Category: 2024 News

WASHINGTON (OSV News) – Catholic voters are among the key constituencies that candidates are seeking to win in 2024, as surveys and analysts indicate they are on track to be closely divided at the polls.

Catholic voters as a whole have varied in recent presidential elections about which party most of them choose to support. For example, data from the Pew Research Center found that most Catholic voters supported former President Donald Trump in 2016, but more Catholics voted for President Joe Biden in 2020.

Margaret Susan Thompson, an associate professor of history at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, who has studied the intersection of religion and politics in the U.S., told OSV News, “We know that Catholics are probably as divided as the rest of the electorate right now.”

“The election is extremely close by almost any standard and Catholics seem to be in many ways mirroring the American population in that regard,” she said.

Polls of the 2024 contest have shown conflicting data about Catholic voters, but also that similar trends are playing out in this constituency compared to the electorate as a whole.

A poll by the Pew Research Center in September found Trump leading Vice President Kamala Harris 52%-47% among Catholic voters. But Pew’s survey differed from an EWTN News/RealClear Opinion Research survey of Catholic U.S. voters conducted Aug. 28-30, which found 50% of Catholic voters said they plan to support Harris for president, while 43% said they planned to support Trump, with another 6% undecided.

Another poll of Catholic voters in seven battleground states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — by the National Catholic Reporter found these voters favored Trump over Harris 50% to 45%, with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.86%.

But most of those same polls also found partisan gaps widened when divided by demographics such as race and gender. While majorities of white Catholics favored Trump, majorities of Black and Hispanic Catholics said they would support Harris.

Thompson said that the Catholic vote in recent decades has grown less distinct from that of the general electorate, and “Catholics are very representative of the American population these days.”

“I think a lot of Catholics are going to vote for Harris, a lot of Catholics are going to vote for Trump,” she said. “And I don’t know how many of them are going to vote for Harris or Trump because they are Catholic.”

Catholic experts who have spoken with OSV News have alternately drawn points of agreement and tension between the platforms of Harris and Trump with respect to Catholic social teaching, on issues ranging from abortion and in vitro fertilization to immigration to climate and labor.

Pope Francis in September cast the upcoming U.S. election as a choice between the “lesser of two evils,” citing tension with the candidates’ platforms on immigration and abortion as “against life.”

But despite this tension, both campaigns have courted Catholic voters and launched Catholic coalitions. The Trump campaign has on social media made some cultural signals to Catholics, for instance, tweeting the St. Michael prayer. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, is also a convert to Catholicism. Trump and his surrogates have also labeled Harris as anti-Catholic, pointing to her work as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2018, when she scrutinized the nominations of some potential judges over whether their membership in the “all-male” Knights of Columbus, a Catholic charitable organization, could impact their ability to hear cases “fairly and impartially,” citing the organization’s opposition to abortion.

The Harris campaign, Thompson said, has been less overt in targeting specifically Catholic voters, but is trying “to retain the votes that President Biden received” in 2020. Biden, whom Harris serves under, is the country’s second Catholic president.

“I do think one area where the Catholic Church position may — and I really emphasize ‘may’ not ‘will’ — help the Democrats is on immigration,” she said, arguing that the U.S. bishops have long advocated for humane immigration policy and treatment of migrants, even those bishops who sometimes otherwise appear “generally pretty conservative.”

“And of course, so has the Holy Father,” she added, referring to Pope Francis.

Courting Catholic voters was also on display Oct. 17 at the annual Al Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner, a long-standing white-tie fundraiser benefiting Catholic charities. The dinner has a long tradition of welcoming both major party presidential candidates in election years, where the rivals typically exchange lighthearted jabs at one another. But this year, Harris declined to attend the event, sending a video message in which she praised “the tremendous charitable work of the Catholic Church.”

Thompson said that although Trump was in attendance at the event, his remarks included vulgarities and differed from the traditional format of light humor about the other candidate. For example, in 2008, then Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain teased one another but also offered remarks noting their respect for their rival, with Obama praising the “honor and distinction” of McCain’s military service, and McCain praising the historic nature of Obama’s candidacy and his “skill, energy and determination” to achieve it.

Harris instead spent that evening campaigning in Wisconsin, one of the three Rust Belt states along with Michigan and Pennsylvania that are seen as key battlegrounds in 2024.

Of those states, Pennsylvania, nicknamed the Keystone State, might live up to its nickname as the key contest in determining whether Trump or Harris secures the 270 Electoral College votes necessary to be elected president. A significant share of that state’s electorate is Catholic.

Micheal Allison, professor and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Scranton, said the area has a sizable Catholic population. It includes descendants of “particularly European Catholics who came over 100 years ago, 130 years ago,” and then those whose more recent relatives, or they themselves, immigrated to the area, he said, including “a lot from Latin America.”

Asked about how Biden carried both Catholic voters and Pennsylvania in 2020, Allison told OSV News that Biden was arguably “the right person at the right time,” someone who was seen as “a safe, moderate to conservative Democrat, up against someone who had overseen a pretty rough to worse time, particularly under COVID.”

Exit polling from 2020 found that 30% of Pennsylvania voters that year said they were Catholic. Allison said that shows “Catholic voters are going to show up.”

