A parent approached Christina Lamas after a Spanish-language seminar on artificial intelligence in February at the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress. The mother was in tears. She felt her daughter had replaced her with A.I., spending hours in her room confiding in a chatbot.
“She said, ‘I don’t know how to compete with the chat,’” Ms. Lamas, the executive director of the National Federation of Catholic Youth Ministry, told America. “This bot that she said is now her go-to. It’s her friend.”
According to Pew Research, 64 percent of teenagers already use A.I. chatbots, and 54 percent have used them for school work. Instead of chatbots, Ms. Lamas said, this generation needs help navigating friendships, including misunderstandings, forgiveness and working through real conflict.
Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” comes at the perfect time, she said, though Catholics serving in various ministerial settings have already begun implementing the technology in their work. The encyclical stresses the dignity of the human person and the need to focus on the common good in the wake of A.I.
“Technology should not be considered, in itself, as a force antagonistic to humanity,” the pope wrote early in the document, adding later, “We must learn, then, how to exercise restraint in the use of AI and to protect our young people from the promise of the perfect machine, from that subtle temptation which renders human thought seemingly superfluous precisely when it is most needed.”
In youth ministry, Ms. Lamas said, it is now common for volunteers to step into roles once filled by paid full-time employees. At times, she said, youth ministry volunteers rely on A.I. to fill the gap.
“You find a tool that you can insert a topic into and say, ‘Put together a theme for youth night on this topic,’ and it easily spits it out for you,” Ms. Lamas said. “And so now you have something tangible that you can show up with.”
But A.I., she said, recalling something she read recently, should be more of an editor, not a creator.
“The risk is that some folks are using it more as a creator to generate content and are not always spending the time to verify that the content is authentically Catholic and that it is grounded in church teaching and that the Scripture is correct,” Ms. Lamas said. But authentic teaching about the Catholic faith is what young people expect from their elders.
Despite the pitfalls, Ms. Lamas believes A.I. has the potential to assist youth ministers. It can help adapt session outlines to specific age groups, like middle or high school, and can help tailor presentations for specific cultural communities. But humans must review, revise and verify before any material reaches a young person.
That emphasis on the human person is something Pope Leo has highlighted throughout his papacy, not just in the encyclical. The pope joined the National Catholic Youth Conference remotely via livestream last November, where Ms. Lamas recalled a young person who asked him specifically about A.I. Leo’s answer stuck with her.
“A.I. will not judge between what is truly right and wrong, and it won’t stand in wonder, in authentic wonder, before the beauty of God’s creation,” the pope said.
Evangelizing the ‘digital continent’
For many involved in ministry every day, the question of whether to engage with A.I. has already passed. The question that remains is how.
Deacon Charlie Echeverry was an early adopter of A.I. He started with SudoWrite, a platform designed to help people struggling with writer’s block. It could also generate prose that matched the style of loaded text. Deacon Echeverry typed in a paragraph from Ernest Hemingway and watched SudoWrite create the next paragraph. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, he engaged with it, too.
“Almost immediately, I recognized it was on the level of the internet, or perhaps bigger,” he said of the advent of A.I. “It was seismic.”
Deacon Echeverry is the host of the “Living the Call” podcast and is the chief executive officer of Black Brown, a communications and consulting firm. For his podcast, the producer used to spend a lot of time on background research for podcast guests. But now, A.I. tools generate guest bios instantly, freeing the producer to focus more time on quality, structure and storytelling.
He recognizes similar patterns between the reaction to artificial intelligence today and the emergence of the internet decades ago. Deacon Echeverry also said that resistance to A.I. in ministerial settings is natural, predictable and, ultimately, not sustainable.
“Somebody who’s just like, ‘I just don’t want to touch it,’ to me, that can border on a sort of irresponsibility vis-à-vis ministry,” Deacon Echeverry said. “Because at worst—at worst—you will better understand what the people you’re ministering to are doing. That’s the worst-case scenario.”
Best-case scenarios include A.I. expanding the reach of ministry, he said.
“We’re called as Christians to go out everywhere: to all nations, including the digital continent, and proclaim the Gospel,” he said. “That presupposes an engagement with the world even though we’re not of the world.”
The limits of A.I.
Father Phillip Larrey, a philosophy professor at Boston College, is more cautious when it comes to A.I. He looks at A.I. through the lens of Catholic ethics.
“There’s not a lot of space for A.I. in evangelization,” Father Larrey told America. “Evangelization is usually a person-to-person encounter. When people go to a parish, they want to become part of a community. They want to meet other people, talk with other people, experience things with other people. A.I. is not really a part of that.”
Some have tested the limits, he said, noting the example of a church in Switzerland that introduced A.I. to help parishioners prepare for confession, and Catholic Answers, an apologetics-centered outreach based in San Diego that rolled out an A.I. priest. Neither effort lasted, and Father Larrey called them both disasters.
The gap between what A.I. can do and what ministry requires is wider than enthusiasts tend to acknowledge, Father Larrey said. But he maintains that A.I. nevertheless has a role to play. Some may find A.I. helpful in homily preparation, for example. And Father Larrey also noted Magisterium AI, a Catholic-aligned platform built by Matthew Sanders.
