Paid Pillar subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR
Happy Friday friends,
I am looking forward to the long weekend, as I am sure most of you are.
Monday is likely to prove a working holiday for us here at The Pillar, given that it sees the formal presentation of Pope Leo’s first encyclical — with the man himself doing the presentation, no less.
When Peter speaks, we listen. Even if it is the double feast of Pentecost and Memorial Day weekend.
The much teased subject of the letter is set to be, of course, artificial intelligence. And as JD noted on Tuesday, the presence at the press conference of Christopher Olah, a leading purveyor of AI products, suggests it will be something less than a full and unequivocal condemnation of all intelligences artificial.
That’s mostly cool with me. You can’t uninvent the wheel, and the Church would be doing no one any favors pretending that we can. But there is an urgent need for clarity on the moral and intellectual limits on AI use.
For example, I would note as a journalist that Claude, the marquee AI bot of Olah’s Anthorpic, has about as much respect for intellectual property rights as your average Chinese sweatshop baron — the program stripmines the work of journalists and researchers and repackages the fruits of their labors, without compensation or acknowledgement, as its own.
This might sound like quibbling vanity, but it’s a survival issue for places like The Pillar. There are dozens of free-to-read “news” outlets covering the Church, some take real license with the facts, some present opinion as fact, and some use AI (some heavily) to present others’ work as their own.
Our only point of differentiation — the only reason we can ask people to subscribe — is our expertise, our commitment to standards, and our record of getting the real story, getting it right, and often getting it when no one else can. AI’s cannibalistic appetite for our work product makes it more difficult, by a long way, for people to see the difference, and a lot harder for us to convince people our work makes a difference.
But I digress.
Apart from the intellectual property issues and AI’s famous tendency to “hallucinate” facts and events to fit a narrative, the real issue is we risk — as a society and species — treating math equations as a mind.
Worse, because it will simply never be the case that 99.9% of the population will actually understand how the algorithms driving AI work, we will grow to accept it as a kind of magic black box, the contents of which we place our faith in.
Indeed, it is happening already. Peruse the comments in any online discourse or under any news item and you will inevitably see someone post a question and receive a slew of answers asserting that “AI says…”, as though this were an empirical fact check. It ain’t so.
Let me offer a topical example.
This week, the synodal secretariat issued its outline text for the final phase of the global synodal process — yes, that’s still a thing, and a lot more on this in a moment. The document contained the usual amount of impenetrable and obtuse verbiage about “concrete modalities” and similar gibberish.
So, I ran the whole synodal document through an AI detector, and what do you think it found?
“Ah HA!” you might reasonably conclude, “I knew these synodal docs sounded like they were written by glitching robots! Now I have the proof I need to ignore them completely!”
But not so fast.
AI is an unreliable source. And AI detectors are just AI products, so why trust them either? Indeed, I don’t.
So I ran the text through as many AI detectors as I was willing to make time for and wouldn’t you know, one concluded the opposite — that the text was 75% human and 25% robot.
Another announced that the synodal doc was 99% human work, but here’s the kicker: the 1% of the text it flagged as obviously AI were the Gospel quotes.
So according to the robots, the words of Our Lord are AI and the “concrete modalities” are as human as it gets.
My point here is that trusting AI to make any kind of discernment of its own, or render any kind of qualitative assessment of human thought, is a mug’s game.
Here’s the news.
The News
The Vatican’s synod department issued a new document Wednesday defining the steps to be taken ahead of the 2028 “ecclesial assembly” in Rome.
The 6,000-word text details how local Churches should prepare for the event, which is a continuation of the global synodal process launched by Pope Francis in 2021.
Some might be surprised to learn the synodal process was still happening, but it is.
—
Confessionals will not be set up during a youth prayer vigil and other events of Pope Leo’s trip to Spain next month. Instead, “listening centers” will be available for young people who wish to speak with lay pastoral workers dispatched as “listening agents.”
I know.
But a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Madrid, which is organizing the visit, told The Pillar that the listening centers are not meant to replace confession, which is available in the city’s parishes and churches.