“I think they’re committed to voting,” he said. But he added that “the Catholic population is dwindling.”

“A lot of Catholics — people (who) are baptized and raised Catholic — don’t attend Mass,” he said. “There’s been some alienation from the Catholic Church. So it’s not entirely always clear what people mean (in polling) when they say they’re Catholic, and they’re filling out exit polling, versus how regularly they attend church.”

Pennsylvania, he said, also has strong union ties, which can impact the voting habits of some who might otherwise be more socially conservative.

Thompson added that Catholics, like many voters, likely “have their positions pretty well solidified by now,” but pointed to controversial remarks at an Oct. 27 Trump rally at Madison Square Garden that generated headlines after a comedian who spoke there called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” among other controversial remarks about Latinos and other groups, as something that could affect how the remaining undecided Catholics ultimately vote.

Noting that “a sizable proportion of that population is Catholic,” Thompson said, “Is that going to persuade an undecided Catholic voter to say, ‘Well, having heard that, I’m definitely going to vote for the Republicans?’ Frankly, I don’t think so.”

Election Day is Nov. 5.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The Catholic Church must put more effort into ensuring that the sacrament of confirmation is not the “sacrament of goodbye” for young people, who receive it and then do not come to church again until they want to get married, Pope Francis said.

“The problem is how to ensure that the sacrament of confirmation is not reduced, in practice, to ‘last rites,’ that is the sacrament of ‘departure’ from the church, but is rather the sacrament of the beginning of an active participation in its life,” he said Oct. 30 at his weekly general audience.

Continuing a series of audience talks about the Holy Spirit in the life of the church, the pope said parishes need to identify laypeople “who have had a personal encounter with Christ and have had a true experience of the Spirit,” and ask them to lead the confirmation preparation classes.

But all Catholics must help as well by rekindling the “flame” of the Holy Spirit that they received at confirmation like the disciples received at Pentecost, he said. And the Holy Year 2025, which opens Dec. 24, is a good time to do that.

“Here is a good goal for the Jubilee Year: To remove the ashes of habit and disengagement, to become, like the torchbearers at the Olympics, bearers of the flame of the Spirit,” he said. “May the Spirit help us to take a few steps in this direction!”

“Confirmation is for all the faithful what Pentecost was for the entire church,” the pope said, quoting the Italian bishops’ catechism for adults. “It strengthens the baptismal incorporation into Christ and the church and the consecration to the prophetic, royal and priestly mission.”

In other words, he told Arab speakers, “Through the sacrament of confirmation, the Holy Spirit consecrates and strengthens us, making us active participants in the church’s mission.”

Greeting a group of ethnic Croatian young people who had recently been confirmed in Germany, Pope Francis prayed that the Holy Spirit would “inflame your hearts and make you joyful witnesses for Christ.”

Urging everyone present in St. Peter’s Square to continue to pray for peace in Ukraine, Palestine, Israel and Myanmar, the pope said he had just read about 150 people being gunned down.

Pope Francis did not say where, but some assumed he was referring to a terrorist attack Oct. 6 in the village of Manni, Burkina Faso, while Vatican News reported he was referring to Israeli attacks on northern Gaza.

“What do children, families, have to do with war?” the pope asked. “They are the first victims. Let us pray for peace.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Highlighting progress made in safeguarding and recommendations for rectifying ongoing gaps, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors dedicated its first annual report to all victims and survivors of sexual abuse by members of the Catholic Church.

“The commission’s work — including this report — is and always has been about recognition and inclusion of victims and survivors of abuse in the life of the church,” Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, president of the pontifical commission, said at a news conference at the Vatican Oct. 29.

“Your suffering and wounds have opened our eyes to the fact that as a church we have failed to care for victims, and that we didn’t defend you, and that we resisted understanding you when you needed us most,” he said.

“We praise your courageous testimony, and at the same time, we recognize that you are likely tired of empty words,” the cardinal said. “Nothing we do will ever be enough to fully repair what has happened, but we hope that this report and those that will come, compiled with the help of victims and survivors at the center, will help to ensure the firm commitment that these events never happen again in the church.”

The cardinal and other members of the commission presented their pilot annual report, a tool mandated by Pope Francis to measure and document the church’s progress in safeguarding minors and vulnerable adults around the world.

“The pilot report is not intended as an audit of the incidence of abuse within church contexts,” the report said. “This is especially due to time and capacity constraints” and “to a lack of reliable data in some countries, most notably reliable statistics on the number of children who are sexually abused.”

“Hopefully, future reports will address the incidence of abuse, including the question of progress in reducing and preventing abuse,” which might better fulfill “the long-term auditing function of the commission,” it said.

The 100-page report produced detailed “profiles” covering about two dozen church entities.

The commission compiled information about safeguarding received from the about 17 bishops’ conferences whose members visited Rome for their “ad limina” visits in 2023, and it also sent questionnaires, reviewed safeguarding guidelines and exchanged information with: the Consolata Missionary Sisters and the Spiritan priests and brothers; the dicasteries for the Doctrine of the Faith and Clergy; Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican-based confederation of the church’s humanitarian agencies; and three other Caritas entities — one each at the regional, national and diocesan levels.

