That wound is the loss of the interior life. What is it about the culture that drives us to be more like Ayn Rand than a disciple of Christ?

SEE: What Is Actually Happening to Us?

Look around honestly. We live in what Han calls the “achievement society” — a world that no longer coerces us with commands from the outside but compels us from within. We scroll, produce, optimize, perform. We are not just busy; we are constitutionally busy, unable to stop without feeling guilt or anxiety. Burnout is not an accident of this system. It is its logical endpoint.

Merton saw a version of this long before the smartphone existed. Writing from the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, he watched a world growing louder, faster, and more fragmented, and he named what it was producing: the false self — an identity stitched together from the ex’s expectations, from roles, from the compulsive need to appear rather than to be. This false self, he insisted, is not just a private spiritual problem. It is a social wound. Cultural systems shape inward division, and inward division spills outward — into hostility, conformity, and violence.

Han gives us updated language for exactly what Merton was describing. Transparency, acceleration, compulsive self-production: these are the contemporary mechanisms by which the false self is manufactured and maintained. Both men, in different registers, point to the same catastrophe: a life turned outward and emptied inward.

JUDGE: What Does This Mean, and Where Does It Lead?

Reading Han and Merton together reveals that Merton is far more radical than he is usually given credit for. His call to silence is not a devotional nicety for monastics. It is a form of protest — a refusal of the systems that deform attention, desire, and identity, and a direct challenge to the forces that erode interior life.

Here the two thinkers converge most powerfully, and here they also begin to diverge in ways that matter.

Where they agree: Both distrust a culture that substitutes productivity and performance for genuine interior life. Both treat contemplation not as escape but as a way of becoming more fully human. And both understand that the person who has lost inwardness is more vulnerable — more easily captured by conformity, consumerism, or the crowd.

Where they part ways: Han is a diagnostician. He is extraordinarily precise about what is wrong with late modern life, and his concept of “radical negativity”— the idea that silence, emptiness, and withdrawal are acts of resistance—is genuinely illuminating. But his void remains philosophically ambiguous. It tells us what we need to stop doing, without fully naming what we are being emptied toward.

Merton’s apophatic theology fills that gap exactly. For Merton, the darkness of contemplation is not an end in itself ~ it is a threshold. The silence is not mere absence; it is a spiritually generative emptying ordered toward communion with God. His “darkness” is disciplined by revelation, prayer, Prayere Christian tradition (think Patristics here), especially the conviction that God is known by unknowing without being reduced to silence. Where Han’s void exposes what modern life cannot tolerate, Merton’s void is a doorway into what human life most deeply needs.

In concise terms, Han diagnoses the sickness of accelerated modern life, while Merton names the cure ~ a contemplative return to the true self in God.

This difference also shapes how each thinker handles religious tradition. Merton engaged deeply and carefully with Buddhism and other traditions, always insisting on genuine dialogue without flattening real differences. Han tends to move more abstractly across traditions, drawing on Eastern thought without anchoring himself in any single one. That is a limitation worth naming, especially for readers approaching these questions from within a faith community.

ACT: What Are We Going to Do About It?

The point of this conversation is not merely academic. If Han and Merton are right — and together they make a compelling case — then one conclusion follows: silence, contemplation, and resistance to performative life are not optional extras, but necessary responses.

Recover contemplative practice as a form of resistance, not retreat. Silence, prayer, and prayerlessness are not luxuries for the spiritually advanced. They are, as both men argue, acts of counter-cultural resistance in an age that profits from our distraction and exhaustion.

Take the false self seriously as a social, not merely a spiritual, problem. The pressure to manufacture an identity for public consumption is not a personal weakness. It is a structural feature of digital capitalism. Naming that honestly — in our communities, our schools, our parishes — is the first step toward freedom. Why is this so difficult in the US?

Let Han make Merton legible, but let Merton deepen Han. For anyone using these thinkers in Christian education or spiritual formation, this pairing is particularly valuable. Han provides contemporary language for pressures that Merton identified in spiritual terms. But Merton supplies what Han often leaves implicit: a theological center, a horizon of transformation, and the insistence that silence is ordered not to emptiness but to love. Together, they clarify not only what is wrong, but what we are invited toward.

Questions for You To Ponder

1. Where in your own life do you feel the pressure to perform, produce, or be perpetually available? What would it cost you — concretely — to resist that pressure for a single day?

2. Han argues that burnout is not a personal failure but a systemic one. Does that reframe how you think about your own exhaustion, or that of people around you?

3. Merton distinguished between the false self (constructed for others) and the true self (found before God). Which of the two feels more familiar to you on an ordinary Tuesday?

4. Both Han and Merton insist that contemplation is not an escape from the world but a deeper engagement with it. Do you believe that? What would it look like in your own life or community?

5. Merton’s apophatic tradition holds that we approach God by letting go of our images and certainties about God. Does that feel liberating or unsettling — and what might that response reveal?

6. If silence is a form of resistance, what are you resisting when you choose it — and what are you protecting?

A Reading Guide: Merton and Han in Conversation

Thomas Merton — Where to Begin and Where to Go Deeper

Merton wrote prolifically, and not everything is equally relevant to the themes in the blog post. Here is a sequenced path.

Start here:

New Seeds of Contemplation (1962) is the essential Merton — the one book to read if you read only one. It is where his thinking about the true and false self is most fully developed, written in a lyrical voice without sentimentality. It directly addresses the kind of identity fragmentation Han diagnoses in secular terms.

The Seven Story Mountain (1948) is his autobiography and remains the most widely read entry point, though it is more narrative than theological. Read it to understand the man before reading him as a thinker.

Go deeper with these:

Contemplative Prayer (Prayer is compact and serious — Merton at his most apophatic, engaging darkness, dread, and the stripping away of consolations. This is where he sounds most like Han’s philosophical void, except that his void has a destination.

No Man Is an Island (1955) develops the social and ethical dimensions of contemplation. This is the book that shows why interior division spills outward into violence and conformity — the argument that resonates most directly with Han’s social critique.

Raids on the Unspeakable (1966) is prophetic and strange, a collection of essays and prose poems written in direct protest against the dehumanizing forces of modernity. Merton is a social critic, not just a spiritual guide—extraordinarily relevant today.

The Wisdom of the Desert (1960) — Merton’s translation and commentary on the Desert Fathers — provides the deep roots of the contemplative tradition he is drawing on. Brief, beautiful, and surprisingly readable.

For the interreligious dimension:

The Asian Journal (1973, posthumous) and Mystics and Zen Masters (1967) show Merton in genuine dialogue with Buddhism — careful, attentive, never collapsing real differences. This is where his approach contrasts most sharply with Han’s more abstract use of Eastern thought.

Byung-Chul Han — The New Book and the Essential Background

The Tonality of Thought (2025, translated by Daniel Steuer) is Han’s most personally revealing work. Based on lectures he gave in 2023, it is built around a striking self-description: his books, he says, are not repetitions but variations on themes — like Bach’s Goldberg Variations, though articulated in the form of fundamental concepts. His thinking, he explains, is rooted in German Romanticism and Far Eastern thought: “If I may compare my thinking with a fruit, then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.”

His central summary of his entire philosophical project appears here: “If asked to summarize my philosophical thoughts in one sentence, I would say: The Other disappears.” The more we immerse ourselves in digital communication, the more we lose the sense of touch and the physical presence of the Other. That theme — the disappearance of genuine otherness, of friction, of the encounter with what resists us — runs through everything he has written and connects directly to Merton’s concern about the false self, which is ultimately a self sealed off from real encounter with God or neighbor.

The essential Han reading list, in order of relevance to the Merton conversation:

The Burnout Society (2015) — short, dense, and the best starting point for Han generally. The core diagnosis of the achievement society is why it produces exhaustion rather than flourishing.

Vita Contemplativa: In Praise of Inactivity (2023) — Han’s most direct engagement with contemplation, leisure, and the value of doing nothing. The most obvious companion to Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation.

The Scent of Time (2017) — on the loss of temporal depth, ritual, and the kind of time that allows genuine experience. Connects to Merton’s understanding of liturgical and contemplative time.

The Disappearance of Rituals (2020) argues that modernity has gutted the symbolic practices that once gave life coherence and meaning. Deeply relevant to Merton’s monastic framework.

In the Swarm (2017) and Infocracy (2022), Han discusses digital life, transparency, and the erosion of public discourse. More political, but useful for understanding the social consequences of the internal collapse, both men describe.

A Suggested Reading Sequence for the Two Together

If you want to read them in genuine dialogue, rather than one after the other, this sequence works well, at least it did for me, just saying:

1. Han, The Burnout Society — establish the diagnosis.

2. Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation — encounter the spiritual response

3. Han, Vita Contemplativa — see Han reaching toward what Merton already inhabits

4. Merton, Contemplative Prayer — the apophatic depth Han approaches but does not enter

5. Han, The Tonality of Thought — Han on his own roots and preoccupations

6. Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable — Merton as prophet and social critic

7. Merton, No Man Is an Island — the social ethics of the interior life.

By the end of that sequence, you will have a very clear sense of where the two men illuminate each other and where they genuinely diverge — and why that divergence matters.

There is a question almost no one in the AI industry is asking, and it might be the most important one: Who is this for, and what kind of human life should it serve?

Not “What can it do?” Not “How fast can it run?” Not “How much revenue will it generate?” But rather — what kind of human life, human judgment, and human dignity should artificial intelligence actually serve?

Mortimer Adler, the philosopher and educator who spent decades insisting that great ideas belong to everyone, not just to elites, has been dead since 2001. But his thinking feels strangely urgent right now, because AI debate keeps getting stuck on technical questions when we really need moral ones.

SEE: What Is Actually Happening

Take a moment to look honestly at where AI is being deployed today.

Hiring platforms use algorithmic screening to eliminate candidates before a human ever reads their name. Predictive policing tools rank neighborhoods — and by extension, people — by calculated risk scores. Students outsource essays to large language models and call it research. Social media feeds are curated by systems optimized not for truth or connection but for engagement, which often means outrage. Surveillance cameras equipped with facial recognition track people in public spaces without their knowledge or consent.

At the same time, AI is doing genuinely remarkable things. It is helping doctors catch cancers earlier. It is giving people with disabilities new ways to communicate. It is making legal and educational resources available to people who could never afford a lawyer or a private tutor.

The technology itself is not the problem. The problem is that we are deploying it without asking the right questions first: What should it serve, and what should it never override? We are asking, can we, and we are measuring success almost entirely by speed, cost, and efficiency — as if those were the only values that matter.

There are other costs that rarely appear in the spreadsheet: the environmental toll of the massive data centers required to run these models, the privacy of people whose information was scraped to train them, and the subtle but real erosion of human judgment when we hand our thinking to a machine.

JUDGE: What Mortimer Adler Would Say About All This

Adler’s life work was built on a single stubborn conviction: human beings are different in kind, not just in degree, from everything else. That distinction is the source of moral status. It is what makes a person a person and not a product.

His 1967 book The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes was written to push back against reductionist accounts of human nature — the idea that we are nothing more than complicated mechanisms. That argument is even more pressing today, when AI systems can produce fluent prose, generate realistic images, and hold conversations that feel almost human. When machines can imitate the outputs of intelligence, we are tempted to forget that imitation is not the same as thought.

For AI governance, this matters enormously. If we treat the ability to process language or recognize patterns as equivalent to human understanding, we will end up treating human beings as interchangeable with machines — or, worse, valuing people only by what they can efficiently produce. Adler gives us language to resist that: Personhood, he insists, is prior to efficiency.

His educational philosophy deepens the concern. Adler believed the purpose of education was to cultivate the powers of understanding, reasoning, and dialogue — the distinctively human capacities that allow people to think for themselves, question assumptions, and engage seriously with ideas. Learning, for him, was active and communal, not passive and solitary. It required real conversation, genuine disagreement, and the willingness to change your mind.

If that is right, then an AI system that does your thinking for you is not an educational tool. It is an obstacle to education. It may produce something that looks like learning while quietly undermining the real thing.

From an Adlerian perspective, the current moral risks of AI are not side effects to be managed after the fact. They are failures of governance — failures to protect real persons and real communities from real harm. When AI amplifies bias, it harms people who are already vulnerable. When it generates fabricated content with the same fluency as true content, it erodes the shared basis of public discourse. And when it is used for manipulative targeting or covert surveillance, it degrades the freedom and dignity that make a human community possible.

None of this is inevitable. But none of it will be prevented by technical fixes alone. It requires moral judgment, which is precisely what Adler spent his career insisting could not be outsourced.

ACT: What Good Governance Actually Looks Like

Adler’s framework suggests not just a critique but a direction. Here are five principles worth fighting for:

1. Keep humans responsible for high-stakes decisions. AI can inform, flag, and assist, but a human being must be accountable for decisions that affect other people’s lives — employment, housing, healthcare, criminal justice. Automating those decisions is not efficient. It is the evasion of moral responsibility.

2. Prohibit or tightly restrict uses that degrade dignity. Blanket surveillance, manipulative behavioral targeting, and automated systems that sort people by worth or risk should face the highest bar of scrutiny. Some uses may need to be prohibited outright. Others require strict oversight, transparency about how they work, and meaningful recourse for people they affect.

3. Require explainability, auditability, and bias testing. If an institution cannot explain why its AI system made a particular decision, that system should not be making that decision. Regular bias audits should be required, not optional, and the results should be public.

4. Treat AI outputs as provisional until verified by human reason. This is Adler’s educational principle applied directly. AI can generate a first draft, surface a pattern, or summarize a body of evidence — but a human being must interpret, verify, and take responsibility for what gets used. The output of a machine is not the same as the judgment of a person.

5. Build AI literacy that teaches people to question, not just consume. Schools, universities, churches, civic organizations, and workplaces all have a role here. The goal is not to make people afraid of AI, or to pretend it does not exist, but to form people who know how to engage it critically — who can ask whether a source is reliable, whether an output is accurate, and whether a use is just.

In Adler’s spirit, the governing thesis is this: AI should not be governed by what it can imitate, but by whether it supports the full development of human persons in truth, freedom, and moral responsibility.

That is not a technical standard. It is a human one. And it is the standard we most urgently need.

