The Sunday Gospel for October 18 presents the account of yet another clash between Jesus’ ministry and the religious elite of the times. The previous two Sundays have featured parables directed towards the ‘chief priests and elders of the people’ (Mt 22:1). On this occasion it is the ‘Pharisees…together with the Herodians’ (Mt 22:15-16) who engage with Jesus. Commentators tells us that the Pharisees, who often feature in conflict with Jesus, only became prominent after the destruction of the Temple in 70CE. Thus, the conflict depicted in the Gospels is, more likely, reflective of conflicts evident in the late first century, about 50 years after Jesus’ life and ministry. The Herodians are less well known, being mentioned twice only in the Gospel of Mark, apart from this singular reference in Matthew. On each occasion they are shown to be in league with the Pharisees, in opposition to Jesus. While little is known about them, it is assumed, on the basis of the name, that they were collaborators, or at least sympathisers, with the occupying Roman forces.

The question posed to Jesus is, of course, a trick question. It focuses on the hated requirement of paying taxes to the occupying Romans. If Jesus was to speak against this, it would frame him as inciting opposition to the Roman authorities. If he spoke in support of the tax he could be accused of disloyalty to his own Jewish heritage. Jesus first calls out their insincerity then cuts to the crux of the issue. All that matters is that we live and act according to God’s kingdom. Giving ‘to God what belongs to God’ (Mt 22:21) which, of course, is everything that brings life. The other part of the answer ‘give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar’ (Mt 22:21) should be understood not as an endorsement of the tax but as a call for the Pharisees and Herodians to let go of the power and influence they have gained under the protection of the Romans, a power which, in many instances, contributes directly to the oppression of the Jewish people. Rather than enjoying the privileges of their status, they should turn away from such things and truly focus on ‘what belongs to God’ (Mt 22:21).

Gospel Text: Matthew 22:15-21

The Pharisees went away to work out between them how to trap Jesus in what he said. And they sent their disciples to him, together with the Herodians, to say, ‘Master, we know that you are an honest man and teach the way of God in an honest way, and that you are not afraid of anyone, because a man’s rank means nothing to you. Tell us your opinion, then. Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar or not?’ But Jesus was aware of their malice and replied, ‘You hypocrites! Why do you set this trap for me? Let me see the money you pay the tax with.’ They handed him a denarius, and he said, ‘Whose head is this? Whose name?’ ‘Caesar’s’ they replied. He then said to them, ‘Very well, give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar – and to God what belongs to God.’

See

What is the ultimate purpose of the question posed to Jesus by the disciples of the Pharisees and Herodians?

What dilemma does this create for Jesus?

How does Jesus answer the question?

Judge

Jesus calls out the questioners as hypocrites. Why is this important in his answer to their question?

What does the passage convey about integrity on the part of Jesus and on the part of the questioners?

What do we understand by the phrase to ‘and to God, what belongs to God’ (Mt 22:21)?

Act

How can I ensure that I act with integrity in my own life situation?

What steps can we take to give to God what belongs to God our own life situations?

What possibilities are within our spheres of influence to do this in to the lives of others?

Image https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/acvvpCZ3cjPqzgBJ7xSsE

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

See, Judge, Act in the age of algorithms. This is part one: See.

In August 1910, a photographer put a notebook in his pocket and stopped next to a girl working at a spinning frame in the North Pownal, Vermont cotton mill.

Lewis Hine worked for the National Child Labor Committee, which hired him to photograph and support its reports. He wrote while he worked. The caption for the photo says: “Addie Card, 12 years old. Spinner in North Pownal Cotton Mill.“ Other girls said she was ten. She said she was twelve.

The photograph became a symbol of American child labor. In 1998, her face was on a 32-cent stamp honoring child labor reform. Federal officials tried to find her but had no luck. For years, the image was linked to the wrong last name, “Laird,” so the Department of Labor could not find any record of Addie Laird in North Pownshek. She died five years earlier, in 1993, after spending her last years in low-income housing in Cohoes, New York, living on Social Security. heck.

In 2005, Joe Manning, a retired social worker and local historian, started looking for the girl’s real story. Novelist Elizabeth Winthrop, touched by the photo at the Bennington Museum, had asked him to help. The 1910 census finally showed her real name: Card. Manning followed her trail through cemeteries, town records, and old newspapers until he found her family. When he showed her grandchildren the photo, they had never seen it before.

The picture made the whole country stop and look at a child, but it never showed who she really was.

The far end has a name.

Hine’s captions included names, ages, and time spent on the job. This is what it means to truly see: writing down the facts of a person’s life. Every decision about cloth ends with a real person and a real name.

This is the first step in the method Joseph Cardijn created for young workers in Belgium: See. In Mater et Magistra, published on 15 May 1961, Pope John XXIII included this method in Catholic social teaching with three steps: “First, one reviews the concrete situation; secondly, one forms a judgment on it in the light of these same principles,” and then one acts. These steps are “usually expressed in the three terms: look, judge, act.“ When Cardijn heard the news, he reportedly said, “Basil, it’s happened! See, judge, act!“

To See does not mean forming an opinion. It means standing where the consequences happen and gathering the facts, starting with the name.

In week 5 of a ten-week class on Thomas Merton and world religions, I am teaching that the same idea came up from the Hindu perspective. The lesson was about dharma: “the right thing to do here, for someone like me, in this situation.” Dharma is personal and specific. You cannot figure it out from far away, like at the end of a supply chain. The week ended with the idea that human worth lasts beyond economic harm, technology, or the stories systems tell about us: “you are not your job, and neither am I.”

The class ended with a simple question: Who do your decisions affect, and what would it take for you to sit with them?

A medium you cannot see

Seeing is harder than it looks, as Marshall McLuhan once explained.

In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), McLuhan said that “in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message.” He believed a medium’s real power lies not in its content. The “personal and social consequences of any medium“ come from the new scale it brings to our lives. People watch the show but miss the stage.

Three years later, in The Medium Is the Massage (with Quentin Fiore, 1967), he summed up the problem with one image: “We look at the present through a rearview mirror. We march backward into the future.“

Using his terms: figure and ground. The figure is what we notice first. In 1910, it was a girl’s face; today, it might be a quick answer on a screen. The ground is what makes the figure possible but stays hidden. For Addie Card, it was the rest of her life. For an AI system, it is the data center, electricity, water, training data, the people who labeled it, and who keep your conversation. We focus on the figure, but the ground shapes everything.

Thomas Merton understood this feeling. On 13 September 1966, he wrote in his journal that he was reading McLuhan’s Understanding Media, that it was “very important indeed for monks to go into this,” and that McLuhan “brings home to me the fact that I do not really know what is going on“ (Learning to Love, volume 6 of his journals, HarperCollins, 1997, p. 133). Even as a monk in a Kentucky hermitage, with a unique view of his time, he admitted he could not fully see it.

Admitting what we cannot see is the first step in truly seeing.

The false self has a dashboard.

Chat assistants now have a feature called memory, which stores past conversations and shapes future responses. In a homily on 8 October 2026, Pope Leo XIV told students that the mind “must not simply compile data,” as an algorithm “now does more quickly than we can,” but should “recall lived experiences, which contain depths of meaning that only the human soul can recognize.”

Here, the Hindu and Christian ideas from Week 5 come together. Atman, the deepest part of a person, is what is left when every role, memory, and possession is gone. Merton called this the true self, the part of us that is not built or performed. The opposite is the false self, which is created, always performing, and looking for approval from others.

A system that records everything but does not judge what matters is very good at seeking approval. In April 2025, OpenAI reversed an update to its GPT-4o model because, as the company said, it had made the system “overly supportive but disingenuous” by relying too much on “short-term feedback.” The machine learned that approval meant success. As Merton understood him, Gandhi believed the opposite: staying true to your values matters more than success.

To See, in this case, means asking what is happening to the person. It is not just about whether the product works, which is just a new form of compliance, but about what years of constant agreement do to someone’s sense of self.

The one in twenty

The Dutch tax authority gives us a tougher lesson about seeing the far end. From 2005 to 2019, about 26,000 parents were wrongly accused of childcare-benefit fraud. Officials chose families for extra checks based on nationality, and reports say a risk-classification algorithm treated having a second nationality as a risk. The third Rutte cabinet resigned on 15 January 2021.

A system that is right 95 out of 100 times treats its mistakes as just rounding errors. Sarvodaya, the Gandhian ideal mentioned in the slides, rejects this idea. It is “not just the greatest good for the greatest number.” It is “care for every single person.”

To the ministry, a wrongly flagged family was just a number. But at the kitchen table, it meant paying money back.

The best case against going to look

The strongest argument comes from those who build and manage large systems, and it deserves serious attention.

They say seeing doesn’t scale. A tax authority that has to check millions of claims cannot visit every kitchen table, and an algorithm that is right 95 percent of the time may help more people than a team of clerks could. If you focus too much on every single case, you can’t run a large institution.

Addie Card’s story gives us another reason to be careful. A whole country looked at her and even put her face on a stamp, but never learned her real name. Sometimes, a picture makes us feel like we have done enough. Seeing can turn into a show, and that show can replace real action.

Both arguments have truth. Seeing alone isn’t enough, and the logic of big systems is real. But the wrong name on the stamp shows the problem isn’t seeing itself, but seeing poorly. Hine’s approach was better: write down the name, the age, the hours. In the Dutch case, the problem lasted for years before anyone did something. If someone had been there, they’d see the real thing, not the error; with the ebook in hand, they might have caught the mistake sooner. Seeing is the easiest part of the work, but people often skip it. It is just the start. Judgment and action come next, and we’ll cover those in part two.

Five things to see before you decide

Short enough for an index card:

1. Get the name right. Write down who this decision affects but who has no say in it, and make sure you have the right name and facts.

2. Find the ground. For every quick answer or smooth screen, list the machines, energy, labor, and records that make it possible.

3. Ask what is remembered. Who keeps the records, who reads them, and who owns them when the person is gone?

4. Count the one in twenty. Find out what happens to the people the system gets wrong, and who is responsible for fixing it.

5. Go and sit with them. Make the effort to visit in person before deciding, not after saying sorry.

Hine wrote down a name, an age, and a workplace. Almost ninety years later, the name on the stamp was wrong, and the country that had seen her could not find her.

Her grandchildren called her Gramma Pat. She wanted people to call her Pat and never liked the name Adeline. They had never seen the photo until a stranger showed it to them.

This series explores that gap. The people who build systems and those who live with them are on opposite sides, and what gets lost between them often goes unwritten.

Write down the name.

And that is Wisdom Speaking.

Sources

• Smithsonian Magazine, “Through the Mill” (the August 1910 photograph; Hine’s notebook; the National Child Labor Committee; the census search; the 1998 stamp).

• VTDigger, “Then Again: Finding Addie” (18 August 2024; the wrong surname “Laird”; the Department of Labor’s failed search; Elizabeth Winthrop, the 2002 Bennington Museum viewing, and the 2005 request to Joe Manning; the 1993 death, her name “Pat,” and “Gramma Pat”). The sources differ on her age at death, 94 or 95, so the post says only “in her nineties.”

• TIME, “Tracking Down Lewis Hine’s Forgotten Child Laborers” (Hine’s caption, the conflicting ages, and the grandchildren seeing the photograph for the first time), and NPR, “Labor Photos Shed Light on Family History” (25 February 2007; Hine’s captions recording each child’s name, age, and time on the job).

• Library of Congress, “National Child Labor Committee Collection” (Hine’s work from 1908; his methods; captions with names, ages, and addresses).

• John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (15 May 1961), paragraph 236, as presented at Vatican II Journey.

• Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), chapter 1, text at hannemyr.com; Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (1967), p. 74, via The Marshall McLuhan Dictionary of Quotations.

• Thomas Merton Center, journal entry of 13 September 1966, from Learning to Love, ed. Christine M. Bochen (HarperCollins, 1997), p. 133.

• Aleteia, “Leo XIV to theology students: ‘Guard your hearts’” (10 October 2026), on the homily of 8 October 2026.

• TechCrunch, “OpenAI explains why ChatGPT became too sycophantic” (29 April 2025).

• Wikipedia, “Dutch childcare benefits scandal”, and AI Incident Database, “Incident 101”.

Part two, Judge and Act, follows.

Thomas Merton, the monk waiting for him, understood exactly what was being said about his guest and did not believe a word of it. After two days of walking the abbey grounds together, Merton wrote an essay titled “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother,” published that year in the magazine Jubilee and later collected in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968). Merton barely mentions Thich Nhat Hanh’s politics. What he defends is harder to argue in a magazine: that he had met “a perfectly formed monk,” that the visit felt like meeting Vietnam itself, and that “he is more my brother than many who are nearer to me in race and nationality, because he and I see things exactly the same way.”

That is a strange thing to stake a reputation on, for a stranger, in the middle of a war his own church superiors preferred he remain quiet about.

It is also exactly the move missing from most conversations about “empathetic” technology.

Merton could have stopped at feeling. He clearly felt something for Thich Nhat Hanh. But he did not stop there — he made a public argument and spent some of his own credibility defending a specific man against specific slanders, at real cost to himself. Empathy became compassion, something closer to solidarity and justice: a defense with consequences, not just a feeling with a name attached. That distinction, between perceiving someone’s suffering and building the conditions under which their situation actually changes, is the one this essay seeks to recover.

The three words that don’t mean the same thing

Empathy, compassion, and justice belong together, but they do different work. Collapsing them into a single “caring” is where much of technology ethics goes wrong.

A rough sequence runs from attention to empathy to compassion to solidarity to justice. But it is not merely a sequence, because justice also makes compassion durable. One act of kindness helps one person survive an unfair system for one more day. A just institution reduces how many people ever have to depend on luck, or on a stranger’s goodwill, to live with dignity. Compassion without justice tends toward paternalism. Justice without compassion tends toward bureaucracy, or worse. Empathy without either is sentiment with no bill attached.

For a technology built to sense or simulate feeling, the question this collapse obscures is not whether this system can recognize a human emotion, but rather what relationships, what social order, and what distribution of power it creates once it is loosed on the world. That is where Merton’s account of the person and Marshall McLuhan’s account of media meet, and where the rest of this argument lives.

What empathy alone cannot reach

Empathy tells you that suffering is present. It does not tell you what would help, and mistaking the first for the second is its most common failure. A platform can register real concern for isolated users and respond with a “wellness” feature that leaves the addictive design, the underpaid moderators, and the data extraction beneath it untouched. At that point, what compassion needs is not more feeling but discernment: who gets to define the problem, whose account of harm counts, and what response actually reduces it rather than merely advertising concern.

Compassion also tends to preserve a gap between the one who helps and the one who is helped, and closing that gap is the work of solidarity — treating the people a system affects as co-designers and rights-bearing participants rather than recipients of a benefit decided elsewhere. The question shifts from how do we help them to how do we act with them and who actually shares the decision.

Beneath both lies a harder fact: injustice is rarely only a matter of bad intentions. It is reproduced through ownership, incentives, opacity, biased data, and unequal power to contest a decision once it has been made — a power analysis that empathy, by its nature, does not perform, because empathy sees the injured person and stops there, while justice asks what made the injury predictable. None of this holds without accountability: mechanisms that let a person understand a decision, challenge an error, and impose real consequences on the institution that made it. Absent that recourse, an “ethical AI” pledge is a promise made by whoever already benefits from the arrangement.

Further out still is institutional imagination — what rules, public goods, and professional norms should exist before the crisis rather than after it, covering due process, fair labor conditions, and real limits on harmful uses, and not only the person-to-person repair that compassion is built for. And underneath everything is a bias built into empathy itself: it runs strongest toward people who are visible, familiar, or narratively compelling, and a viral platform amplifies exactly that bias, so that some harms are seen everywhere while others — racialized surveillance, disability exclusion, precarious data labor, the slow erosion of public discourse — remain almost entirely invisible. Justice is the discipline of attending, on purpose, to whoever the system has rendered easiest to overlook.

A monk who kept facing east

Merton’s account of the person did not stay inside a single tradition, and that matters here, because his most demanding thinking about compassion happened in conversation with Buddhism rather than apart from it.

By the early 1960s, Merton had spent years in correspondence with the Japanese Zen scholar D. T. Suzuki, work he eventually published as “Wisdom in Emptiness: A Dialogue Between D. T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton” and later folded into Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions, 1968). What Merton found in Suzuki’s account of Zen was not an exotic alternative to Christian charity but a sharper diagnosis of what gets in its way: the illusion of a fixed, separate self that must be defended, flattered, and proven, which Merton had already named, in his own vocabulary, the false self. Buddhist teaching on anatta, the absence of a permanent separate self, and on karuna, compassion, converged for Merton on a single insight — that the gap compassion is meant to cross, between the one who helps and the one who suffers, is in some sense an illusion to begin with. Genuine compassion, in this reading, is not a feeling one person directs at another from across a distance. It is what remains once the false distance collapses.

That is the deeper argument underneath the Gethsemani story. Merton’s defense of Thich Nhat Hanh was not an act of charity performed downward, from a secure Kentucky monastery toward an endangered foreign monk. It was recognition of a brother, stated plainly and without hierarchy — “he and I see things exactly the same way“ — which is a strange sentence for a Catholic priest to write about a Buddhist monk unless one has actually absorbed the idea that compassion does not require the helper to remain above the helped.

The friendship with Thich Nhat Hanh was not an isolated encounter. Two years later, in November 1968, Merton traveled to Dharamsala, India, where the Dalai Lama had lived in exile since 1959, and met him three times over the course of about a week. Merton came away calling it “a warm and cordial discussion” between men he believed shared “a real spiritual bond.” The Dalai Lama would later say Merton was the person who first showed him the real meaning of the word Christian. A month after Dharamsala, on 10 December 1968, Merton died in Bangkok, at a conference of Asian Benedictine and Cistercian communities, killed by a faulty electric fan hours after delivering a talk on monasticism and Marxism. He had spent the final months of his life listening, without defensiveness, to a tradition that questioned the very self his own compassion was meant to serve.

None of this made Merton a Buddhist, and he never claimed to be one. It made him someone who had tested his own account of compassion against a tradition built to interrogate the self at its root, and found that it held, and deepened. That is the standard worth holding technology to as well: not whether a system can simulate warmth, but whether it treats the person in front of it as someone whose reality does not depend on being useful, legible, or profitable to the system observing them.

The common good and the half-built man

Merton’s concern was never machinery as such. It was technological development pursued apart from wisdom, contemplative attention, and what he called the common good. Scholarship on his notebooks and talks, notably Paul Dekar’s study in The Merton Annual, identifies four recurring criteria in Merton’s writing on the subject: does a technology honor the human person rather than treat them as raw material or a measurable output; does it serve the common good rather than only the short-term interests of its owners; does it protect physical, social, and what Merton called psychic health; and does it withstand scrutiny from outside the circle of experts who built it, rather than asking to be trusted on their word alone.

That last criterion had a specific occasion. On 5 June 1966, in a talk titled “The Christian in a Technological Age,” Merton cited an essay by Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the US nuclear navy, titled “A Humanistic Technology” (Nature, 20 November 1965), in which Rickover argued that a technology’s foreseeable harms ought to be weighed before deployment rather than excused as unintended consequences afterward. Merton, no admirer of the military establishment Rickover represented, still found the argument worth borrowing: even a man who built warships understood that capability without foresight is not progress.

Merton’s deeper worry ran beneath any single criterion. He diagnosed a culture of distraction and instrumental reason in which people risk losing contact with reality, with one another, and with their own depths — the same false self that Suzuki’s Zen had helped him name more precisely. If a platform constantly rewards performance, prediction, and marketable self-presentation, people may grow steadily more legible to the systems studying them while becoming less present to themselves and to each other. The danger was never that machines might become too human. It was that human beings might be pressed to live like machines: optimized, surveilled, evaluated, and never quite at rest.

The environment is the message.

Marshall McLuhan supplies the argument’s other half. His claim that the medium is the message, from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964), means that a technology should not be judged only by the content it carries or the purpose its makers state for it. It should be judged by the new scale, pace, and pattern it introduces into how people associate and act.

Media, in McLuhan’s account, extend human capacities: the wheel extends the foot, print extends the eye, and contemporary AI extends memory, language, and pattern recognition. But every extension also alters the environment in which people think and relate, and McLuhan’s real question about any new technology is what it makes normal before anyone has decided whether it is good. A writing assistant may help someone draft or translate. Its deeper message may be a changed environment in which authorship, expertise, and the expectation of a human reply are quietly reorganized. A facial-recognition system is framed as a tool for identification; its wider message is the normalization of continuous surveillance. A recommendation engine offers personalization; its environmental effect is to reshape attention and let opaque rankings decide what a shared conversation even is.

That reframes the question an ethics of AI has to ask. Not only is the output biased, but also what human faculty is being extended, what capacity is quietly being outsourced until it atrophies, who controls the environment a technology creates, and who can opt out of it and who cannot.

Where the two monks meet

Merton and McLuhan diagnose different, complementary dimensions of the same problem.