The report also collected information and “trends” from the commission’s four regional groups of local experts. Among the positive global trends the groups noted are greater collaboration between bishops’ and religious conferences in safeguarding and a shift toward understanding safeguarding is about protecting human rights and dignity.

Some global “challenges” the groups found included: long delays in processing abuse cases by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith; lack of resources for safeguarding training; clericalism and prioritizing the church’s reputation over supporting victims and survivors; lack of effective measures in current safeguarding activities to address abuse online; and inadequate formation to help clergy in understanding and promoting safeguarding.

“While some serious studies of abuse prevalence have been conducted in local churches” in Europe, “there remains a persistent absence of reliable statistics about the scale of abuse by clerics and religious in several parts of the region,” the report said.

In fact, the lack of data or the inability to access available data on sexual abuse by members of the church, it said, is a major hindrance to the empirical-based approach the commission depends on for formulating recommendations and strengthening policies.

Data is what helps the commission track “which initiatives are working and those that are falling short,” Cardinal O’Malley wrote in the report. By compiling progress made and gaps to fill, the commission aims to promote transparency and accountability, “and be a sign of our commitment to restore the hope and trust of victims,” their families and communities.

The commission expects the bulk of each year’s report to be based on the information it manages to receive — as not all diocesan bishops responded to the commission’s questionnaire — from bishops ahead of and during their ad limina visits to Rome. It will also canvas other dicasteries, religious institutes and lay Catholic associations to be included each year.

The commission’s report proposed seven key areas for further study and action, emphasizing that its staff and experts were available to help all levels of the church.

Among the top priorities, the report said is: “access to the truth,” especially for victims wanting information about their allegations of abuse and the status of their alleged abuser; a clear, uniform definition of what constitutes a “vulnerable adult”; a shared protocol that clarifies the different responsibilities of dicasteries in the Roman Curia and of the local church; “the need for a disciplinary or administrative proceeding that provides an efficient path for resignation or removal from office” of church leaders; and promoting the theological-pastoral vision of child dignity and human rights in relation to abuse, perhaps with an encyclical dedicated to the protection of children and vulnerable adults in the church’s life.

A key goal of the annual report is to track and foster “pastoral conversion, a change of heart of overcoming our sinful past” while also encouraging continued steps, recognizing “there is still much needing to be done,” Cardinal O’Malley said.

Known as “conversional justice,” the process of conversion must include the practice of telling the truth, pursuing justice, making reparations and guaranteeing abuse does not happen again, “in other words, institutional reform,” said Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, a commission member and a lawyer from the Netherlands, who was the U.N. special rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children from 2014 to 2020.

Juan Carlos Cruz, another commission member, communications executive and abuse survivor, said that it is true that the annual report is “not perfect” and is just “the tip of the iceberg” with so much more to do.

But, he said, “I’ve realized that there are many more good people in the church, many more good people, than bad.”

“What happens is if the good people don’t talk, they don’t speak and they don’t do things like this report, the bad people are very good at doing their evil, so they win,” he said.

Encouraging other victims to tell their stories, Cruz said that people must keep “bringing light where many wanted darkness.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Two days after opening the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica to inaugurate the Holy Year 2025, Pope Francis will travel to a Rome prison to open a Holy Door as a “tangible sign of the message of hope” for people in prisons around the world, the Vatican announced.

The pope will go Dec. 26 to Rebibbia prison on the outskirts of Rome, “a symbol of all the prisons dispersed throughout the world,” to deliver a message of hope to prisoners, Archbishop Rino Fisichella, pro-prefect of the Dicastery for Evangelization’s section for new evangelization and the chief organizer of the Holy Year 2025, announced at a news conference Oct. 28.

Pope Francis will open the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica Dec. 24. He will then open the Holy Doors at the major basilicas of St. John Lateran Dec. 29, St. Mary Major Jan. 1 and St. Paul Outside the Walls Jan. 5.

In his “bull of indiction,” the document formally proclaiming the Holy Year 2025, Pope Francis wrote that during the Holy Year he will have close to his heart “prisoners who, deprived of their freedom, feel daily the harshness of detention and its restrictions, lack of affection and, in more than a few cases, lack of respect for their persons.”

In the document, the pope also called on governments to “undertake initiatives aimed at restoring hope” for incarcerated persons during the Holy Year, such as expanding forms of amnesty and social reintegration programs.

Archbishop Fisichella announced that the Vatican had signed an agreement with Italy’s minister of justice and the government commissioner for Rome to implement reintegration programs for incarcerated individuals by involving their participation in activities during the Jubilee Year.

The archbishop also outlined the schedule of cultural offerings leading up to the Jubilee Year, during which the city of Rome estimates that 30 million people will visit the Italian capital.

The Vatican will organize a concert of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, to be performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in Rome Nov. 3; three art exhibitions in November and December, including a display of rare Christian icons from the collection of the Vatican Museums; and a concert from the Sistine Chapel Choir two days before the opening of the Holy Door.

Archbishop Fisichella also unveiled the official mascot of the Holy Year 2025: “Luce” (Italian for light), a cartoon pilgrim dressed in a yellow raincoat, mud-stained boots, wearing a missionary cross and holding a pilgrim’s staff. Luce’s glowing eyes feature the shape of scallop shells, a traditional symbol of pilgrimage and hope.