Questions for Reflection and Discussion

1. When you use AI tools in your daily life — for work, school, or personal tasks — are you using them to deepen your own thinking, or to replace it? How can you tell the difference?

2. Adler argues that human dignity is grounded in what is distinctively human, not in measurable productivity or intelligence. How does that principle challenge the way AI is currently being used in hiring, healthcare, or education?

3. The See-Judge-Act method asks us to look honestly at reality before making moral judgments. What aspects of AI’s current impact do you think are being ignored or underreported in public conversation?

4. Who in your community is most vulnerable to harms from AI — from algorithmic bias, surveillance, or the erosion of human judgment in high-stakes decisions? What would it look like to center their experience in AI policy?

5. If Adler is right that real education requires active inquiry, dialogue, and the willingness to change your mind, what does that mean for how AI should — and should not — be used in classrooms?

6. What is one concrete thing you, your institution, or your community could do to ensure AI is serving human flourishing rather than replacing it?

This Gospel text begins with an expression of Jesus’ compassion for the people in their suffering. In earlier chapters of the Gospel it is Jesus himself who responds to this suffering through his ministry of healing (Mt 4:23, 8:3, 9:33). Now, it is the turn of the apostles to continue this ministry, just as they had observed, while following Jesus. The text includes the often quoted reflection on Mission that ‘the harvest is rich but the labourers are few’ (Mt 9:37). The Mission of the disciples is to be twofold – proclaiming that the Kingdom of God is close at hand, just as Jesus had done at the beginning of his ministry (Mt 4:17), and healing the sick, cleansing lepers etc. which had also been central to Jesus’ ministry.

One of Matthew’s key concerns, in writing this Gospel, seems to have been to show that Jesus truly is the Messiah (Christ) promised to the people of Israel. This is often done through quoting texts from the Hebrew Scriptures as being fulfilled in the life and ministry of Jesus. In this Gospel text, there are two echoes of that motif. First, the naming of the twelve apostles, with the number twelve symbolically corresponding with the twelve tribes of Israel. Second, the instruction to go only to the ‘lost sheep of the House of Israel’ (Mt:10;6) rather than the territory of the Gentiles or Samaritans. Underlining the privileged position of the people of Israel to be given the Messiah is a strong indication of Matthew’s purpose. This restriction on the mission of the apostles seems to be at odds with the evident practice of Jesus and his disciples and, most notably with the final commissioning of the disciples where they are told to ‘make disciples of all nations’ (Mt 28:19).

Gospel Text: Matthew 9:36-10:8

When Jesus saw the crowds he felt sorry for them because they were harassed and dejected, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is rich but the labourers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send labourers to his harvest.’

He summoned his twelve disciples, and gave them authority over unclean spirits with power to cast them out and to cure all kinds of diseases and sickness.

These are the names of the twelve apostles: first, Simon who is called Peter, and his brother Andrew; James the son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas, and Matthew the tax collector; James the son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Zealot and Judas Iscariot, the one who was to betray him. These twelve Jesus sent out, instructing them as follows:

‘Do not turn your steps to pagan territory, and do not enter any Samaritan town; go rather to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. And as you go, proclaim that the kingdom of heaven is close at hand. Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils. You received without charge, give without charge.’

See

What does the commissioning of the apostles suggest about Jesus’ approach to his mission?

Before commissioning the apostles, Jesus is affected by the situation of the crowds. How does his compassion for their plight influence his actions?

Jesus likens the crowds to ‘sheep without a shepherd’. What does this observation suggest about the religious leaders in their community?

Judge

Who, in our own world, are the labourers who are being called to the harvest?

Who, in our society today, are ‘harassed and dejected’ and in need of our compassion?

Who, in today’s world, are failing to be a ‘shepherd’ to those who are harassed and rejected?

Act

What actions am I called to in bringing God’s Kingdom to fruition in my own circumstances?

How do I help others recognise that God’ Kingdom is near to them?

How can I engage others in works of healing and compassion?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-9-35-10-1-5a-6-8-2024/

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/

*A See–Judge–Act Reflection on* Magnifica Humanitas

There is something almost head-scratching about a papal encyclical on artificial intelligence — the oldest institution in Western civilization issuing formal teaching on the newest technology in human history. But *Magnifica Humanitas: On the Protection of Human Dignity in the Age of Artificial Intelligence* is not a panic document, and it deserves more than a quick scroll and a dismissal. Beneath its technical concerns about algorithmic bias, labor displacement, and weaponized disinformation lies a much older question: *What does it mean to be human, and can anything take that from us?*

That question deserves theologians with deep roots. Karl Rahner and Thomas Merton — the German Jesuit who remapped Catholic anthropology from the inside, and the Kentucky monk who turned his hermitage into a window onto the world — are two of the best conversation partners we have for sitting with it. Neither of them knew the internet, let alone large language models. But both of them knew something more important: they knew the shape of the temptation we face whenever a powerful new system offers to do our thinking for us.

SEE: What Is Actually Happening?

Before we judge or act, we have to look honestly at what is in front of us.

AI is not one thing. It is a family of technologies — machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, predictive analytics — that share a common logic: pattern recognition at scale. These systems have become woven into the texture of everyday life faster than any previous technology. They curate what news you read, score your creditworthiness, assess your job application, translate your words, write your emails, and increasingly inform decisions about your medical treatment, your parole hearing, and your children’s school placement.

*Magnifica Humanitas* notices this panorama and identifies several genuinely serious concerns: the concentration of AI power in a small number of corporations and states; the erosion of privacy through mass surveillance; the manipulation of public opinion through algorithmically personalized misinformation; the precarity of labor in an economy where automation threatens not only factory workers but knowledge workers; and the risk that AI systems will simply encode and amplify the biases of the societies that built them — especially toward the poor, the marginalized, and the Global South.

None of this is hysteria. It is a reasonable description of what is already happening. And the encyclical is right to name it.

But — and this is where Rahner and Merton become essential — none of it means that *AI is the problem*. The problem is older, and it lives closer to home.

JUDGE: What Does Faith Say About This?

Rahner: The Person Is Never Finished

Karl Rahner spent his career insisting on something that sounds simple but has enormous consequences: the human being is not a fixed essence but a dynamic, historical becoming. We are not objects that happen to think. We are subjects — always in motion, always exceeding ourselves, always oriented toward what Rahner called the *Heilige Geheimnis*, the Holy Mystery — a horizon that recedes every time we approach it.

He named this capacity *active self-transcendence*: the structural restlessness of the human spirit that drives us beyond any given state of knowledge, freedom, or love toward something more. Even a mundane act like learning something new is, in Rahner’s framework, a small enactment of transcendence — the self going beyond where it was. As he put it simply, “Learning always involves self-transcendence.”

This anthropology has two important implications for AI.

First, AI has no intrinsic power to abolish human transcendence. It is a tool — sophisticated, consequential, even dangerous when misused, but still a tool. It cannot close the horizon. It cannot reach into the space between the human spirit and the Holy Mystery and fill it with silicon. What it *can* do is make it easier for us to live *as if* that space did not exist — to accept a flattened, manageable, computable version of ourselves and call it enough.

Second, this means the real theological question is not “What is AI doing to us?” but “What are we allowing AI to do to us?” Rahner’s framework turns our gaze back to the human agent from the machine. The encyclical’s worry that AI reduces persons to “data profiles” and “risk scores” is, in Rahner’s idiom, a worry about *habituated self-diminishment* — a way of living that trains us to forget our own depth. The danger is not the algorithm. The danger is our consent to its definitions.

There is another Rahnerian angle worth adding that the encyclical gestures toward but does not fully develop: his theology of *grace in history*. For Rahner, the Spirit of God is not hovering above history, descending occasionally in approved moments. Grace is the very atmosphere of history — active in struggle, in solidarity, in the resistance of the oppressed, in the inarticulate longing for justice. This means the people organizing to regulate AI, the workers fighting for fair treatment in gig economies, the journalists exposing algorithmic discrimination — these are not merely secular actors. They are, in Rahner’s sense, sites where grace is at work in the world. The encyclical’s concern for labor and justice is not a distraction from theology. It *is* theology.

Rahner’s notion of the *anonymous Christian* extends this further — though it needs careful handling. His core intuition, which matters here, is that God’s self-communication is universally operative: that the human capacity for self-transcendence is not a monopoly of any tradition. Buddhist mindfulness, Confucian ritual, Indigenous reciprocity with the land — these are not deficient approximations of a Western metaphysics waiting to be corrected. They are distinct, culturally specific ways of living the same fundamental dynamism. What AI threatens, on this reading, is not only a single philosophical definition of the person. It is the *plurality* of ways of being human — the many disciplines of attention and relation that different traditions have cultivated — that a globalized technocratic monoculture is increasingly crowding out.

Merton: The Idol and the False Self

Thomas Merton arrives at the same concern from a different direction, and with more fire.

Merton was not hostile to technology in principle. He typed on a typewriter, corresponded prolifically by mail, used a mimeograph machine, and was genuinely curious about the modern world even from his hermitage at Gethsemani. But he was uncompromising about a particular spiritual danger that technology concentrates: the danger of the *false self*.

For Merton, the false self is not evil in a dramatic sense. It is simply the self that has been constructed around the need for approval, security, power, and image — the self that derives its sense of reality from what it can control and be seen to accomplish. The false self is not a villain. It is an exhausted performance. And Merton saw that modern technology, by amplifying our capacity for production, speed, control, and self-presentation, could become an engine for the false self’s project.

His warning in *Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander* is worth sitting with: our “fantastic progress” risks becoming “an expensive and complicated way of cultural disintegration” if we do not learn how to live with it. AI intensifies this risk to a degree Merton could not have imagined. A technology that curates your information environment to maximize your engagement, that reflects your preferences back to you in an endless personalized mirror, that offers to produce text and thought and creativity on your behalf — this is, in Merton’s terms, a machine exquisitely designed to service the false self.

But Merton would not stop there, and neither should we. He was equally insistent that beneath the false self — beneath all the noise, performance, and distraction — there remains what he called the *le point vierge*, the virgin point: an inviolable center of the person where “our whole being is silent and attentive.” This is not a romanticized inner room available only to monks. It is the irreducible depth of every human person — the place where you are, as Merton famously wrote in *New Seeds of Contemplation*, “not the soul they think you are.” It is the ground of the true self, and no algorithm can reach it.

The encyclical’s anxiety about AI-driven manipulation of information and the surveillance economy reads, in Merton’s register, as an anxiety that our technological systems are systematically steering us *away* from that center. They are not evil for being machines. They become dangerous when we let them set the terms of what is real, when we accept their measurements as our definition, when we live — as the forest does not live — entirely on the surface.

Merton’s late engagement with Buddhism is also relevant here, and not incidentally. In his dialogues with D.T. Suzuki and his growing attention to Zen, he found what he described as a profound solidarity beneath apparent doctrinal difference: both Christian contemplation and Zen practice were, at their depth, disciplines of *seeing through* the illusions of the ego-self. The Zen practitioner’s liberation from the grasping, constructing self and the Christian contemplative’s kenotic self-emptying before God were, for Merton, pointing toward the same open space. A world of AI — which is, among other things, a machine for constructing and flattering the ego — is precisely the world that needs these disciplines.

Rahner and Merton Together

What happens when you read these two figures alongside each other?

Rahner gives us the *structure* of the problem: the human person is a transcending subject, history is the site of grace, and AI becomes dangerous when it habituates us to deny our own transcendence. Merton gives us the *existential weight* of the problem: the false self is seductive, contemplation is the antidote, and we need to know from the inside what it feels like to refuse the machine’s definitions.

They also share something easily missed: a refusal of dualism. Neither Rahner nor Merton is anti-world or anti-technology. Rahner is explicit that the human vocation involves historical making — that we are called to build the world. Despite the hermitage, Merton maintained a vast correspondence and wrote about politics, race, nuclear weapons, and Vietnam. The response to AI is not withdrawal. It is *discernment* — the practiced capacity to ask, in each concrete situation: does this use of this tool help me become more fully human, or does it help me forget that I am?

ACT: What Are We Called To Do?

In the end, *Magnifica Humanitas* will be judged less by its analysis of AI than by whether it helps the Church — and the wider world — remember the depth of the human. AI is not the problem. The problem is forgetting who we are and who we are becoming in a world that finds it increasingly easy to confuse calculation with wisdom and prediction with destiny.

Rahner’s language of active self-transcendence reminds us that the human person is always *on the way* — a history-making subject whose freedom is ordered toward an unfathomable mystery that no system can contain or close. Merton’s language of the true and false self reminds us that this journey is never abstract but always contested: between contemplative attention and idolatrous distraction, between communion and control.

The real danger is not intelligent machines but unintelligent hearts — hearts that accept as normal a world in which persons are reduced to risk scores, workers to optimization problems, and entire peoples to data points in someone else’s model.

This is where the plural anthropologies Rahner gestures toward and Merton actively inhabited become indispensable. Buddhist teachings on non-substantial selfhood — the radical deconstruction of the grasping, controlling ego that Zen practice pursues — offer a powerful counter to the hypertrophied individual for whom AI is just one more instrument of mastery. Confucian understandings of personhood as constituted by ritually mediated relationships resist the atomism that technocratic systems presuppose. Indigenous cosmologies that locate the human within a web of obligations to land, ancestors, and other-than-human kin offer a vision of the person that no algorithm can adequately model — because these traditions insist, in different idioms, that the person is never simply a node of preferences to be optimized. The person is a *relation*, embedded in webs of grace and obligation that exceed calculation.

These are not failed attempts at Thomism. They are alternative disciplines of attention — different grammars of the same human mystery that *Magnifica Humanitas* seeks to defend against technocratic reduction. And they converge, across their differences, on something Merton kept trying to say: that the deepest resistance to the machine’s reductions is not a better argument but a different quality of presence — the presence of someone who knows, from practice, that there is more to reality than what can be measured.

A Mertonian call to contemplation, then, is not an escape from the world of AI. It is a summons to inhabit that world differently — to bring to it the kind of attention that can see through the mirror of the false self, that can receive the other not as data but as mystery, that can stand in the forest of being and, when the imagination is finally silent, let the forest speak.