—
A 70-year-old deacon in Tulsa pleaded guilty last week to bank fraud and unlawful monetary transactions, after stealing nearly $1.5 million while working at a local Catholic parish.
Deacon John Sommer, the former business manager and parish manager of Christ the King Parish, accepted a plea deal with federal prosecutors on May 13, admitting he used the money to “advance what I believed to be certain potential romantic interests online and [...] invest in cryptocurrency-based ventures.”
Of course he did.
—
American bishops have been scheduled to meet next year with Pope Leo XIV, in the first of the ad limina visits to Rome for U.S. bishops during Leo’s pontificate.
In a May 19 letter, Msgr. Michael Fuller, general secretary of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, told U.S. bishops that while the Vatican had previously indicated quinquennial meetings would not be possible next year, a full schedule of meetings for the bishops of the country’s 196 dioceses has been recently granted.
Read all about the plans right here.
—
Germany’s bishops are months away from a potential showdown with a surging political party they have urged Catholics not to vote for because of its “racial-nationalist” attitudes.
In the state of Saxony-Anhalt the Alternative for Germany party is projected to win the most seats, with the latest poll putting it in first place with 42%, well ahead of the center-right Christian Democratic Union.
Local Bishop Gerhard Feige has described the possibility that Saxony-Anhalt will become the first of Germany’s 16 states to be controlled by the AfD as an “existential” challenge to the Church as the party has proposed eliminating key aspects of the German church tax system.
This is a fascinating story by Luke.
I have been saying for years that the church tax system isn’t, as most assume, the German bishops’ strength, it’s their ultimate vulnerability. I’ve also tried to game out a scenario in which someone (the Holy See) could use the prospect of litigation over the funds to effectively put the German Church in a sleeper hold, if needed.
I had not anticipated the same tactic being considered by a political party — but the AfD aren’t just considering it, they are promising to do it if they get the chance.
This is a big deal, read all about it here.
Prepare your diocese for 2027’s Education Freedom Tax Credits with the Catholic Education Fund. Our turnkey SGO solution provides shared infrastructure, compliance, fundraising, and distribution at scale—delivering national reach with local impact. Don’t navigate this alone. Join our national network of dioceses as a Partner. Let’s grow Catholic education, together.
The beginning of the end
With the publication of this week’s document on the build up to the 2028 “ecclesial assembly” I think the era of the synod on synodality has officially begun to end.
If you want an excellent, entirely human-generated, AI-free digest of the document, what it says, what’s new, and the context, you should obviously read Luke’s expert synthesis.
What I found interesting about the text is the reflexive reaction to it across wings of the ecclesiastical spectrum, which ranged from “Oh no, Leo’s brought the synod back,” to “We are so back, baby.”
Both these readings seem wrong to me.
It’s a simple fact that the synodal timeline was laid out under the previous pontificate and designed, absent direct papal intervention to the contrary, to run on rails until its scheduled conclusion in 2028.
Leo has, it seems to me, pointedly de-emphasized the language and, ahem, “modalities” of the synodal process in his first year of his reign.
In fact, I think he’s tacitly acknowledged the toxicity of the word “synod” by convening this October a meeting of the heads of the world’s bishops conferences in Rome, under his authority and by his invitation, to discuss particular questions around Amoris laetitia. We have a word for this kind of gathering in canon law, it’s called a synod. But Leo isn’t calling it a synod because, I think, people no longer associate the word with its actual meaning — and reasonably so.
Clearly, Leo moving away from “synodality” as it has come to be understood doesn’t mean he’s junking actual synodality — the active and proper pursuit of collaborative exercises of discernment before the exercise of governance by a competent authority. Nor should he, in my estimation.
At the same time, he has to deal with the fallout, excuse me, fruits of the multi-year synod on synodality which clearly sought to assert a kind of deliberative governing authority and charism of quasi infallibility. And it is my assessment that he’s quietly moved to clip the wings of the thing and move it towards a reconciliation with reality, without killing it in its tracks.
Again, I think this is a prudent way of proceeding. Let me explain.