The mascot, he said, was inspired by the church’s desire “to live even within the pop culture so beloved by our youth.”

“Luce” will also serve as the mascot of the Holy See’s pavilion at Expo 2025, which will take place in Osaka, Japan, from April to October 2025. The Holy See pavilion — which will be hosted inside of Italy’s national pavilion — will have the theme “Beauty brings hope,” and display the 17th-century painting “The Entombment of Christ” by Caravaggio — the only one of his works housed in the Vatican Museums.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – After members of the Synod of Bishops approved their final document, Pope Francis announced that he would not write the customary post-synodal apostolic exhortation but would offer the final document to the entire church to implement.

“There are already highly concrete indications in the document that can be a guide for the mission of the churches in the different continents and contexts,” he told synod members late Oct. 26.

“For that reason, I do not intend to publish an apostolic exhortation. What we have approved is enough,” he said. Instead, he ordered the publication of the synod’s final document.

With the exceptions of the first synods convoked by St. Paul VI in 1967 and 1971, all ordinary assemblies of the Synod of Bishops have been followed by an exhortation on the synod’s themes and discussions by the pope.

Members of the synod on synodality, after meeting for a month in 2023 and again from Oct. 2-26, approved their final document by voting on each of the 155 paragraphs. All paragraphs passed with the approval of more than two-thirds of the members present and voting.

The document presented synodality as a style of Christian life and ministry based on the “equal dignity of all the baptized” and a recognition that they all have something to offer to the mission of proclaiming salvation in Christ.

The practical suggestions included making pastoral councils mandatory for every parish and ensuring the bodies are truly representative of the parish members, recognizing the contributions of women to the life and ministry of the church and hiring more women and laymen to teach in seminaries.

The 10 study groups the pope set up in the spring to research some of the more complicated issues raised by the synod — women’s ministry, seminary education, relations between bishops and religious communities, the role of nuncios — will continue to work before offering him proposals, the pope said. “Time is needed, to arrive at choices that involve the whole church.”

However, he promised that “this is not the classical way of postponing decisions indefinitely.”

Instead, he told synod members, it “corresponds to the synodal style with which even the Petrine ministry is to be exercised: listening, convening, discerning, deciding and evaluating. And in these steps, pauses, silences, prayer are necessary. It is a style that we are learning together, little by little.”

Much of the 2021-2023 process for the synod on synodality, the pope said, involved listening sessions on a parish, diocesan, national and continental level and included helping synod members themselves learn to listen to each other respectfully and listening for the voice of the Holy Spirit in those conversations.

The final document “is a triple gift,” he said, one given to him first of all. “The bishop of Rome, I often remind myself, needs to practice listening and wants to practice listening so as to respond each day to the words of the Lord, ‘Confirm your brothers and sisters in the faith. Feed my sheep.'”

The task of the pope, he said, “is to safeguard and promote — as St. Basil teaches us — the harmony that the Spirit continues to spread in God’s church, in relations among the churches, despite all the struggles, tensions and divisions that mark its journey toward the full manifestation of the Kingdom of God, which the vision of the Prophet Isaiah invites us to imagine as a banquet prepared by God for all peoples — all, with the hope that no one is missing.”

Pope Francis repeated the phrase that has become a refrain since he first said it at World Youth Day in Portugal in 2023: “Everyone, everyone, everyone! No one excluded, everyone.”

Harmony is the goal, he said, not uniformity. It is a sign of the Holy Spirit, just as it was on Pentecost when people of different nations heard the disciples proclaiming the wondrous works of God in their own languages.

The church, the pope said, “a sign and instrument of how God has already set the table and is waiting. His grace, through the Spirit, whispers words of love into the heart of each person. It is given to us to amplify the voice of this whisper, without hindering it; to open doors, without erecting walls.”

“How bad it is when women and men of the church erect walls,” he said. The Gospel is for “everyone, everyone, everyone! We must not behave as if we were dispensers of grace who appropriate the treasure and tie the hands of the merciful God.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Parishes and dioceses must move quickly to give life to the consultative bodies and broad participation in mission and ministry already foreseen by church law if the Catholic Church is to have any hope of becoming a more “synodal” church, members of the Synod of Bishops said.

“Without concrete changes in the short term, the vision of a synodal Church will not be credible and this will alienate those members of the People of God who have drawn strength and hope from the synodal journey,” the members said in the final document they approved Oct. 26.

Pope Francis convoked the synod in 2021 and called on parishes, dioceses and bishops’ conferences to hold listening sessions before the first synod assembly in Rome in 2023. The current assembly, including most of the same members, began with a Mass at the Vatican Oct. 2.

Members voted on each of the 155 paragraphs of the document, which made suggestions and requests to Pope Francis that included long-term projects, such as continuing discernment about the possibility of women deacons, the need to reform seminary training and the hope that more lay people would be involved in the selection of bishops.

But they also included actions that could and should be implemented immediately, including hiring more women and laymen to teach in seminaries or having bishops make pastoral councils mandatory for every parish and pastors ensuring those bodies are truly representative of the parish members and that he listens to their advice.

