A More Catholic AI

לקריאה בעברית

The debate over AI is producing an unexpected defense of individual human judgment. Even the Catholic Church increasingly speaks as though the important thing is to keep a person in control.

That is a strange place for Catholicism to end up.

Catholicism traditionally dealt with human fallibility by embedding judgment in an authoritative tradition. Scripture, councils, canon law, theologians, bishops, and centuries of accumulated interpretation were supposed to give the individual access to something larger and more reliable than his own private reasoning.

AI looks remarkably well suited to that project.

A Catholic AI could know the Fathers, councils, canon law, papal teaching, and moral theology in far greater breadth than any ordinary priest. It could also keep track of distinctions that are easily blurred in ordinary religious discussion: what is dogma, what is authoritative but reformable, and what remains genuinely disputed.

A believer could then bring a concrete question to an interlocutor capable of locating it inside the whole tradition rather than relying on whichever fragment happens to be remembered by the person he asks.

Some roles would remain personal because Catholicism understands them that way. A machine cannot hear sacramental confession or become a bishop. But much religious guidance consists precisely in interpreting and applying an inherited body of teaching.

Perhaps the more Catholic response to AI is therefore to appropriate it.

The Church has spent two thousand years constructing a collective memory and a machinery for applying it to new situations. AI could turn that machinery into something immediately available to every believer.

The irony is that the contemporary Church may have absorbed enough modern humanism to recoil from the very possibility. A more traditional Catholic instinct might be considerably less impressed by the sanctity of private judgment.