Merton supplies the moral center: the person, contemplative attention, the common good, and a settled suspicion of technological idols. McLuhan supplies the cultural diagnostic: media are environments, and their strongest effects are structural rather than intended. Together, they resist two opposite errors — solutionism, the assumption that more capability automatically means more human flourishing, and fatalism, the assumption that because a technology is powerful, its social shape is therefore inevitable. Their shared alternative is the harder one: the conscious, democratic, and morally serious shaping of the environments new technology creates.

A justice-centered framework, applied.

Take a live example: an AI system screening job applicants.

Empathy asks what it is like to be rejected by a system you cannot see inside, when your employment determines your housing and your family’s stability. Compassion asks what explanation, correction, or human review is owed once the system gets it wrong. Justice asks whether automated screening belongs in that setting at all, whether the training data encode decades of past exclusion, whether an applicant can appeal, and who profits from a labor market this system quietly tilts.

The missing links become visible only at that third question: public participation, worker voice, independent audit, real remedy, and the willingness to simply refuse a use that undermines the dignity of the people it touches.

What this asks of anyone building the thing

1. Treat empathy as a starting instrument, not a finished ethic. It tells you where to look, never what to do.

2. Let compassion do more than comfort. Ask what changes, not only who was consoled.

3. Practice discernment before designing a response — whose definition of the problem is being used, and whose is not.

4. Build solidarity by sharing the decision, not only the concern.

5. Read power before reading intentions. Injustice survives on incentive and opacity more than on malice.

6. Install accountability that a person without resources can actually use.

7. Design institutions before the crisis, not in apology after it.

8. Attend on purpose to the harms that never go viral.

9. Ask Merton’s question of the person, and McLuhan’s question of the environment, together, before asking whether the output looks fair.

My Recommendation

Design and govern technology so that it increases people’s capacity for truthful attention, mutual recognition, and shared power — not merely their capacity to predict, persuade, and extract.

That, in the end, is the whole content of what Merton did at Gethsemani in 1966. He did not run a sentiment analysis on a stranger’s face. He spent two days in a stranger’s actual company, recognized a brother where his own government had told him to see a threat, and then spent his name defending it in print. A system that can only simulate the first half of that — the recognizing — while remaining structurally incapable of the second, the defending, has not built compassion. It has built a very convincing rumor of it.

Sources: Thomas Merton, “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother,” Jubilee (1966), collected in Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice (University of Notre Dame Press, 1968) — text via Englewood Review of Books; Jim and Nancy Forest, “When America Met Thich Nhat Hanh” (2021); Thomas Merton Center, “Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama”; Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions, 1968); Thomas Merton and Daisetz T. Suzuki, “Wisdom in Emptiness: A Dialogue Between D. T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton”; Paul Dekar, “Thomas Merton on Technology,” The Merton Annual, vol. 17; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964).

Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there. I am not a traditional academic. Rather, I am a public thinker and technology futurist, drawing on my roots in cultural history, society, and technology. Today, I explore how technology, society, and ethics come together to shape a future where People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity thrive for everyone. That is the whole of it. See more in the “How I Write and What I Use section on my website.

In 1894, a Seventh-day Adventist in Sydney was convicted of violating the Sunday laws. The sentence offered two options. Pay the fine or sit in the public stocks for two hours.

The Adventists observed Saturday as their Sabbath and worked on Sundays. That year, they drew about five hundred people to each of two protest meetings at Parramatta Town Hall.

Three years later, in 1897, the Protestant churches of the Australian colonies sought to write God into the constitution of the nation they were about to build. The Council of the Churches in New South Wales launched a petition in March. It asked the preamble to recognize God as the world’s supreme ruler and the source of all law, for each house of Parliament to open with prayer, and for the Governor-General to proclaim days of national thanksgiving and humiliation.

The Adventists responded with their own petition, announced in their newspaper, The Bible Echo, on 29 March 1897. It asked the Federal Convention to keep religion out of the Constitution altogether, and the Convention received it on 6 April. That July, the same paper called the Council of the Churches a “religio-political organization “ and linked the campaign to the National Reform Association in the United States, a body that sought to have the American Constitution declare the nation’s allegiance to Jesus Christ.

On 7 February 1898, a Victorian delegate, Henry Higgins, a lawyer who would later sit on the High Court, said the quiet part aloud. He told the Convention in Melbourne that recognizing God “was not proposed merely out of reverence.” It was proposed for political reasons, influenced by American debates.

He had a case to present. In Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (1892), the United States Supreme Court had described America as a Christian country. Higgins argued that Congress then relied on that reasoning to order the Chicago exhibition of 1893 closed on Sundays.

His fear was specific. Put God in the preamble, and a court might one day read it as permission for Parliament to legislate on religion, especially on Sunday. On 8 February, his first attempt to forbid such laws died on the voices, without a vote.

On 2 March 1898, the Convention did both. Patrick Glynn of South Australia moved to insert the words “humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God,” and the motion carried. Later that day, Higgins tried again. By a vote of 25 to 16, the delegates agreed that the Commonwealth could not establish a religion, impose religious observance, or prohibit the free exercise of religion, nor require a religious test for any public office.

Australia has lived with both ever since.

That afternoon in Melbourne holds the whole subject in miniature.

An idea born in the United States crossed the ocean. Local people feared it, borrowed it, and bent it to fit their own institutions. What arrived was neither a copy nor an invention. It was something new, and it remains in the Australian Constitution today.

Four cousins

I chose the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and Australia because they are most closely aligned: a shared language, a shared legal inheritance, and a shared news feed. When an argument crosses a border, it crosses these borders first.

The same story travels to all four. A Christian civilization is under threat from secularism, cultural change, or outsiders, and someone must defend it. Each country then tells the story through its own institutions. As a rough shorthand:

• In the United States, the idea has a party.

• In Britain, it has a badge.

• In Canada, it has a protest.

• In Australia, it has a lobby.

The rest of this post expands on those four sentences and corrects them where they are too neat. New Zealand belongs in this company, too. It deserves its own post.

Before the numbers

Start by clarifying what the term does not mean. Christians vote, organize, lobby, and run for office in every democracy. A church that backs a conservative party is not nationalist for that reason, and neither is a voter who cares about religious freedom.

Christian nationalism is narrower. It fuses national identity with Christianity. On this view, the nation is truly Christian. Many will say Christianity deserves a special place in public life. Drifting from that tradition threatens the nation itself. Nick Spencer of the British think tank Theos reduces it to a test of belonging: do you have to be Christian to be truly British or truly American? Scholars still debate where to draw the line, and the argument grows harder to draw across borders.

The word “rise“ needs the same care. It can mean more believers, louder ones, or those closer to power. Those are three different stories, and they do not always move together. In May 2026, the sociologist Andrew Whitehead told a Theos podcast that fewer Americans strongly embrace Christian nationalism than before, even as its rhetoric has spread and people in powerful seats now voice it.

Where the idea has a party

The United States stands out for a simple reason. A large religious constituency overlaps with the governing party.

The Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) interviewed more than 22,000 American adults through 2025. It asked questions about Christianity, American identity, and government, then sorted people into four groups. About one in three Americans, 32 percent, fall into the top two: 11 percent as “Adherents“ and 21 percent as “Sympathizers.” Among Republicans, the two groups together make up 56 percent, compared with 25 percent among independents and 17 percent among Democrats. Among white evangelical Protestants, the two groups together reach 67 percent. Among Hispanic Protestants, they reach 54 percent. Those are the only two major religious groups in which a majority qualifies.

These are survey categories, not membership rolls. Nobody joins an organization called Christian Nationalism. Still, PRRI’s 50-state report, released on 17 February 2026, finds that states with higher scores also tend to favor Donald Trump and send more Republicans to their legislatures. Arkansas tops the list at 54 percent. That is correlation, not causation. It shows how closely the attitudes track the political map.

Two details complicate the usual picture.

First, practice matters here. Among Americans who attend services weekly, 54 percent qualify as Adherents or Sympathizers, compared with 39 percent of those who attend a few times a year and 20 percent of those who seldom or never attend. The idea is not only white, either. Christians of color score 39 percent, compared with 46 percent for white Christians.

Second, the movement has become more visible without growing larger. PRRI reports that the overall share has held steady for about three years. In April 2026, the Pew Research Center found that 59 percent of Americans have now heard at least a little about Christian nationalism, up from 45 percent in 2024. Ten percent view it favorably, and 31 percent view it unfavorably. And 17 percent say the federal government should declare Christianity the official religion, up from 13 percent in 2024. Pew also notes that support for related ideas is mostly unchanged.

A badge, not a habit

Britain tells a different story. Churchgoing is low, and identity drives the energy.

On 13 September 2025, the Metropolitan Police counted about 110,000 people at the “Unite the Kingdom“ march in London, organized by activist Tommy Robinson, whose legal name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. Other estimates were higher. Many marchers carried wooden crosses. Ordained ministers spoke from the stage, and a worship band played. Church leaders pushed back. The presidents of Churches Together in England said that some at the rally had used symbols and words of the faith to support views opposed to its message, and Cardinal Vincent Nichols of the Catholic bishops’ conference joined them.

On 11 October 2026, Theos, a Christian think tank, published a detailed new poll. Its pollster, RED C, questioned 1,765 adults across the United Kingdom (UK) between 7 April and 27, 2026.

The headline is smaller than the rallies suggest. Eight percent strongly agree, and another 9 percent slightly agree, that to be truly British, you should be a Christian. That totals 17 percent. Asked to choose the single most important factor in being British from a list of twelve, 1 percent chose Christianity.

The researchers then sorted respondents into five groups. The group that comes closest to Christian nationalism, which Theos calls Identity Integrationists, accounts for 11 percent of UK adults. They regard Christianity as fundamental to Britishness and seek to defend it from what they see as threatening outside influences. Within that group:

• 81 percent claim a Christian affiliation.

• 13 percent attend church weekly.

• 43 percent are affiliated with Reform UK.

• 30 percent agree that all religions should be treated equally in public life.

• 82 percent agree with the claim known as the Great Replacement theory that the white population of Europe is being deliberately replaced by migrants from Muslim countries.

That is the reverse of the American pattern. In the United States, frequent churchgoing predicts support. In Britain’s most nationalist group, most people do not attend church. In every group where the comparison can be made, nominal Christians sympathize slightly more with merging Christianity and Britishness than practicing Christians do. Theos concludes that culture matters more than belief in this debate.

Three cautions.

First, “rise” is a claim about visibility, not numbers. British Social Attitudes found that the share saying it is very or fairly important to be Christian to be truly British fell from 32 percent in 1995 to 19 percent in 2023. What has changed since is mobilization. The Christian Conservative lawmaker Danny Kruger defected to Reform UK. In September 2026, black-clad agitators chanted “Christ is King“ at Dover and Portsmouth to protest refugees arriving in small boats.

Second, the label itself is disputed. Luke Bretherton, an Oxford professor, has told the Church of England’s bishops that “Christian nationalism“ often functions more as a stigmatizing label than an analytical term.

Third, Theos polled the entire United Kingdom, not just Great Britain. Northern Ireland has its own history that this post does not cover.

A smaller, patchier thing

Canada shares television, church networks, and political slogans with the United States, so American influence is easy to spot. The country below is different.

Start with the pool of believers. A March 2025 survey by the Angus Reid Institute and the think tank Cardus questioned 5,000 Canadians and 5,000 Americans. Eighteen percent of Canadians were counted as “religiously committed,” compared with 37 percent of Americans. That measures devotion, not nationalism, but it shrinks the potential constituency. Pew’s strict four-question test, conducted in 2024, classified 3 percent of Canadian adults as religious nationalists, compared with 6 percent of Americans.

The idea seems to exist mostly outside party politics. During the 2022 Freedom Convoy, the Canadian scholar Christine Mitchell wrote in The Conversation that she had spotted a supporter waving a banner bearing a biblical promise to heal the land. If people say the Bible should decide what society allows, she argued, that is the definition of Christian nationalism. She was describing a faction of the convoy, not the whole protest.

It also appears in provincial conflicts. Canadian commentators link Christian-conservative activism to Alberta’s battles over parental rights, education, and policies affecting transgender youth. Not everyone who uses the language of parental rights is a Christian nationalist, and that language is not new. Conservative groups in Alberta, largely led by Dutch immigrants, invoked parental rights to secure public funding for private schools as far back as the 1960s.

No national party embraces the idea. Jonathan Malloy, a political scientist at Carleton University, calls evangelicals and social conservatives a marginal force in Canadian politics, even within the Conservative Party. In his view, the parliamentary system gives party leaders firm top-down control, and the movement has largely fought defensive battles. A study in the Canadian Journal of Sociology reaches a similar conclusion from the pews. Canadian evangelicals are as morally conservative as American ones, it finds, but they understand the link between religious morality and national identity differently.

Canada is a patchwork: protest here, provincial policy there. It is not American Christian nationalism with a northern accent.

A network, not a nation

Australia shows that the Christian right and Christian nationalism are not the same thing.

Researchers describe the Australian Christian right as a loose yet connected network of church leaders, lobby groups, politicians, and media. It gained access under Prime Minister John Howard, who treated the Australian Christian Lobby as a legitimate voice for Christianity as a whole, and Labor leaders courted it as well. Today, it works through candidate forums, scorecards that grade parties against what the groups call Christian values, and election campaigns.

The 2025 federal election provided a messy example. The Plymouth Brethren Christian Church, formerly the Exclusive Brethren, is a separatist church whose members typically do not vote. In April 2025, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age reported that the church had sent hundreds of members to polling booths in marginal seats to campaign for the Coalition. Newspapers owned by Nine later reported that the church paid far-right influencers to heckle Labor campaigners. At a parliamentary hearing on 21 August 2026, church leaders denied paying anyone or directing members, and the Coalition called the inquiry a witch-hunt. Whatever the committee finds, the episode concerns a religious group’s political influence. It is not a claim that Australia is a Christian nation.

The nationalist element emerges only when campaigns cast Australia’s authentic identity as Judeo-Christian, link national decline to secularism, or treat Christianity as the necessary foundation of civilization. Elenie Poulos, a Uniting Church minister who studies the movement, describes the story this way: Australia belongs to Western Christian civilization, and only those who grasp its true foundations can save it.

The limits are real. In a 2021 analysis, David Smith of the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney found that the phrase “Christian nation“ was fading from Australian life. It appeared in print media 35 times in 2016 and 8 times in 2020, and nearly half of those uses came from people rejecting the claim. Of 15,500 submissions to the federal Religious Freedom Review, only four asserted that Australia is a Christian nation. A 2008 inquiry had drawn that assertion in 40 percent of its submissions. Tony Abbott once called his country “relentlessly secular.” When Australians do call it Christian, Smith found, they usually mean heritage, holidays and census numbers, not divine election or a sacred covenant. His data end in 2020, so they cannot speak to the 2025 campaign.

Australia, then, has an organized Christian right with real reach and a thin tradition of Christian nationhood. The network is stronger than the idea.

One story, four soils

The story crosses borders on its own. Media and activist networks carry it. The London rally in September 2025 drew speakers from across Europe and North America, and Elon Musk appeared via video.

Institutions then decide what the story becomes. The United States has two parties, and a large religious base can capture one. Canada and Australia run parliamentary systems with strong party discipline, which gives outsiders less leverage. Britain has no formal separation of church and state, so American fights over school prayer or religious symbols do not even translate. In each country, the same story meets different machinery, and the results differ.

Four numbers, four questions

No single measure supports a four-country league table. Here is what the main sources count.

• PRRI, United States, 2025. It measures agreement with statements about Christianity, American identity, and government. Result: 32 percent are Adherents or Sympathizers.

• Pew 36-country survey, 2024. It counts a strongly religious response to all four questions on belonging, leaders, and laws. Result: United States 6 percent, Canada 3 percent, UK 1 percent.

• Theos and RED C, UK, April 2026. It reports agreement that you should be Christian to be truly British. Result: 17 percent, with 11 percent in the closest group.

• Angus Reid Institute and Cardus, March 2025. It measures religious commitment, defined as devotion rather than nationalism. Result: Canada 18 percent, United States 37 percent.

Australia has no comparable headline figure in the sources used here. The evidence there concerns networks and language, not poll shares.

None of these numbers is wrong. They answer different questions. A strict test like Pew’s counts only people who give the strongest answer every time. A looser one like PRRI’s counts people who agree with most of the statements. Each carries a trap. Theos warns that if you define a Christian nationalist by agreement with mild statements, such as allowing religious symbols in public places, you will find a large constituency by definition. Pew admits the opposite problem: more Americans may support individual policies linked to Christian nationalism than the 6 percent its strict test classifies.

Pew adds a finding that cuts both ways. By global standards, the United States has low religious nationalism. Among rich countries, though, it stands out, especially on whether the Bible should shape the law.

Five lines for an index card

1. Ask the belonging question. Must you be a Christian to truly belong to this nation? That test separates nationalism from ordinary faith in politics.

2. Count three things, not one: believers, volume, and access to power. They move separately.

3. Compare shapes, not percentages. Each survey draws its own line.

4. Check the pews. Where nationalism outruns churchgoing, culture does the work that creed does elsewhere.

5. Check the machinery. A party, a protest, a lobby, a badge: the same story runs on a different engine in each country.

Higgins did not stop the God clause. He studied the American cases, named what he feared, and wrote a limit into the same constitution before anyone needed it.

The preamble and Section 116 still sit side by side. One invites God into the document. The other bars the Commonwealth from establishing a religion or imposing a religious observance. Ideas cross oceans. Institutions decide what they become.

Higgins said the clause came from America. So did the wall.

Sources

A note on the links: I removed them because they don’t always carry over from the Word doc to Substack, though they usually do on WordPress. I just list the links as a quick start for your own research and reference.

Figures as of 11 October 2026.

United States

• PRRI, Breaking Research: 50-State Survey Finds Majority of Republicans Qualify as Christian Nationalism Supporters, 17 February 2026.

• Gina Christian, OSV News, More Americans are aware of Christian nationalism, but a negative view of it prevails, 14 May 2026, reporting on the Pew Research Center’s April 2026 survey.

• Church Times, Few US adults care for Christian nationalism, 29 May 2026.

• Pew Research Center, Comparing Levels of Religious Nationalism Around the World, 28 January 2025.

Britain

• Nick Spencer and Yinxuan Huang, Theos, Beyond “Christian nationalism”: Measuring attitudes to Christianity and Britishness today (full report), 11 October 2026.

• Nick Spencer, Theos, How big is Christian Nationalism in the UK?, 15 May 2026.

• CBS News, London march organized by far-right activist Tommy Robinson, September 2025.

• National Catholic Register, Cardinal Vincent Nichols Condemns Words and Symbols Co-Opting Christianity.

Canada

• Cardus, Religion in the Public Square, reporting the March 2025 Angus Reid Institute and Cardus survey.

• Jonathan Malloy, Carleton University, Canada’s marginal Christian right.

• Canadian Journal of Sociology, Why doesn’t Canada have an American-style Christian Right?

• Religion Unplugged, How Canada Truckers’ Protest Parallels American-Style Christian Nationalism, 18 February 2022, citing Christine Mitchell in The Conversation.

• Perspectives Journal, Christian Nationalism and the Remaking of Canada’s Political Right.

Australia

• David Smith, United States Studies Center, A Christian nation no longer, 6 August 2021.

• The Other Cheek, A look at Aussie Christian nationalists, on Elenie Poulos.

• Northeast Times, Australian church denies paying far-right activists to disrupt election, 21 August 2026.

• Canberra Times, Calls for probe into Christian sect’s election role, August 2026.

• True North, News update for 29 April 2025, summarizing The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

The 1898 Convention

• Luke Beck, The Constitutional Prohibition on Imposing Religious Observances, Melbourne University Law Review41 (2017) 493.

• Gonzalo Villalta Puig, Parliamentary Prayers and Section 116 of the Australian Constitution, Parliament of Australia.

• The Bible Echo, 26 July 1897, Melbourne.

All of the Sunday Gospels for the month of October are drawn from the twenty-second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. Curiously, last week’s text was from the latter part of the chapter while the text for this week is found at the start of the chapter. The audience for Jesus’ parables, in this chapter, are the religious leaders of the time. In this text the writer names ‘the chief priests and the elders of the people’ (Mt 22:1), later in the chapter, the Pharisees are named. The parable, in allegorical form, indicts the religious authorities for their lack of care for their place as God’s chosen people and, even further, for their malicious treatment of those who adhered to God’s word. The lack of care is depicted in those who simply went about their business without regard for having been invited to the wedding (Mt 22:5), while the malice is shown in the mistreatment of the servants (Mt 22:6). The destruction of the murderers and burning of their town (Mt 22:7) is painfully reminiscent of the fate of the city of Jerusalem, its temple and the people at the hands of the Romans around a decade before Matthew’s Gospel was written. Evidently, the author intends to portray the destruction of Jerusalem as the punishment of the religious elite, by God, for their malice and lack of integrity as the custodians of God’s Covenant.