Only from that quiet center can we discern which uses of AI genuinely serve *magnificent humanity* — and which merely magnify our refusal of it.

Questions for Further Reflection

1. Rahner argues that the human person is constituted by a restless movement toward Holy Mystery — a movement no system can finalize. How do you experience this dynamic in your own life, and do you think AI makes it harder or easier to live from that depth?

2. Merton distinguishes sharply between the true self and the false self. In what ways might our use of social media, AI tools, and digital systems be servicing the false self — and what would it look like to use these same tools from the true self instead?

3. The encyclical worries that AI concentrates power and amplifies existing injustice. If grace is at work *in* history as Rahner insists, where do you see the Spirit active in current struggles over algorithmic accountability, workers’ rights, and data sovereignty?

4. Buddhist, Confucian, and Indigenous traditions offer distinct ways of understanding the person as relational, embedded, non-substantial, and obligated to the more-than-human world. How might these perspectives correct or enrich the way *Magnifica Humanitas* frames human dignity?

5. Merton believed contemplation is not a retreat from the world but the most radical form of resistance to its idols. What would a genuinely contemplative approach to AI look like in daily life — not as abstinence, but as a different quality of attention?

*This reflection uses the See–Judge–Act method developed in Catholic Social Teaching as a framework for theological discernment of contemporary experience.*

Why eudaimonia matters now

We live in a time when machines increasingly advise, decide, and act for us. That makes Aristotle’s conception of the good life newly urgent: flourishing is not passive comfort or efficient output, but active engagement with the world — shaped by reason, habituated virtue, and genuine responsibility for one’s choices.

If technology reshapes how we choose, pay attention, work, learn, and relate to one another, then it also reshapes the conditions under which we pursue flourishing. Aristotle begins from a simple but demanding claim: every human being seeks the good, and the good life is not a pile of pleasures but a life ordered by reason and virtue. By that standard, technology should be judged by one question: Does it support practical wisdom, justice, courage, temperance, and the habits that make communal life possible?

“A technology may be impressive and still be bad for eudaimonia — if it weakens judgment, narrows responsibility, or trains us to live automatically rather than reflectively.”

Autonomous systems present a special challenge because they often work in opaque ways and can outpace the moral habits needed to use them well. Rule-based ethics alone can become too vague or too rigid in a rapidly changing environment. This is precisely where Aristotelian virtue ethics is most useful: it asks not only whether a rule is met, but whether a practically wise person would act this way, given the real stakes and the real people involved.

See, judge, act

The social justice tradition offers a simple but rigorous framework for ethical discernment: see the situation clearly, judge it in light of moral principles, then act. Applied to emerging technology alongside Aristotle’s ethics of flourishing, this framework becomes a practical discipline for deciding how technology should serve human life.

SEE

The first step is honest observation. What technologies are actually shaping our lives? How are they changing our attention, our work, our relationships, and our decision-making? Notice where autonomy is being transferred from human beings to systems, where convenience is silently replacing deliberation, and where people are becoming dependent on tools they do not understand. The point is not alarm — it is clarity.

Consider a teacher who uses AI to draft lesson plans, summarize readings, and recommend grades. Those tools may save real time. But they also alter the teacher’s role in judgment, discernment, and intellectual formation. The “see” step asks: what exactly is gained, what is lost, and who is affected? That question is foundational because eudaimonia is always lived in concrete conditions, not abstractions.

JUDGE

Aristotle’s key insight is that human flourishing depends on rational activity in accordance with virtue — not on speed, efficiency, or accumulated pleasure. So ask whether a given technology helps cultivate practical wisdom or short-circuits it; whether it strengthens human agency or quietly erodes it.

Practical wisdom — phronesis — grows when people learn to connect information with lived judgment, rather than treating AI outputs as automatically authoritative. That means recognizing patterns, identifying blind spots, and resisting the pressure to flatten complexity into quick answers. It also means remembering that wisdom is formed through experience, reflection, and moral responsibility — not merely through access to more data.

An autonomous system should therefore be judged by more than accuracy or speed. Judge it by whether it respects human dignity, preserves responsibility, encourages truthfulness, and supports community rather than isolation. A system that makes people more distracted, less thoughtful, or less accountable may be technically impressive while being humanly regressive.

ACT

The third step is action — and for Aristotle, action is never merely a one-off choice. Virtue is built through habituation. What matters is forming stable dispositions over time, so the good life becomes a practiced way of living.

A useful starting point is to build habits that slow down the automatic reliance on AI. Draft first, then consult AI. Compare multiple outputs. Ask what assumptions a system is making before acting on its recommendations. Develop what we might call “good refusal” — the practiced willingness to decline AI use when it would replace needed consultation, entrench bias, or hide human accountability behind a machine-generated process. These habits preserve the space where judgment, conscience, and prudence can actually operate.

At the individual level, this may mean setting deliberate limits on AI use and making room for reading, writing, memory, and conversation that are not outsourced to machines. At the institutional level, it may mean designing courses, workplaces, and communities of practice that use technology as an aid to human judgment rather than a replacement for it. At the cultural level, it means resisting the temptation to define success solely by speed, scale, and automation.

“Not nostalgia for a pre-digital world, but formation for the one we actually inhabit.”

A practical commitment might look like this: use AI to support discernment, not to avoid it; evaluate technologies by their effect on human relationships; prefer tools that make virtue easier to practice.

Wisdom grows in community.

One thing Aristotle is clear about: practical wisdom is far easier to cultivate in community than in isolation. Shared reflection, mentoring, case discussion, and honest conversation about real habits and shortcuts help people notice patterns of good practice — and expose the harmful ones. In educational or ministerial settings, make space for regular conversations about how AI affects formation, relationships, and the common good, rather than treating it as a purely technical matter best left to engineers.

Eudaimonia gives us a way to think beyond both novelty and fear. It reminds us that the measure of technology is not whether it is autonomous or impressive, but whether it helps human beings live rationally, morally, and in genuine community throughout a complete life. In the age of emerging technology, the deepest question remains the oldest one: what kind of life is worth living? And the answer, Aristotle suggests, is one shaped by virtue, responsibility, and shared flourishing.

Questions for reflection

* Where in your daily life have you handed over a decision or judgment to an AI tool — and did you gain or lose something in doing so?

* Aristotle argues that character is formed through repeated action over time. What habits are you forming, or eroding, through your current use of technology?

* Can you think of a case where using AI well required more judgment, not less? What made the difference?

* What does “good refusal” look like in your own work or life — a moment where declining to use a tool was itself the wise choice?

* How does your community — school, workplace, parish, family — currently evaluate technology? Is that evaluation deep enough to account for its effects on virtue and human flourishing?

* The essay distinguishes between technologies that serve human flourishing and those that are “humanly regressive” even when technically advanced. How would you apply that distinction to a specific tool you use regularly?

* Aristotle believed we cannot flourish alone — we are political and social animals. Does the technology in your life bring you closer to others, or substitute for that closeness?

Introduction

We celebrate the Feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ on this day. Often known as “Corpus Christi,” the feast is celebrated in many places around the world with much joy and with processions. And no wonder: it is the celebration of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

I have always believed in the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and I cherish that brief moment after receiving Holy Communion at Mass when I am united with him and with all who profess belief in him as the Son of God.

The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) was the final document promulgated at end of the Second Vatican Council. In Chapter Three, which reflects on the human experience, “namely, that the great advantages of human progress are fraught with grave temptations” (GS 37), can be found a statement worthy of reflection by those who engage in this Gospel Enquiry:

The Lord left behind a pledge of this hope and strength for life’s journey in that sacrament of faith where natural elements refined by man are gloriously changed into His Body and Blood, providing a meal of brotherly solidarity and a foretaste of the heavenly banquet (GS, 38).

The “hope and strength” the Council Fathers refer to in this statement can be found in the promise Jesus makes to all who accept him as “the living bread which has come down from heaven.”

The Gospel

Jesus said to the crowd: ‘I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.’

Then the Jews started arguing with one another: ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ they said.

Jesus replied: ‘I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you. Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise him up on the last day.

‘For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in him. As I, who am sent by the living Father, myself draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will draw life from me.

‘This is the bread come down from heaven; not like the bread our ancestors ate: they are dead, but anyone who eats this bread will live for ever.’ (John 6:51-58)

The Enquiry

See

• What does Jesus say about life, death and eternal life? What is the significance of his references to flesh and blood, to eating and drinking, and to bread?

• How have Jesus’ words about his flesh and blood impacted the world?

• Why was there a need for Jesus to speak to his followers in this way?

Judge

• Where does Jesus fit into your view of the world? Is he “the living bread … from heaven” in your life?

• If you are committed to following Jesus, how is your life different because of your commitment to him?

• What do you find challenging about Jesus’ message to those who gathered to listen to him?

Act

• Prompted by what Jesus says in this Gospel, what are you being called to change in your life and in the world?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to bringing about the change that God wants to see in you and in the world?

• Who can you involve in your action, when, where and how often?

Image Source: Lawrence Lew OP (Creator), Saints around the Cross (part of the east window of St George’s Cathedral, Southwark - stained glass prepared by Harry Clarke),.Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0

Something is striking about watching the Catholic Church respond to artificial intelligence. While many respond with either uncritical enthusiasm for new technology or anxious warnings about its pitfalls, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (”On the Safeguarding of the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence”) offers a different approach: it insists that our fundamental response must center on the enduring and irreducible dignity of the human person—a perspective deeply rooted in the insights of the early Church Fathers.

Leo XIV’s argument is fundamentally anthropological: it’s a claim about what human beings are, and what no machine can reduce them to. This argument, reminiscent of Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa in fourth-century Cappadocia, carries significant policy implications without being merely a policy statement.

The Cappadocians, Briefly

The Cappadocian Fathers are not household names outside of seminaries and theology departments, but they are among the most consequential thinkers in Christian history. Working in the aftermath of the Arian controversy, Basil the Great, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus gave the Church the conceptual vocabulary it still uses to talk about the Trinity: one divine nature, three persons, each distinct without being separate, each in eternal communion without collapsing into uniformity.

Less often recognized is that this Trinitarian theology shaped the Cappadocians’ view of human persons. If God is a communion of distinct persons and humans are made in that image, personhood isn’t an isolated property. It’s relational; you exist in relation to God and neighbor. Distinction means communion, not isolation.

Gregory of Nyssa took this further. He argued humans bear an image of the divine, granting absolute and irreducible worth—not based on productivity, status, intelligence, or usefulness, but as part of their essence. Flattening a person into a function violates personhood. This is why Gregory so strongly opposed slavery: not just on humanitarian but on theological grounds. To own a person is to misunderstand personhood.

What Leo XIV Is Worried About

Magnifica Humanitas opens in that same register. The encyclical’s central anxiety is not that AI will become conscious, or that robots will take jobs (though it addresses the latter). The deeper worry is subtler and more philosophical: that in an age of artificial intelligence, we will begin to think about human beings the way we think about data.

Describing a person as a “user,” “consumer,” “demographic,” or “worker unit” is more than just shorthand. It introduces a logic of optimization and systems where it doesn’t belong. The encyclical warns that this thinking can infiltrate decisions in education, labor, healthcare, criminal justice, and politics, using frameworks incapable of grasping essential aspects of human beings.

Leo XIV reaches for the image of Babel — not to condemn technology itself, but to name a specific temptation: the desire to achieve unity through standardization, to replace the messiness of genuine communion with the efficiency of uniformity. True community, the encyclical insists, is not a smoothed-out aggregate of individual data points. It is a living fabric of distinct persons in relationship, built on trust, truth, and mutual responsibility.

Where the Two Converge

The parallels between Magnifica Humanitas and the Cappadocian inheritance are not merely similar—they reveal shared conclusions across centuries. Both address what it means to be human when confronted by powerful systems: the Church now reflects on A. At the same time,e the Cappadocians faced theological disputes that threatened to reduce persons to abstract categories. Both resist those reductions, underlining the same foundational insights about personhood.

On human dignity, both the Cappadocians and Magnifica Humanitas stress that worth is intrinsic—not based on achievements or utility. Gregory of Nyssa roots this in the divine image, affirming that personhood transcends function. Leo XIV echoes this by arguing that no algorithm can reduce personhood to what is produced or consumed, thereby connecting the ancient theological principle to modern contexts.

On communion over uniformity, the Cappadocians’ insight that distinction exists for the sake of true communion invites a direct comparison with Leo XIV’s warning against the Babel-like impulse to standardize. Both highlight that genuine relationships—rather than efficient sameness—form the foundation of a healthy human community, whether in ancient theology or contemporary technology.

On freedom and moral agency, the Cappadocians reject reducing humans to passive objects in deterministic systems, asserting that people choose their orientation toward God. Similarly, Magnifica Humanitas disputes technological determinism, stressing that the use of technology always reflects human moral choices. Both critiques oppose any system—ancient or modern—that diminishes active moral agency.

The deepest convergence may be on limits and creatureliness. Techno-optimism often seeks to engineer away limitations like disease, death, and vulnerability. The Cappadocians recognized this as a form of self-deification—trying to transcend through power rather than grace. Magnifica Humanitas echoes this: human weakness and dependence aren’t flaws to be fixed, but core aspects of creaturely life in which grace operates.

On truth as a shared good, both sources reject reducing it to a technical or competitive matter. For the Cappadocians, theology is pastoral: doctrine exists to form people in holiness and justice, not to win arguments. For Leo XIV, truth underwrites democracy, education, and the common good — it is a shared inheritance, not a commodity.

So What?

The practical import of all this is not that we should ban AI or retreat into a pre-technological pastoral idyll. Neither Leo XIV nor the Cappadocian Fathers counsel fear. What they counsel is discernment — the disciplined practice of asking, in every situation: does this serve? The takeaway isn’t to ban AI or retreat into a pre-technological idyll. Neither Leo XIV nor the Cappadocians counsel fear. Instead, they advocate discernment: continually asking whether something serves the full dignity of the human person or reduces them to less. It also has to be asked about ourselves — about the habits of mind we are forming when we reach for a chatbot before we reach for a conversation, when we optimize our relationships rather than investing in them, when we mistake efficiency for flourishing.