Synod officials said all the paragraphs were approved by the necessary two-thirds of synod members present and voting; 355 members were present and voting, so passage required 237 votes. A paragraph devoted to increasing women’s profile in the church received, by far, the most negative votes of any paragraph with 97 members voting no and 258 voting yes. The paragraph, which required 66% of the votes, passed with 72%.

“In simple and concise terms,” members said, “synodality is a path of spiritual renewal and structural reform that enables the Church to be more participatory and missionary, so that it can walk with every man and woman, radiating the light of Christ.”

In a synodal church, the document said, members have different roles, but they work together for the good of all members and for the mission of the church.

Like the synthesis report from the first assembly of the synod in 2023, the final document did not use the term “LGBTQ” or even “homosexuality” and spoke only briefly about the need to reach out to people who “experience the pain of feeling excluded or judged because of their marital situation, identity or sexuality.”

The document repeatedly referred to the “equal dignity” of men and women by virtue of their baptism and insisted the Catholic Church needed to do more to recognize women’s contributions to the life and mission of the church and their potential to offer more.

“Women continue to encounter obstacles in obtaining a fuller recognition of their charisms, vocation and roles in all the various areas of the Church’s life,” it said. “This is to the detriment of serving the Church’s shared mission.”

Members of the synod called for the “full implementation of all the opportunities already provided for in Canon Law with regard to the role of women,” and said, “there is no reason or impediment that should prevent women from carrying out leadership roles in the Church. What comes from the Holy Spirit cannot be stopped.”

“Additionally, the question of women’s access to diaconal ministry remains open,” they said. “This discernment needs to continue.”

The question of women deacons was among several questions Pope Francis assigned to study groups last spring. Synod members asked the General Secretariat of the Synod “to continue to watch over the synodal quality of the working method of the study groups,” which are supposed to report to the pope in June.

The synod process, members said, was a “call to joy and renewal of the Church in following the Lord, in committing to service of His mission and in searching for ways to be faithful.”

But the document repeatedly acknowledged the crime and sin of clerical sexual abuse and abuse of power, and insisted that a commitment to synodality, particularly to learning to listen and to necessary forms of transparency and accountability, were essential to preventing abuse.

Synodality, members said, “will also help to overcome clericalism, understood as use of power to one’s own advantage and the distortion of the authority of the Church which is at the service of the People of God. This expresses itself above all in forms of abuse, be they sexual or economic, the abuse of conscience and of power, by ministers of the Church.”

Lay men and women have many talents that can and should assist bishops and parish priests in the smooth functioning of their dioceses or parishes, synod members said. Tapping into those talents can help bishops and priests, who often feel overworked.

Where church law requires the bishops to consult their priests’ or pastoral council or pastors to consult the parish council, the document said, they “may not act as if the consultation had not taken place.”

“As in any community that lives according to justice,” it said, “the exercise of authority does not consist in an arbitrary imposition of will.”

Synod members also said listening, consulting, praying and discerning before making a decision is not the end of the process. “It must be accompanied and followed by practices of accountability and evaluation in a spirit of transparency inspired by evangelical criteria.”

Ensuring accountability and regularly evaluating all those who minister in the church’s name “is not a bureaucratic task for its own sake. It is rather a communication effort that proves to be a powerful educational tool for bringing about a change in culture,” synod members said.

One issue that prompted debate during the synod involved the authority of national bishops’ conference, particularly when it came to doctrinal matters.

The synod members, in the final document, called for a study of the theological and juridical status of bishops’ conferences and for a clear definition of “precisely the domain of the doctrinal and disciplinary competence” of the conferences.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – The Catholic Church has a valuable role to play in providing “clear moral leadership” to protect humanity from the negative impact of new technology, a leading AI researcher said under the vaulted ceiling of the Pontifical Academy for Sciences headquarters in the Vatican Gardens.

“You could have made so much money on human cloning; the Catholic Church came out against it, all countries are against it, it’s illegal everywhere, we do not have a problem with that,” said Max Tegmark, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and president of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to reducing existential risks from advanced technologies.

Speaking at a forum on artificial intelligence development Oct. 24, Tegmark said that today, in the AI age, the church must advocate for pausing further developments in artificial general intelligence — a form of AI which surpasses human cognitive capabilities across many tasks — and computer superintelligence “at least until maybe one day someone will figure out how it can be controlled or aligned.”

Otherwise, he said, “we have no idea how to keep things like that under control.”

Leaders in the tech industry, church officials, ethicists and entrepreneurs gathered at the Vatican for a conference on ethical AI development Oct. 24-25, hosted at the Pontifical Academy for Sciences.

AI, and its perils and promises, have become an increasingly important area of concern for the Vatican. Pope Francis dedicated his message for World Day of Peace Jan. 1 to the theme of artificial intelligence and peace, and he spoke about AI to world leaders at the G7 summit in southern Italy in June.

At the conference Oct. 24, Taylor Black, director of AI and venture ecosystems at Microsoft, noted how few people in the technology industry “think of persons in a holistic sort of way because we think that a whole bunch of things about what makes a person a person are outside of the purview of tech, whether that’s correct or incorrect.”

That is why the advent of artificial intelligence is a “fantastic opportunity” for the church, he said, since “tech has to come to the only place where the person is really understood and where we have paths to further understand the human person.”