The second phase of the parable sees the King extending the invitation for all people to join the banquet. A gesture with unmistakable echoes of the influx of Gentiles into the infant Christian Churches of the late first century. God’s love is available to all people ‘bad and good alike’ (Mt 22:10), however, as the harsh treatment of the unsuitably dressed guest conveys, it is not enough to simply be invited, one must freely choose to live according to God’s Kingdom in order to share in the banquet. Father Michael Fallon MSC sums up the parable as follows:

“The point of the parable is that enjoyment of the blessings of God is always a matter of free choice. God invites all but forces no one. We must respond to love, and if we choose not to we cannot enjoy divine communion.” https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

Gospel Text: Matthew 22:1-14

Jesus began to speak to the chief priests and elders of the people in parables: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a feast for his son’s wedding. He sent his servants to call those who had been invited, but they would not come. Next he sent some more servants. “Tell those who have been invited” he said “that I have my banquet all prepared, my oxen and fattened cattle have been slaughtered, everything is ready. Come to the wedding.” But they were not interested: one went off to his farm, another to his business, and the rest seized his servants, maltreated them and killed them. The king was furious. He despatched his troops, destroyed those murderers and burnt their town. Then he said to his servants, “The wedding is ready; but as those who were invited proved to be unworthy, go to the crossroads in the town and invite everyone you can find to the wedding.” So these servants went out on to the roads and collected together everyone they could find, bad and good alike; and the wedding hall was filled with guests. When the king came in to look at the guests he noticed one man who was not wearing a wedding garment, and said to him, “How did you get in here, my friend, without a wedding garment?” And the man was silent. Then the king said to the attendants, “Bind him hand and foot and throw him out into the dark, where there will be weeping and grinding of teeth.” For many are called, but few are chosen.’

See

What might be the significant of Jesus directing this parable to the ‘chief priests and elders of the people’?

How would we describe the behaviour of the invited guests in this parable?

Who might the allegory be representing as the invited guests, the king, those who ultimately attend the wedding feast?

Judge

What does the parable teach us about the privilege of being invited into God’s kingdom?

If this parable was set in modern times, who might be the people who ultimately attend the wedding feast?

Jesus’ parable is an indictment of the religious elite of his time. What warning does that carry for those of us who are religious?

Act

What actions do we need to take, in our own lives, to ensure we do not disregard the privilege we have in being invited into God’s kingdom?

How do we ensure that we are responding freely in love, to God’s invitation, and not simply acting religious?

What steps can we take to ensure we are welcoming of all ‘good and bad alike’ (Mt 22:10), in our own communities?

Image https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-20-1-16-2023-2/

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

Where We Left the Monk

Recap in three sentences, using the cards from Tuesday. God gathers the assembly. The assembly receives before it acts. The test of a liturgy is the kind of people it makes. Ask yourself what you brought on the card today: which social reality in your community the prayers name, and which they don’t.

Then go back to Minnesota.

In 1930, Dom Virgil Michel went north to recover among the Chippewa of northern Minnesota. He was near exhaustion, and his eyes had given out. By 1933 he was back at Saint John’s Abbey, and the magazine he had started was waiting for him.

He did not return to a quiet life. The United States was in the fourth year of the Great Depression. Michel had spent seven years teaching that the liturgy belonged to everyone in the pews, and he now pressed the other half of the claim: that it also obliged them toward everyone outside the pews.

In 1935 he put the argument in print. In Orate Fratres, in an article called “The Liturgy the Basis of Social Regeneration“, he set out a syllogism: “Pius X tells us that the liturgy is the indispensable source of the true Christian Spirit; Pius XI says that the true Christian spirit is indispensable for social regeneration.” The conclusion followed in a line. The liturgy is the indispensable basis of social regeneration.

Then he acted on it. He criticized an economy that treated workers as parts. In Commonweal in 1938, he answered a writer who had called Christ the first preacher of capitalism: “What blasphemy! As if there were anything really Christian about our modern capitalism.“He supported employee-owned businesses and decentralized economies. He corresponded with the philosopher Mortimer Adler. According to Stanley Vishnewski, he visited the Catholic Worker and told the community about the Mystical Body of Christ’s relationship to society.

On 26 November 1938, in the infirmary at Saint John’s, Virgil Michel died of pneumonia and a streptococcus infection. He was 48.

Dorothy Day wrote the next year: “What a great loss we all suffered when this great priest died.“

The Turn

The monk who broke under the weight of a movement spent his last years arguing that the movement rested on something other than himself.

That reading is mine, and Michel might have resisted it. But the shape is plain enough for this blog post. The community he wanted would not be built from one person’s exhaustion. It had to come from what he kept pointing to: a people gathered by God around a table and then sent out. Today we ask what that kind of liturgy asks of the people who attend it.

(Let that sink in for a moment.)

Judge: The Church’s First Words About God

(Get out your New Testament and read: 1 Corinthians 10:16–17, then 12:12–27.)

Now think: Is the liturgy the Church’s primary theology? Aidan Kavanagh, a Benedictine of Saint Meinrad Archabbey, gave the Hale Memorial Lectures at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in 1981. They were published as On Liturgical Theology (Pueblo, 1984). He claims that liturgy is theologia prima, primary theology. Books, lectures, and propositions come second. They are the Church thinking about what it has already done. (This is key to understanding the work of historians with liturgy and the history of the Church)

Four consequences follow, and each bears on community.

1. Liturgy is meant to be done, not read, observed, or studied.

2. The worshipping assembly is not incidental to theology. It is one place where theology happens.

3. Faith is not a set of correct ideas that later produces worship. Right worship forms, displays, and sustains a way of life.

4. A church does not first agree and then express its agreement in liturgy. By doing the liturgy, a people learns to live as a re-created world.

This is also the old Benedictine instinct that Michel carried in Minnesota. His own formula, preserved by the American Catholic History podcast, ran lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi: how a people prays shapes what it believes, and what it believes shapes how it lives. The original formulation comes from St. Prosper of Aquitaine (5th century), a Christian writer and disciple of St. Augustine. In his work De Auctoritate Episcoporum (On the Authority of the Past Bishops of the Apostolic See). (If you haven’t figured out by now, I love being a public historian… Just saying :))

In his earlier handbook Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style (Pueblo, 1982), Kavanagh wanted liturgy to be “festive, ordered, aesthetic, canonical, eschatological and, above all, normal.” Teach the last word carefully. Normal does not mean casual or mediocre. It means that worship belongs to the ordinary, durable life of a people: eating and drinking, gathering and reconciling, listening and responding, grieving and hoping, receiving and giving.

“The liturgical assembly is less a gathering of individuals than a dynamic coordination of orders.”

One Bread, Many Hands

Thomas Merton makes the communal point harder than anyone. In “Christian Worship and Social Reform,“ he writes:

“Liturgical worship is not only a communal celebration but a celebration of community, of communion ‘‘in the Spirit.”

Merton goes on to say that liturgy unites people to Christ’s worship of the Father, that it expresses “the mystery of peace and unity in Christ“, and that “we who eat of one bread are one in Christ.“ That last phrase is Paul’s, from 1 Corinthians 10:17:

“ Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.“

The verse makes a theological claim and an ethical claim in one breath. To receive one bread while holding contempt, exploitation, exclusion, or indifference toward fellow members of Christ’s body is a contradiction, and the liturgy itself exposes it. Paul does the same thing a chapter later. In 1 Corinthians 12, the body has many members, none of them dispensable, and verse 26 says that when one member suffers, all suffer together.

Think of all the times we leave the Church after liturgy, and in our hearts hold contempt, exclusion, or indifference toward people because of what we see, hear, and experience in the news and on social media.

Merton adds a practical corollary. Liturgy, he says, “expresses a communal responsibility and reciprocity“ that should then show up in ordinary work. A parish that shares the altar and withholds fair wages from its own custodian has told two different stories, and the second is the one that teaches. The same applies for a diocese and the teachers in their schools.

Two False Escapes

Merton rejects two tempting simplifications, and you should be drawn to one or the other.

* The first escape says liturgy is sacred privacy. Worship withdraws from history into a protected hour, and the world can wait in the parking lot.

* The second escape says liturgy is worth only what it can measure. Worship becomes a rally, and its value is counted in hours volunteered and dollars raised.

Both escapes are understandable. The first protects the mystery. The second protects low-income people from pious indifference. The tradition answers that each one guards a real good and then loses the other. Liturgy is not reducible to activism, and it cannot stay indifferent to the concrete world. Merton insisted that active participation by the laity is vital “to manifest the struggle for peace and brotherhood in the great crises of the twentieth century.“ Mitchell, from the other side, said that Christian worship is inherently worldly.

The teaching sentence for this movement: the liturgy does not remove the Church from the world. It trains the Church to see the world truthfully, love it sacrificially, and serve it faithfully.

Act: What a Monday Looks Like

The goal of the Act movement in the Cardin tradition is not to make worship more entertaining or busier. It is to help the assembly enact more fully the communion it has received. Offer these five practices as invitations, and tell us to pick one.

1. Recover the assembly as the real subject of worship. Plan every liturgy around one question: What is this entire assembly called to do before God? Treat the congregation as a praying body, not an audience. Use silence on purpose, so that people can hear, consent, grieve, and receive. Make acclamations, responses, sung prayer, posture, and ritual movement intelligible and genuinely shared. Add ministries only when each one serves the prayer of the whole body, and attend to access so that children, elders, disabled persons, and newcomers can take part with dignity.

2. Make the intercessions local and concrete. The Prayer of the Faithful is where the assembly learns to carry the world before God. Shape it around the community’s actual wounds and joys. (For pastors, I think this is important. I am basing this on many conversations with my classmates who are ordained.) Name those affected by poverty, violence, displacement, illness, imprisonment, and ecological harm. Name public leaders and the institutions that shape the common good. Name the dead and the grieving, and name the divisions that need reconciliation. Mitchell’s conviction stands behind this: liturgy meets God’s action in the real world.

3. Tie the table to the parish. If the Eucharist forms one body, parish life should make the unity visible. Hold regular shared meals across differences of age, class, and politics- yes, politics- remember Jesus and the gospels are political, not partisan. Build a reliable pastoral-care network for illness, grief, job loss, caregiving, and isolation. Pair social ministries with mutual encounter, so that charity does not run in only one direction. Invite testimony from members whose lives show a community need. Examine whether the budget, hospitality, leadership, and building access say the same thing about the equal dignity of the baptized. Merton’s phrase common work is the test: do the parish’s economic habits resemble the reciprocity professed at the altar?

4. Practice reconciliation before symbolic peace. The sign of peace turns routine without practices of repair behind it. Build clear processes for conflict and harm. Build habits of listening across difference. Make room for confession, lament, apology, forgiveness, and restitution. Agree together never to use Christian language to cover hostility or inequality. The peace of Christ is not politeness. It is the costly reconciliation the Church receives and is commanded to practice.

5. Form liturgical leaders as theologians of the assembly. Following Kavanagh, those who preside, preach, sing, read, serve, decorate, welcome, and prepare the space are helping the Church enact its primary theology. Train them in Scripture and sacrament, in symbol, gesture, silence, movement, and space, and in how worship shapes social imagination. Prefer simplicity to constant novelty. Judge their work by whether the community’s prayer is truthful, hospitable, and mission-forming, not only by whether it ran smoothly.

The objection to answer. A parish leader will say, with some justice, that volunteers are scarce, that people are exhausted, and that five new practices are a recipe for burnout. Michel’s story gives the objection a hearing. He wrote more than a third of his magazine’s first volume himself, and within four years he was near exhaustion. Hence the rule for the exercise below: one change, sustained, shared among many hands.

My Suggestion For A Three-Week Practice

1. Week one, See. Observe one Eucharistic celebration. Note who acts, who is absent, how the assembly takes part, what the prayers name, and which social realities stay invisible.

2. Week two, Judge. Read 1 Corinthians 10:16–17 and 12:12–27 beside short excerpts from Merton, Mitchell, and Kavanagh. Ask what vision of Church appears there, and how your practice compares.

3. Week three, Act. Choose one change you can sustain for at least three months: a more locally grounded intercession, a hospitality practice, a listening circle, an accessible worship adjustment, a shared meal, or a ministry of reconciliation.

As The Old Saying Goes: Pray, Brethren

The question we began with, two days ago, was what turns a gathering into a community. The Christian answer is not common interests, shared culture, or emotional affinity. The Church becomes itself when God gathers diverse persons into Christ’s self-offering, gives them a common Word, forms them at one table, and sends them into a wounded world as agents of reconciliation.

The synthesis, for the index card.

1. Merton: liturgy is communion expressed as common work, mutual responsibility, and peace.

2. Mitchell: liturgy is God’s work, and a meeting with mystery that turns people toward God, neighbor, and world.

3. Kavanagh: liturgy is primary theology, the Church’s first enactment of what it believes and who it is.

The closing affirmation. In liturgy we do not merely attend a sacred event. We become, by grace, the people we are called to be: a body gathered from many lives, reconciled in Christ, nourished for common responsibility, and sent in peace for the life of the world.

The return to Collegeville. Go back to the magazine’s name. Orate Fratres is the priest’s invitation before the great prayer of thanksgiving, and it is never a monologue. The people have a line to speak in reply. They ask the Lord to accept the sacrifice from the priest’s hands, for the praise and glory of God’s name, for our good, and for the good of all the Church.

In 1930, the man who had named a movement for that invitation could not say it. The invitation did not fail. It never depended on one voice, and it never belonged to the one who issued it. The assembly was always going to answer, and in the end the movement he started carried on without his strength. The magazine still exists, under the name Worship. Read it.

That is the claim of these two evenings. The liturgy does not wait for the most capable person in the room. It waits for the people.

Questions to Carry Home

* Where does our community most clearly embody the communion it celebrates?

* Where is there a gap between our Eucharistic practice and our social life?

* What would change if we viewed the liturgy not as a service we attend but as God’s work that forms us into Christ’s body?

* How might our worship better reveal concern for those who are absent, marginalized, or wounded?

* What is one practice we can adopt so that “ Go in peace” becomes a real communal mission rather than a closing formula?

Let’s close this by asking you to say aloud the one practice you will try for three months.

Pray, brethren.

The people answer.

This will be two blog posts: one for today (Tuesday) and the other for Thursday.

The Monk Who Could Not Pray

In 1930, a Benedictine at Saint John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, was coming apart. His eyesight was failing. He had severe headaches and could not sleep. By one biographer’s account, he could not read, and he could not bring himself to celebrate Mass.

Four years earlier he had started a magazine. He called it Orate Fratres, the Latin words a priest speaks to the people before the great prayer of thanksgiving: Pray, brethren. The first issue appeared on the First Sunday of Advent 1926, which fell on 28 November. The monk wrote more than a third of the first volume himself. By 1929 the magazine reached readers in 26 countries.

He was baptized George Michel and born in St. Paul, Minnesota, on 26 June 1890. He is remembered as Dom Virgil. He was ordained on 14 June 1916. In 1918, he finished a doctorate at the Catholic University of America, with a dissertation on the nineteenth-century American writer Orestes Brownson. From February 1924 to August 1925, he traveled in Europe on what was supposed to be a philosophy course. He began in Rome at Sant’Anselmo, under Joseph Gredt, and moved on to Louvain. Somewhere in those months, he spent long hours with the Belgian monk Lambert Beauduin, who taught that the liturgy belongs to the whole Body of Christ, not to the clergy alone. He came home convinced that liturgical renewal mattered, and that it mattered most in America.

The plan was to write. By 1930 the writing had left him near exhaustion.

His abbey sent him north, to the Chippewa people of northern Minnesota, to recover.

That is where the story stops for now.

The Turn

A man who had built a movement around praying together could not pray at all.

Hold that image, because it holds the difficulty of this blog post. Whatever lay behind his breakdown, the image carries a warning: a community is not produced by effort alone, however sincere, and the people who work hardest at it are not exempt. The question underneath every parish council meeting and every worship/liturgy committee is the same one.

Who makes this a community, and who is asked only to receive it?

Today we ask that question of ourselves, using a method Joseph Cardijn gave to the young workers of Belgium: see, judge, act. Two days from now, on Thursday, we will go back to the monk and find out what happened to him.

One Sentence on an Index Card

Take out an index card. Write and Finish one sentence: “When I hear the word liturgy, I most immediately think of ______.” Say it out loud; that is important. What we see and hear often are two different experiences. Think of them as one. Do any of your words say Mass, ritual, music, rules, tradition, obligation, beauty, boredom, community, sacraments? Do not correct any of them.

Then ask the question these two days will try to answer: “What makes a group of people gathered in one place into a genuine community?” Let that settle into your mind for a while.

Now name a concern you have in three sentences. Then, think about how a congregation can be physically assembled without becoming a community. Can a community have warmth and familiarity without worship transforming it? Can Liturgy address both? Does God gather a people, form them through Word and sacrament, and send them into the world with a shared vocation? Is the reward for attending Mass the coffee and donuts afterward?

The thesis, spoken once and slowly. Liturgy is not primarily something a community produces for God. God’s action in Christ and the Spirit gathers, reveals, reconciles, feeds, and sends a people into communion and mission. The assembly is not an audience, a voluntary association, or a collection of private spiritual consumers. It is the Body of Christ acting through a shared pattern of listening, responding, giving thanks, interceding, eating, remembering, and being sent.

See: What the Pews Actually Say

Cardijn taught his young workers to begin with what they could see, before anyone told them what it meant. So begin there. Before asking what liturgy should be, ask what worshipping communities actually experience and communicate.

What we often see. Read the list slowly and think about your gut reaction, not your brain.

1. People arrive as individuals and leave as individuals.

2. A small group does the liturgy while the congregation functions as an audience.

3. Participation shrinks to activity: more readers, more music, more movement, more announcements.

4. Some communities treat reverence as passivity, silence, distance, or clerical control. Others treat participation as spontaneity, informality, or constant speech. Both can miss the assembly.

5. Communion can sit comfortably beside social division, economic indifference, political hostility, racism, exclusion, or neglect of the vulnerable.

6. Worship becomes a refuge from the world instead of the place where the world’s wounds are named before God.

7. Parish life becomes program-centered rather than communion-centered: many activities, little mutual responsibility.

If you work in education, or sit on liturgy committees, ask these six questions of any congregation. Put these on a handout.

* Who is visibly participating, and who is missing, silent, marginalized, or unable to take part?

* Does the arrangement of the space say common belonging, hierarchy, spectatorship, or mutual recognition?

* What does the community’s silence reveal: attentive receptivity, awkwardness, exclusion, or prayer?

* Are the poor, the grieving, the ill, the alienated, and the socially invisible present in the assembly’s prayers and practices?

* Does the exchange of peace remain a gesture, or does it press on real estrangement?

* Does “Go in peace” shape how the community lives from Monday through Saturday?

Three Memories, Two Minutes of Silence

Give two minutes of silence. In your liturgy committee, class, or just a group of friends, ask them to recall one recent liturgy and write down three things:

1. One moment when they felt part of a praying body rather than an observer.

2. One moment when the liturgy felt fragmented, rushed, performative, or detached from ordinary life.

3. One communal reality, whether joy, conflict, grief, injustice, or need, that was either named or ignored.

Listen for the pattern. If the second and third answers describe the same gap, say so: the liturgy went on, and part of the community’s real life stayed outside the door.

The central observation. The problem is rarely that people do not understand the liturgy. The deeper problem is that communities struggle to understand themselves as a people called into communion by God.

Thomas Merton saw this in the early 1960s. In his essay “Christian Worship and Social Reform”, written between October 1962 and December 1963 and published long after in The Merton Seasonal, he calls liturgy a “common work”:

“Liturgy therefore expresses a communal responsibility and reciprocity which, after taking a religious form in the sacred cult, afterwards incarnates itself in work characterized by a similar responsibility and reciprocity.”

Thomas Merton

Worship cannot be detached from a congregation’s actual social habits. What the people do on Tuesday with each other’s labor, money, and attention is already a liturgy of its own, and Sunday either contradicts it or confirms it.

Judge: Whose Work Is This?

Now go and read: Acts 2:42–47, then Romans 12:1–2.— no commentary

The Greek word leitourgia can mean public service, a common work. Many Christians stop there and conclude that liturgy is the work of the people, a human project that a competent people can do well or badly. The tradition says something stronger and stranger.

First, liturgy is God’s work before it is ours. Nathan Mitchell, writing in Spirituality Today in March 1982, puts it flatly:

“liturgy is above all God’s work, God’s passionate activity on our behalf.”

Nathan would often say that in class. We were often too busy writing it down to actually reflect on what that meant.

For Mitchell, the work is reconciliation. “In the cross of Jesus, God acted to break the barriers of separation, to reconcile humankind, and to release us from the paralyzing hostility that bound us.” Christians assemble to answer that act with gratitude. They do not assemble to manufacture an experience. Let that sink in for a moment. I often flash back to grade school, going to Mass with my grandmother, who knelt the whole time praying her rosary; it was the 1950s. What question was she answering?