“A.I. can be very, very helpful,” he said. “But as a priest, I don’t use A.I. a lot to communicate with people because I think people want to be communicated with by people.”
Father Larrey, who sits on Boston College’s A.I. policy steering committee, said deciding when to use A.I. can get complicated in academic settings. One of his students recently told him that “the vast majority” of students are using A.I. to complete assignments. To those students, Father Larrey offers words of caution.
“If you farm out to an A.I. what you should be doing yourself, you’re shooting yourself in the foot,” he said. “Because tomorrow you’re going to be in a room with a C.E.O. with an A.I., and the C.E.O. is going to say, ‘What do you bring to the table that the A.I. doesn’t?’ And if all you’ve been doing is farming out your work, you’re not going to have an answer.”
Lessons from the corporate world
Will Smith, the director of liturgy and music at Mount St. Peter Parish in New Kensington, Penn., didn’t need to mull over hypothetical scenarios in lecture halls. He watched it play out inside a corporate marketing firm.
Taking a break from ministry, Mr. Smith worked in digital marketing for seven years and helped businesses build customer management and communications strategies. Then the A.I. revolution began, and the business changed overnight.
“A.I. is the reason I left digital marketing and returned to ministry,” Mr. Smith told America. “I saw firsthand both the negative and the very few positive results of A.I. being implemented unchecked in businesses across the board. Needless to say, the dignity of the person, the employee, was not considered. Only the bottom line.”
Businesses rushed into A.I. and implemented half-baked workarounds to get it to work properly. It didn’t always save time, and it often created more problems, he said. Companies saw bumps in their stock price after mentioning A.I. would enable them to lay off employees. Mistakes by A.I. tarnished reputations, and some companies hired people back after their stocks leveled off.
“If only leadership had been a bit more cautious and judicious about how they implemented A.I., there would be fewer hurt families,” Mr. Smith said.
What he saw in the corporate world made it clear that the church needed to have a conversation about artificial intelligence. Mr. Smith designed a program, “Holy Work on Human Time: AI for Youth Ministry,” to help fellow ministers use A.I. judiciously, being mindful of environmental concerns while safeguarding human connection.
“Instead of scrolling endlessly on Instagram, young people want to engage,” he said. But he also recognized that young people are accustomed to digital media: “So they’ll engage with an A.I. instead of engaging in a real relationship.”
For Mr. Smith, fostering real relationships means accompanying grieving parishioners, sitting with teenagers in crisis and welcoming strangers as members of faith communities. A.I. can allow that work to take precedence over more mundane tasks like bulletin blurbs, social media calendars, meeting prep and other grunt work that falls on overtaxed ministers.
“A lot of youth ministers fall into one of two categories,” Mr. Smith said. “They’re either kind of dabbling in A.I., or they hate the stuff…. My goal is to bridge that gap.”
A balanced approach
Bridging the gap is crucial for leaders who are already stretched thin. José Antonio Martínez-Navarrette, the director of marriage, family life and spirituality for the Diocese of Phoenix, serves 94 parishes. The calls and emails never stop.
Mr. Martínez-Navarrette has to choose where to spend his time. Using A.I. as a tool can help free him up for things that machines simply cannot deliver. People who work for the church, he said, often wear multiple hats, like managing marriages, baptisms, funerals, routine administration and communication.
“Either I do all that,” he said, “or I dedicate time to accompanying people, listening to them, humanly, spiritually. Where am I going to invest my time?”
Mr. Martínez-Navarette, an engineer by training, sees his ministry through both his religious and professional backgrounds. And recently, when doctors operated on his knee, he saw it from a hospital bed. The doctors used robotic tools and advanced imaging software to facilitate the procedure, which was a success. Thanks to an artificial component in his knee, he can walk and run again.
“Those tools assisted the doctor,” he said. “They did not replace the human being.”
Still, he noted that some communities are vulnerable to A.I.-generated misinformation, from fake videos of priests speaking against church teaching to A.I.-fueled outreach from churches claiming to be Catholic.
“It is a constant bombardment of information, and people don’t know how to filter it,” Mr. Martínez-Navarrette said. Without understanding what A.I. can do, he added, the people the church wants to reach won’t be able to distinguish truth from falsehoods.
In recent months, Mr. Martínez-Navarrette has met with groups of parents grappling with children lost to virtual worlds.
“We never paused long enough to ask what the true purpose of these tools should be or who would teach us how to use them wisely,” he said. “Much of it was left to experimentation, trends and a lack of critical thinking.”
The church must safeguard the pastoral encounter by finding the right balance, Mr. Martínez-Navarrette said. Those in ministry can lean on A.I. to offload and automate some administrative burdens and prioritize personal connections.
“The best screen,” he said, “is still the human face. The best data processor is our brain, connected with our heart. And the best scanner is still the human eye, capable of seeing with compassion and understanding.”
Politics
Faith
Culture
Vatican
Scripture
Podcasts