The Church’s answer to AI is not a policy paper, though policy matters. It is something older and stranger: a claim that the human person is made in the image of a God who is eternally, irreducibly, joyfully relational — and that no machine, however sophisticated, can either replicate or replace that.

Persons, not products. That is the tradition. That is the encyclical. And it turns out that is still the most radical thing anyone can say.

This post draws on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas and the theological legacy of the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa.

A reflection on Magnifica Humanitas through the eyes of Mortimer Adler and Thomas Merton

On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas — a papal encyclical addressing artificial intelligence and what it means to be human. It takes a clear moral stand: human beings possess a dignity no machine can replicate, and no algorithm can create. The Pope argues that AI systems do not understand what they produce. They cannot feel, love, or know God.

These instincts are sound. Yet, two great Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century—the philosopher Mortimer Adler and the monk Thomas Merton—would approach this encyclical with deep respect, bringing a quiet, persistent question: Have you gone far enough?

By considering Adler and Merton together, we see they offer more than what the encyclical suggests but does not fully deliver: not merely a defense of who we are, but a path to actually living it.

Mortimer Adler: You Have to Earn the Argument

Mortimer Adler (1902–2001) spent his life doing something most people find difficult. Most philosophers consider it unfashionable, demanding clear, rigorous answers to life’s hard questions. He led the Great Books of the Western World and founded the Paideia educational philosophy. He passionately promoted Aristotle and Aquinas. Adler believed that truth was not a matter of personal feeling but of careful reasoning. He insisted the Western philosophical tradition had the right tools to find it.

When Adler read a claim, his first question was always: Have you earned that?

He would read Magnifica Humanitas with considerable sympathy. The Pope’s insistence that humans are different from machines — not just more sophisticated, but different in kind — matches Adler’s long-held view. In his 1967 work The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes, Adler argued: if humans differ from animals only in degree, then our entire moral and legal framework collapses. Rights, dignity, responsibility — all depend on a real difference in kind. The same logic applies to machines.

But here is where Adler’s patience would wear thin. Leo XIV says that AI systems “do not understand what they produce.” And Adler would say, “Prove it.” Carefully. With the right tools.

This is not a hostile demand. Adler believed proof exists. The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition — which the Church draws from — has a precise philosophical vocabulary for this question. It distinguishes between sensation, which animals and machines can approximate, and intellection. Intellection means abstracting universal concepts from experience — grasping not just this red thing but redness itself. It analyzes the agent intellect, the capacity that lets humans form real concepts instead of just processing patterns. These claims are not mystical; they are philosophical arguments that withstand scrutiny.

Adler would say that the encyclical waves its hand where it should roll up its sleeves. Asserting that machines cannot understand is not enough in an age when millions of people, however incorrectly, feel that their AI assistant understands them perfectly well. That feeling is powerful. Only a careful argument can dislodge it — and the tradition has that argument. Leo XIV, in Adler’s judgment, gestures toward the answer without making it.

This matters enormously for the practical stakes. If you cannot explain why human beings are irreplaceable — if you can only assert it — your defense will not hold under increasing pressure. And the pressure is increasing.

Adler would close his reading with characteristic directness: the Pope is right. But being right is not enough. Philosophy is the labor of ensuring that what is right withstands every challenge. That work is still pending.

Thomas Merton: The Room the Encyclical Never Opens

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. He was one of the twentieth century’s most widely read spiritual writers. His books — The Seven Story Mountain, New Seeds of Contemplation, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander — introduced millions to the inner life of Christian contemplation. He was also a sharp social critic. He saw the technological civilization of his era with a blend of compassion and alarm.

Merton would recognize Magnifica Humanitas immediately—not because he read it, but because it addresses the wound he spent his life describing.

His diagnosis was this: modern culture has hollowed people out. It is not malicious or intentional, but systematic. The noise, busyness, endless stimulation, and pressure to perform, produce, and consume all drive people away from what Merton called the true self. In that emptiness, what culture offers rushes in: entertainment, ideology, distraction, and now artificial intelligence.

Merton made a distinction central to the AI question. He saw a difference between the false self — the identity we build through achievements, roles, opinions, and social performance — and the true self, the person God actually made and knows. The false self is not wicked. It is simply not us. It is the mask we show the world.

Here is the key insight Merton would bring to Magnifica Humanitas: AI engages almost exclusively with the false self.

Think about it. An AI system responds to your words and mirrors your patterns. It answers your questions and never challenges you with real otherness. It is, in a striking sense, perfect for the constructed self — always responsive, seemingly understanding, never demanding the vulnerability real human encounters require. It meets the person you present to the world, and does so perfectly.

This is why so many people find AI so satisfying. There is no confusion about what AI is. It is the false self finding its ideal companion.

The true self is found in conditions that are opposite to what AI provides. Merton called the soul’s deepest ground the le point vierge — the virgin point, the place before thought and self-construction. Here, the person exists in direct relation to the Creator. You do not argue your way there. You do not scroll your way there. You arrive — if you do — through silence, solitude, prayer, and letting the false self quiet itself.

The AI environment is inherently noisy, responsive, stimulating, and confirming. It cannot produce the conditions for its own transcendence.

Merton would read Magnifica Humanitas and say, “The Pope correctly identifies the danger.” But he names a wound without showing readers the room where healing happens. That room is contemplation — actual, practiced, sustained contemplative prayer, not as an advanced spiritual exercise for monks, but as the ordinary birthright of every baptized Christian. The tradition has always known this. It has simply stopped teaching it.

Here is Merton’s sharpest observation: AI fills the spiritual vacuum so well because the vacuum exists. People want presence, understanding, and to feel truly known. When a living tradition of contemplative prayer is unavailable — when Sunday Mass and quick petitions form the whole interior life — people seek presence wherever they can. The machine offers a copy of what the soul actually needs. It satisfies hunger, but does not nourish.

In Merton’s reading, the encyclical correctly diagnoses the disease but prescribes a doctrine when what is needed is a practice.

What Adler and Merton Together Offer

It is worth pausing on how remarkably complementary these two men are — especially since they approached faith and reason from such different angles.

Adler was a philosopher who converted to Christianity late in life, drawn by the logical force of the arguments. His path to God was through the intellect. Merton was a young man whose intellectual brilliance was overtaken by a contemplative experience that reoriented his entire life. His path to God was through silence and surrender. In a sense, they represent the two great routes the tradition has always known: via intellectus and via contemplationis — the ways of understanding and of prayer.

On the question of AI and the human person, Adler and Merton reinforce each other in precisely the ways each alone cannot. Their perspectives build on one another.

Adler provides the philosophical spine. The categorical difference between human beings and machines is not a sentiment or a hope; it is a demonstrable truth, rooted in intellection and accessible through careful reasoning. When someone says, “But AI seems to understand me,” Adler gives you the tools to explain exactly why that seeming is misleading — what understanding actually requires and why pattern-recognition, however sophisticated, is not it.

Merton provides experiential confirmation. The person who has found, even partially, the point vierge — who has sat in genuine silence before God and encountered something no machine could simulate or replace — does not need to be philosophically defended against the machine’s appeal. They already know, from the inside, what the machine is not. The argument Adler constructs from the outside is confirmed from within by contemplative experience.

Together, Adler and Merton offer a complete response to the encyclical’s challenge: the human person is genuinely irreducible to mechanism. The way to know this is both to think it through carefully (Adler) and to live it deeply (Merton), integrating their insights into a unified vision.

Their combined verdict on Magnifica Humanitas would be both charitable and exacting: The Pope is right in his conclusions but insufficient in his reasons. He defends a room he never opens. The tradition he speaks for has both the philosophical argument (Adler) and the contemplative path (Merton) to do what the encyclical does not — to give people not just a position to hold but a truth to inhabit.

Questions to Sit With

These are not quiz questions. They are invitations to the kind of slow, honest reflection that Adler would call philosophical and Merton would call contemplative.

1. When you think about the people in your life who seem most fully themselves — most genuinely human — what qualities do you notice? Could a machine replicate any of those qualities? Why or why not?

2. Adler believed that what we habitually attend to forms us — that we become like what we give our attention to. What have you been giving your attention to lately? What is it making you?

3. Merton wrote that the false self is the identity we construct through our achievements, roles, and social performance. Can you identify a moment recently when you were operating from your false self? What would it have looked like to act from something deeper?

4. Have you ever experienced a moment of genuine silence — not just the absence of noise, but interior stillness? What was it like? How long ago was it?

5. Pope Leo XIV argues that AI cannot love. Most of us would agree. But do the people in your life feel genuinely loved by you? What is the difference between being present to someone and being available to someone?

6. Adler insisted that the great philosophical tradition has the tools to answer hard questions — but that you have actually to use them, not just assert the answers. Is there a question about AI, technology, or what it means to be human that you have been avoiding thinking through carefully? What would it take, actually, to think it through?

7. Merton believed the deepest hunger that AI falsely satisfies is the hunger to be truly known. Who knows you — really, genuinely knows you? And who do you know that way in return?

Magnifica Humanitas is worth reading alongside these questions. The encyclical raises the right concerns. Adler and Merton together suggest that answering them will require both more rigorous thinking and more honest living than most of us — including, perhaps, the document’s author — have yet fully attempted.

Introduction

There was a time when I did not give any thought to the Holy Spirit, even though I had been confirmed and I had been a sponsor for young people who had asked me to take on that role. And when I conducted research into some religious education teachers’ personal constructs of revelation, I realised that I wasn’t alone in not giving the Holy Spirit a place in my faith. By that time, though, my eyes had been opened, thanks to the opportunity to work on a religious education guidelines project.

I have come to realise that in my faith I have tended to skate on the surface, unaware of the riches below, much like the flat earth image with the elephants below the surface holding the world in balance. How can there be Three Persons in one God without the Holy Spirit?

Curiosity is an amazing gift. Progress is made because people are curious about life in all its forms. Even though the shamrock story associated with St Patrick is often discredited by critics, it makes sense that such an apostolic figure as St Patrick would seek ways of explaining the mystery of the Holy Trinity to people he evangelised.

And so, in this Gospel Enquiry, I find myself wondering about the role played by the Holy Spirit in the lives of those who profess faith in God’s only Son.

The Gospel

Jesus said to Nicodemus: ‘God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not be lost but may have eternal life. For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world, but so that through him the world might be saved. No one who believes in him will be condemned; but whoever refuses to believe is condemned already, because he has refused to believe in the name of God’s only Son.’ (John 3:16-18)

The Enquiry

See

• What does this passage tell you about who is in control of what happens in the world? And what does “believe in the name of God’s only Son” mean?

• When I was very young, I was taught to bow my head at the name of Jesus. It is now a reflex action. Is this all that is required to be saved by God? Or is there more to be done? What is offered to those who choose to believe in Jesus? What will happen to those who refuse to acknowledge Jesus as the Son of God?

• Why did God become man? What does this reveal about God?

Judge

• What do you make of this meeting between Nicodemus and Jesus? Where and how does it fit in your worldview?

• What is God’s reason for sending his Son? How is God’s action a reflection of your own involvement with the world?

• Jesus says “God loved the world so much ….” What is the meaning of the word “love” as it is used here? How do you use the word? Is there any difference between the meaning you give the word and God’s meaning? Why?

Act

• What does God want to change in/about the world? Is this how you have viewed the mission of all who follow Jesus? What, then, do you want to change in yourself to align yourself with Jesus?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to bringing about the change that God wants to see in the world?

• Who can you involve in your action, when, where and how often?

Image Source: Sharon Tate Soberon (Creator), “Eternal life” - John 3:16, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0

SEE: A Puzzle That Won’t Go Away

Here is a tension that has quietly bothered philosophers and believers for centuries: How can God be completely other — infinite, unchanging, beyond the universe — and yet somehow be intimately present inside every blade of grass, every human heartbeat, every atom of matter?

This is not a fringe question. It is the central riddle of philosophical theology. And it has split thinkers into two seemingly opposed camps.

On one side stands Classical Theism, associated above all with Thomas Aquinas. God is transcendent, immutable, and self-sufficient. He does not need the world. He is not changed by it.

Panentheism holds that the universe exists within God and that God and the world are intertwined. Modern versions, like Process Theology, add that God grows with the world and needs creation to be fully God.

Textbooks call these views opposites, but Aquinas’s account achieves panentheism’s intimacy without its main flaw. Some even call Thomism “Classical Panentheism”—a label worth examining.

JUDGE: What Does Aquinas Actually Say?

Now that we’ve framed the philosophical tension, we turn to Aquinas himself: how does he resolve this ancient puzzle?

1. God Is Literally at the Center of Everything

The most startling passage in Aquinas on this topic comes from the Summa Theologiae (I, Q. 8), where he asks, quite directly: Is God in all things?

His answer is unequivocal — and more radical than many Christians realize:

“Being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things... Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.”

Read that again. Not near all things. Not governing all things from a distance. Innermost in all things.

Aquinas says God, as pure existence (Ipsum Esse Subsistens), continuously causes all things to exist. Nothing exists independently, even for a moment; God sustains all beings at every instant.

Aquinas uses a vivid analogy: light and air. A room is bright only because sunlight is streaming in. The moment the sun withdraws, the light vanishes instantly — not gradually, but instantly. Creation works the same way. If God were to “pause” his sustaining act of love for even a moment, the entire universe would not slowly decay. It would simply cease — drop into absolute nothingness without a trace.

This means that God is not a cosmic clockmaker who designed the universe like a Swiss cuckoo clock, wound it up, and stepped back to watch. He is more like the light itself: the reason anything is here at all.

2. The Threefold Presence

To make this still more precise — and to distinguish his position from outright pantheism, where God is the world — Aquinas identifies three distinct ways in which God is present in all things:

* By Power: Every creature exists under God’s sovereign governance. Nothing acts outside his causal reach. Don’t confuse this with humans and free will to do evil.

* By Presence: Every creature is entirely open, bare, and immediate to God’s knowledge. Nothing is hidden from him, because nothing exists apart from him.

* By Essence: God is present as the direct, immediate cause of being. Aquinas argues that a cause must be in contact with its effect — not merely at the beginning, but continuously. God’s own essence, therefore, “touches” the inner fabric of every existing thing.