The consequence for community is plain, and it runs counter to most parish planning.

1. Shared preferences, similar demographics, and organizational efficiency do not create a Christian community.

2. Communion begins with God’s initiative. The assembly does not possess Christ. Christ gathers it.

3. Participation is more than self-expression. It is receptivity, consent, response, and conversion.

Here is the teaching sentence for the room or your liturgy committee: we do not come to liturgy chiefly to display that we are a community. We come so that God may make us into one.

Does that cause you any angst? Think about it first with your gut, then your heart, and then your mind. Any difference in the three?

The Second Vatican Council said the same thing in its own idiom. Sacrosanctum Concilium §7 teaches that Christ is present in the liturgy in the assembly itself, and §26 that liturgical services belong to the whole Church as the sacrament of unity. Paragraph 14 asks for the full, conscious, and active participation of all, and grounds the request, like the liturgy, not in a preference for busy congregations.

Let’s return to the monk for a moment. Whatever else his breakdown meant, it pictures what happens when one person tries to carry a communal work alone. The work is received before it is done.

A Meeting, Not a Code

Second, liturgy is a meeting with mystery, not a container of meanings.

In Meeting Mystery: Liturgy, Worship, Sacraments (Orbis Books), Mitchell resists treating ritual as a code to decipher or a lesson to master. His reviewer Peter Fink, writing in America on 21 May 2007, summarizes the claim: “Ritual activity aims to take you deeply into the world around you to the point where the One who is its source is met.“ Mitchell begins, Fink reports, with “the sober recognition that we don’t know what we are doing.”

That admission changes the questions a community asks of its worship.

The limited question The fuller liturgical question

See The graph in my post on my webdsitr allthngscyberspace.com The left column describes a consumer. The right column describes a people.

The strongest objection deserves its full weight here. Someone will say that people come to worship tired, grieving, and short of time, and that asking them to give up the question “what did I get out of it?” is a luxury of the well-fed. That is a fair objection, and the tradition answers it from the other direction. The tired and the grieving are exactly the people who cannot produce a meeting with God by effort. They can only be met. A liturgy that lifts the burden of producing the experience is the best news a depleted person hears all week.

Mitchell also refuses the opposite mistake, in which worship becomes a place of retreat. In the same 1982 essay, he writes that “Christian worship is inherently worldly” and that “worship does not create an ‘alternative world’ to which we can retreat when ordinary life becomes intolerable.” The mystery we meet is already at work in the world’s beauty, suffering, and catastrophe.

What We Carry Out the Door

Take out that index card again and write three sentences on it.

1. A gathering becomes a community when God gathers it, not when it organizes itself.

2. The assembly is a body that receives before it acts.

3. The honest test of a liturgy is what kind of people it is making.

Now in your liturgy committees, or class or discussion groups, ask:

* Where in your own parish or group does the assembly act as a body, and where does it watch?

* Which of the seven things we often see describes your community most accurately? Which one would your community least like to admit?

* Mitchell says we do not know what we are doing. What changes if a community says that out loud?

The hinge.

Return to the monk, and give only the facts. A man who could not pray went north to recover, and by 1933 he was back at his abbey. In 1935 he published an argument about what the liturgy is for. The lecture two days from now begins there.

Ask yourself to answer the question the ‘See’ section left open: which social reality in my community is named in our prayers, and which is not?

More to come on Thursday.

A sidebar here:

I was greatly influenced by the Benedictines during college and graduate school. I read and studied what Aidan Kavanagh, OSB, wrote and what Aurelius Boberek, OSB, taught, and I developed a deep appreciation for Nathan Mitchell, in and out of class, over the years.

This text provides a further example of polemics between Jesus and the religious authorities of his day. According to most scholars, the polemic is more a reflection of tensions between Jewish and Christian groups at the time of writing, rather than those that might have existed at Jesus’ time, half a century earlier. A significant catalyst for this tension was the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, following a brief and ill-fated uprising against the occupying Roman forces. This destruction was accompanied by the expulsion of most of the Jewish population of Palestine and the effective demise of the Temple Priests as the central authority of Judaism. In the aftermath of this turmoil, the group known as the Pharisees came to the fore and sought to cleanse the religion of any perceived impurities. This amounted to a schism between the Jewish communities of the time and the fledgling Christian Churches, many of whom were, by then, populated by Gentiles as well as Jewish converts. It is likely, therefore, that this turmoil had a significant impact on the way in which the Pharisees were depicted in the Gospels and, in particular, where conflict between Jesus and his contemporaries was found. Viewed through the lens of the late first century conflict, the violence and treachery of the tenants in the parable, is somewhat indicative of how these communities, in conflict with one another, viewed their adversaries.

The parable presents a strong indictment, against the religious authorities of the time, not only for their failure to act as good stewards of God’s gifts but also for their rejection of the prophets who regularly called them to account. It also foreshadows Jesus’ own fate in the treatment of the landowner’s son (Mt 21:38-39). Beyond these indictment of the religious leaders, the parable asserts that all humankind are stewards of God’s gifts, charged with the responsibility of bearing fruit from that which we are given.

Gospel Text: Matthew 21:33-43

Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people, ‘Listen to another parable. There was a man, a landowner, who planted a vineyard; he fenced it round, dug a winepress in it and built a tower; then he leased it to tenants and went abroad. When vintage time drew near he sent his servants to the tenants to collect his produce. But the tenants seized his servants, thrashed one, killed another and stoned a third. Next he sent some more servants, this time a larger number, and they dealt with them in the same way. Finally he sent his son to them. “They will respect my son” he said. But when the tenants saw the son, they said to each other, “This is the heir. Come on, let us kill him and take over his inheritance.” So they seized him and threw him out of the vineyard and killed him. Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?’ They answered, ‘He will bring those wretches to a wretched end and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will deliver the produce to him when the season arrives.’ Jesus said to them, ‘Have you never read in the scriptures:

It was the stone rejected by the builders

that became the keystone.

This was the Lord’s doing

and it is wonderful to see?

‘I tell you, then, that the kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.’

See

How does the text depict the state of the vineyard at the time that it was leased to the tenants?

What motivation is shown, in the text, to explain the behaviour of the tenants?

What is the consequence of their actions for the tenants?

Judge

How does the background to the conflict between Christian and Jewish communities in the late first century inform our understanding of this text?

What is the significance of ancient historical religious conflicts for the way that we live today?

What responsibilities does this text place on us, as stewards of God’s gifts?

Act

What steps can we take to ensure that we use God’s gifts in way that bear fruit?

What actions can we take, within our own communities, to ensure that ancient conflicts do not lead to mistrust and division today?

In what ways can we help to influence broader social narratives to focus on our common humanity rather than sectarian divisions?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-20-1-16-2023-2/

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

In late November 1968, Thomas Merton rode in a car near Madras, heading to see the ancient stone temples at Mahabalipuram. Spotting hills in the distance, he asked his Catholic driver if those were the mountains where Ramana Maharshi had lived. The driver smiled and said yes.

The driver was wrong. Arunachala, the sacred hill where Maharshi spent decades in silence, was actually about a hundred miles farther southwest. Merton, who had studied Maharshi’s teachings for years at the Abbey of Gethsemani, just made a note in his journal. He didn’t correct the driver or ask to change direction, and as far as we know, he let the thought go as the car continued.

Two weeks later, on December 10, 1968, Merton died unexpectedly because of a faulty electric fan in a Bangkok conference center, just hours after speaking to Christian and Buddhist monks. He never visited the mountain or met the Hindu sage whose words had influenced him for years. The closest he came to Ramana Maharshi was the driver’s mistaken answer.

Some might see that missed meeting as a quiet tragedy—a monk nearly reaching the source of an idea he valued, only to miss it because of a mistake. But maybe it was not a loss. Merton did not need to climb the mountain. By 1968, he had already spent years exploring the same question that was central to Ramana Maharshi’s spiritual path, though he did so from a different tradition.

Two Ways of Turning Inward

During the 1960s, Merton read many Hindu and Buddhist texts, not just out of curiosity but as someone searching for deeper understanding. His journals from that time, later published as The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton, show him comparing his Christian contemplative practice with what he learned from these traditions. He also wrote two long essays on Gandhi: “Gandhi: The Gentle Revolutionary” (1964) and the introduction to Gandhi on Non-Violence (1965).

In these essays, Merton said that Gandhi did something rare for his time: he put the teachings of the Gospel into political life so fully that his faith and politics could not be separated. Merton was not saying Gandhi was secretly Christian. Instead, he showed that a Hindu had lived out something Christian social ethics often only talk about—a spirituality that is not just private.

Merton was also interested in Gandhi’s idea of svadharma, which means one’s own duty, found through conscience rather than forced from outside. He saw Gandhi’s nonviolent politics (satyagraha, or “truth-force”) as coming from this idea. For Gandhi, political action was about showing the truth, not just trying to win. Being true to one’s values mattered more than success.

Ramana Maharshi, the sage on the mountain Merton never visited, taught a path focused on one question: “Who am I?”This practice is not about finding a simple answer, but about letting the question break down the illusions of body, mind, and social identity that hide the Atman. Merton found this approach powerful for contemplation, and it shaped how he saw Hindu spirituality.

Gandhi had a very different personality, but shared the same deep commitment. While Ramana’s path led to silence and a quiet ashram, Gandhi’s led to public marches, hunger strikes, and publishing. Both refused to let anything but their true selves shape them, making that choice a matter of conscience. Merton, who had taken vows of silence and stability, saw himself in both men.

A Principle That Needs a Reason to Care

Catholic Social Teaching connects human dignity, the common good, subsidiarity, and solidarity. Pope Benedict XVI explained this in his 2009 encyclical Caritas in Veritate. He said solidarity and subsidiarity must stay linked: subsidiarity without solidarity leads to social indifference, leaving local communities on their own, while solidarity without subsidiarity creates a welfare system that takes away people’s agency. Both principles, he said, come from the same source: the dignity of each person as a subject, not just an object of policy.

Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, offered a similar summary in a 2025 address, describing CST’s core as “human dignity, the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, and care for creation”, principles he framed as a moral compass for addressing contemporary global crises rather than a fixed rulebook.

Hindu ethics, shown in ideas like Atman, Dharma, and Seva, can add to this vision without simply repeating it. If ultimate reality is found deep within each person, not in their status or role, then dignity is more than just a slogan—it is a real claim about what a person is. And if dharma means a right order that includes all of nature, not just human society, then subsidiarity’s respect for local communities and Catholic Social Teaching’s focus on caring for creation find support in a tradition that has long seen rivers, forests, and animals as having their own rights.

A Test Case Neither Tradition Saw Coming

All of this may sound like distant history, but both traditions are now facing these same questions because of new technology.

Both traditions agree that artificial intelligence (AI) should not decide what a person is worth. This is where Atman and imago Dei become practical ideas. The Vatican’s January 2025 document on AI, Antiqua et Nova, warns against seeing human worth only in terms of productivity or skills and says a person’s value comes from inherent dignity, not ability. This is the same danger that Atman warns about: if AI can out-write, out-calculate, and out-produce people, and society measures worth by what someone does, then AI could be used to say people are no longer needed. Modern Hindu writers on AI make a similar point using the idea of samskaras, or mental impressions, compared to Atman: AI can copy patterns of thought and memory, but copying a pattern is not the same as having the conscious self that makes those patterns belong to someone. It is the difference between a good imitation of a person and a real person.

The idea of structural sin also applies to how AI affects society. Antiqua et Nova points out a real problem at work: AI often makes workers adjust to the machine’s speed and demands, rather than making the machine help people, which goes against the principle of subsidiarity. This problem happens by default, not because of one person’s bad choices. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026) makes this link clear, using the main ideas of Catholic Social Teaching—the common good, subsidiarity, solidarity, and social justice—to address “the era of artificial intelligence.”

Merton’s warning about noise and speed fits today’s world of algorithmic feeds. He said that real freedom and nonviolence are impossible for anyone who gives in to a society focused on constant stimulation and distraction. Although he wrote this in the 1960s about mass media, his words now seem more like a diagnosis than a metaphor. In this setting, Ramana Maharshi’s question, “Who am I?” becomes a practical tool—not a rejection of technology, but a way to stay connected to what AI cannot copy, even as the world pulls our attention into endless scrolling.

Both traditions agree on moral agency. The Church says clearly that only humans—not machines—are self-aware enough to listen to conscience, use good judgment, and seek what is right. Hindu writers who use dharmic reasoning about AI, drawing from the Mahabharata’s ideas about duty, reach a similar point differently: a self-driving car can act to save lives, but what makes an action truly dharmic is that a conscious person stands behind it and takes responsibility. Neither tradition is willing to let responsibility shift from people to systems.

Voices Worth Sitting With

• Gandhi, on the foundation of his whole ethical project: “There is no God higher than truth.”

• Merton, on what made Gandhi’s witness distinctive: he found Gandhi’s political action “inseparably religious and political at the same time.”

• Ramana Maharshi’s method, compressed into two words: “Who am I?”

• Cardinal Parolin, naming what CST insists on protecting: policies that prioritize the vulnerable, the refugee, older people, the unborn, over profit or power.

Questions for discussion

• Merton, a Trappist monk under vows of stability and silence, found in Gandhi’s public, political nonviolence something that deepened his own contemplative life rather than distracting from it. What does that suggest about the relationship between silence and public action: are they in tension, or do they need each other?

• Ramana Maharshi’s self-inquiry and Gandhi’s nonviolent activism look like opposite lifestyles, one withdrawn, the other public. In what sense might they represent the same underlying discipline, and can we practice one without ever practicing the other?

• If both traditions insist that only a human being can bear moral responsibility, what does that imply about decisions we are currently comfortable letting AI systems make on our behalf, hiring, medical triage, content moderation, lending, where a human “signs off” but the AI effectively decides?

What to Carry Out of the Car

Taken together, this suggests a fairly concrete ethic for the present moment:

1. Judge AI by whether it serves human flourishing (seva, integral human development), not merely by whether it is efficient or profitable.

2. Treat structural harm as seriously as individual misuse. Problems like algorithmic bias, job loss, and the digital divide deserve the same moral attention as a single person’s bad actions, because both traditions already recognize injustice that no one person meant to cause.

3. See contemplative practice, silence, self-inquiry, and choosing to unplug as necessary steps for using technology responsibly, not as ways to avoid it.

Merton never visited Arunachala. He died two weeks after asking about it, in a country he was just starting to explore, in an unexpected way. But the mountain was never really the goal. Ramana Maharshi spent his life asking “Who am I?” from one quiet place, while Gandhi asked the same question while marching, fasting, and writing, always on the move. Merton, a monk committed to silence but also interested in the world’s activity, felt at home in both approaches.

He got close enough to the mountain he had thought about for years to ask a stranger about it, smiled at the wrong answer, and kept going.

Sources: Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions, 1973), per the excerpted text at archive.arunachala.org; Thomas Merton, “Gandhi: The Gentle Revolutionary” (Ramparts, 1964) and the introduction to Gandhi on Non-Violence (New Directions, 1965); Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (2009); Cardinal Pietro Parolin, remarks reported by Vatican News (2025); Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education, Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence (28 January 2025); Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026); Merton’s death per contemporaneous and Merton Society accounts.

Their answer was simple and direct: eighty acres, half irrigated and half dry, enough for forty families to finally have land of their own.

Bhave did not ask the government for help. Instead, he turned to the landowners in the room and asked a straightforward question: if the state would not provide this land, could the villagers do something about it themselves?

A local landowner, V. Ramachandra Reddy, stood up. He owned 3,500 acres and immediately offered 100, more than the families had even asked for.

The giving did not stop in Pochampally. Within weeks, the Nizam of Hyderabad promised fourteen thousand acres. Landowners across India joined in—some eagerly, others less so—until the movement slowed down over the next decade. It never became as large as Bhave had hoped, and much of the land offered was either poor quality or disputed. Still, every story started the same way: one person responding to a question that saw caring for the land as a shared duty.

This idea is central: a person’s inner life and a village’s land records are not two separate things, one spiritual and one economic, but different names for the same reality. Hindu ethics calls this dharma. Catholic Social Teaching uses its own words for the outward side, and in recent years has focused more on what happens when a whole society, not just one landlord, ignores the question.

Three Words That Refuse to Work Alone

A friend once asked me why a Catholic should care about what Hindu philosophy says about justice. My honest answer is that neither tradition is complete on its own. Both say that inner and outer life are connected, and both are uneasy when faith is kept only private.

This is a comparison, not a claim that both traditions say the same thing. Hindu philosophy is not a single system: Advaita Vedanta, Vishishtadvaita, and the different devotional (bhakti) schools often disagree about the nature of Atman and its connection to the divine, sometimes as much as they agree with Christian ideas. I will point out when I am generalizing.

Three Sanskrit words are central in Hindu ethics. Atman, often called “self” or “soul,” is, in most Vedantic schools, the deepest part of a person, what remains when all roles, memories, and possessions are gone. Dharma is hard to translate, covering duty, natural law, cosmic order, and the sense of “what is right for me, here and now.” Seva means selfless service, doing something without looking for reward or recognition. These three stand alone. One does not first realize the Atman and then separately choose whether to act ethically. In most classical teachings, the deepest self is found through dharmic action and selfless service, not apart from them. The contemplative and active lives are not separate roads that sometimes meet; they are one path, seen from two perspectives. Reddy’s hundred acres showed this truth before either tradition had the words for it.

This is where Christian social thought and Hindu ethics meet. Catholic theology says human dignity is something built-in: no one is just their job or social role. Hindu ethics comes to a similar idea in a different way. If the self is deeper than the ego’s roles and functions, then a person cannot be reduced to those things. The traditions differ on why—Christianity finds it in the image of God, Vedanta in consciousness itself—but both agree that personhood is more than just function.

A Word for What Nobody Intended

It is helpful to pause and consider Buddhism here, because it makes the comparison clearer. Engaged Buddhism, the socially active branch connected to people like Thich Nhat Hanh and the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka, teaches that suffering (dukkha) is caused by systems, not just by individual desires. Poverty, war, and environmental damage are seen as problems created by structures that need to be changed, not just, personal failings that call for charity.

Catholic Social Teaching makes a similar point, though it comes from its own history. The Church uses the phrase “structures of sin,” which Pope John Paul II mentioned in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), to show that injustice can be built into economic and political systems and can last beyond any one person’s choices. CST’s four pillars—the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, and care for creation—are ways the Church tries to put this idea into practice. The tradition asks not just whether people are kind to each other, but whether tax codes, labor markets, and global debt treat people as ends or merely as means.

A purely Vedantic focus on individual liberation (moksha) would miss the full range of Hindu ethics. The structural critique seen in engaged Buddhism also has deep roots in Hindu social reform. Gandhi’s economic arguments for swadeshi (self-reliance) and his criticism of colonial exploitation focused on changing systems, not just personal virtue. Bhoodan was Gandhian economics in action, led by someone who had worked closely with Gandhi, and carried out village by village.

Dharma and CST, Side by Side

To see this graph, visit

https://allthingscyberspace.com

Questions Worth Sitting With

• If Hindu ethics bases human worth on the depth of consciousness (Atman) and Christian ethics bases it on being made in the image of God (imago Dei), does this difference in foundation change what each tradition asks of society, or do both ultimately require similar duties toward the poor and vulnerable?

• Catholic Social Teaching calls “structures of sin” something different from individual wrongdoing. Can a system be unjust even if no one inside it means to do harm? If so, who or what should change it?

• Where does the table above show the closest match, and where is the biggest difference, between Hindu Dharma and Catholic Social Teaching? Does that gap reveal something about the traditions themselves, or about how imperfectly people live out any tradition?

What to Carry Out of the Room

Here are three lessons from this comparison that are worth taking into everyday life:

1. Dignity based on what someone produces is not real dignity. Both traditions ground their ethics in a self that lasts longer than any job, caste, or bank account.

2. Service is not less important than charity. Both seva and diakonia see serving others as a way to discover the self, not just something extra after self-discovery.

3. Look at the system before blaming the individual. A structure can let people down even if no one means to do harm, so someone needs to raise the issue with those in charge.

Decades later, families whose grandparents once had nothing still farm Reddy’s hundred acres. The gift did not solve land reform in India. Historians now say most Bhoodan pledges were never fully kept, and the movement’s hopes were bigger than what one person’s question could achieve. But the moment did not have to fix everything to matter. It just needed one landlord to hear a question about dharma and respond with land.

That is, the exchange this essay has explored: a faith that is honest enough inside to challenge the world outside. Pochampally shows what can happen when that exchange takes place.

Sources: Pope John Paul II, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987); the Bhoodan movement’s origins at Pochampally, 18 April 1951, per Wikipedia’s Bhodan movement, Bhoodan Pochampally, and V. Ramachandra Reddy; Vinoba Bhave biographical details per Vinoba Bhave.

