Should priests use A.I. for homily help? A Silicon Valley pastor explains how and how not to

“If you don’t spend time writing your homily today and you just get up and give it, ask ChatGPT or Claude—they’re gonna do a better job than you,” Father Brendan McGuire says. In the third episode of our series on Preaching for Missionary Discipleship, host Ricardo da Silva, S.J., welcomes Father McGuire, pastor of St. Simon Parish in Los Altos, Calif., and a former Silicon Valley technology executive who now advises the Vatican and Anthropic on A.I. ethics. A longtime teacher of homiletics, Father McGuire recently led formation sessions for Jesuit scholastics in Florence on using A.I. in homily prep—and brings that teaching here, making the case for a disciplined “deep prompt,” built from a preacher’s own best homilies, over a “thin prompt” that produces something generic and derivative.

Timecodes:
0:00 AI may prepare a better homily than you
2:29 Meet the Silicon Valley priest advising Anthropic and the Vatican
4:00 Recalling his first homilies — 30 years ago
8:20 Preaching as an ‘art’
11:41 Preaching that leads to “missionary discipleship”
15:33 Not just the words of the homily — but the delivery
18:20 A nun challenges him to change how he preaches
23:00 AI homilies: Yes or No? 25:19
25:58 AI homilies: thin prompts vs. deep prompts
30:10 AI Hallucination and scriptural analysis
37:20 What are the ethical guardrails for an AI homily?

Links from the show:
Father Brendan McGuire’s homilies