United in Faith and Community
United in Faith and Community is the theme for this year’s Catholic Schools Week. It reminds us that Catholic schools are a place of learning, but it’s always in the context of our faith and in communion with one another. We continue to grow as human persons as we interact with each other, our families and at our school with other students, and with the faculty and staff. Our faith in a loving God, who created us as individuals with a purpose and a dignity, is essential to our learning and our continued growth. The importance of this faith in community is essential in the world today in which we are driven to be individuals on our own without true interaction with each other, especially through modern-day technology and communication. We interact more with our iPhones than we do with individuals. We communicate in a context that lacks fundamental respect for the dignity and value of every individual human being made in the image likeness of God. All we have to do is reflect upon the lack of respect for an unborn child which still exists within our nation, as well as the current division occurring about the proper respect for immigrants, living in and coming to our nation. Indeed, faith and community are essential to who we are.
One of the challenges that affects our learning in faith and community is that which comes from an ever-growing involvement with artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence operates outside of both faith and community as it creates a sense that learning what the meaning of life is all about, and all that pertains to its value, is outside of a human context. Artificial intelligence can do a great deal of good in helping us to learn and to integrate all aspects of knowledge within our person. However, it can also cause a great deal of disruption in terms of giving a false impression of who we are as human beings and really undercut the potential that we have as individuals with the specific gifts that God has given to us. Artificial intelligence is misnamed. It is not intelligence. It is the ability to arrange algorithms to come to quick conclusions without true human interaction. Animals have more intelligence than AI, and perhaps it would be better to refer to it as algorithmic information.
On the Feast of St. Francis de Sales, Jan. 24, our Holy Father, Pope Leo XIV, gave an extraordinary presentation on the 60th World Day of Social Communications, which was a strong critique of the danger that artificial intelligence can cause, especially in the context of true learning as human beings. How fitting is his presentation for this Catholic Schools Week, which helps true learning. Intelligence and Human Value, the title of his address, was about preserving our unique voices and faces as human persons. His main point was that artificial intelligence can move us away from the face and the voice which God has given to us, which endow us with an unrepeatable identity and define the very elements of every encounter we have with others. Artificial intelligence can move us into deep conflict with our identity as human persons and with our relationships with one another as well as with God.
Pope Leo expressed that “Each of us possesses an irreplaceable and intimate vocation that originates from our own lived experience and becomes manifest through interaction with others. By simulating human voices and faces, wisdom and knowledge, consciousness and responsibility, empathy and friendship, the system known as artificial intelligence not only interferes with information ecosystems, but also encroaches upon the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships.”
Perhaps the wisest advice that Pope Leo gave in his address was “Do not renounce your ability to think.” How essential this is for Catholic schools and for what our Catholic schools are all about. He went on to say that, “Education aims to do precisely this: To increase our personal ability to think critically; evaluate whether our sources are trustworthy and the possible interests behind selecting the information we have access to; to understand the psychological mechanisms involved; and to enable our families, communities and associations to develop practical criteria for a healthier and more responsible culture of communication.” Artificial intelligence cannot produce true art, poetry, achievements of culture, and can actually disturb the significance of these human endeavors by replacing them with algorithmic information. Our world today is interested in AI, not simply for the good which it can accomplish, and it can, but for the monetary success it can have in the lives of already powerful individuals.
The pope began his address by referring to the face and the voice to which God has given us. It is very easy to be afraid of that face and voice and to hide behind a mask. AI can be such a mask. However, to be truly human is to have the face and use the voice which God has given to us, and not to mask them. Our political society today wears so many masks which do not enhance the human person but buries the very meaning of human life. We have to be careful in our own lives that artificial intelligence does not lead to this even more.
Pope Leo exhorted that, “We need faces and voices to speak for people again. We need to cherish the gift of communication as the deepest truth of humanity, to which all technological innovation should also be oriented.” Our Catholic schools enable us to grow in this regard as united in faith and community. Let us use them to know better our face and speak our voice and to grow as the person God created us to be.
Most Reverend Gerald M. Barbarito