This text from Matthew is set in the Holy City of Jerusalem and depicts Jesus in open conflict with the religious leaders of his day. Following his entry into Jerusalem, at the beginning of chapter 21, Jesus drives the money changers from the temple (Mt 21:12), then curses the fig tree, an allegorical reference to a lifeless religious culture. His authority is then directly challenged by the ‘chief priests and elders of the people’ (Mt 21:23). It is in the context of this challenge that Jesus tells the parable of the two sons. One notable feature of this section of the Gospel is how the crowds acclaim Jesus while the religious elite oppose him. This pattern is affirmed in this passage where Jesus contrasts the belief of the ‘tax collectors and prostitutes’ (Mt 21:32) with that of his adversaries who had refused to accept the witness of John the Baptist.

The parable of the two sons seems to convey a very straightforward message. The son who gives verbal assent but then fails to act is to be condemned. In contrast, the son who initially refused and later does as he was asked is to be praised. The condemnation falls on those who, on the surface, profess a religious belief but, in practice, show themselves to be opposed to the Gospel. In contrast, it is those who are most often thought of as sinners who are seen to embrace the Gospel and, therefore find themselves welcomed in the ‘kingdom of God’ (Mt 21:31).

Gospel Text: Matthew 21:28-32

Jesus said to the chief priests and elders of the people, ‘What is your opinion? A man had two sons. He went and said to the first, “My boy, you go and work in the vineyard today.” He answered, “I will not go,” but afterwards thought better of it and went. The man then went and said the same thing to the second who answered, “Certainly, sir,” but did not go. Which of the two did the father’s will?’ ‘The first’ they said. Jesus said to them, ‘I tell you solemnly, tax collectors and prostitutes are making their way into the kingdom of God before you. For John came to you, a pattern of true righteousness, but you did not believe him, and yet the tax collectors and prostitutes did. Even after seeing that, you refused to think better of it and believe in him.’

See

How are the religious leaders of the time depicted in this passage?

How are the tax collectors and prostitutes depicted in this passage?

What message is conveyed by the parable of the two sons?

Judge

What does this passage teach about integrity of speech and actions?

Where, today, can we see failings similar to those condemned by Jesus in this parable?

Who, in today’s world, might be seen as the outsiders, who embrace the Gospel?

Act

What can we do to ensure that our own actions are in line with the faith we profess?

What action can we take if religious leaders of today fail to act with integrity?

How can we act to ensure that those who might appear to be outsiders, in our communities, are made to feel welcome?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-21-28-32-2020/

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

He spent two days with Thomas Merton. The next day Merton told his novices that their visitor was “a perfectly formed monk.” For proof, he offered something the monk had said about practice: before you can meditate, you must learn how to close the door. Merton pointed out that his own monks, hurrying to choir, left a trail of slammed doors behind them. The novices laughed.

That summer Merton published a short essay called “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother.” The monk was Thich Nhat Hanh. “He is more my brother than many who are nearer to me in race and nationality,” Merton wrote, “because he and I see things exactly the same way.” Nhat Hanh did not go home. South Vietnam refused to let him back, and after the war the communist government kept him out too. The exile lasted until 2005, 39 years in all.

A Trappist and a Zen monk recognized each other by the way one of them closed a door.

More than inner peace

Ask most Westerners what Buddhism is about, and you will hear meditation, letting go, inner peace. That is part of it. It is not the whole of it. Buddhism has always had a social dimension, where compassion, community, and liberation are the same goal seen from different angles.

Catholic Social Teaching (CST) has spent 135 years, since Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891, insisting that justice is a shared project and not only a private virtue. Set side by side, the two traditions push each other to take collective liberation more seriously. In 2026, they also offer a practical way to judge artificial intelligence (AI) by how it shapes community, work, and power.

The third jewel

Buddhists take refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma (the teaching), and the Sangha (the community). In early Buddhism, Sangha meant the ordained community of monks and nuns. Many traditions now use the word more broadly for the whole community of practitioners. In either sense, its place on the list says something important. Awakening was never meant to be a solo project. The community forms, challenges, and holds the practitioner accountable.

Catholic thought has a close cousin to this idea. The Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes (7 December 1965) teaches that the human person “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (§24). The vocabulary differs, but the instinct is the same: people are changed in relationship, not in isolation.

Four threads of Engaged Buddhism

Thich Nhat Hanh made the term “Engaged Buddhism” known in the West, most prominently in Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire (Hill and Wang, 1967). The idea predates the phrase. It draws on Vietnamese Buddhist reform movements and on the Chinese monk Taixu’s “humanistic Buddhism” earlier in the century. Four threads run through it.

It starts on the inside. Buddhism names three poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion. Engaged Buddhists treat them as more than personal failings. In The Great Awakening: A Buddhist Social Theory (Wisdom Publications, 2003), teacher David Loy argues that the poisons become institutions: an economy built on greed, militarism built on hatred, and media built on delusion. Reform the system while ignoring the poisons, and the same harm comes back in a new shape. CST makes the same move with its call for conversion of heart. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1888) speaks of “the permanent need for inner conversion” if social change is to serve the person.

It does not stop there. Suffering (dukkha) gets built into economic and political arrangements. Pope John Paul II gave the Catholic version of this insight its best-known name in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (30 December 1987): “structures of sin” (§36), patterns of injustice that outlast and exceed any one person’s wrongdoing. Both traditions reach the same conclusion. Compassion without analysis does not go far enough.

Non-violence is a way of seeing, not just a tactic. The first Buddhist precept is to refrain from taking life. Nhat Hanh’s teaching of “interbeing” grounds that precept in the fact that all beings depend on one another, so harming one harms the web. Catholicism’s record is more mixed. The Catechism still sets out conditions for legitimate defense (§2309). Recent popes, however, have moved steadily toward active non-violence. Francis devoted his World Day of Peace message of 1 January 2017 to “Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace.” In Fratelli Tutti (3 October 2020, §258), he wrote that it is now very difficult to invoke the old just war criteria at all.

The community practices what it preaches. Engaged Buddhism asks the Sangha to live right speech, mutual care, and shared responsibility now, rather than waiting for a better society to arrive. CST calls this the common good: “the sum of those conditions of social life” that let groups and individuals reach their fulfillment (Gaudium et Spes §26). In both traditions, community is already a form of justice, not only a tool for getting there.

The convert at Nagpur

On 14 October 1956, in Nagpur, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar took the Buddhist vows. The scale is where accounts differ: about 400,000 to 500,000 people converted with him. Ambedkar had been born into a caste regarded as “untouchable.” He chaired the committee that drafted India’s constitution, and twenty years earlier, he wrote Annihilation of Caste. He chose Buddhism as a direct rejection of caste. He died less than two months later, on 6 December 1956. His movement, sometimes called Navayana, still counts millions of followers.

The pairing of Buddhism and social justice did not begin in the West. It has deep roots in a movement against a specific, named system of harm.

Others carried the same current elsewhere. A. T. Ariyaratne founded the Sarvodaya Shramadana village movement in Sri Lanka in 1958. Maha Ghosananda led peace walks through war-torn Cambodia in the 1990s. Robert and Anne Aitken helped found the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in 1978. Sulak Sivaraksa of Thailand co-founded the International Network of Engaged Buddhists in 1989.

The strongest objections

This convergence can be overstated, and fairness means saying where it breaks down.

The biggest difference concerns the self. CST rests on the dignity of the human person, created in God’s image. Buddhism teaches anatta, non-self: nothing permanent lies at the core of a person. Both traditions honor the person, but they give different accounts of what a person is. A comparison that hides this does neither tradition any favors.

Neither tradition has a clean record on violence, either. Brian Victoria’s Zen at War (Weatherhill, 1997) documents Japanese Zen leaders who blessed imperial militarism. In Myanmar, nationalist monks helped stir the hatred behind the 2017 campaign against the Rohingya. The Catholic record needs no rehearsal. Some scholars also argue that Engaged Buddhism is a modern reinterpretation shaped by Western social thought rather than the recovery of an ancient ideal.

These objections are serious, but they do not sink the comparison. They show that both traditions agree on something more important than their own innocence: good doctrine does not protect a community from structures that betray it. That is exactly the lesson the AI moment needs.

See, Judge, Act: the machine that feeds craving

AI can magnify those same structures if no one examines them. Joseph Cardijn built the See-Judge-Act method for young workers in Belgium. John XXIII endorsed it in Mater et Magistra (15 May 1961, §236). It is the most portable tool I know for turning conviction into a decision, and it offers a clear way to read the AI moment.

See. Much of the AI economy runs on attention, and attention runs on craving (tanha), which the Buddha named as the engine of suffering. A recommendation engine learns what a person wants to feel and supplies more of it. The work behind the systems is often hidden. In January 2023, Time reported that OpenAI, through the contractor Sama, used Kenyan workers paid less than 2 USD an hour to label violent and abusive text. The data centers that run these systems consume large amounts of energy and water. The minerals inside the chips often come from mines in the Global South. No single engineer intends any of this, which is exactly what a structure of sin looks like.

Judge. Both traditions offer measures. Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path includes right livelihood and right speech. Its teaching on interdependence has no concept of an externality, because what a system pushes out of sight still lands on someone. Catholic teaching measures technology against human dignity, the dignity of work, and the common good.

Pope Leo XIV, who took his name partly to echo Leo XIII’s response to the Industrial Revolution, signed his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on 15 May 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. Its subtitle is “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” It calls for AI to be “disarmed,” warns against concentrating power in private hands that “surpass” many governments (§5), and returns to “structures of sin” (§36). It also asks for “personal and communal conversion” alongside “structural reforms” (§22), a phrase any Engaged Buddhist could have written.

Defenders of AI have a strong case, and it deserves a full hearing. These tools already help detect disease, translate between languages, and open the world to people with disabilities. Many Buddhists would add that a tool has no poison of its own; the poison lives in the mind that uses it. That is true as far as it goes. But a system trained to maximize engagement is not neutral. Its design encodes a decision about which desires to feed. Both traditions hold that people answer for the structures they build, not only for their private intentions.

Act. Merton’s question applies here: what is happening to the human person? A tradition that treats the Sangha as a jewel will not accept a technology that dissolves community into isolated users. A tradition built on the common good will not accept one whose benefits flow to a few while its costs fall on the unseen.

An index card for the week

1. Close the door first. Before adopting an AI tool, notice what craving it serves.

2. Name the structure. Ask who labeled the data, who bears the energy costs, and who profits.

3. Judge by People, Planet, Purpose, and Prosperity for everyone, not by capability alone.

4. Refuse violence in code and in the street. Support efforts to keep AI out of weapons of war.

5. Build a Sangha around the machine. Decide together, in a parish, a workplace, or a school, how the tools will be used, rather than letting each person negotiate with the algorithm alone.

Questions to sit with

• Where in your life or community do inner work and outer action run in separate lanes?

• Ambedkar used Buddhism to dismantle a specific structure. Which specific harm could your own tradition help you dismantle?

• Can you name a structure in your workplace, neighborhood, or feed that produces harm without anyone intending it?

• For you, is non-violence a strategy or a conviction about how the world works? Does the difference matter when the weapon is software?

• If community is already a form of justice, what would it take for your community to embody its values in the way it uses AI?

The door

In 1966, a monk taught a monastery how to close a door. Sixty years later, the doors in our pockets never close. They open onto a feed designed so that nobody walks away.

The practice is the same as it was at Gethsemani. Close the door gently, then walk out together to change what lies on the other side.

That is where the work begins.

And that is Wisdom Speaking.

Sources

• Jim and Nancy Forest, “Learning from Thich Nhat Hanh”

• Thomas Merton, “Nhat Hanh Is My Brother,” via Buddhistdoor Global

• Daniel J. Adams, “Thich Nhat Hanh Then and Now,” The Merton Seasonal

• Deekshabhoomi, History

• Dhammachakra Pravartan Din

• Billy Perrigo, “OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour,” Time

• Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)

• USCCB, “In first encyclical, Pope Leo urges world to ‘disarm’ AI”

• Magnifica Humanitas, Wikipedia

• Church documents: Gaudium et Spes §§24, 26; Sollicitudo Rei Socialis §36; Catechism of the Catholic Church§§1888, 2309; Fratelli Tutti §258; Mater et Magistra §236

Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.

The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn and is central to Catholic Social Teaching.

So when I write essays, keynotes, and articles, I run the result through Grammarly. It fixes spelling and punctuation. That is the whole of it. See more in the “How I Write and What I Use section on my website.

Thomas Merton was forty-nine. The man he went to see, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, was ninety-three and staying at Butler Hall near Columbia University. Suzuki had done more than anyone to carry Zen to English-speaking readers, and the two men had been writing to each other since the late 1950s. Merton had read the books. He knew the arguments. He could have asked his questions by letter.

He went anyway. Suzuki’s secretary, Mihoko Okamura, prepared tea, and the two men talked. Merton later called them “a couple of all too short conversations” and the experience “unforgettable.” Two years later, Suzuki was dead. What Merton found in that small room, he wrote, “was like finally arriving at one’s own home.”

Merton already had the information. He traveled for the presence.

That difference, between knowing about someone and meeting them, is the best place to begin thinking about artificial intelligence (AI). Most public discussion treats AI as a technical achievement, an economic force, or a looming risk. Each is true, and none goes deep enough. The deeper question is Merton’s: what is happening to the human person? Before asking what machines can do, ask what kind of people we are becoming in their presence, and whether AI is shaping us toward wisdom, freedom, truthfulness, compassion, and a humane society.

What follows uses the See-Judge-Act method of Joseph Cardijn, founder of the Young Christian Workers. First, look hard at what is happening. Then weigh it against what matters. Then decide what to do on Monday morning.

SEE

The pilgrim, not the collector

Merton took Zen and other Buddhist traditions seriously without blending them with Christianity into one generic spirituality. He sought a disciplined encounter, in which each tradition could illuminate the other while their real differences stayed intact. In October 1968, in a paper prepared for a gathering of religious leaders in Calcutta, he described himself this way:

“I come as a pilgrim who is anxious to obtain not just information, not just ‘facts’ about other monastic traditions but to drink from ancient sources of monastic vision and experience.”

He went on to say he sought to become a better monk, not merely a better-informed one.

That split between knowing more and becoming better is the heart of the AI question. We know a great deal about model capabilities, benchmarks, market valuations, training data, regulations, and productivity gains. None of it tells us whether these systems are making us wiser, freer, more truthful, or more compassionate.

AI gives us more access to information. Merton asks whether it gives us more contact with reality.

A machine for the false self

Buddhist teaching examines craving, attachment, illusion, and the habit of building a solid, defensive self at the center of experience. Merton found a parallel in the Christian contemplative critique of the false self: the socially manufactured identity that seeks security in status, possession, control, approval, and performance.

For thirty-five years I helped build the systems I now ask questions about, so I will say this plainly. A recommendation engine is a machine for finding and feeding the false self. That is not a metaphor. It describes the product.

Generative AI adds power to the same machinery. It lets us project confidence without understanding, produce work without patient labor, manufacture images without encounter, and simulate intimacy without vulnerability. It offers instant answers when we most need a better question. It flatters our preferences, hardens our prejudices, and lets us feel in command because a system obeys our prompts.

The danger is not only that an AI system may be wrong. The greater danger is that we use it to avoid the work of becoming truthful, and that changes how we see ourselves and one another.

In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton wrote:

“At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own world.”

Nearly thirty years after his death, a Buddhist monk read that passage aloud at the Gethsemani Encounter, a meeting of Buddhist and Christian monastics held at Merton’s own abbey. It speaks across both traditions because it names a limit no system can cross. A person is more than a profile, a prediction, a behavioral trace, or a probability. No human being can be adequately understood as an optimization target.

JUDGE

Zen is judged by its acts.

Merton was drawn to Zen partly because it refuses to turn spiritual life into a set of propositions one owns. In Mystics and Zen Masters, he described it as:

“A concrete and lived ontology which explains itself not in theoretical propositions but in acts emerging out of a certain quality of consciousness and awareness. Only by these acts and by this quality of consciousness can Zen be judged.”

That corrects much of today’s AI debate. We tend to treat AI as a problem the right abstraction will solve: a policy framework, a safety checklist, a benchmark, a corporate principle, an alignment technique, a compliance regime—these matter. Merton would press further. What quality of consciousness builds and deploys these systems, and what kind of people are they forming?

A society driven by fear, rivalry, extraction, spectacle, and the desire to dominate will build AI in its own image. A society shaped by humility, truthfulness, solidarity, and reverence for persons could use the same technical capacity very differently.

So the question is larger than “Can this system be controlled?” It also includes these:

1. What human desires is this system automating?

2. Who defines success?

3. Who bears the cost of error, surveillance, displacement, or exclusion?

4. What kind of attention does it reward?

5. Does it deepen our contact with reality, or insulate us from it?

6. Does it serve compassion, justice, and the common good, or merely scale convenience and profit?

The stakes are highest in systems that rank, profile, surveil, hire, discipline, recommend, or deny services. When such a system reduces a person to what data can extract or predict, real people absorb the cost. Efficiency is not justice. Personalization is not understanding. Prediction is not wisdom.

Here is the essay’s central claim: judge AI not only by its performance or our control over it, but by the kind of people and society it helps form.

Suffering is not a bug.

Technology culture runs on the promise of frictionlessness: no waiting, no uncertainty, no discomfort, every task optimized. AI enlarges the promise. It offers instant summaries, polished prose, images on demand, continuous companionship, automated decisions, and apparently effortless productivity. The risk is that we learn to treat every discomfort as a defect to delete.

Some difficulties are not defects. Grief, uncertainty, moral conflict, patient learning, reconciliation, and responsibility cannot be responsibly settled with an instant answer. In Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Merton wrote:

“Both Christianity and Buddhism show that suffering remains inexplicable, most of all for the man who attempts to explain it in order to evade it, or who thinks explanation itself is an escape.”

And: “Suffering is not a ‘problem’ as if it were something we could stand outside of and control.”

The opposing case deserves its full strength. AI helps clinicians find disease earlier. It translates across languages, opens doors for disabled users, lifts repetitive labor, speeds research, and widens access to useful knowledge for people who never had it. The contemplative critique can also sound like a luxury. At three in the morning, a lonely person with no counselor, no congregation, and no neighbor close by may find that a chatbot is the only thing that answers. Telling that person to wait for authentic presence is not wisdom. It is indifference in principled clothing.

That objection is serious, and it sharpens the point rather than defeating it. The moral test is whether we use technology to relieve unnecessary suffering while remaining willing to accompany one another in the suffering no machine can remove. The goal is relief and presence together. A system that comforts the lonely person at three in the morning should also help that person find someone who will still be there at noon.

A chatbot can generate comforting words for a grieving person. It cannot be a friend, a faith community, a counselor, or a neighbor who stays. It can help a student draft an essay. It cannot replace the struggle by which the student learns to think, judge, revise, and speak in their own voice. It can summarize a moral dilemma. It cannot assume responsibility for the decision.

AI becomes dehumanizing when it trains us to treat every difficulty as an inconvenience and every person as a task to optimize. That habit erodes our capacity to meet one another honestly.

ACT

Six disciplines before the prompt

For Merton, contemplation was not withdrawal from the world. It was a way of seeing the world without being captured by its illusions. In an AI-saturated culture, contemplation becomes a civic and educational discipline. Educators, writers, clergy, and public leaders need to teach people not only how to use AI, but how to pause before they do.

An index card for the desk

1. Silence before generation. Before asking for an answer, name what you already know, what you fear, what you want, and what human stake is involved.

2. Attention before automation. Ask whether the task is merely repetitive or carries judgment, relationship, accountability, or learning that should stay human.

3. Truth before fluency. AI-generated language can be elegant, persuasive, and wrong. Treat confidence as a prompt to verify, not a reason to trust.

4. Presence before substitution. Use AI to support human connection and care, not to replace them where mutual presence carries moral weight.

5. Compassion before efficiency. Ask whom a system’s errors, exclusions, labor practices, data extraction, or unequal access might harm.

6. Humility before mastery. Admit what neither the tool nor its user can know. Greater computing power does not remove the need for wisdom.

The classroom test

Education is where these disciplines matter most. The central question is not whether students should use AI. It is whether AI use strengthens or weakens the practices that make students attentive, discerning, responsible, and capable of real dialogue. A student who outsources every difficult sentence, every interpretation, and every act of synthesis may turn in better-looking work while losing the formation that education exists to provide.

The return

Merton did not treat Buddhism as a supply of exotic techniques or an escape from Christian discipleship. He treated it as a serious tradition that could teach him to see more deeply. Shortly before he died, he told Brother David Steindl-Rast:

“I do not believe that I could understand our Christian faith the way I understand it if it were not for the light of Buddhism.”

That is the right model for engaging AI. It is not a new religion, an oracle, or a neutral appliance, and condemning it from a distance will not do either. Meet it critically: learn enough to understand what it does, keep enough distance to recognize its illusions, and ground its use in moral commitments it cannot generate for us.