One way in which unchecked AI development could harm the dignity of the human person is by replacing large swaths of the workforce without providing any kind of fallback for people put out of work, said Anthony J. Granado, associate general secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholics Bishops.

Artificial intelligence, he told Catholic News Service, “should supplement what humans do, it should not replace humans,” he said, noting how the U.S. bishops’ conference is currently looking at ways to “minimize the impact” of artificial intelligence on job losses.

A 2023 Goldman Sachs report estimated that artificial intelligence could replace the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs while increasing the total annual value of goods and services produced globally by 7%.

Yet he noted that AI also holds potential benefits for the church, such as being a “great tool for helping to promote catechesis.”

“The church throughout all of human history has to look at and read the signs of the times and use those opportunities to promote the Gospel in different ways, so AI will be one of those frontiers where the Gospel will need to be preached,” Granado told CNS.

Addressing the church’s dual role in embracing but also ethically guiding the development of AI, Dominican Father Eric Solobir, chairman of the Human Technology Foundation’s executive committee, said the church must work with the tech industry to “align the planets” between its profitability and ethics.

“We need to try to create a paradigm shift to change the ethical software” of the tech industry, he said, which tends to be consequentialist and prioritize long-term gains to the point of ignoring immediate harm caused by certain decisions.

Father Solobir recalled engaging with tech leaders on matters of ethics, explaining that people in the tech industry would typically gauge the permissiveness of an action on its legality and not in terms of promoting human flourishing.

The church, he said, “can put some drops of this virtue ethics in their process of reflection, and that completely changes how one deals with the ethics of technology.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – A world that has become “heartless” and indifferent to greed and war, and a Catholic Church in need of revitalizing its missionary joy need to open themselves up to Christ’s infinite love, Pope Francis wrote.

By contemplating Jesus’ Sacred Heart, the faithful can be filled with the “living water that can heal the hurt we have caused, strengthen our ability to love and serve others, and inspire us to journey together toward a just, solidary and fraternal world,” the pope wrote in his encyclical, “‘Dilexit nos’ (‘He loved us’): on the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ.”

The Vatican released the 28,000-word text Oct. 24.

While it is the pope’s fourth encyclical, he wrote that it is meant to be understood in tandem with his previous two encyclicals, “Laudato Si’, on Care for Our Common Home” and “Fratelli Tutti, on Fraternity and Social Friendship.”

“The present document can help us see that the teaching of the social encyclicals … is not unrelated to our encounter with the love of Jesus Christ,” he wrote. “For it is by drinking of that same love that we become capable of forging bonds of fraternity, of recognizing the dignity of each human being, and of working together to care for our common home.”

The pope had said in June, the month the church traditionally dedicates to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, that he was going to release a document in the fall on the devotion to “illuminate the path of ecclesial renewal, but also to say something significant to a world that seems to have lost its heart.”

The encyclical includes numerous reflections from the Bible, previous magisterial texts and the writings of saints and his fellow Jesuits, to re-propose to the whole church the centuries-old devotion. Since 1899, there have been four papal encyclicals and numerous papal texts dedicated to the Sacred Heart — a symbol of Jesus’ infinite love, which moves the faithful to love one another.

“In the deepest fiber of our being, we were made to love and to be loved,” the pope wrote.

However, he wrote, “when we witness the outbreak of new wars, with the complicity, tolerance or indifference of other countries, or petty power struggles over partisan interests, we may be tempted to conclude that our world is losing its heart.”

“It is heartbreaking,” he wrote, to see elderly women, who should be enjoying their golden years, experiencing the anguish, fear and outrage of war. “To see these elderly women weep, and not feel that this is something intolerable, is a sign of a world that has grown heartless.”

“The most decisive question we can ask is, ‘Do I have a heart?'” the pope wrote.

The human being is more than an instrument, a material body and a carrier of intelligence and reason, the pope wrote.

The human person also embodies spiritual, emotional, creative and affective dimensions that are often undervalued, neglected or squelched in today’s world, he wrote. It is the heart that integrates all these dimensions that are so often fragmented or neglected.

The most precious treasures that animate and dwell in the human heart are often the simple and poignant moments in life: “How we first used a fork to seal the edges of the pies that we helped our mothers or grandmothers to make at home”; “a smile we elicited by telling a joke”; “the worms we collected in a shoebox”; and “a wish we made in plucking a daisy.”

“All these little things, ordinary in themselves yet extraordinary for us, can never be captured by algorithms” and artificial intelligence, he wrote, and, in fact, “poetry and love are necessary to save our humanity,” not just reason and technology.

At a Vatican news conference presenting the encyclical Oct. 24, Archbishop Bruno Forte of Chieti-Vasto, Italy, said the document is a “compendium” and the “key” to understanding Pope Francis’ pontificate.

Some commentators criticize the pope for focusing too narrowly on “social” issues, the archbishop said. This encyclical explicitly presents the spiritual and theological foundation underlying the pope’s message to the church and the world for the past 12 years – that everything “springs from Christ and his love for all humanity.”

Many saints and religious congregations have a special devotion to the Sacred Heart, including St. Ignatius of Loyola and the Society of Jesus, the religious order the saint co-founded and to which Pope Francis belonged.