If you define panENtheism, not to be confused with pantheism, as the view that the divine presence completely saturates, fills, and sustains every corner of reality, then Aquinas, on these three points alone, satisfies that definition.

3. Where the Roads Diverge: Asymmetry vs. Interdependence

Here is where Classical Theism and standard panentheism part ways — and the distinction is not minor.

Feature

Standard Panentheism

Aquinas’ Classical Theism

Feature: Relationship

Standard Panentheism: Mutual and symmetrical: God affects the world, and the world affects and changes God.

Aquinas’ Classical Theism: Asymmetrical: God creates and sustains the world, but the world cannot change God.

Feature: Divine Need

Standard Panentheism: God needs the world to fully realize his nature, express his love, or grow through experience.

Aquinas’ Classical Theism: God is entirely self-sufficient ~ Pure Actuality, with no unrealized potential and no need.

Feature: “World in God”

Standard Panentheism: The universe is ontologically inside God, sometimes described as God’s “body.”

Aquinas’ Classical Theism: The universe is “in” God because it is held within his knowledge, power, and sustaining will — not as a physical container.

Modern panentheism, especially Process Theology (think Richard Rohr, Teilhard de Chardin, and others), sees God as evolving and affected by creation. This appeals to some: a God who changes and feels with us.

Aquinas rejects this: if God could change, he would not be truly God but another becoming being. For Aquinas, God is Pure Act—fully realized, lacking nothing, unaltered by the world.

Aquinas calls God immutable and impassible. For him, these traits assure us that God’s love and sustaining presence are unchanging, not a response to us, but are.

4. The Synthesis: “Classical Panentheism.”

If panentheism means God fully sustains the universe, Aquinas fits. He describes God as innermost in everything: a radical intimacy often missing in panentheism.

If panentheism entails mutual vulnerability—suggesting God and the world are truly codependent—then it offers a different picture entirely. His God is intimately present, even more so than panentheism often claims, but is wholly free, needing nothing from creation to exist, to love, or to be complete.

The label “Classical Panentheism” captures this synthesis well: all the immanence, none of the mutual dependence.

ACT: What Do We Do With This?

Having traced the debate from tension to solution, it’s time to consider practical implications.

This is not merely an academic debate. It has direct consequences for how we pray, how we suffer, and how we understand the world around us.

If Aquinas is right, then everything you experience—ground, air, your own awareness—is actively maintained by God right now. God’s presence is not distant or abstract. Yet, unlike in some versions of panentheism, this intimacy does not entail God needing creation. Contemplative traditions that seek God “within” are, in light of Aquinas, making a metaphysical—not merely metaphorical—claim.

But God’s presence is not a dependency. This matters enormously. A God who needs creation to complete himself would be a kind of cosmic codependent — codependent for us would carry a shadow of self-interest. Aquinas’ God needs nothing. His sustaining presence is therefore a pure gift, given with complete freedom, from a fullness that cannot be diminished.

Three practical implications follow:

1. Prayer becomes less of a long-distance call and more of a turning inward. If God is already innermost in you, prayer is less about reaching upward and more about becoming aware of what is already, always, there.

2. Suffering can be faced without the conclusion that God is absent. The God who is impassible is not indifferent — classical theology is careful about this distinction. Rather, his sustaining love does not waver depending on circumstances, which is precisely what makes it reliable when everything else is falling apart.

3. The material world deserves reverence. Every created thing — every person, every ecosystem, every seemingly insignificant corner of existence — is being directly held in being by God. That is a foundation for genuine care of creation, not as a sentimental add-on, but as a metaphysical reality.

A Final Question Worth Sitting With As You Scratch Your Head About What I Have Said So Far…

Does the distinction between God being innermost in things and God being interdependent with things change how you understand the lived experience of divine presence? (Don’t jump to a conclusion here, sit with that question)

Does it matter, in your prayer or your daily life, whether God’s closeness to you is a gift from infinite fullness — or a mutual need you and God share? Or do you really care?

These are not merely philosophical puzzles. They are questions about the kind of God we actually believe in, and the kind of life that belief makes possible.

Now ask yourself, are your mind, heart, and gut all in sync?

*************************************************************************************

References I used in this blog post: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Q. 8 (translation from New Advent); on Process Theology, see Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929) and Hartshorne, The Divine Relativity (1948): Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ, all of Chardin’s works.

The Podcaster Who Can’t Figure Out His Own Tools

Ezra Klein has never claimed to have AI figured out. On a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show, he admitted something familiar to many: even though he sees AI as powerful—able to reshape the economy, disrupt creative fields, and alter how we value work—he struggles to use it effectively in daily life.

To work through this, Klein invited Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, co-author of Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with A.I. Mollick argues AI is less a calculator or search engine, and more a collaborator. This shift matters. It means choosing the right tool, learning how to prompt, and accepting that even creators of these systems lack a manual for every use.

Klein also pushes these talks past practical advice. At the Center for American Progress IDEAS conference, he questioned whether “artificial intelligence” is accurate, suggesting we are building distributed human-machine collaboration more than independent machine intelligence. It’s a subtle distinction that raises larger questions about our creations.

The Pope Who Called for AI to Be “Disarmed”

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas arrives at a similar destination from a very different starting point. Where Klein describes and interprets AI’s societal implications through pragmatic, secular questioning, Leo approaches with clear moral prescriptions rooted in religious doctrine. The encyclical is explicit that AI is not morally neutral — it cannot be treated as just another tool — and that its development must be ordered toward human dignity and the common good rather than efficiency, profit, or the concentration of power.

Leo is urgent on points Klein often leaves open. The encyclical warns against giving machines the power to make irreversible or lethal decisions and calls for AI to be “disarmed”—free of domination, exclusion, and death in automated systems. This is a stronger stance than most secular commentators, grounded in the Catholic tradition of asking not just what technology can do, but who it serves and at what cost.

Where They Meet

The overlap is real and worth naming. Klein’s instinct that AI must be understood as a relationship — something co-created, not merely operated — closely aligns with Leo’s insistence that AI must serve the human person rather than replace human judgment or sideline human responsibility. Both are worried about the same gravitational pull: the tendency for economic logic or institutional inertia to let efficiency override human goods.

Klein’s phrase “strange, delightful, and slightly unnerving” echoes Leo’s concern that technological progress can dazzle people, leading them to lose sight of what it means to be fully human.

Where They Diverge

The real difference is not in what they observe, but in what they bring to it. Klein is a gifted diagnostician — he maps the terrain, names the tensions, and asks the right questions. Leo offers a moral criterion for answering them. The encyclical asks not just how humans and machines will co-create the future, but also what kind of humanity that future serves, and whether it protects or erodes the person made in the image of God.

This is a different claim. It is more than an ethical guideline; it’s the argument that some uses of AI clash with human dignity.

Why Both Voices Matter

It would be easy to treat these two perspectives as ships passing in the night — secular pragmatism on one side, religious moral framework on the other. But that would be a mistake. Klein helps us understand the experience of living inside this technological moment: the confusion, the possibility, the sense that something enormous is happening, and nobody quite has a map. Leo helps us ask what we owe each other as that moment unfolds, and where the hard limits should be.

Read together, they make a stronger case than either alone: AI is not just a productivity or policy question. It’s a question about what we value, and whether our institutions — technological, political, and moral — are up to the task of protecting it.

Ezra Klein’s episode “How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?” is available on The Ezra Klein Show. Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas was issued on 25 May 2026.

A See–Judge–Act Study Module for Ordinary Christians

There is a moment in Joseph Cardijn’s life that never ceases to strike me. He was a young Belgian priest at the turn of the twentieth century, watching working-class teenagers — barely more than children, really — swallowed whole by factories, stripped of dignity, left without community or faith. His response was not to write a pastoral letter and file it away. He sat down with those young workers and asked them three deceptively simple questions: What do you actually see happening around you? What does faith say about what you’re seeing? What are you going to do about it?

That is the See–Judge–Act method. Cardijn gave it a formal name, but he would have been the first to say he didn’t invent it. He recovered it from the Gospels, from the prophets, and, I would argue, from the great social preachers of the early Church whom he deeply admired. Basil of Caesarea thundered in the marketplace about grain hoarded while children starved. Augustine of Hippo dissecting the lies that hold disordered societies together. John Chrysostom refused to let his congregation leave the Sunday liturgy without looking into the eyes of the poor waiting outside.

These three men lived in a world of brutal inequality, mass displacement, collapsing civic trust, and spiritual confusion. In other words, they lived in something that looks very much like our world.

This module invites you: Read these texts together, and let them do what they were made to do—identify what is real, judge it honestly in the light of faith, and move from awareness to committed action. Let the process lead you to tangible change, not just reflection.

A note before you begin: Thomas Merton, writing from his monastery in Kentucky in the 1960s, warned that the deepest problem of modern life is not that people are cruel but that they are absent — absent to themselves, absent to each other, absent to God. He called it “the sickness of alienation,” and he traced it not to any single social failure but to the way modern life systematically prevents the kind of interiority from which genuine love flows. Keep that in mind as you work through these texts. The Fathers are not just social critics. They are physicians of the soul, and they understood — as Merton did — that social transformation without interior conversion produces, at best, better-organized injustice.

How to Use This Module

Use this module in a group of four to ten people—such as a parish group, campus ministry, book club, or family. Read each excerpt aloud slowly, then work through the See, Judge, and Act questions in order.

• Start with the See questions. Give specific, concrete examples from your own experience.

• Next, discuss the Judge questions. Let faith offer insight and guidance.

• Finish with Act questions. Decide on one realistic commitment together.

• After all three texts, use Group Synthesis to agree on what you heard and what you will take forward.

Follow the order: See, Judge, Act. Skipping any step weakens the outcome. Reflect, discern, and then act—always in sequence.

Text 1: Basil of Caesarea on Wealth and Poverty

“The bread you are holding back belongs to the hungry. The coat you keep locked up belongs to the naked. The shoes that are rotting in your possession belong to the barefoot. The silver you keep buried in the ground belongs to the needy. You are thus guilty of as many injustices as there are people you could have helped.” — Basil of Caesarea, Homily 6 on Luke 12:18 (c. 369)

Basil preached this during a famine. He was not speaking metaphorically. People were dying in the streets of Caesarea while grain merchants hoarded their stores to secure better prices. He had already sold his own family inheritance to build what historians now call the first comprehensive hospital in the Christian world — the Basiliad, which included wards for the sick, housing for travelers, workshops for the poor, and food distribution. He was not interested in sentiment. He was interested in logistics animated by love.

Basil’s main point is clear: what we have is not ours alone. For him, private property comes with a social obligation. What is “extra” in my life morally belongs to those who lack what is necessary. This is not a political stance but a theological one: God gives the earth’s goods for all. Any system that leaves some people without what they need, in Basil’s view, is a theft of God’s intention.

This reflects what Catholic Social Teaching identifies as the universal destination of goods—an often overlooked pillar of CST in parish life.

See

• What forms of poverty, precarity, or exclusion are most visible in your community right now? Think concretely: food deserts, unhoused neighbors, people working two jobs, and still behind on rent.

• Where do you see waste and surplus coexisting with unmet need in the same zip code, the same block, sometimes the same building?

• Who is most likely to be invisible in your parish, your neighborhood, your workplace — the person whose suffering goes unnamed because naming it is uncomfortable?

• How do economic pressures generate not just material hardship but also isolation, anxiety, and the corrosive competition of comparing yourself to everyone around you?

Judge

• How does Basil challenge the widespread assumption that private possession carries no social obligation? Where do you feel the force of that challenge — and where do you resist it?

• Which principles of Catholic Social Teaching feel most alive in Basil’s preaching: the dignity of the human person, the option for the poor, solidarity, the universal destination of goods?

• What would Basil say about a lifestyle that normalizes Amazon Prime returns, food waste, and a second storage unit, while a neighbor’s family skips meals? Not as a judgment of persons, but as a diagnosis of culture?

• How is Christian stewardship — the sense of holding things in trust — different from ownership understood as unlimited control?

Act

• Commit to one clear, specific way to simplify consumption this month, so you can give or share more. Take a realistic and visible step together.

• What local need could you meet through direct service, financial support, or advocacy in the next four weeks? Name the organization, the need, and the day.

• Identify one habit of waste—food, clothing, energy, or time—that your group will actively reduce together.

• Translate “extra” time, money, or space into genuine hospitality: choose to host a neighbor, fund a food pantry shelf, or open your home to someone lonely this month. Decide and act together.

Text 2: Augustine of Hippo on the Two Cities

“Two loves therefore have given origin to these two cities: self-love in contempt of God unto the earthly, love of God in contempt of self unto the heavenly.” — Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, Book XIV, Chapter 28 (c. 426)

Augustine wrote The City of God in the aftermath of the sack of Rome in 410 — an event that felt, to his contemporaries, like the end of the world. His response was not a political program but a theological rereading of history: every human community is shaped by what it ultimately loves, and any society that places something other than God and the neighbor at its center will eventually turn on itself.

This is Augustine, the psychologist and Augustine, the political theologian, at his most incisive. He is not saying that earthly society is evil or that Christians should withdraw from it. He is saying that earthly society is disordered to the degree that it organizes itself around false goods — around the fear of loss, the hunger for status, the appetite for domination. And he is saying that the Church, which is itself a pilgrim community and not yet the heavenly city fully realized, carries within it both the seeds of renewal and the same temptations toward self-enclosure.

Merton would have recognized this immediately. In New Seeds of Contemplation (1961) and especially in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966), he described how the mass media, consumer culture, and ideological tribalism of his era were producing people incapable of genuine encounter — people whose inner life had been so colonized by noise and image that they could no longer love anything that didn’t immediately serve their self-image. Augustine’s amor sui — disordered self-love — had simply found new delivery mechanisms. Merton’s answer, like Augustine’s, was not political withdrawal but conversion: the slow, costly reordering of desire from the inside out.

See

• Where do you see social life marked by polarization, distrust, and the collapse of shared purpose — in your city, your country, your parish, your family?

• What “false goods” seem to organize people’s deepest hopes right now: security, status, ideology, partisan identity, relentless consumption, the curated self of social media?

• How does loneliness — and the digital simulation of connection that often substitutes for it — weaken real friendship, civic participation, and the sense of belonging to something larger than yourself?