Merton’s contemplative life did not end in private enlightenment either. It led him toward peace, justice, nonviolence, social criticism, and friendship across religious lines. That wider horizon is essential now.

AI will keep growing more capable. The more urgent question is whether people, institutions, and communities will grow better at using intelligence without surrendering conscience. The answer begins with attention: to the desires driving the tool, the persons it touches, the suffering it can ease or deepen, and the reality no system can fully capture.

Merton could have stayed home in 1964. He had the letters, the books, and the facts. He boarded a plane for a cup of tea because some things happen only when two people share a room.

No prompt returns that.

Questions to ponder

1. See: Think of the last task you handed to an AI tool. Was it merely repetitive, or did it carry judgment, relationship, or learning you gave up without noticing?

2. See: Where in your own habits does technology feed the false self Merton described: the hunger for approval, performance, or control?

3. Judge: What in your life are you tempted to “solve” that you are really called to accompany or endure?

4. Judge: When a system that ranks or predicts people gets it wrong, who in your community bears the cost, and could they ever appeal?

5. Judge: Is a chatbot that comforts a lonely person a failure of community or an act of mercy? Can it be both?

6. Act: Merton traveled for presence when he already had the information. Who is waiting for your presence rather than your answer?

7. Act: Which of the six disciplines would change your work most if you practiced it for one week?

Sources

• John A. Coleman, SJ, “Thomas Merton and Dialogue with Buddhism”, America, 13 July 2012.

• Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Doubleday, 1966).

• Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967).

• Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New Directions, 1968).

• Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New Directions, 1973).

• Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life: Journals, Volume Five, 1963–1965 (HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

• “Deep Ecumenism in the Mystical Thought of D. T. Suzuki and Thomas Merton,” The Merton Seasonal 31, no. 3.

• Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University.

Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.

The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn and is central to Catholic Social Teaching.

So when I write essays, keynotes, and articles, I run the result through Grammarly. It fixes spelling and punctuation. That is the whole of it. See more in the “How I Write and What I Use section on my website.

The Gospels consistently present Jesus’ life and ministry and a radically counter-cultural phenomenon which literally turns things upside down. The well-known saying ‘the last will be first, and the first, last’ (Mt 20:16), is a fairly stark way of conveying this idea. If this saying is not sufficiently unsettling for those of us living lives of comfort, the parable that precedes it is even more disturbing. The context is simple, day labourers wait in a village square hoping that someone will give them work for the day. While the reader might be inclined to see idleness among those waiting as the hours of the day pass, the reality is more akin to desperation as, to not work, even for a day, would likely equate to hunger for the worker and their family. In the parable, after initially hiring workers at daybreak, for an agreed amount, the landowner returns a further four times, each time hiring more labourers. The twist in the tail of the parable comes at the end of the day when the labourers are paid. The latest arrivals are paid first and, very generously, they are paid the rate for a full day’s work. This, unsurprisingly creates an expectation among those who had worked all day that they would receive greater pay. When this doesn’t eventuate they are left frustrated and annoyed. The landowner reminds them that they are being paid according to what was agreed and, therefore, no injustice had been done. It is an instance of generosity to the late arrivals rather than discrimination against the first.

The parable invites multiple levels of meaning. In its original context among the Palestinian Jewish communities of the first century, it is an allegory about the people of Israel, as the chosen ones, and the Gentiles who experience God’s love at a later point in history. The historical precedence of the election of the Jewish people does not, in any way, suggest a hierarchy in God’s Kingdom. Rather, God’s love is poured out generously, and abundantly, to all people, without distinction. This understanding had significance at the time of the Gospel writing, in the latter part of the first century, as, by this time, the Gospel message had well and truly reached the Gentile world causing the infant Christian Churches to wrestle with the way to include these non-Jewish converts alongside their Jewish brethren. The Acts of the Apostles and the Letters of St Paul have frequent references to this struggle.

Beyond matters pertaining to the first century, the parable also invites a contemporary application. By paying the last of the workers first, the parable touches on the notion, from Catholic Social Teaching, of the preferential option for the poor, which asserts that the poorest and most vulnerable members of communities should be given the highest priority in terms of support, provision of services etc. For those of us living in comfort, this brings the challenge of accepting and supporting a society which takes the resources generated from our wealth and distributes these in a way that prioritises the needs of the poorest. Such a redistribution of wealth is a radical departure from our usual sense of entitlement. But which is closer to the message of the Gospel?

Gospel Text: Matthew 20:1-16

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a landowner going out at daybreak to hire workers for his vineyard. He made an agreement with the workers for one denarius a day, and sent them to his vineyard. Going out at about the third hour he saw others standing idle in the market place and said to them, “You go to my vineyard too and I will give you a fair wage.” So they went. At about the sixth hour and again at about the ninth hour, he went out and did the same. Then at about the eleventh hour he went out and found more men standing round, and he said to them, “Why have you been standing here idle all day?” “Because no one has hired us” they answered. He said to them, “You go into my vineyard too.” In the evening, the owner of the vineyard said to his bailiff, “Call the workers and pay them their wages, starting with the last arrivals and ending with the first.” So those who were hired at about the eleventh hour came forward and received one denarius each. When the first came, they expected to get more, but they too received one denarius each. They took it, but grumbled at the landowner. “The men who came last” they said “have done only one hour, and you have treated them the same as us, though we have done a heavy day’s work in all the heat.” He answered one of them and said, “My friend, I am not being unjust to you; did we not agree on one denarius? Take your earnings and go. I choose to pay the last comer as much as I pay you. Have I no right to do what I like with my own? Why be envious because I am generous?” Thus the last will be first, and the first, last.’

See

This Gospel text is presented as a parable. What do we understand about how parables are presented?

Considering the possible allegorical meaning of this text, who is represented as the landowner?

What actions of the landowner are particularly characteristic of God’s Kingdom?

Judge

In what ways are the actions of the landowner fair or unfair, according to conventional societal behaviour?

Do those who have worked all day have reason to be aggrieved? Why/Why not?

How does this parable contrast the values of God’s Kingdom with those of the dominant views in society?

Act

Study the meaning and application of the preferential option for the poor and other principles of Catholic Social Teaching.

How can I provide preferential treatment of those who are poor and/or vulnerable within my spheres of influence?

How can I advocate for those who are poor and/or vulnerable in a broader social context?

Image https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-20-1-16-2023-2/

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

In the winter of 1887, a machinist from Carbondale, Pennsylvania, waited anxiously to learn if his Church would cast countless fellow workers beyond the reach of the sacraments.

He started as a railroad worker, became a machinist, then rose to mayor of Scranton. A Catholic, he also led the Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor, an organization that, by 1886, counted 730,000 members and reached nearly a million at its height. His name was Terence Vincent Powderly.

The trouble started in Quebec. In 1884, Archbishop Elzéar-Alexandre Taschereau brought back the Church’s old ban on secret societies, which was first meant for the Freemasons, and applied it to the Knights. Catholics in Canada who stayed in the Order risked being denied absolution. The Knights had oaths, passwords, and rituals, which made them seem like a lodge to a Quebec church leader. But to a worker in Scranton, the Knights seemed like their only protection.

Pressure to spread the condemnation to the United States came quickly, and the consequences were very real. Many, if not most, Knights were Catholic. If the Church condemned the Order, it would force hundreds of thousands of its poorest members to choose between their faith and their union.

On 28 October 1886, the American archbishops met in Baltimore to decide what to advise Rome. They did not agree. Only two, Peter Richard Kenrick of St. Louis and Jean-Baptiste Salpointe of Santa Fe, wanted the condemnation. Because the vote was not unanimous, the question went to Rome anyway.

James Gibbons, the Cardinal Archbishop of Baltimore, took the issue to Rome. On 20 February 1887, he sent a memorial in French to Cardinal Giovanni Simeoni, Prefect of Propaganda Fide. He wrote it with help from Bishop John Keane of Richmond, Bishop John Ireland of St. Paul, and Denis O’Connell of the North American College. The memorial argued that the Knights’ constitution was not that of a secret society, that American conditions were different from those in Europe, and that workers had a right to what Gibbons called legitimate resistance.

After that came the argument that would outlast every other word in the document.

To lose the heart of the people would be a misfortune for which the friendship of the few rich and powerful would be no compensation.

On 16 August 1888, the Holy Office ruled that the Knights of Labor tolerari potest, it may be tolerated, subject to some tidying of the statutes. Gibbons told Ireland privately that he attached little or no importance to the conditions. Three years later, on 15 May 1891, LeGibbons was not defending socialism. He was standing up for something older and harder to define: the belief that a workers’ association has moral value the Church must recognize. When the Church sides with the powerful instead of the poor, it loses more than a policy debate—it risks losing its true purpose. But it’s its very reason for being.

This is the real question behind every comparison of Catholic social teaching and Christian socialism.

The main issue is not who owns the factories, but who the economy should serve.

What the economy is for

Catholic social teaching begins with the human person and radiates outward. It judges economic systems by whether they allow people to flourish, not by how much they produce.

The Christian socialist tradition began in London in 1848, when F. D. Maurice, Charles Kingsley, and J. M. Ludlow started publishing under that name after the Chartist demonstration. Their main objection to capitalism was not about numbers. They believed a system that treats people as commodities, consumers, and units of labor would eventually make people see themselves that way.

Both traditions, then, reject the idea that whatever creates the most wealth is automatically good. That shared refusal underpins nearly all their points of convergence.

Yours, but not only yours

This is where the two traditions overlap most, and where misunderstandings often happen: private property. Both agree that the goods of creation are meant for everyone. Ownership is real, but it comes with conditions. You can own something, but that does not erase your responsibility to others.

Thomas Aquinas put the sharp edge on it in the Summa Theologiae(II-II, q. 66, a. 7). In a case of urgent and evident necessity, taking what one needs to survive is not, properly speaking, theft, because in that necessity the goods of creation revert to their common purpose. John Paul II gave the same idea its modern phrasing in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), where he wrote that private property carries a social mortgage.

Leo XIV restated it in May of this year, in language nobody can soften: “the Christian tradition has never recognized the right to private property as absolute or inviolable” (Magnifica Humanitas, 66).

The Catholic view is not that “property is theft” or that “what is mine is mine, and soci

ety has no claim on it.” Instead, it sees a chain: property leads to responsibility, which leads to the common good. This echoes the Christian socialist idea that property brings social duties. The real debate is not about abolishing property, but about what happens in the space between ownership and responsibility.

Reading from the bottom

Catholic social teaching often insists, even when it is uncomfortable, that society should be judged from the perspective of those at the bottom. The Christian socialist tradition says something similar: judge the system by what happens to workers, the poor, and those without power.

Both trace their lineage to the prophetic tradition. Isaiah and Amos, then Jesus, then the community described in Acts, then the Fathers, then the modern Christian social movements that ran from Bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler of Mainz, whose Die Arbeiterfrage und das Christentum appeared in 1864, through Cardinal Manning in London, through Gibbons in Baltimore.

The question changes from “how much did society produce?” to “who benefited, who paid, and who made the decisions?”

That is a socialist question—and, just as clearly, a Catholic one.

Labor is not a commodity.

Rerum Novarum (1891), Quadragesimo Anno (1931), and John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens (1981) all refuse to reduce work to a price. Laborem Exercens states the principle most bluntly: labor has priority over capital. The worker is not an input.

Leo XIV extends it: “Work is not considered simply as a problem to be dealt with or a means of generating income, but a fundamental good for the person” (Magnifica Humanitas, 37). And he supplies the test. A fair wage is how you find out whether a company regards its workers as persons or as production costs.

This echoes the Christian socialist criticism of treating labor as a commodity. Both traditions reach the same conclusion.

Solidarity, and the sentence it refuses

In Catholic teaching, solidarity is more than just politeness. It is a statement about human nature: we are connected, depend on each other, and are responsible for one another, whether we choose to be or not.

The Christian socialist tradition refuses the same sentence Catholic teaching refuses. I earned mine; you look after yourself.

This is why Catholic social teaching can criticize laissez-faire capitalism, collectivism, nationalism, and radical individualism all at the same time, without contradiction. It is not trying to find a middle ground; instead, it uses one view of human nature to point out the problems in each approach.

The common good is larger than equality.

Here, Catholic thought moves away from socialism and takes a different path. It does not focus mainly on making everyone’s holdings equal. Instead, it asks what kind of society helps everyone thrive. The common good includes food, housing, work, health care, education, family, culture, participation, worship, friendship, and freedom. Leo XIV says the common good “cannot be reduced to a mere list of conditions or institutions” (Magnifica Humanitas, 60).

When we see the person more broadly, we also see the need for a wider solution. Distribution is important, but it is only one part of the answer.

Subsidiarity, and the workshop floor

Catholic teaching has grown steadily more interested in unions, cooperatives, worker ownership, and participation in the decisions that shape a job. Leo XIII defended workers’ associations; Pius XI affirmed the right to associate even more strongly.

Pius XI also gave the tradition its most politically awkward principle. In Quadragesimo Anno (79), he stated subsidiarity: it is an injustice to assign to a larger and higher body what smaller and lower bodies can do for themselves. Decisions belong as close as reasonably possible to the people who live with them.

Subsidiarity challenges both centralized state socialism and modern corporations, where people affected by decisions often learn last. If we take subsidiarity seriously, it suggests we need more democratic and participatory ownership, not just the old solutions from the last century.

The texts nobody wants to preach on

The strongest link between the two traditions may finally be exegetical rather than economic.

You cannot serve God and mammon (Matthew 6:24). Blessed are you who are poor (Luke 6:20). Woe to you who are rich (Luke 6:24). Sell what you own and give the money to the poor (Mark 10:21). Whatever you did for one of the least of these, you did for me (Matthew 25:40).

Christian socialism sees these as economic statements. Catholic teaching does not turn them into laws, which is understandable. But it also refuses to treat them as only private spiritual advice, and that is the harder and more honest choice. When you do this, the economic life of society becomes a moral and spiritual issue, and stays that way.

The case against the comparison, stated at full strength.

Anyone making this argument should present the other side’s strongest case. Here it is.

The magisterium has condemned what we call communism, explicitly and more than once. Leo XIII did so in Quod Apostolici Muneris (1878), before he wrote a word about the workers’ condition. Rerum Novarum calls the socialist remedy of abolishing private property emphatically unjust and says it would harm the very workers it claims to help. Pius XI, having spent most of Quadragesimo Anno dismantling liberal capitalism, wrote at paragraph 120 that no one can be at the same time a good Catholic and a true socialist. John Paul II, who had watched the experiment from inside it, located socialism’s fundamental error in its anthropology: it treats the person as a molecule of the social organism (Centesimus Annus, 13).

Nor does Catholic teaching accept class struggle as history’s engine. It reads conflict between capital and labor as a disorder to be resolved, not as the motor of progress. And it will not concede the state ownership of productive property.

What Catholic social teaching does instead is hold six pairs in tension, refusing to let go of either half:

That is why Catholic social teaching doesn’t fit neatly on a left-right spectrum. Both American political parties quote it when it suits them, but neither fully embraces it.

Why this lands hardest in the United States

Workers built the American Church—and nearly told them to walk away.

That is the important part of Gibbons’s story. He wasn’t merely being generous; he was honest about who made up the American Church: Irish, German, Polish, and Italian workers in mills, mines, and rail yards, who had little except each other and the sacraments.

The design repeated. On 12 February 1919, the National Catholic War Council issued the Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction, written by Monsignor John A. Ryan of the Catholic University of America. It called for a legal minimum wage, insurance against unemployment, illness, and old age, public housing, the abolition of child labor, and worker participation in management. Ryan argued for a living wage as early as 1906, in A Living Wage (Macmillan). He was called a socialist for it, for decades. He lived to see most of the program become the New Deal and was nicknamed Monsignor New Deal. He gave the benediction at Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration in January 1945.

Then Dorothy Day sold the first copies of The Catholic Worker in Union Square on 1 May 1933, for a penny, on May Day, to a crowd which had come to hear communists.

None of that history corresponds to the current American Catholic political scene, where party loyalty often comes before tradition, if tradition is considered at all. Today, Catholics tend to vote like everyone else. Very little in either party’s platform would be familiar to Gibbons, and each party only claims the parts of tradition that do not require sacrifice. This has made things awkward.

First, democratic socialism has become an ordinary feature of US electoral politics again, rather than an exotic one. Zohran Mamdani governs New York City. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary. Francesca Hong came close in Wisconsin. Milwaukee, which elected three socialist mayors in the last century, would find none of this surprising.

Second, the new pope hails from Chicago.

Robert Prevost was elected on 8 May 2025 and took the name Leo, which is not a neutral choice and was not meant to be. On 15 May 2026, 135 years to the day after Leo XIII signed Rerum Novarum, he signed Magnifica Humanitas and released it ten days later. It addresses artificial intelligence, work, and what it means to be human. Now, American Catholics are being given their own social tradition, in their own language, by one of their own, just when their politics has almost no place for it.

The algorithm at the dock gate

Leo XIII wrote about the factory. Leo XIV wrote about the model.

The technology has changed less than it might seem. In 1891, the question was what happens when a machine a person does not own, cannot inspect, and did not choose controls work. In 2026, the question is what happens when a system a person does not own, cannot inspect, and did not choose shapes work.

Three lines from Magnifica Humanitas do most of the work.

Technology “is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it” (9). That is Marshall McLuhan’s point with a moral obligation attached.

The universal destination of goods now reaches immaterial goods: patents, algorithms, platforms, and data (67). Concentrate those in a few hands, and you have recreated, in a new substance, the imbalance the principle exists to prevent.

The encyclical also clearly identifies the main players: “major economic and technological actors that exercise de factopower over the conditions.” The Catholic question about AI is not only about how much productivity it brings. It is the old Gibbons question, updated for today: Does this system expand human participation and freedom, or does it reduce people to inputs controlled by concentrated economic and technological power?

And this is where Matt Bruenig leads the People’s Policy Project and argues from a social-democratic economics perspective. Elizabeth Bruenig writes for The Atlantic and draws from Catholic theology. Again and again, they reach the same moral conclusions about economic life, even though they take different paths. They also met on their high school debate team, which I find meaningful because I have spent years coaching students to argue both sides of a topic and have seen what happens when they finally have to choose. must finally choose.

The real question is not whether Catholicism is socialism or communism. It is not, and the encyclicals make that unmistakably clear.

A better question is why two traditions that disagree about ownership, the state, and even history keep looking at the same economy and coming to the same conclusion.

The answer is that both traditions share a view of humanity: the person comes before the system. Everything else is just a debate about how to put this into practice.

Five tests, short enough for an index card

1. Who here is treated as an end, and who is treated as an input?

2. Does ownership in this arrangement still carry obligations, or has it been made absolute?

3. Read it from the position of the person with the least power. Does it hold?

4. Who participates in the decision, and how far are they from its consequences?

5. What does it do to work — does it make the worker more of a person, or less of one?

Gibbons wrote his memorial in French to a Roman cardinal, about a fraternal order that was already falling apart. The Knights disappeared within a generation. He likely knew this would happen, even then.

The sentence survived, even though it was never really about the Knights. It would be a misfortune for which the friendship of the few rich and powerful would be no compensation.

It is worth asking who is writing that kind of letter today, and to whom, and whether anyone in Rome, Washington, or Menlo Park is listening.

Questions to sit with

1. Gibbons argued that condemning the Knights would cost the Church the workers. If the same calculation were made today, which group would the American Church be most afraid of losing, and what does the answer reveal?

2. Catholic teaching says property is real but not absolute. Where, concretely, would you draw that line — for a house, for farmland, for a patent, for a trained model?

3. Subsidiarity says decisions belong near the people who live with them. Name one decision at your own work that violates this. Who would have to give something up to fix it?

4. Ryan was called a socialist in 1919 for proposing unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. What is being called socialist now that will look ordinary in fifty years — and what is being called ordinary now that will look indefensible?

5. If technology takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, and regulate it, what characteristics are currently being built into the systems you use every day, and who chose them?

6. Rerum Novarum asked what industrial work was doing to the human person. Ask it of your own week. Is the work you do making you more of a person or less of one — and are you able to tell?

Sources

• Gibbons’ Memorial to Rome, 1887, and the 1886 archbishops’ meeting: The Catholic University of America Libraries, “Catholics and Labor Unionization”

• Rome’s 1888 decision (tolerari potest): John Tracy Ellis, The Life of James Cardinal Gibbons, ch. 5, text at LacusCurtius

• Henry J. Browne, The Catholic Church and the Knights of Labor(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1949)

• Knights of Labor membership and the Quebec condemnation: Knights of Labor, Wikipedia; Terence V. Powderly

• Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 15 May 2026: full text, Vatican. va

• Leo XIV on AI and the industrial revolution: National Catholic Reporter

• Socialism and Catholic social teaching in current US politics: “Socialism is back in style,” America, 18 August 2026

• The 1919 Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction: The Catholic University of America Libraries; John A. Ryan

• Elizabeth Bruenig and Matt Bruenig: Elizabeth Bruenig, Wikipedia; People’s Policy Project

• Encyclicals cited: Leo XIII, Quod Apostolici Muneris (1878) and Rerum Novarum (1891); Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931); John Paul II, Laborem Exercens (1981), Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987), Centesimus Annus (1991); Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 66, a. 7

A Note on my blogs

Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.

