A Catholic Moment?

Unlike previous years, “techies” are willing to listen to a moral voice

Some twenty years ago, the U.S. military sponsored a meeting between technology developers and a group of theologians and philosophers. The goal was straightforward: could the people building the future and the people thinking most seriously about the human person find common ground?

A good Catholic journalist friend of mine attended that meeting. He came back baffled. There was almost no real dialogue between the two sides. The techies -programmers, computer scientists, wtc- were convinced they did not need philosophers or theologians. They believed they were the ones shaping history, and that they alone had the knowledge and power to decide where humanity was going.

That was the atmosphere of the early digital age: the world of Ray Kurzweil, of The Age of Spiritual Machines and the transhumanist horizon.

There was a real sense in those years that technology was not merely expanding human capacities, but preparing to replace humanity as we know it. The curve of progress seemed to point toward the emergence of a superior intelligence: more rational, more efficient, more capable, and perhaps, in the minds of some, more worthy of inheriting the future than we were.

But that mood has changed.

Today, many of the people closest to the development of AI still believe they are participating in a revolution. But unlike the old tech culture, they no longer seem equally certain about where that revolution is going. In fact, many now understand that nobody really knows.

And that is precisely why ethicists, philosophers and theologians matter again. Check my story yesterday about the Catholic priest helping guide Anthropic’s Claude.

More people in AI are interested in what the Catholic Church has to say, not because they suddenly became religious, but because they have discovered a limit in their own worldview. They know AI is powerful. They know it is moving fast. They know the race is real. But they also know that power alone does not answer the most important questions.

What is intelligence for? What is freedom? What is judgment? What is creativity? What is responsibility? What, in the end, is a human being?

These are not technical questions. They are human questions. Which means they are also philosophical and theological questions.

The Church does not confuse intelligence with wisdom, or power with purpose. She insists that the human person is not a machine, not a data point, not a bundle of impulses, and not raw material for technical optimization. Man is made in the image of God. That is not a poetic slogan. It is the foundation of human dignity.

I know many Catholic parents who think that, for their own salvation and their children, they need to take the Benedict Option and disengage from this tech-controlled world. The hermit life has a long and strong tradition in the Catholic church.

But for those who choose to engage, Catholic engagement must be bold, creative, and intellectually serious. The truths are ancient, but the challenge is new.

For years, the modern world assumed it could build the future without asking what man is. AI is exposing the weakness of that assumption. And at the very moment our civilization is losing confidence in its own definition of the human person, the Church still has one.

That is not a small thing. That is the opening.