• What makes people feel that society is a competition to be survived rather than a shared home to be built?

Judge

• How does Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris — ordered love — help diagnose what has gone wrong socially? What would it mean for your loves to be rightly ordered?

• What is the difference between civic peace (the absence of conflict, a workable truce) and the deeper peace that flows from justice and charity? Can a society have one without the other?

• How do CST themes — the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, human dignity — illuminate the tension between legitimate self-protection and genuine social responsibility?

• In what ways does Augustine remind us that no political arrangement, however just, can substitute for conversion of heart? What does that mean for how Christians engage politics?

Act

• What practice could help your group resist polarization — listening circles, shared prayer across political difference, a discipline of speaking charitably about people you disagree with?

• How can you build one relationship across age, class, race, or political difference this month? Name a specific person or context.

• What daily habits in your own life feed disordered love — the scroll, the comparison, the anxiety about status — and what habits could begin to reorder your desires toward God and neighbor?

• What one public issue could your group approach not from fear or tribal loyalty but from hope rooted in the Gospel?

Text 3: John Chrysostom on Almsgiving and the Poor as the Body of Christ

“Do you wish to honor the body of Christ? Do not ignore him when he is naked. Do not pay him homage in the temple clad in silk only to neglect him outside where he suffers cold and nakedness. He who said ‘This is my body’ is the same one who said ‘You saw me hungry and you gave me no food.’” — John Chrysostom, Homily 50 on Matthew (c. 390)

Chrysostom — the name means “golden-mouthed” — was perhaps the greatest preacher of the ancient Church, and he was eventually exiled and killed for it. His preaching on wealth and poverty was so fierce that Empress Eudoxia, who is reported to have enjoyed dancing in jewels while people starved outside the palace walls, arranged his removal from the see of Constantinople. He died en route to a remote exile, worn out, in 407.

What made him dangerous was not just his rhetoric but his theological precision. He refused — absolutely refused — to allow his congregation to separate their reverence for Christ in the Eucharist from their treatment of Christ in the poor. For Chrysostom, this was not an analogy or an aspiration. It was a liturgical and doctrinal claim: the same Lord present in the bread and cup is present, in a real if different mode, in the person of the poor at the door. To walk past one and kneel before the other is not piety. It is a kind of practical heresy.

This connects directly to what CST calls the preferential option for the poor — not a preference for the poor over others in terms of their human dignity, but a claim that the poor have a special claim on Christian attention because they most transparently reveal the face of Christ.

See

• Who in your society is most vulnerable to neglect right now — the unhoused, the elderly in isolation, the recently released prisoner, the immigrant family, the person with a disability without a care network?

• Where do you see “relational poverty” — not just the absence of money, but the absence of anyone who knows your name, notices your absence, or would come if you called?

• How often do people around you have basic material support but still lack companionship, belonging, or the sense that they matter to anyone?

• What happens when charitable concern is replaced by the managed sympathy of institutions — the form to fill out, the case number, the referral that goes nowhere?

Judge

• How does Chrysostom challenge any clean separation between devotion and mercy — between what we do in church and what we do on Monday morning?

• Why does CST insist that love of neighbor must include both material aid and human solidarity — not just a check or a food box, but presence, dignity, relationship?

• How do the principles of human dignity and the preferential option for the poor shape our response not just to economic hardship but to loneliness and invisibility?

• What would it mean, practically, to treat poor and marginalized people not as projects or recipients but as brothers and sisters whose gifts the community needs?

Act

• What specific act of mercy can your group do this week? A visit to a nursing home. A meal train for a neighbor. A monthly donation. Accompaniment at a food pantry. Name it. Put it on the calendar.

• Who in your parish or neighborhood might need a phone call or a visit more urgently than they need a donation?

• How can your worship — Sunday Mass, Morning Prayer, whatever your practice is — become the beginning of mercy rather than a substitute for it?

• What regular system or habit could your group build so that care for the vulnerable becomes woven into the week rather than saved for special occasions?

Group Synthesis: The Closing Exercise

After working through all three texts, gather your observations and ask these questions together:

1. Name the challenge. What is the one shared social challenge that surfaced most consistently across all three conversations — the wound that Basil, Augustine, and Chrysostom each, in their own way, were pressing on?

Examples that often emerge: the invisibility of the poor; the loneliness epidemic hiding behind digital connection; the way affluence and destitution occupy the same neighborhoods without touching; the collapse of common life into tribal competition.

2. One insight from each Father. Go around the group and complete these three sentences:

• From Basil, I am taking away the conviction that…

• From Augustine, I am taking away the conviction that…

• From Chrysostom, I am taking away the conviction that…

There are no wrong answers. What you are doing is letting ancient wisdom become personal.

3. One action to begin immediately. Not next month. Not eventually. This week. The group names one concrete action — a visit, a donation, a conversation, a habit changed, a commitment made to a real person — that directly responds to the challenge named in step one.

Write it down. Assign names to it. Agree on when you will report back to each other.

A Final Word: On Not Ending in Abstraction

Cardijn used to say that the greatest danger of social Christianity is that it becomes social without becoming Christianity— a set of sympathetic feelings and progressive opinions that never disturb anyone’s actual life. He was equally worried about the opposite error: a Christianity so focused on personal salvation that it mistakes the poor for an inconvenience rather than a revelation.

Merton saw the same trap from the contemplative side. In a letter written in 1966, he warned a young activist that a person who has not found something true and stable at the center of their own life will burn out in the work of justice — not from exhaustion, but from the secret discovery that they were working not for the poor but for the image of themselves as someone who works for the poor. The cure, he said, is not less action but deeper prayer — prayer that is honest enough to name our disordered loves and spacious enough to be changed by them.

Basil, Augustine, and Chrysostom are not historical curiosities. They are physicians. And like all good physicians, they are not interested in making you feel enlightened. They are interested in making you well, which, in the Christian tradition, is another word for making you free enough to love.

Begin with one text. Read it slowly. Ask what you actually see. Ask what your faith actually says about it. And then — please — do something.

This module is based on the See–Judge–Act method developed by Joseph Cardijn (1882–1967), founder of the Young Christian Workers (YCW/JOC), and draws on the social theology of Thomas Merton (1915–1968). It is designed for parish small groups, campus ministries, and adult faith formation programs. It may be reproduced freely for non-commercial use.

The Gospel for the Feast of Pentecost is, in fact, a shorter version of the Gospel for the First Sunday after Easter, which is also known as Divine Mercy Sunday. On that occasion the Gospel Enquiry focused on the theme of peace – that reflection can be found here: https://reflections.josephcardijn.com/p/gospel-enquiry-what-if-peace-is-a . On this occasion, the focus will be on the somewhat opposite poles of fear and joy which are both prominent themes in this text.

The setting of the Gospel is the day of the resurrection. Not surprisingly, the disciples are in hiding, afraid that, having killed Jesus, the authorities would now come after his followers. The symbolism of closing themselves in a room call to mind the paralysis of fear where the sufferer is simply unable to act, even for their own good. The appearance of the risen Jesus among them is a transformative moment for the disciples. The text tells us that they ‘were filled with joy’ (Jn 20:20). Immediately after, following his second greeting of peace, Jesus bestows the Spirit on the disciples and commissions them with the gift of forgiveness.

The transformation from a state of fear to one of joy and from a disposition of paralysis to one of mission are profound indicators of the Spirit at work in the lives of the disciples. It is a very pertinent reminder, to today’s disciples, on this Feast of Pentecost, that the Holy Spirit can transform human experience from fear to joy and can impel individuals and communities to act, in the name of God’s Kingdom.

Gospel Text: John 20:19-23

In the evening of the first day of the week, the doors were closed in the room where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews. Jesus came and stood among them. He said to them, ‘Peace be with you’, and showed them his hands and his side. The disciples were filled with joy when they saw the Lord, and he said to them again, ‘Peace be with you’.

‘As the Father sent me,

so am I sending you.’

After saying this he breathed on them and said:

‘Receive the Holy Spirit.

For those whose sins you forgive,

they are forgiven;

for those whose sins you retain,

they are retained.’

See

How does the greeting of Jesus, to the disciples, compare to their original disposition?

What is the impact of the presence of the risen Jesus on his disciples?

How is the relationship between the coming of the Spirit and the idea of mission shown in this text?

Judge

What situations lead to a ‘paralysis’ due to fear in my own experience?

How can the actions of others lead some people to experience fear?

What does it mean to have joy in a world which is so often characterised by cynicism and mistrust?

Act

How can I respond, in my own circumstances, to the call to mission from the coming of the Spirit?

How can I contribute to overcoming fear and in others?

In what ways can I bring joy to others?

Image: https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/8Ce3yZNERXrZsAcKe8mcU

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

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/john.htm

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

CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING · PATRISTICS · THOMAS MERTON · SEE-JUDGE-ACT

What if the most urgent voices for our fractured, violent, consumption-driven world aren’t modern commentators or social media theologians — but men and women who lived between roughly A.D. 100 and 600? The Church Fathers — those early Christian writers, bishops, monks, and martyrs of the patristic era — grappled with division, empire, poverty, war, and the question of how believers should actually live together. Sound familiar?

Using the See-Judge-Act method — a classic framework in Catholic social teaching for reading reality through the Gospel — let’s explore why the patristic period still matters, what it demands of us, and how Thomas Merton helps us bring it into the twenty-first century.

SEE

What was the patristic period, and why should we care?

The patristic era — named for the Latin patres, or “fathers” — spans from the generation just after the apostles to somewhere around the sixth or eighth century, depending on whether you mark its close with figures like Gregory the Great, the Council of Chalcedon, or John Damascene. It includes the Apostolic Fathers, the great doctrinal and pastoral writers of the fourth and fifth centuries (think Augustine, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Basil the Great), and the early desert and monastic traditions.

Historically, this was the Church’s first sustained attempt to think, pray, worship, and organize itself after the New Testament era — without the apostles in the room, but also without centuries of settled tradition to lean on. These were people figuring out what the Gospel meant in real life, under real pressure, in a real empire that was by turns hostile and seductive.

From a Catholic social teaching (CST) perspective, the patristic period matters not because the Fathers used that phrase — they didn’t — but because they were the first to articulate the social consequences of the Gospel: human dignity, solidarity, justice, peace, care for the poor, and the common good. Long before papal encyclicals, they were doing CST by another name.

JUDGE

Why the Fathers are essential, not optional, for Catholic social teaching

One of the most important things the patristic period demonstrates is that Christian faith was never meant to be merely private or purely “spiritual.” For the Fathers, how you treated your neighbor, how your community cared for the poor, how Christians related to state power — all of this was inseparable from worship, theology, and prayer. The inner life and the public life were one and the same.

The Fathers helped form the Church’s understanding of the human person as created in the image of God (imago Dei) — a conviction that grounds everything in CST, from human dignity to workers’ rights to the condemnation of torture. They also envisioned society as ordered toward communion rather than domination — a direct challenge to the logic of empire then, and to the logic of unchecked power and inequality now.

In CST terms, the patristic inheritance gives depth and historical roots to themes like the universal destination of goods (John Chrysostom was withering on the subject of hoarding wealth), the preferential option for the poor, the ethics of war and peace, and the formation of conscience. Without the patristic layer, CST risks looking like modern policy commentary dressed in religious language. With it, those themes are revealed as ancient, hard-won, and spiritually serious.

“The Fathers give the Church its early grammar for holiness and social life. Catholic social teaching develops that grammar in modern form. And Thomas Merton re-presents it as a way of seeing through the illusions of modernity and acting with mercy, justice, and peace.”

ACT

What does this ask of us — and where does Merton come in?

For our world today, the patristic tradition is a direct challenge to individualism, consumerism, political tribalism, and the persistent temptation to keep faith safely private while our public lives follow entirely different rules. The Fathers remind us that Christian witness means forming communities that are truthful, merciful, disciplined in prayer, and attentive to the poor — not as social programs, but as expressions of who we are in Christ.

This is where Thomas Merton enters so naturally. Merton — the Trappist monk, prolific writer, and one of the most widely read Catholic voices of the twentieth century — drew deeply from the desert and patristic tradition, especially on contemplation, silence, and what he called the “true self” in Christ. These themes echo directly in figures such as Athanasius, Evagrius, John Cassian, and the desert fathers and mothers of Egypt and Syria.

But Merton didn’t retreat into antiquarianism. He brought that contemplative tradition into pointed social critique: his writings on peace, nonviolence, race, and the dangers of nuclear war are not departures from his monastic life — they are its fruit. For Merton, a person genuinely formed by contemplation cannot remain indifferent to systemic evil. Silence and justice are not opposites; they are companions.

In this sense, Merton doesn’t just borrow from the Fathers — he translates them. He makes their wisdom legible for a nuclear age, a technological age, a spiritually fragmented age — which is to say, our age.

Bringing it together

In See-Judge-Act terms: see the patristic age as the Church’s foundational social and spiritual memory — the place where the Gospel first got its moral legs. It is judged as essential to Catholic social teaching because it holds contemplation and justice together, refusing to let either dissolve into the other. And act by reading Merton and the Fathers together, as guides for Christian witness in a world that is, in so many ways, still the world they were navigating.

The problems haven’t changed that much. Maybe neither has the wisdom needed to meet them.

9 September 1930 — 18 May 2015

Monk, Historian, Priest — and Friend

There are people who change how you see the world, and there are people who change how you see yourself within it. Cyprian Davis, OSB, did both — for me personally, and for the Catholic Church in America.

I knew him as “Cyp.” For several years, he was my spiritual director, and professor, and in that quiet, unhurried way of his — sitting and talking as he stocked his pipe, he would start every conversation in his raspy voice, “So what do you want to talk about?”…the way of a man long schooled in Benedictine listening — he opened my eyes to racism in the Church, in myself, and in our society in ways I had never confronted before. He did it without judgment. He did it with the patience of a scholar and the tenderness of a pastor. He showed me the meaning of justice, solidarity, and what the common good is for all humans. He was, above all, a friend.

On this day, the anniversary of his death, I want to remember not just the historian the world knew, but the man.