The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn and is central to Catholic Social Teaching.

As a cultural historian, I am grateful for my experience in the Benedictine tradition in college and in the Graduate School of Theology. In Benedictine life, “Ora et labora” means that prayer and work are inseparable.

I am not a professional academic. I am a practitioner who reads. And that is Wisdom Speaking. — someone who applies theological thinking to technology and its consequences.😎

Leo XIII, philosophical liberalism, and a question that never went away.

The order was unmistakable, and everyone expected him to obey. He was summoned to the barracks at Bad Kissingen, where he was to raise his right hand and recite the oath. His religious superiors pressed him to comply. When he refused, they threatened to expel him from the Society. Later, in Tegel prison, a Catholic chaplain withheld communion, declaring that anyone who shirked his duty had no place at the altar.

He arrived on 15 April 1942 and stood firm: he would not swear the oath.

His name was Franz Reinisch. He was thirty-nine, born in Feldkirch on 1 February 1903, and ordained in Innsbruck on 29 June 1928. He was a Pallottine priest, and since 12 September 1940, the Reich had banned him from preaching or speaking in public. He did not refuse to serve. He said he was willing to serve Germany or any government, even to carry a stretcher if needed. But he would not give unconditional loyalty to Adolf Hitler. “There must be people,” he said, “who are protesting against the abuse of authority, and I feel called to this protest.”

A military court sentenced him to death on 7 July 1942, for undermining military morale. Guards took him to Brandenburg-Görden, where he was beheaded at 5:03 in the morning on 21 August 1942. His body was cremated. He was the only Catholic priest in the Third Reich who refused his call-up order, and the only priest executed for it. The diocesan phase of his cause began in Trier on 28 May 2013, and ended on 28 June 2019.

It is important to see what Reinisch was not doing: he was not making a stand for personal autonomy.

He never claimed the right to act as he pleased, nor did he pretend his conscience was his own invention. On the contrary, he insisted that a higher authority—one he neither created nor could alter—had already claimed him. The state and his superiors alike were answerable to this authority. Both ordered him to swear the oath, but he answered that neither could speak the final word.

At its heart, this question concerns the true source of authority over a person. More than half a century earlier, a pope tackled this very issue in an encyclical now largely forgotten.

The Encyclical Nobody Quotes

On 20 June 1888, Leo XIII released Libertas praestantissimum. Though it is the least discussed of his writings, it quietly underpins all the rest.

Leo was not attacking freedom itself. He called liberty one of the greatest natural gifts and began by defending free will against determinism. His real target was the idea that the human will is the highest authority. He stated this clearly. Rationalism, he wrote, “proclaims its own independence, and constitutes itself the supreme principle,” so that “every man is the law to himself” (§15).

He responded with a two-part argument. Freedom is a capacity, and every capacity has a purpose. The purpose of a rational will is the good that reason can recognize. Law is not just a limit on freedom; it describes what freedom is meant for. “In man’s free will,” he writes, “or in the moral necessity of our voluntary acts being in accordance with reason, lies the very root of the necessity of law” (§7).

In practical terms, Leo’s point is stark. If nothing is true about a person before they choose, then choices are never wrong, only unsuccessful. If no choice can be wrong, then every conflict becomes a contest of power.

When freedom is treated as the highest value, only the strongest freedom prevails. Leo was not simply defending authority over freedom; he was probing what keeps authority from collapsing into mere power.

Franz Reinisch confronted this question in its most brutal form. A state that recognized no truth above its own will demanded absolute loyalty to a single man, executing those who refused. Pure autonomy cannot explain why Reinisch was right; in that framework, he was merely one preference pitted against the machinery of law and religious authority.

The Bill of Indictment

Serious arguments run against reviving Leo’s ideas, and they deserve to be faced head-on, not brushed aside.

First, Leo did not stop at the metaphysics. Libertas draws political conclusions from it. Liberty of worship, of the press, and of teaching are treated as concessions the state may tolerate to avoid a greater evil, not as rights the person holds (§§20, 23, 24, 33). The doctrine that error has no rights was not a caricature invented by Leo’s opponents. It was the working principle.

Second, the institution making the argument had a record. On 20 June 1859, twenty-nine years to the day before Libertas, papal troops under Colonel Anton Schmid retook Perugia from its provisional government and sacked parts of the city. Around twenty-seven Perugians died. The bishop of Perugia at the time was Gioacchino Pecci, the future Leo XIII. A hierarchy that insists freedom must answer to truth, while holding the instruments of coercion, faces an obvious temptation, and Catholic history offers plenty of examples of the Church yielding to it.

Third, the Church itself revised the political half of Leo’s teaching. Dignitatis humanae, promulgated on 7 December 1965, holds that the human person has a right to immunity from coercion in religious matters, and grounds that right in the dignity of the person rather than in the truth of the person’s opinions. Whether this is development or reversal has been argued for sixty years. What is not arguable is that the practical program attached to Libertas did not survive.

So the real question is not just whether Leo was right, but whether his deeper philosophical claim endures now that the political structure built on it has crumbled.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spent his working life under restriction. His superiors removed him from teaching in Paris and sent him to China in the 1920s after a private paper on original sin circulated. He was forbidden to publish his religious and philosophical work; Le Phénomène humain appeared only after his death on 10 April 1955. The Holy Office issued a monitum on 30 June 1962 warning against the ambiguities in his writings.

Teilhard is often labeled an optimist, but that misses his complexity. His real insight lies in where he locates the standard: for him, the truth that binds a person is not a static rule imposed from outside history, but the very direction of creation, moving toward Christ. Authority emerges from within reality itself, not imposed upon it.

The main objection is obvious: a standard still unfolding cannot guide anyone in the present, and Reinisch did not have eternity to decide. Teilhard replies that reality does not lose its force just because it is unfinished. A river’s course is still real, even as it moves.

In any case, Teilhard does not champion autonomy. He places the source of authority even farther from human choice, not nearer.

The Grace That Arrives Before the Command

Karl Rahner best illuminates Reinisch’s stance.

Rahner’s doctoral thesis in philosophy was rejected at Freiburg for leaning too far toward Heidegger; it was published as Geist in Welt in 1939 and eventually honored with a doctorate at Innsbruck in 1973. In 1962 his superiors informed him that Rome had placed him under pre-censorship: no publishing, no lecturing without prior permission. That same year, John XXIII named him a peritus at the Second Vatican Council, where he became one of the theologians shaping Lumen gentium.

His main idea, called the supernatural existential, says that God’s self-communication is already present in every person before any religious act, command, or hearing of the Gospel. Grace is not something added to a neutral being; it is the condition in which every person already exists.

This idea has two consequences. First, it rules out autonomy, since a relationship they never chose shapes every person. Second, it denies that authority comes only through official channels, because the truth that binds a person is discovered within and can be recognized personally. His superiors had real authority, but they were not its source. When they told him to swear the oath, he could respond from within the same tradition that shaped them, and he was not just following his own preference.

Freedom Is Not Only Non-Interference

Gustavo Gutiérrez published Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas in Lima in 1971. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith responded twice: Libertatis nuntius on 6 August 1984, warning against borrowings from Marxist analysis, and Libertatis conscientia on 22 March 1986, affirming the aspiration to liberation as authentically Christian.

Liberation theology, when set beside Libertas, is not Leo’s opposite. Instead, it borrows Leo’s argument and turns it toward a different question—one Leo largely left aside.

Leo challenged political liberalism, which holds the will of the citizen or the state as the highest law. Gutiérrez challenged economic liberalism, which insists that any freely made contract is justified by its freedom. Both contend that a freely chosen arrangement can still be unjust, because something true about the human person exists before any agreement. For instance, a wage accepted out of desperation is not necessarily fair. That principle could be lifted straight from Rerum Novarum—and indeed, it is.

The real concern of the 1984 instruction was both different and crucial: a system that explains everything through class conflict risks eroding the very idea of the person it aims to defend, leaving individuals at the mercy of whoever prevails. This is Leo’s warning, echoed in a new key.

The Monk Who Was Told to Stop Writing About Peace

On 26 April 1962, Thomas Merton received a letter from Dom Gabriel Sortais, the Abbot General of his order, forbidding him to write further about war and Peace. The manuscript of Peace in the Post-Christian Era was ready. Orbis Books did not publish it until 2004. Merton’s Cold War Letters, written between October 1961 and October 1962, went out to Jim Forest, Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan and others in mimeograph. “The orders are, no more writing about peace,” he wrote to Forest. “This is transparently arbitrary and uncomprehending.”

He obeyed the order, yet he kept writing. That tension—obedience and persistence—is his main legacy to this debate.

Merton devoted his life to exploring the idea of the false self—the self constructed, defended, and mistaken for personal preference. In his spiritual journey, he sought to dismantle this false self, which philosophical liberalism elevates to the center of politics. For Merton, the autonomous self is not just a fragile political notion; it is an illusion that breeds unhappiness. The aim of contemplation is to release it.

This is why Merton, rather than Leo, speaks to our time. Leo answers in the language of law and metaphysics, which Today often sounds like an institution guarding its privileges. Merton responds in the language of lived experience: you did not create yourself, you are not your preferences, and what truly holds authority over you is found in silence, not imposed by decree.

The Load-Bearing Wall

In this way, the whole argument enters Catholic Social Teaching, stepping out of the realm of academic debate.Community comes first, and it is not earned. Leo XIV writes in Magnifica humanitas, signed on 15 May 2026, that human dignity “is neither acquired nor earned, nor does it need to be justified” (§53). If autonomy were the ground of dignity, then dignity would scale with the capacity to choose, and the infant, the person with advanced dementia, the prisoner, and the unconscious would hold less of it. Leo XIII’s premise is what keeps that door shut.

The common good rests on more than tallying up everyone’s preferences. Counting preferences yields a majority, but not always what is truly good. Only a deeper truth about the person lets us say the majority can be wrong.

Subsidiarity depends on both sides of the argument. Quadragesimo anno, from 15 May 1931, teaches that a higher authority should not take over what a lower group can handle. This principle makes no sense if you believe only in autonomy, because there would be no way to limit authority, and it also fails under absolutism, because there would be no reason to limit it. It only works if authority is both real and accountable.

Property and contracts are real, but never absolute. Rerum Novarum, from 15 May 1891, upholds private property but insists it must serve the common good. This is Libertas in action for labor contracts: consent is necessary, but never sufficient.

And the warning runs in both directions. John Paul II in Centesimus annus, 1 May 1991, writes that “a democracy without values easily turns into open or thinly disguised totalitarianism,” and in the same paragraph warns against those who “in the name of an ideology which purports to be scientific or religious, claim the right to impose on others their own concept of what is true and good.” Veritatis splendor, 6 August 1993, names the modern error precisely as “the dependence of freedom on truth” being lessened. Today, the question appears in new forms. Magnifica humanitas describes mass data collection and behavioral prediction as “a new form of power” (§171), warns that technology should not be controlled “by only a few people” (§67), and notes that “a more moral AI is not enough if that morality is determined by a few” (§107). Recommendation systems now claim authority over people, using the language of autonomy: your feed, your choices, your preferences—shaped and returned to you by a system that influenced them. Leo XIII would recognize this pattern. When freedom is the highest value, and nothing stands above it, whoever shapes preferences holds the real power. ces governs.

Five Questions to Carry

1. Who or what is claiming authority over this person right now, and on what grounds does it claim it?

2. Is the claim answerable to anything, or is it self-justifying?

3. Would the arrangement still be defended if the person consenting to it had a real alternative?

4. Does this account of dignity survive when the person cannot choose?

5. Who benefits from the answer, and would they be willing to say so out loud?

These questions are simple enough to jot down on an index card—and that is their strength. Leo XIII’s question is not merely a doctrine to recite; it is a test to live by.

Reinisch possessed neither power nor influence. He defied a lawful order, faced expulsion from his religious order, was denied communion by a priest, and was executed by a court that followed its own rules. By the logic of pure autonomy, he was simply a loser.

He was not demanding the right to decide for himself. He believed the decision had already been made by an authority that neither the Reich nor the Pallottines could create or erase.

This is the very claim Leo XIII made in 1888, stripped of its political and religious trappings and tested in the crucible of real life. It deserves another look—not to revive an old political program, but because the question beneath it still matters.

Someone still determines what a human being is meant for.

At 5:03 in the morning, Franz Reinisch already knew the answer.

Sources

• Leo XIII, Libertas praestantissimum, 20 June 1888 (Vatican; Papal Encyclicals Online).

• Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 15 May 1891.

• Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno, 15 May 1931.

• Second Vatican Council, Dignitatis humanae, 7 December 1965.

• John Paul II, Centesimus annus, 1 May 1991; Veritatis splendor, 6 August 1993.

• Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Libertatis nuntius, 6 August 1984; Libertatis conscientia, 22 March 1986.

• Leo XIV, Magnifica humanitas, signed 15 May 2026, published 25 May 2026.

• Holy Office, Monitum on the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, 30 June 1962.

• Gustavo Gutiérrez, Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas (Lima: CEP, 1971).

• David Rice, I Will Not Serve: The Priest Who Said No to Hitler (Dublin: Mentor Books, 2018).

• Thomas Merton, Peace in the Post-Christian Era (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2004); Cold War Letters, edited by Christine M. Bochen and William H. Shannon (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2006).

A Note on My Blogs:

Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.

The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn and is central to Catholic Social Teaching.

As a cultural historian, I am grateful for my experience in the Benedictine tradition in college and in the Graduate School of Theology. In Benedictine life, “Ora et labora” means that prayer and work are inseparable.

I am not a professional academic. I am a practitioner who reads. And that is Wisdom Speaking. — someone who applies theological thinking to technology and its consequences.😎

This Gospel passage is found in a section of Matthew’s text where Jesus constantly highlights the loving, merciful and forgiving nature of God. Such an emphasis is a strong reassurance to the audience that God will always love and forgive them, regardless of their failings. Here, we are presented with another parable in simple allegorical form. As is often the case, the scene is set with a question to Jesus. In this instance, Peter asks about forgiveness for wrong done against him (Mt 18:21). How many times must he forgive? Peter volunteers the number seven, a generous amount indeed. Jesus counters with hyperbole, seventy-seven times (or seventy times seven in some translations). The number is not important, rather it is the contrast to Peter’s seven time which, in fairness, seems like a significant amount. However, Jesus’ reply highlights the limitless capacity of God’s love.

The parable that follows tells a dramatic tale of forgiveness and violent punishment. The debt owed by the first servant is an incredible amount, many time the amount a labourer could hope to earn in their entire lifetime. It is a huge debt and the act of forgiveness in cancelling the debt is extraordinary in its generosity. The episode with the second servant gets to the crux of the matter. While the first servant begged the King to forgive him, he showed no such mercy towards his fellow servant. Such hypocrisy is abhorrent in God’s eyes. The conclusion of the parable is troubling in its violence. A dramatic way to highlight consequences of the lack of integrity on the part of the first servant.

Gospel Text: Matthew 18:21-35

Peter went up to Jesus and said, ‘Lord, how often must I forgive my brother if he wrongs me? As often as seven times?’ Jesus answered, ‘Not seven, I tell you, but seventy-seven times.

‘And so the kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who decided to settle his accounts with his servants. When the reckoning began, they brought him a man who owed ten thousand talents; but he had no means of paying, so his master gave orders that he should be sold, together with his wife and children and all his possessions, to meet the debt. At this, the servant threw himself down at his master’s feet. “Give me time” he said “and I will pay the whole sum.” And the servant’s master felt so sorry for him that he let him go and cancelled the debt. Now as this servant went out, he happened to meet a fellow servant who owed him one hundred denarii; and he seized him by the throat and began to throttle him. “Pay what you owe me” he said. His fellow servant fell at his feet and implored him, saying, “Give me time and I will pay you.” But the other would not agree; on the contrary, he had him thrown into prison till he should pay the debt. His fellow servants were deeply distressed when they saw what had happened, and they went to their master and reported the whole affair to him. Then the master sent for him. “You wicked servant,” he said “I cancelled all that debt of yours when you appealed to me. Were you not bound, then, to have pity on your fellow servant just as I had pity on you?” And in his anger the master handed him over to the torturers till he should pay all his debt. And that is how my heavenly Father will deal with you unless you each forgive your brother from your heart.

See

What is evident in Jesus’ response to Peter’s question about forgiving seven times?

What does the parable show about the first servant’s integrity?

What meaning is conveyed in the text where the King says ‘Were you not bound, then, to have pity on your fellow servant just as I had pity on you?’ (Mt 18:33)

Judge

What characteristics of God are depicted in this text?

What does the text suggest about mercy and forgiveness in our current context?

How do we understand the emphasis on personal integrity in this passage?

Act

How can I act to ensure that I am offering forgiveness to those who have wronged me?

How can I act to seek forgiveness when I have wronged others?

What steps can I take to ensure that I act with integrity in my dealings with others?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-18-21-19-1-2025/

Gospel Text https://www.universalis.com/Australia/1100/mass.htm

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

https://ncec.catholic.edu.au/faith/scripture-resources/

In 1236, Korea’s government had relocated to an island.

Five years earlier, Mongol cavalry crossed Korea’s northern border. King Gojong’s court fled the mainland capital for Ganghwa, a tidal island safe from the horse riders. On the mainland, the invaders burned everything they encountered, including the woodblocks of the first Korean Buddhist canon—a printing archive carved over seventy-six years.

Cornered and already losing the war, the court ordered the entire canon to be carved again.

The project lasted sixteen years, from 1236 to 1251. Artisans on Ganghwa and the southern coast cut birch trees, soaked the logs in seawater for three years, then cut them into blocks, boiled them in brine, and dried them in the shade for another three years before carving. They made 81,258 blocks, carving both sides, for a total of about fifty-two million characters. The work is so consistent that tradition holds it looks like a single carver did it.

As a form of war magic, it failed. Goryeo surrendered in 1259. The year before, Kim Chun assassinated Choe Ui, the military leader whose family had sponsored the carving. Under Mongol orders, the court left the island, and Korea remained a vassal state for the next century.

The blocks survived. In 1398, they were moved to Haeinsa, a temple on Gayasan in the south. By 1488, monks had finished building the four structures that still house them. These buildings are especially interesting. They sit about 655 meters above sea level, positioned to catch dry mountain air and avoid damp valley winds. The north and south windows differ in size, creating a natural ventilation system. The floors are made of packed earth with layers of charcoal, lime, salt, and sand, which absorb moisture during the wet season and release it during the dry season.

In 1970, the Korean government built a new storage facility for the blocks, using modern materials and climate control. Officials moved some test blocks into the new facility, but they developed mildew. They returned the blocks to the 1488 hall, where they remain today.

Once again, we are building something similar, but on a scale the first carvers could never have imagined. Yet we speak of it as if it were nothing more than plumbing.

The building is the belief.

The data center is the cathedral architecture of our century. Like the cathedrals before it, it is built with resources from people who may never know whether their sacrifice was worth it.

According to the International Energy Agency, global data centers will use about 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, roughly 1.5 percent of the world’s total. This is growing by about 12 percent each year and could reach 945 terawatt-hours by 2030. In the United States, data centers are expected to account for nearly half of all electricity demand growth by 2030. By then, they may use more power than the aluminum, steel, cement, and chemical industries combined. Water use is harder to track, but a single large facility with evaporative cooling can use more than a million gallons on a hot day. One estimate for 2026 puts national water use at about 19 billion gallons a year, possibly rising to 60 to 110 billion by 2030.

People are paying attention. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, Data Center Watch reported at least seventy-five projects blocked or delayed, valued at about $130 billion. Local opposition groups grew from 396 to 833 across forty-nine states, and lawmakers in fourteen states, from both parties, filed moratorium bills.

These debates are rarely about technical issues, such as latency or uptime. Instead, they focus on what a place should be, what a community owes to the future, what can be taken from shared resources and with whose permission, and whether the promised benefits are real or merely stories from outsiders. These are, in a strict sense, religious questions—about ultimate goals and which sacrifices are justified.

A society reveals its deepest beliefs in what it chooses to build at great cost and still insists is necessary.

Goryeo considered the canon worth sixteen years of hard work during a siege. You can see that belief in the blocks. Our own beliefs are visible in the substations we build.

The thing that could not reply

When people look for a religious metaphor for artificial intelligence, they often cite the golem—but usually the wrong version.

The well-known story holds that Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague created a clay servant to protect his community but lost control of it. Loew died in 1609, and no sources from his time or the next two centuries link him to a golem. This connection first appears in German literature between 1834 and 1847 and becomes standard in Yudl Rosenberg’s Nifla’ot Maharal, published in Piotrków in 1909 and presented as a manuscript from Metz. Gershom Scholem called it modern fiction. The story we treat as ancient wisdom about machines outgrowing their creators is actually a modern worry dressed up in old clothes.

