something in broken English than bot vomit.
I’ve ended friendships people that can’t help themselves from pulling out their phones to ask their AI about something we’re talking about in-person. Like come on I want to know what YOU think.
Nothing new. I'm sure something similar was said about Google before...
https://encourageandteach.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2...
This kind of headline is something we could have only imagined as a joke 5 years ago.
Love the headline and curious what the pope actually believes that brains do.
Their brains? Does god steer those brains but can't steer LLMs?
The results are probably too logical, and morally consistent.
I wish the Catholic Church would use that approach more often.
... but will they be able to compete with religions that have embraced AI, or will they be hopelessly left behind?
Tom Tugendhat had to stand up in the House of Commons and tell MPs not the use AI to write their speeches.
“I rise to speak. I rise to speak. I rise to speak. ChatGPT knows you’re there, but that is an Americanism that we don’t use, but still, keep using it, because it makes it clear that this place has become absurd.”