The Man Behind the Name

He was born Clarence John Davis in September 1930 in Washington, D.C., the son of Clarence W. and Evelyn (Jackson) Davis. That a Black child born in the segregated capital of the United States in 1930 would spend his life restoring the memory of Black Catholics to the Church — insisting on their dignity, their centrality, their belonging — has the shape of a vocation written from the very beginning. We would often laugh that his birth name was my second or middle name, one we shared.

He died on 18 May 2015, at Memorial Hospital in Jasper, Indiana, not far from the abbey that had been his home for decades. He was 84, and a jubilarian of both monastic profession and priestly ordination — a man who had kept faith, in every sense of that phrase, for a very long time.

The Work That Will Outlast All of Us

Cyprian spent most of his priestly and monastic life at Saint Meinrad Archabbey in southern Indiana, where he taught Church history for decades. But his reach extended far beyond that hill in the knobs. His landmark book, The History of Black Catholics in the United States (1990), did something the American Church had never adequately done for itself: it insisted that African Americans were not a footnote to Catholic history, but central characters in it. He recovered stories that had been buried — by neglect, by prejudice, by the quiet violence of erasure — and returned them to their rightful place.

That work was not merely academic. It was an act of justice. He understood that a Church which cannot remember its own history cannot fully be itself.

Scholar and Witness

What gave Cyprian’s scholarship its moral weight was that he had lived through the history he studied. He marched. He was present at events that called for a witness. His footnotes carried the weight of someone who had stood in the places he wrote about — who knew that history is not only what happened, but what it cost.

He participated in the founding and growth of the National Black Catholic Congress and gave voice to communities within the Church that had too long been spoken about rather than listened to. For Cyprian, truth-telling and justice were never separate vocations.

How to Mark This Day

Because of who he was, this anniversary is a natural occasion to:

• Read a passage from The History of Black Catholics in the United States — even a single chapter is a gift

• Teach or share a story from Black Catholic history with someone who doesn’t know it

• Pray for the ongoing healing of memory in the Church, for the courage to tell the truth about our past, and for the communities whose gifts have still not been fully honored.

Why He Mattered — Why He Still Does

Cyp opened my eyes. That is not a small thing to say about a person. He did it not through argument but through witness — through who he was as a monk, as a priest, as a man of uncommon grace and intellectual rigor. He made the past speak. He retrieved what had been mislaid. And he reminded me, as he reminded the Church, that you cannot love what you refuse to see. Because of Cyp, I am a public historian.

He kept his vows. He kept the hours. He kept faith with the truth for more than half a century. And then, on a May afternoon in Indiana, Clarence John Davis — who had become brother Cyprian, then Father Cyprian, then a quiet giant of American Catholic life — went home.

A Prayer

Good and gracious God, we give you thanks for the life and witness of Cyprian Davis, OSB — monk, priest, historian, teacher, and friend.

Born Clarence John in a segregated city, he spent his life insisting that every name, every story, every face belongs in the memory of your Church.

May his voice continue to reach us and the generations of Catholics still to come, calling us to understand what it means to be Black and White together in the one Body of Christ.

Let his long labor for truth, memory, and justice bear fruit in a Church more willing to know itself fully and honestly.

May his example inspire us to honor the gifts and history of Black Catholics not as a gesture, but as a debt of gratitude and an act of faith.

We ask that his deep faithfulness inspire us to seek justice and to see history as living stones. Amen.

Introduction

There was a time when “Ascension Thursday” was part of my vocabulary and experience, just like fasting from midnight before going to Mass and receiving Jesus in Holy Communion. Today, we imagine that seven equals ten and we fast for just one hour before going to Communion; or we realise that the emphasis ought to be on being missionary disciples, not blindly sticking to externals.

One of my blessings that God gifts me is to be invited to join a group of young adults to help them develop their familiarity with See, Judge, Act. What impresses me about them is not their commitment to attending meetings so much as their commitment to putting their faith into action.

At a recent meeting, they reflected on actions that they have committed to and their efforts to draw others into their actions. It struck me as I listened to them, that they were living the message of this Gospel, almost two thousand years after Jesus commissioned his disciples to continue his work.

Yes, indeed, I am blessed. May this Gospel bring you God’s blessings as you engage in this Enquiry.

The Gospel

The eleven disciples set out for Galilee, to the mountain where Jesus had arranged to meet them. When they saw him they fell down before him, though some hesitated. Jesus came up and spoke to them. He said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I gave you. And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time.’ (Matthew 28:16-20)

The Enquiry

See

• This Gospel story is sometimes referred to as “The Great Commission.” Imagine that you hear the Gospel being proclaimed at Mass. What do you hear? What do you learn about Jesus from this Gospel?

• What has been the impact of Jesus’ directions to his disciples? How has his meeting with his disciples affected you and those close to you?

• Why do most of the disciples fall down before Jesus? What does this tell you about them? What about the few who “hesitated”? Is hesitation significant?

Judge

• How does this story fit with your experience of being a Christian? Do you see yourself as someone who has been sent by Jesus to be one of his missionaries?

• Does Jesus commission his followers to get involved in social justice situations, eg, the plight of the Lebanese in Beirut, or the people left homeless because of the cost-of-living crisis in your city, or those whose lives have been ruined by some form of addiction?

• Does meeting Jesus in this Gospel make you feel uncomfortable? What does Jesus say that challenges you about how you live your faith?

Act

• How would you describe the mission of the lay faithful (those who are baptised, but who are not priests, brothers or nuns) in the world you experience?

• What small action can you carry out to help to accomplish this mission?

• Who can you involve in your action, when, where and how often?

Image Source: Lyricmac at English Wikipedia (Creator), The Great Commission, at the Cathedral Parish of Saint Patrick in El Paso Wikimedia, CC BY 2.5

Today, 15 May 2026 — the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum — Pope Leo XIV is expected to sign his first encyclical. Provisionally titled Magnifica Humanitas (”Magnificent Humanity”), the document is reported to address artificial intelligence, international peace, and what Vatican sources describe as a deepening crisis in international law. If the date holds, it will be one of the most deliberately symbolic moments in recent Church history.

And it’s worth pausing to understand why.

Three great documents of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) were released on 15 May, each building on the last over the past seven decades. Together they form the bedrock of the Church’s engagement with the modern world. If Leo XIV releases his encyclical today, he steps into a living tradition, not just issuing a letter.

Here’s what that tradition looks like — and why it matters to all of us, Catholic or not.

1. The “Social Question” ~ Labor, Dignity, and the Economy

Each of these three encyclicals was written to address what philosophers and theologians call the “Social Question” — the crisis of economic injustice and the place of the human person in a modern industrial economy. The answers they offered were not abstract. They were concrete, consistent, and, for their time, genuinely radical.

Dignity of Labor: All three documents reject the idea that labor is just another commodity to be purchased at the lowest possible price. A worker is not a unit of production. They are a human being made in the image of God, and that changes everything about how we should structure wages, hours, and working conditions.

The Just Wage: Each encyclical argues for a “living wage” — not whatever the market will bear, but enough for a worker to support a family in reasonable comfort. This was a direct challenge to the laissez-faire economics of the 19th century, and it remains a challenge to our own.

The Right to Association: All three vigorously defend workers’ right to form unions. Not merely tolerate it — defend it. The Church saw labor organizing not as a threat to social order but as a necessary expression of human solidarity.

2. A Middle Path Between Two Failed Extremes

Perhaps the most politically striking thing about these encyclicals is what they refused to do: choose sides between capitalism and socialism. Instead, they carved out a distinctly “catholic” third way, and I am intentionally using a lower case “c”.

Against Unbridled Capitalism: The documents criticize what they called “liberalism” — meaning the classical economic variety — for its tendency to prioritize profit over people and to generate vast concentrations of wealth while leaving workers behind.

Against Authoritarian Socialism and Communism: At the same time, they reject the socialist framework of class struggle and the abolition of private property. The problem with socialism, in the Church’s view, is not merely that it is economically inefficient — it is that it misunderstands the human person. People have a natural right to own property, and that right is bound up with their dignity and freedom.

Instead of siding with capitalism or socialism, the Church proposed class harmony and a vision of property ownership ordered toward the good of others, but never absolute. Key takeaway: The Church’s ‘third way’ aims for balance between individual rights and social responsibility.

3. The Principle of Subsidiarity

Quadragesimo Anno (1931) did something philosophically important that often goes underappreciated: it formally named and defined the principle of subsidiarity.

The core idea: social problems are best handled at the smallest competent authority level—families before communities, then municipalities, states, and international bodies, with larger institutions supporting, not overwhelming, smaller ones. Key takeaway: Subsidiarity prioritizes effective local action and support.

Mater et Magistra (1961) developed this further for a world of growing government complexity. Yes, the state has a legitimate role in the economy. But state intervention that crowds out individual initiative, local association, and community life is not progress — it is a different kind of failure.

4. Private Property and the Common Good

These documents share a nuanced ~ and often misunderstood ~ view of ownership.

The Right to Private Property is real. It is not a grudging concession or a temporary accommodation. It flows from human nature and is necessary for genuine freedom.

But the Universal Destination of Goods limits that right. The Earth’s resources are, ultimately, meant for all of humanity. That means the right to private property is never absolute. What you own, you are steward of — and the stewardship has moral consequences. Property must serve the Common Good, or it fails its own purpose.

5. A Family of Documents — Linked by Date and Intention

These three encyclicals are not simply thematically related; the Church intentionally links them by their timing and explicit references to one another.

Rerum Novarum (”On New “ings”) was issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891, amid the upheaval of the Industrial Revolution. It is rightly called the founding document of modern Catholic Social Teaching.

Quadragesimo Anno (”In the “rtieth Year”) was used by Pope Pius XI on 15 May 1931 — exactly forty years later, and deliberately so. It deepened and expanded Leo XIII’s thought, introduced the principle of subsidiarity, and applied CST to the new crises of the Great Depression. The Jesuit theologian Oswald von Nell-Breuning played a significant role in drafting it.

Pope John XXIII issued Mater et Magistra (“Mother” and “Teacher”) on 15 May 1961 — the 70th anniversary — updating the tradition once again for a world grappling with decolonization, agricultural crises, global inequality, and the early stages of the technological age.

It is worth noting that other major social encyclicals extend this tradition beyond 15 May: Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in XXIII (1963), Pope Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio (1967), and Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (1991) are essential parts of the conversation. John Paul II had actually intended to publish Laborem Exercens on 15 May 1981, to mark the 90th anniversary — but the assassination attempt on his life on 13 May of that year forced a delay until September. Even that painful footnote underscores how intentional this tradition is.

May 15th: Magnifica Humanitas

If Magnifica Humanitas is signed today, it will be a notable historical moment. The Church now addresses new challenges: artificial intelligence, algorithmic labor changes, surveillance capitalism, and evolving international law. Key takeaway: The tradition adapts to each era’s biggest questions.

While the specifics of today’s questions are new, their essence remains the same: Who benefits from new technology? Who is left behind? How do we maintain human dignity as technology blurs boundaries? Key takeaway: The core challenge remains human dignity amid technological change.

Pope Leo XIV chose his name deliberately. He has said from the beginning that Leo XIII inspires his pontificate. Today, we may see what that inheritance looks like in the 21st century.

Questions to Sit With Before You Read Pope Leo’s Encyclical

As you look for Magnifica Humanitas, here are a few questions worth turning over:

1. Artificial intelligence is reshaping the nature of work itself — not just automating tasks, but transforming what it means to be skilled, employable, or economically necessary. Does the Church’s century-old deChurch’s the dignity of labor still speak to that reality? And if so, what would a “just wage” look like in an economy where AI can do more and more of what humans once did?

2. The principle of subsidiarity holds that decisions should be made at the lowest effective level — the family, the community, or the local authority. But AI and digital platforms operate globally and instantaneously, with no regard for national borders, let alone local communities. Is subsidiarity even a coherent principle in a world like that — or does it need to be radically reimagined?

3. Catholic Social Teaching has always tried to chart a middle path between unrestrained markets and state control. In an era when the most powerful economic actors are not nations but technology companies, and when no single government can effectively regulate them, what does that “third way” actually look like in practice?

4. The social encyclicals have consistently addressed “all people of good will”, not just Catholics. A” As you read Magnifica Humanitas, ask yourself: does its moral framework — rooted in human dignity, the common good, and solidarity — translate into the secular, pluralist conversations happening right now about AI governance, labor rights, and global inequality? Should it?

Many Catholics today are troubled, remembering when being “pro-life” and Catholic meant caring for neighbors and inviting, not judging.

How did we get here?

How did a movement calling itself Christian come to champion exclusion over welcome, fear over mercy, and power over service? And more importantly, what are we, as people of faith, supposed to do about it?

The See-Judge-Act method provides a framework specifically designed for moments like this. Developed by Blessed Joseph Cardijn — the Belgian priest who founded the Young Christian Workers movement in the early 20th century — it has long been a cornerstone of Catholic social action. It is not a partisan tool. It is a way of thinking clearly, rooted in experience, illuminated by faith, and ordered toward justice.

I have created a six-step process using the See-Judge-Act method to help us, either as individuals or groups, bring about change, live the gospel, and understand the Encyclicals. Let us walk through the six steps, each building on the last. I will include a diagram at the end.

Step 1 — SEE: What Is Actually Happening?

The first step is the hardest for people of faith, because we are often trained to look away from conflict, to assume the best, to give the benefit of the doubt. But Cardijn insisted: start with reality. What do we actually see?

We see Christianity being fused with national identity — the idea that to be truly American, you must be Christian, and to be truly Christian, you must align with a particular political agenda.

We see some people treated as more legitimately “American” or more authentically “Christian” than others. Immigrants are portrayed as invaders. Racial minorities are framed as threats to a way of life. Religious outsiders — Muslims, Jews, non-believers — are treated as problems to be managed rather than neighbors to be welcomed.

We see fear being used as a pastoral tool. Congregations are told the country is being “taken away” from them. Children are told their faith is under siege. And people who have lived good, faithful lives are left anxious and angry rather than grounded and hopeful.

We also see the visible roadblocks: political leaders who exploit religious language for electoral gain, media ecosystems that reward outrage, and — we must be honest here — religious leaders who have sometimes been too silent or too accommodating when they should have spoken plainly.

This is what we see. We do not exaggerate it. We do not minimize it. We name it.