St. Ignatius’ spiritual exercises encourage people to “enter into the heart of Christ” to “enlarge our own hearts” and train them to “sense and savor” the Gospel message and “converse about it with the Lord,” the pope wrote.

Christ’s heart is aflame with infinite love, and Christ desires to be loved and consoled in return, the pope said, especially by loving and serving one’s neighbors and those who are most marginalized.

Jesus associated with “the lowest ranks of society,” he wrote, introducing the “great novelty of recognizing the dignity of every person, especially those who were considered ‘unworthy.'”

“In union with Christ, amid the ruins we have left in this world by our sins, we are called to build a new civilization of love,” the pope wrote. “That is what it means to make reparation as the heart of Christ would have us do.”

“Amid the devastation wrought by evil, the heart of Christ desires that we cooperate with him in restoring goodness and beauty to our world,” Pope Francis wrote.

The encyclical was published as members of the Synod of Bishops were wrapping up a multiyear process focused on fostering “a synodal Church: communion, participation and mission.”

In his encyclical, the pope emphasized how only a deep and abiding love in the Lord can inspire and fuel Catholics to share the Gospel and God’s love with the world.

Mission requires missionaries who are “enthralled by Christ” and are “impatient when time is wasted discussing secondary questions or concentrating on truths and rules because their greatest concern is to share what they have experienced,” he wrote.

“They want others to perceive the goodness and beauty of the Beloved through their efforts, however inadequate they may be,” he wrote.

The heart of Christ also frees Catholics from the problem of communities and pastors who are “excessively caught up in external activities, structural reforms that have little to do with the Gospel, obsessive reorganization plans, worldly projects, secular ways of thinking and mandatory programs,” he wrote.

“The result is often a Christianity stripped of the tender consolations of faith, the joy of serving others, the fervor of personal commitment to mission, the beauty of knowing Christ and the profound gratitude born of the friendship he offers and the ultimate meaning he gives to our lives,” he added.

Pope Francis invited Catholics to rediscover or strengthen their devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the practices connected with it, particularly Eucharistic adoration and receiving the Eucharist on the first Friday of each month.

This practice once served to remind the faithful that Communion was not a reward for the perfect, he wrote, but to renew people’s confidence in the “merciful and ever-present love” of Christ in the Eucharist and his invitation “to union with him.”

Today the First Fridays devotion, he wrote, can help counter “the frenetic pace of today’s world and our obsession with free time, consumption and diversion, cell phones and social media (and) we forget to nourish our lives with the strength of the Eucharist.”

 

Editor’s Note: To read the full encyclical in English, click here. 

Editor’s Note: To read the full encyclical in Spanish, click here.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Even if some members of the Synod of Bishops end up feeling disappointed by the results of the synod, “God’s providence is at work in this assembly, bringing us to the Kingdom in ways that God alone knows,” the spiritual adviser to the synod on synodality told them.

“The triumph of the good cannot be frustrated,” and “we may be at peace whatever the result” of the synod’s monthlong second session, said Cardinal-designate Timothy Radcliffe, offering his morning reflection in the Vatican’s Paul VI Audience Hall Oct. 21 before members began reading, discussing, amending and voting on the final document to be presented to Pope Francis Oct. 26.

He also cautioned people, especially the media, against trying to look for “startling decisions, headlines” to come out of the final text, saying, at a Vatican briefing with reporters, that that would be a mistake.

The document will need to be read as something seeking to bring deep renewal of the church not “through dramatic decisions, but it evokes new ways of being a church in which we relate to each other much more profoundly in Christ and to Christ much more profoundly with each other,” he said at the afternoon briefing.

“I think many people in the synod, out of the synod, in the church, still struggle to understand the nature of the synod. They still tend to see it as a parliamentary body which will make big administrative, structural changes. I think it’s natural because that’s the model that dominates our world,” he told reporters. “But we’ve seen and it’s been repeated endlessly that is not the sort of body it is.”

The world is experiencing growing “violence and war, social disintegration. You’ve only to look at the election process in the United States to see how there is a danger of social collapse,” he said. “In this perilous difficult moment, I think the church has a very particular vocation to be a sign of Christ’s peace and Christ’s communion and that means all sorts of steps which will not make headlines.”

The Dominican theologian helped open the final week of the Oct. 2-27 assembly with a reflection in the morning on how members should embrace their freedom and responsibility.

“Christ has set us free,” he said, and “our mission is to preach and embody this freedom.”

This freedom, however, has two features: “It is the freedom to say what we believe and to listen without fear to what others say, in mutual respect,” he said, and it is the freedom of knowing that God always works for the good of those who love God.

“God’s providence is gently, silently at work even when things seem to go wrong,” Cardinal-designate Radcliffe said.

“If we have only the freedom to argue for our positions, we shall be tempted by the arrogance of those who, in the words of (Jesuit Father Henri) de Lubac, see themselves as ‘the incarnate norm of orthodoxy.’ We shall end up beating the drums of ideology, whether of the left or the right,” he said.

“If we have only the freedom of those who trust in God’s providence but dare not wade into the debate with our own convictions, we shall be irresponsible and never grow up,” he added. “God’s freedom works in the core of our own freedom, welling up inside us.”

“The more it is truly of God, the more it is truly our own,” he said, pointing to some lessons offered by two theologians who had been silenced and shunned at one point by the Catholic Church’s hierarchy — popes and Vatican officials — in Rome.