The older stories ask a deeper question. In tractate Sanhedrin 65b, Rava creates a man and sends him to Rabbi Zeira. Zeira speaks to the creature, but it does not reply. Zeira then says, “You were made by one of the companions; return to your dust.”

The test was whether it could speak—not strength, obedience, or danger. It was about conversation. Zeira ended it because it could not respond.

Think about that, especially now, when machines can answer fluently and at length. The tradition behind the golem story did not fear a talking creation. It judged personhood by the ability to respond and warned strongly against trusting what people make. Psalm 115 criticizes idols for having mouths but not speaking. Our creations do speak. The real issue was never what the object can do, but where people direct their devotion.

Sacred vs. sacred tools of the altar. Christianity ran the longest continuous field trial we have in living deliberately with tools, and it wrote the results down.

The Rule of Saint Benedict, written in the sixth century, instructs the cellarer to treat every utensil and item in the monastery as a sacred tool, leaving nothing uncared for. Cistercian monasteries operated water-powered mills, forges, and fulling works, all organized around a schedule of prayer hours. The Rule does not ask whether a tool is efficient. Instead, it asks how the tool affects the daily routine, group meals, and the person using it.

Thomas Merton brought this question into the twentieth century. In the summer of 1964, Ping Ferry sent him a manuscript of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society, which was published in English that year and first released in French in 1954. Merton wrote three notebook pages and made three journal entries about it in one week. He called it “great, full of firecrackers,” but later said Ellul was too pessimistic, though not without reason. He reviewed the book favorably in Commonweal that December. In his notes, he wrote a line that still resonates: the peace movement’s attitude toward technology will shape its spiritual foundation.

That is the Benedictine question, renewed for our time.

The real issue is not what the system can do but how it shapes the daily lives of those within it.

Nothing exists on its own

Buddhist analysis offers us the part most missing from our public debate, and it is not a warning—it is simply a description. Dependent origination, paṭiccasamuppāda, holds that nothing possesses independent existence; everything arises in dependence on conditions. Applied here, “the model” is a convenient fiction. What exists is a chain: a fabrication plant, a transmission line, a substation in a county that approved a tax abatement, an aquifer, a data annotator paid by the task, a corpus of writing whose authors were not asked, a cooling tower, a five-year depreciation schedule. Call the chain a cloud, and you have made a metaphysical claim, a false one.

Marshall McLuhan called this figure and ground. The chatbot is the figure, the part everyone sees. The substrate is the ground, the hidden foundation that makes the figure possible. Religions are humanity’s oldest and most reliable means of revealing the ground. Practices such as Sabbath, fasting, daily prayers, and almsgiving break our fixation on the figure so we can notice the ground beneath. If a society cannot look away from the interface, it will overlook the community that sustains it.

The Mongols still won.

This argument deserves to be stated plainly, because its strength is undeniable.

Religious institutions have often opposed new technologies. They resisted lightning rods, anesthesia for childbirth, dissection, and even printing in some places, always citing higher purposes—and they were often wrong. Religious worldviews have justified resource extraction as much as they have limited it; for example, interpreting Genesis as granting dominion has led to more deforestation than any spreadsheet. Bringing religious authority into infrastructure decisions empowers groups with their own interests and no accountability to those affected. The issues before a county board are truly technical, and a hydrologist is more helpful than a preacher.

The strongest version of this objection is the story at the beginning of this essay. The canon was created to defend against the Mongols, but the Mongols won.

All of that is true. The point is not that religions always grasp technology—Goryeo lost the war. The real point is more precise and harder to dismiss: religions are the longest record we have of people deciding what is worth great sacrifice, who should bear the cost, what is owed to the future, and what a creation is truly for. No other source has endured so many centuries and so many storms. Read across traditions so none overshadows the rest. The aim is not authority but a vocabulary vast enough for the question.

Questions to ask before building begins

1. Ask why you are building something before asking if it works.

2. Focus on the background, not just the main feature. Notice the substation, the aquifer, the annotator. The canon is paid for—find out by whom, and whether they consented.

3. The old test for something made was whether it could respond. The new test is what we owe to the people whose words helped create it.

4. Judge any tool by how it affects the daily lives and everyday experiences of the people who use it.

5. Pay attention to where people direct their devotion.

On 7 February 2025, Amazon told investors that it had reduced the useful life of some of its servers from six to five years, effective 1 January 2025. That is the planning horizon for the physical side of this revolution: five years, then replacement.

The hall at Haeinsa has no wiring, chillers, or generators. Its design features a slope, two window sizes, and a floor made of charcoal, lime, salt, and sand. This has kept fifty-two million characters readable and mildew-free for over five centuries. In 1970, it outperformed a modern facility so clearly that they returned the blocks to the mountain.

The builders designed it for readers they would never meet.

That is the standard we ought to reach for.

Everything else is just logistics.

Sources

• UNESCO World Heritage Center, “Haeinsa Temple Janggyeong Panjeon, the Depositories for the Tripitaka Koreana Woodblocks” (inscribed 1995): https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/737/

• UNESCO Memory of the World Register, “Printing woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana and miscellaneous Buddhist scriptures”: https://media.unesco.org/sites/default/files/webform/mow001/korea_tripitaka.pdf

• “Haeinsa” and “Tripitaka Koreana,” Wikipedia (construction and rebuilding of Janggyeong Panjeon, ventilation and floor composition, the 1970 relocation attempt): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haeinsa

• Atlas Obscura, “Tripitaka Koreana” (1970 mildew and return of the blocks): https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/tripitaka-koreana

• “Goryeo under Mongol rule,” Wikipedia (capitulation of 1259, the killing of Choe Ui in 1258): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goryeo_under_Mongol_rule

• International Energy Agency, Energy and AI, executive summary: https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/executive-summary

• Water Foundation, Water and Data Centers (2026), summarizing Han et al. (2026) and James et al. (2025): https://waterfdn.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Water-Data-Centers-2026.pdf.

• Data Center Watch, Q1 2026 report: https://www.datacenterwatch.org/q1-2026

• Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 65b, Steinsaltz edition: https://steinsaltz-center.org/portal/library/Talmud/Sanhedrin/chapter/65.b

• “Golem,” Wikipedia, on the nineteenth-century German origin of the Prague attribution and Yudl Rosenberg, Nifla’ot Maharal (Piotrków, 1909): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem

• The Rule of Saint Benedict, chapter 31, on the cellarer: https://eriebenedictines.org/spirituality/rule-of-benedict.html

• International Jacques Ellul Society, “Ellul and Merton,” on Merton’s 1964 reading of Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, translated by John Wilkinson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964): https://ellul.org/themes/ellul-and-merton/

Nota Bene: I write for people of any faith or none. For the family sitting in the pew on a Sunday morning with kids who really don’t want to be there.

The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn and is central to Catholic Social Teaching.

As a cultural historian, I am grateful for my experience in the Benedictine tradition in college and in the Graduate School of Theology. In Benedictine life, “Ora et labora” means that prayer and work are inseparable.

I am not a professional academic. I am a practitioner who reads. And that is Wisdom Speaking. — someone who applies theological thinking to technology and its consequences.

What would Thomas Merton say to a Franciscan’s charge of patriarchal clericalism?

In March 1925, a Belgian priest boarded a train to Rome, certain he was heading toward his own downfall.

At forty-two, the son of a Schaerbeek coal merchant had spent six years building something his own bishops put on trial. His movement, the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, brought together factory girls and apprentice machinists in back rooms, without a priest present, to talk about their work, struggle with the Gospel’s demands, and make their own decisions. Belgian church leaders called it divisive. At a tribunal led by Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, Bishop Louis Picard said the movement was breaking apart the unity of the Mystical Body.

Joseph Cardijn had every reason to fear the outcome. Fifteen years before, on 25 August 1910, Pius X condemned Marc Sangnier’s Le Sillon in Notre charge apostolique. The issue was not heresy, but that a lay movement tried to act outside church authority. Sangnier’s followers were told to dissolve their national group and reorganize under local church control. Their mistake was trying to govern themselves as baptized laypeople.

Cardijn went into the papal audience still holding onto that same forbidden hope.

Pius XI heard him out and said: “Here Pius XI listened to him and said, “Here at last is someone who comes to speak to me about the masses.” He made it clear that without the working class, the Church is not truly the Church of Christ. Cardijn returned home with the Pope’s blessing, and the tribunal ended. The three verbs had been built in their back rooms were three verbs. See. Judge. Act. It ran through the JOC into the Young Christian Workers, into the Christian Family Movement, into Latin America. John XXIII wrote it into Mater et Magistra on 15 May 1961, at paragraph 236: one reviews the concrete situation, one forms a judgment on it in the light of Christian principles, one decides what can and should be done. Cardijn himself sat at the Second Vatican Council and pressed it into the documents on the laity. On 22 February 1965, Paul VI made him a cardinal. He was eighty-two.

A man who spent his life insisting that baptized people are not just spectators was given a red hat and a titular church. He died as a prince of the Church on 24 July 1967.

One life, one problem made clear. That’s why this method fits the question we’re facing.

Michael H. Crosby, OFM Cap, opens a hard passage in Finding Francis, Following Christ (Orbis Books, 2007):

“The Roman Catholic Church has its own story, an understanding of itself as the only vehicle of salvation, superior to all other ways. In the Catholic Church, this “Romanism” is grounded in a deeper “ism,” which is ideologically nurtured day in and day out: patriarchal clericalism. Clericalism connotes the conscious or unconscious concern to promote the particular interests of the priesthood (with its power, perks, and prestige) over all others in the church who are merely baptized. The patriarchal form of this clericalism limits all such power, perks, and prestige to males alone. This is justified by the ideologically grounded conviction that this divide is divinely sanctioned. It is further expressed in rituals and rubrics that sanction the divide canonically (all of which have been written by the clerics themselves). “Among its chief manifestations,” Donald Cozzens writes, “are an authoritarian style of ministerial leadership, a rigidly hierarchical worldview, and virtual identification of the holiness and grace of the church with the clerical state and thereby with the cleric himself.”

How would Thomas Merton respond? He would not judge, but instead use three verbs.

What the eye truly sees

In my first year of graduate school in 1972, my patristics professor went to the chalkboard and wrote: patriarchy breeds clericalism, which breeds hierarchy, which breeds imperialism. He turned and said, “Welcome to the Roman Catholic Church.” Even fifty-four years later, I still remember that moment.

Merton had witnessed it from within, and long before.

What makes Merton more than just a commentator is that he first tried to become a Franciscan. It wasn’t because of Bonaventure, as some say. He was inspired by Étienne Gilson’s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Dan Walsh at Columbia, who studied Duns Scotus, and Father Edmund Murphy at St Francis of Assisi Church in Manhattan. Merton applied to the friars in 1940 and was accepted. Legalism entered the equation. He was advised to withdraw, so he did.

Note what he did next, because it is the part usually left out. Refusing the clerical form of the Franciscan life, he took the lay one, joining the Third Order of St Francis. Then he taught English at St Bonaventure College in Olean, New York, until he entered the Abbey of Gethsemani on 10 December 1941.

He spent twenty-seven years there, living inside the system Crosby describes. His abbot read his mail, and censors reviewed his manuscripts. On 20 January 1962, Dom Gabriel Sortais, the Abbot General of the Cistercians, told him to stop writing about nuclear war. The order reached him on 27 April. His book Peace in the Post-Christian Era was suppressed and did not appear until 2004, thirty-six years after his death. Merton followed the ban to the letter but found a loophole. He could not publish, but he could use a mimeograph. In June 1962, he made about 170 copies and sent them to Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, and Jim Forest, along with the 111 Cold War Letters he had been sharing the same way.

Here is someone sharing what he experienced, not just what he read in books.

The instant the claim unraveled

Merton would focus on Cozzens’s last point: equating the Church’s holiness with the clerical state, and with the cleric himself. That belief broke for him on a street corner.

On 18 March 1958, in Louisville at Fourth and Walnut, Merton suddenly realized he loved the strangers around him and could not be separate from them. What he wrote afterward was not about comfort, but about breaking down barriers. He described waking from “a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness.” Then he wrote a line that sounds more like doctrine than emotion: “Thank God, thank God that I am like other men.”

He had been in the monastery in a system that told him his position brought him closer to God, but he wrote in his journal that this was an illusion. Crosby’s phrase, merely baptized, describes a difference Merton had already broken down from the inside.

He also used his own sharpest tool to examine this issue. In New Seeds of Contemplation, the false self is not evil, but a kind of wrapping: a person covers himself with experiences like bandages so that something invisible becomes visible. If you remove the bandages, nothing is left underneath. For Merton, clericalism is this process carried out by an institution, then given rules, laws, and funding. This is an even tougher judgment than Crosby’s. A false self cannot be fixed; it can only be let go.

When it comes to the idea of being the only way to salvation, the late Merton had moved on. In Calcutta in October 1968, two months before he died, he told an interfaith group that we are already united, but we imagine we are not, and what we need is to recover our original unity. On 2 December 1968, he stood before the reclining Buddhas at Polonnaruwa and said he was “jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things.” Everything is emptiness, and everything is compassion. He died eight days later, on 10 December 1968, twenty-seven years after he entered Gethsemani.

Where he would pause and slow the argument

Judge is the risky verb. Cardijn’s insight was to give people what the Church had taught them to avoid. Merton’s point is that anyone using it should stay within the situation themselves.

He would not let priesthood turn into clericalism. He loved the Mass deeply, as shown throughout The Sign of Jonas. The problem, he would say, is when a role becomes an identity—when someone stops serving and starts claiming ownership. Crosby, a Capuchin, would agree. Francis was never ordained a priest and called the brothers minores, meaning the lesser ones. The Franciscans became clericalized within a generation of his death, which is a classic example of this problem. Merton would see Crosby’s chapter not as an outside attack, but as the Franciscan tradition doing its real work.

He would present the strongest opposing argument, which comes from the opening story. Cardijn was not saved from clericalism by laypeople, but by the highest cleric. The local hierarchy put him on trial, but the Pope overruled them and protected a lay movement that the bishops wanted to control. Someone who supports the hierarchy would say this proves that a teaching office outside local pressure keeps the Church from breaking apart, and Cardijn’s trip to Rome is the evidence. This argument is important and should be taken seriously. Merton would do so, but he would also point out that the same office that saved the JOC in 1925 silenced him on nuclear war in 1962. A system whose protection depends on who is in charge is not real protection—it is a gamble.

He would pause at the word “breeds.” My professor’s chalk line matches Merton’s argument; in his later work, Merton traces the same path from religious domination to the machinery of war. In his essay “A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann,” in Raids on the Unspeakable (1966), he makes this point more clearly than most summaries do. Eichmann was examined and found sane. That is the real horror—not a man without conscience, but someone functioning well inside a legitimate system. Still, the word breeds describes a process, and a process happens outside us, letting the person with the chalk avoid blame. Merton titled his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. The word guilty is the key.

He would ask what criticism does to the critic. Anti-clericalism can create its own kind of clerical group, with its own status—the pride of seeing through things; its own rewards—the satisfaction of diagnosing problems; and its own followers—the people who have not yet understood. Just turning an ideology around does not make it something new. In 1966, Rosemary Radford Ruether wrote to him, saying the monastery was an escape from history and that he should leave. Their letters, published as At Home in the World: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Rosemary Radford Ruether, edited by Mary Tardiff, OP (Orbis Books, 1995), are the closest we have to Merton being questioned on this issue. He agreed with her on many points, but he did not leave. He believed that living on the margins is a real place to stand, not just a way to hide, and that someone who leaves in anger has not escaped the system—they have just moved it somewhere else.

The final verb

Merton’s answer to Jim Forest on 21 February 1966, when Forest was burning out in the peace movement, is the most useful thing he ever wrote to anyone holding a true and exhausting critique:

Do not depend on the hope of results. ... Concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.

In Cardijn’s method, act is never just a personal matter, and Merton is not giving anyone an excuse to do nothing. He is describing how action can last when it meets an institution that refuses to change. Four things follow from this.

1. Make the diagnosis specific. Seeing clericalism as a general theory explains everything but changes nothing. But if clericalism is the reason a parish council has no control over its own budget, that is something you can work on this year.

2. Reject the inner version of clericalism—the part of us that wants power, perks, and the pride of being the one who pointed out the problem.

3. Stay, and look for the opening. Merton followed the ban but still mimeographed his book. He could have either obeyed completely or left, but he chose a different way.

4. Let go of deadlines for change. If you hold onto a critique for fifty years and expect it to have worked by now, it can become bitter.

Cardijn died as a cardinal. It’s easy to see this as the system winning, silencing its critic by promoting him.

But look again. The three verbs made their way into the Council and out into the world, still alive in places where no priest is in charge. Cardijn was honored, but his method became independent.

That is more or less what Merton accepted, and it is both everything and nothing at the same time.

Sources

• Michael H. Crosby, OFM Cap, Finding Francis, Following Christ (Orbis Books, 2007).

• John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, 15 May 1961, §236.

• Pius X, Notre charge apostolique, 25 August 1910.

• Stefan Gigacz, The Leaven in the Council, chapter 2, on Le Sillon, the Mercier tribunal and Cardijn’s March 1925 audience: https://theleaven.com.au/2-lamennais-le-sillon-la-joc/

• Joseph Cardijn: biography, ordination, JOC founding, elevation 22 February 1965: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Cardijn

• Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966); New Seeds of Contemplation (1961); Raids on the Unspeakable (1966); The Sign of Jonas (1953); The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1973).

• Patricia A. Burton, “Forbidden Book: Thomas Merton’s Peace in the Post-Christian Era,” The Merton Annual 17, on the Sortais order of 20 January 1962: https://merton.org/ITMS/Annual/17/Burton25-57.pdf

• Daniel P. Horan, OFM, The Franciscan Heart of Thomas Merton: A New Look at the Spiritual Inspiration of His Life, Thought, and Writing (Ave Maria Press, 2014); reviewed by Br Nicholas Alan SSF, The Merton Journal 22.1 (Eastertide 2015), 39–41: https://thomasmertonsociety.org/Journal/22/22-1AlanRevHoran.pdf

• Donald Grayston, “Thomas Merton in Asia: The Polonnaruwa Illumination,” on the visit of 2 December 1968: https://thomasmertonsociety.org/Edge/Grayston.pdf

• Thomas Merton and Rosemary Radford Ruether, At Home in the World, ed. Mary Tardiff, OP (Orbis Books, 1995).

• Thomas Merton to James Forest, 21 February 1966, in The Hidden Ground of Love (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985).

Introduction

I have grown up in the Church and I regularly express my belief in the “communion of saints.” I have two stories to share briefly here about the gathering of saints in my life.

The first story comes from the distress some of my students felt when they were told by a visiting priest that the word “saint” only applied to those who made it into heaven. I had taught them that those who sought to follow Jesus are saints. I am convinced that my better half is a saint.

And so is my daughter. Recently, I messaged her about a statue perched on a rooftop in the school where she teaches. I spotted the statue when I walked past the school on my way to the train station. Sure enough, it is a statue of St Joseph, on the roof of the St Joseph wing, where she teaches RE.

Yes, I believe in the communion of saints, both here on earth and in heaven. Amen.

The Gospel

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘If your brother does something wrong, go and have it out with him alone, between your two selves. If he listens to you, you have won back your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you: the evidence of two or three witnesses is required to sustain any charge. But if he refuses to listen to these, report it to the community; and if he refuses to listen to the community, treat him like a pagan or a tax collector.

‘I tell you solemnly, whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven.

‘I tell you solemnly once again, if two of you on earth agree to ask anything at all, it will be granted to you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three meet in my name, I shall be there with them.’ (Matthew 18:15-20)

The Enquiry

See

• Put in your own words what you think Jesus is teaching his followers here. What link does Jesus make between listening and reconciliation? Is choosing to avoid listening a form of injustice?

• What has been the impact of his teaching on his followers and on the world since then? What evidence can you present to show that Pope Leo XIV lives by Jesus’ message here?

• Which group(s) do you belong to that gather in the name of Jesus? Why does Jesus make a commitment to be with those who gather in his name? Why is prayer a necessary part of seeking justice?

Judge

• What have you discovered about Jesus in this Gospel that might have escaped your awareness of him?

• What is there in his teaching that you think would improve people’s lives if they took him seriously and followed him faithfully?

• This Gospel seems to be a collection of sayings by Jesus, bound together by a shared theme. Which part(s) of the Gospel challenge(s) you to seek to change so as to become more like Christ?

Act

• Given what you have been reflecting on through this Gospel, what do you want to change in the world and in yourself that will bring you closer to Jesus?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to bringing about this transformation of the world and yourself?

• Who can you involve in your action, when, where and how often?

Image Source: Robert Wilhelm Ekman (Creator), Jesus wakes Lazarus, a painting from 1860 in the Finnish National Gallery, rawpixel.com, PDM 1.0