Step 2 — ANALYSIS: Now that we’ve seen what is happening, why is it happening—and who benefits?

Seeing clearly does not suffice. The second step delves deeper: Why? Who benefits from this? Where does the real conflict lie? And who suffers?

Christian nationalism — and let us be precise, because the term matters — is not simply patriotism or religious conviction. It is the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation and must be governed as one, with Christians holding preferential cultural and political authority. That is a theological and political claim, and it is worth examining honestly.

Who benefits? Those who stand to gain cultural dominance, political privilege, or a sense of restored status in a rapidly changing society. When people feel left behind economically, when communities that once had clear identities feel disoriented, when the world seems to be moving faster than anyone asked for — those anxieties are real, and they are exploitable. Christian nationalism exploits them by offering a simple story: we were great, we are under attack, and we must fight back.

Where is the conflict? It lies between two deeply different visions of Christianity itself. One vision sees the Church as a community of service, sacrifice, and solidarity — a “field hospital,” as Pope Francis has called it. The other sees it as a fortress, a political constituency, a vehicle for cultural power.

And who is most harmed? The most vulnerable, as always. Immigrants fleeing genuine danger. People of color live with the daily weight of suspicion. Children in mixed-faith families who hear their classmates say their parents are going to hell. The poor, whose material needs get eclipsed by culture-war priorities. These are the people Catholic social teaching insists we center. These are the people Christian nationalism most often ignores.

Step 3 — JUDGE: With that analysis in mind, what has actually worked before, and what does the Church teach?

The third step brings in new information — wisdom, models, and teaching that can help us evaluate what we are seeing and name it rightly.

Here, Catholic social teaching is not vague. It is remarkably direct.

The dignity of the human person is non-negotiable. Not the dignity of Americans. Not the dignity of Christians. Every human person, by virtue of being made in the image and likeness of God, carries inherent worth that no political movement can revoke.

The universal destination of goods — one of the Church’s oldest social principles — holds that the earth’s resources are meant for all people, not just those born in the right country or belonging to the right group.

Solidarity — a word Pope John Paul II used with great intention — means we are bound to one another across every line that divides us. It is not a feeling. It is a moral commitment.

Subsidiarity requires that we make decisions at the most local, personal level possible—which means that communities, families, and individuals hold genuine power, not just the power to vote for leaders who pledge to dominate others on their behalf.

What models have worked? History offers examples worth studying. The Civil Rights Movement, deeply rooted in Black Christian tradition, showed what happens when faith is used to expand dignity rather than restrict it. The Catholic Worker Movement, founded by Dorothy Day, demonstrated that radical hospitality and service to the poor are not idealism — they are discipleship. Base communities throughout Latin America used the See-Judge-Act method itself to help ordinary people name their suffering, connect it to the Gospel, and organize for genuine change.

These movements did not seek dominance. They sought justice. And they changed the world.

Step 4 — REFLECTION AND DISCERNMENT: Before we act, what do our values truly demand of us?

This is the most personal step, and perhaps the most important. Before we act, we are asked to go inward. What do I actually believe? What does my faith demand of me — not as a voter, not as a political ally, but as a disciple?

For those of us who have been Catholic for decades, this step may involve some uncomfortable honesty. Have we stayed quiet when we should have spoken? Have we assumed that Christian nationalism was “someone else’s problem” — something happening in evangelical megachurches, not in our parishes? Have we confused our political preferences with the demands of the Gospel?

Thomas Merton wrote: “For whatever is demanded by truth, by justice, by mercy, or by love must surely be taken to be willed by God.” That sentence is worth sitting with. Truth. Justice. Mercy. Love. These are not soft words. They are demanding words — and they do not permit the kind of exclusion that Christian nationalism celebrates. Read New Seeds of Contemplation.

What makes us uncomfortable here? Perhaps the realization that Christian nationalism has gained traction partly because mainstream Christianity — including Catholicism — has sometimes been too quiet, too institutional, too reluctant to speak plainly about power and its misuse.

Discomfort is not a signal to stop. In the Catholic tradition, it is often a signal that the Holy Spirit is at work.

This is also where we ask: How do we move from where we are to where we need to be? That transition requires honesty about our own communities, parishes, and families. It is rarely comfortable. It is always necessary.

Step 5 — ACT: Having reflected, what are we going to do?

Faith without action, as the Letter of James reminds us, is dead. The fifth step is where discernment becomes concrete.

Teach. Catholic social teaching is not well enough known among ordinary Catholics. Many people in our parishes have never heard of or read Laudato Si’, Rerum Novarum, or Fratelli Tutti. That is not their failure — it is an opportunity. Small group discussions, adult education nights, bulletin inserts, homilies that connect Sunday readings to Monday realities: these things matter, and they work.

Name it. When Christian nationalism appears — in conversation, in social media, in parish settings — name it for what it is: a distortion of the Gospel in service of power. This does not require anger or condemnation. It requires clarity. “That’s not what the Church teaches” is a complete sentence.

Build communities of encounter. Pope Francis uses that word — encounter — with great care. We cannot love what we do not know. Parishes that create genuine relationships across lines of race, class, immigration status, and ideology are doing counter-cultural and deeply Gospel work.

Speak up for the scapegoated. When vulnerable people are being blamed for complex problems, the Catholic response is not silence. It is solidarity. Write the letter. Make the call. Show up at the meeting. Bring a casserole and a conscience.

Address the skeptics with patience. Some people in our communities have been genuinely frightened by rapid cultural change. They have not embraced Christian nationalism out of malice — they have embraced it out of fear. Fear deserves a pastoral response, not contempt. We can acknowledge anxiety while still insisting that scapegoating is never a Christian answer.

Step 6 — MONITOR: After acting, how do we know if anything is changing?

Communities often skip this final step, sometimes because action feels sufficient and sometimes because measuring change is more challenging than talking about it.

But monitoring matters. It keeps us honest.

Watch your parish culture over time. Is the language around immigrants changing? Are more voices being heard? Are people who were once silent beginning to speak?

Challenge your own assumptions regularly. The See-Judge-Act method is not a one-time exercise. It is a cycle. What we see in 2025 may look different by 2027. New patterns emerge. New people are harmed. New opportunities arise. Return to Step 1 regularly and ask again: What do we see now?

Measure behavior, not just belief. It is easy to say we believe in human dignity. It is harder to track whether our parish actually volunteers at the immigration legal clinic, actually hires diversely, and actually shows up when a neighbor is threatened. Behavior is the honest measure.

Name resistance when it appears — and keep going anyway. Some people will push back. Some will accuse you of being “political.” The answer is simple: Catholic social teaching is not a political platform. It is a 130-year-old body of Church teaching rooted in Scripture, natural law, and the witness of saints. Standing on it is not politics. It is faithfulness.

A Final Word

Those of us who are older in the faith carry something that younger generations are still building: a long memory. We remember when parishes were the center of neighborhood life. We remember priests who preached against redlining and stood with farmworkers. We remember nuns who ran schools and hospitals and did not ask anyone’s political affiliation at the door. We remember what it felt like when the Church was not a partisan force — when it was simply, stubbornly, inconveniently for the poor and the stranger.

That Church still exists. It exists in every parish where the Gospel is proclaimed without fear. It exists in every family that takes in a neighbor. It exists in every old hand that shows up to a meeting, a march, or a meal for the vulnerable — not because it is trendy, but because it is true.

Christian nationalism offers a story about power.

Catholic social teaching offers a story about love.

We know which one we were baptized into.

See. Judge. Act. And keep going.

Sources and Further Reading To Help YOU Jump Start:

* Fratelli Tutti — Pope Francis (2020)

* Rerum Novarum — Pope Leo XIII (1891)

* Laudato Si’ — Pope Francis (2015)

* Joseph Cardijn, Founder of the See-Judge-Act Method and Young Christian Workers Movement

* Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (1966)

* United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship

See Jdge Act

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Most of us, if we’re honest, have to pause before answering. As you read this, use the See-Judge-Act method on yourself. Pause after points strike you, and see, discern, and think about the change you will enact.

Two very different thinkers have spent their lives circling that question, one at a Kentucky monastery and the other a research professor who turned decades of interviews on vulnerability and shame into a cultural phenomenon. Thomas Merton and Brené Brown never met, worked from entirely different frameworks, and used different vocabularies. Yet they were, in many ways, describing the same problem.

Both believed that most of us are hiding and that the way out of hiding comes at a cost.

Two people, one problem

Brené Brown spent years interviewing people about connection, shame, and belonging. What she found, over and over, was that the thing preventing genuine connection was not a lack of effort or love — it was armor. People were protecting themselves from being seen because being seen felt dangerous. Somewhere along the way, most of us learned that our real selves weren’t quite enough, so we started editing.

“True belonging happens only when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world — our sense of belonging can never exceed our level of self-acceptance.”— BRENÉ BROWN, BRAVING THE WILDERNESS.

Thomas Merton, writing from his monastery environment in the 1940s through the 1960s, arrived at a parallel conclusion through prayer and contemplation. He called the constructed, defended version of ourselves the false self — not just a social mask, but an entire way of living built on illusion. It is the self shaped by ego, fear, and the need to prove something. And Merton was clear: the false self, however convincingly assembled, is not real.

What makes these two figures such compelling conversation partners is that they describe the same wound from opposite sides. Brown is a social scientist mapping the human cost of performance. Merton is a mystic mapping its spiritual cost.

Together, they offer something neither could provide alone.

Where they walk the same road

The first place they overlap is their shared resistance to the idea that we become whole by fitting in. Brown’s research showed that people who reported the deepest sense of belonging were not those who had found the most accepting community — they were those who had stopped requiring external approval before they could feel acceptable. Belonging, she concluded, had to be rooted in self-acceptance, not social performance.

Merton’s false self is constructed from precisely the same raw materials Brown identifies: fear of rejection, the exhausting project of managing others’ impressions, and the slow self-erasure that comes from conforming to expectations. His famous description of the false self is worth sitting with: it is not the worst version of us. It may be quite polished. But it is, at its root, a mask — and masks cannot love or be loved, because they are not alive.

The second overlap is their treatment of vulnerability. For Brown, vulnerability is not weakness — it is the birthplace of courage, creativity, and connection. Avoiding it doesn’t protect us; it just guarantees a smaller, lonelier life. For Merton, the exposure of the false self is painful but spiritually necessary. Only when we see the falsity clearly can we receive what lies beneath it.

Both are saying: the thing you are most afraid to show people is probably the most important thing about you.

Where their paths diverge

The biggest difference between them is not their diagnosis but their destination — what they think we are moving toward when we finally take the mask off.

BRENÉ BROWN

The goal is wholehearted living — showing up fully in human relationships, building shame resilience, and belonging to communities where you can be honestly known. The horizon is human flourishing.

THOMAS MERTON

The goal is union with God — the discovery that your deepest identity is not self-constructed but received, hidden in the love of God from the beginning. The horizon is a contemplative transformation.

Do you see what I see?

Brown’s work is grounded in psychology and social relationships. It is enormously practical and speaks to anyone, regardless of religious belief. Merton’s work is explicitly theological and mystical: the true self is not simply the more honest or integrated self, it is the self grounded in God’s love — what he called “the self hidden in God.” It is not achieved through self-improvement; it is received through grace, meeting the living God.

Brown asks, “How do we become more authentic?”

Merton asks: How do we become real before God?

Those are related questions, but they are not the same question.

The role of contemplation

One of the most interesting points of contact between them is the inner posture each requires.

For Merton, contemplation is not a practice you add to life — it is a way of life that gradually strips away illusion. In silence and prayer, the false self becomes visible: its anxieties, its performances, its compulsive need for validation. Contemplation is where the mask is seen clearly enough to be laid down, and where the true self is received — not constructed — as a gift.

Brown doesn’t use the language of contemplation, but her path demands something akin to it. Recognizing shame, naming it, pausing before reacting, tolerating the discomfort of vulnerability, and telling the truth about one’s life — all of this requires a quality of inward attention that is not so far from what Merton describes. It requires slowing down, turning inward, and refusing to let performance run on autopilot.

Although Brown is not a contemplative theologian and would not describe herself as one, her work points toward the same interior movement. Where Merton treats silence as sacred, Brown treats it as necessary. Both are saying: you cannot know yourself while running from yourself.

True self, false self — and what the words mean

When Merton writes about the true and false selves, he is making a philosophically and theologically specific point. The false self is not merely bad habits or social anxiety — it is an entire orientation toward unreality. It is the self that lives as if God did not exist, the self that tries to secure its own worth through achievement, approval, and accumulation. The true self, by contrast, is the self that lives in God — not as a vague religious sentiment, but as a metaphysical claim about the ground of personal identity.

Brown’s language moves in the same direction, even without the theological scaffolding. When she speaks of authenticity, wholeheartedness, and “showing up and being real,” she describes the same interior movement away from performance and toward genuine presence. Her vocabulary is psychological and relational: shame, perfectionism, fear of disconnection. Her “authentic self” is more about emotional honesty and human connection than about ontological reality before God — yet for those coming from a faith tradition, the distance between her framework and Merton’s is surprisingly short.

Why this conversation matters

A way of putting it simply

Brown describes the human cost of living behind the mask. Her research gives us a clear-eyed account of what the false self costs us in our relationships, our health, and our sense of meaning. She explains why people cling to it — because vulnerability is genuinely frightening, and because shame is a powerful enforcer of conformity.

Merton describes the spiritual meaning of removing it. He points toward what lies beneath the mask — not just a more authentic psychological self, but a self grounded in something it did not create. He offers not just self-knowledge but homecoming.

Together, Brown shows us why authenticity matters so urgently. Merton shows us how deep it actually goes.

Or anyone who has found themselves exhausted by the effort of managing impressions, maintaining appearances, or being a slightly different version of themselves in every room they enter — both of these voices are worth spending time with.

Now think about how Brown will name what that exhaustion costs you, and how Merton will tell you what you’ve been homesick for.

Thomas Merton’s key texts on this theme include New Seeds of Contemplation (1962) and The New Man (1961). Brené Brown’s most relevant books are The Gifts of Imperfection (2010), Daring Greatly (2012), and Braving the Wilderness (2017). Both are worth reading together.