The late Dominican Father Yves Congar wrote “that the only response to this persecution was ‘to speak the truth. Prudently, without provocative and useless scandal. But to remain — and to become more and more — an authentic and pure witness to what which is true,'” he said.

This shows, he said, “we need not be afraid of disagreement, for the Holy Spirit is at work even in that.”

And the late Father de Lubac, who also “endured persecution,” wrote that “far from losing patience,” the one who is being persecuted “will try to keep the peace” and strive “to retain a mind bigger than its own ideas,” the cardinal-designate said.

A Christian must cultivate the freedom to transcend himself and avoid “‘the terrible self-sufficiency which might lead him to see himself as the incarnate norm of orthodoxy,’ for he will put ‘the indissoluble bond of Catholic peace’ above all things,” he said.

“Often we can have no idea as to how God’s providence is at work in our lives. We do what we believe to be right and the rest is in the hands of the Lord,” he said.

“This is just one synod. There will be others. We do not have to do everything, just take the next step,” he said, and those who come after will “go on beginning. How, we do not know. That is God’s business.”

VATICAN CITY (CNS) – Pope Francis called on the faithful to yearn to serve, not thirst for power, as he proclaimed 14 new saints, including Canada-born St. Marie-Léonie Paradis, founder of the Little Sisters of the Holy Family, and 11 martyrs.

“Those who dominate do not win, only those who serve out of love,” he said Oct. 20.

“When we learn to serve, our every gesture of attention and care, every expression of tenderness, every work of mercy becomes a reflection of God’s love,” he said. “And so, we continue Jesus’ work in the world.”

The pope said the new saints lived Jesus’ way of service. “The faith and the apostolate they carried out did not feed their worldly desires and hunger for power but, on the contrary, they made themselves servants of their brothers and sisters, creative in doing the good, steadfast in difficulties and generous to the end.”

On World Mission Sunday in St. Peter’s Square, during the synod on synodality, the pope created the following new saints:

— Italian missionary Giuseppe Allamano (1851-1926) founder of the Consolata Missionaries.

— Eight Franciscan friars, including Manuel Ruiz López, and three Maronite laymen who were martyred in Syria in 1860. Seven of the Franciscans were from Spain and one was from Austria while the Maronite laymen were blood brothers. They were murdered in St. Paul’s Church and convent in Damascus the night between July 9 and 10, 1860, by Druze militants.

— Canada-born Mother Marie-Léonie Paradis, founder of the Little Sisters of the Holy Family. Born in L’Acadie, Quebec, in 1840, she had various teaching assignments in Canada before being sent to teach at St. Vincent’s orphanage in New York. She died in 1912 in Sherbrooke, Canada.

— Sister Elena Guerra (1835-1914), an Italian nun who founded the Oblates of the Holy Spirit.

Tens of thousands of people attended the Mass, including the more than 300 cardinals, bishops and others taking part in the Oct. 2-27 synod on synodality. Dignitaries from Canada, Spain and Italy, including Italian President Sergio Mattarella, were present for the canonization and Mass.

In his homily, the pope pointed to the new saints as inspiring examples of “men and women who served in martyrdom and in joy” and who remained faithful servants “throughout the troubled history of humanity.”

“This is what we should yearn for: not power, but service. Service is the Christian way of life,” he said.

Jesus listened to his disciples and asked them questions that revealed what was truly in their hearts, the “hidden expectations and dreams of glory” they secretly cultivated, the pope said. “Many times in the church, these thoughts (desiring) honor, power emerge.”

But Jesus helps change their perspective by revealing he was not the Messiah of worldly power and victory, the pope said. “He is the God of love, who stoops down to reach the one who has sunk low, who makes himself weak to raise up the weak, who works for peace and not for war, who has come to serve and not to be served.”

Jesus’ teachings about service, Pope Francis said, “are often incomprehensible to us as they were to the disciples, yet by following him, by walking in his footsteps and welcoming the gift of his love that transforms our way of thinking, we too can learn God’s way of service.”

Serving others is “not about a list of things to do” that can be checked off and completed so that person can say he or she did his or her part, he said.

Service isn’t a job, it does not “just do things to bring about results, it is not occasional,” he said. It is “born from love, and love knows no bounds, it makes no calculations, it spends, and it gives.”

Before leading the recitation of the Angelus after Mass, the pope urged Catholics to support the world’s missionaries with their prayers and concrete assistance. These men and women bring the Gospel message “often with great sacrifice.”

And, he said, every Christian is called to take part in this mission by being courageous and joyful witnesses to the Gospel in every aspect of their life.

“We continue to pray for people who suffer because of war,” he said, such as “martyred Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, martyred Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar and all the others.”

The pope also appealed to political and civil authorities in the Amazon region to guarantee the protection of the Indigenous peoples in the Amazon, including their fundamental rights, “against every kind of exploitation of their dignity and their territories.”

The pope highlighted the presence at the Mass of representatives of the Yanomami people, an Indigenous ethnic group living in the forest between Brazil and Venezuela. The second miracle needed for the canonization of St. Allamano involved a member of the community, Sorino Yanomami, who had been seriously wounded in the head by a jaguar and survived.