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

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

Gospel Text: Matthew 21:28-32

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

See

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

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

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

Judge

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

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

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

Act

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

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

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

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

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

More than inner peace

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

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

The third jewel

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

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

Four threads of Engaged Buddhism

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

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

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

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

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

The convert at Nagpur

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

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

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

The strongest objections

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

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

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

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

See, Judge, Act: the machine that feeds craving

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

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

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

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

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

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

An index card for the week

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

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

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

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

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

Questions to sit with

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

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

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

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

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

The door

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

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

That is where the work begins.

And that is Wisdom Speaking.

Sources

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

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

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

• Deekshabhoomi, History

• Dhammachakra Pravartan Din

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

• Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026)

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

• Magnifica Humanitas, Wikipedia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEE

The pilgrim, not the collector

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

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

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

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

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

A machine for the false self

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

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

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

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

In Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton wrote:

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

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

JUDGE

Zen is judged by its acts.

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

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

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

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

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

1. What human desires is this system automating?

2. Who defines success?

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

4. What kind of attention does it reward?

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

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

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

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

Suffering is not a bug.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACT

Six disciplines before the prompt

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

An index card for the desk

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

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

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

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

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

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

The classroom test

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

The return

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

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

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

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

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

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

No prompt returns that.

Questions to ponder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gospel Text: Matthew 20:1-16

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

See

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

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

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

Judge

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

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

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

Act

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the economy is for

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

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

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

Yours, but not only yours

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

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

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

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

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

Reading from the bottom

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

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

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

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

Labor is not a commodity.

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

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

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

Solidarity, and the sentence it refuses

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

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

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

The common good is larger than equality.

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

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

Subsidiarity, and the workshop floor

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

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

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

The texts nobody wants to preach on

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

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

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

The case against the comparison, stated at full strength.

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

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

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

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

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

Why this lands hardest in the United States

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second, the new pope hails from Chicago.

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

The algorithm at the dock gate

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

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

Three lines from Magnifica Humanitas do most of the work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five tests, short enough for an index card

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Questions to sit with

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Note on my blogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Encyclical Nobody Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bill of Indictment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Grace That Arrives Before the Command

Karl Rahner best illuminates Reinisch’s stance.

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

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

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

Freedom Is Not Only Non-Interference

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

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

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

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

The Monk Who Was Told to Stop Writing About Peace

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

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

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

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

The Load-Bearing Wall

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

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

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

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

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

Five Questions to Carry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Someone still determines what a human being is meant for.

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

Sources

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

• Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 15 May 1891.

• Pius XI, Quadragesimo anno, 15 May 1931.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Note on My Blogs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gospel Text: Matthew 18:21-35

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

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

See

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

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

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

Judge

What characteristics of God are depicted in this text?

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

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

Act

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The building is the belief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thing that could not reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is the Benedictine question, renewed for our time.

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

Nothing exists on its own

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

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

The Mongols still won.

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

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

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

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

Questions to ask before building begins

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

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

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

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

5. Pay attention to where people direct their devotion.

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

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

The builders designed it for readers they would never meet.

That is the standard we ought to reach for.

Everything else is just logistics.

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the eye truly sees

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

Merton had witnessed it from within, and long before.

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

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

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

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

The instant the claim unraveled

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

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

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

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

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

Where he would pause and slow the argument

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

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

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

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

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

The final verb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

The Gospel

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

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

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

The Enquiry

See

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

• What has been the impact of his teaching on his followers and on the world since then? What evidence can you present to show that Pope Leo XIV lives by Jesus’ message here?

• Which group(s) do you belong to that gather in the name of Jesus? Why does Jesus make a commitment to be with those who gather in his name? Why is prayer a necessary part of seeking justice?

Judge

• What have you discovered about Jesus in this Gospel that might have escaped your awareness of him?

• What is there in his teaching that you think would improve people’s lives if they took him seriously and followed him faithfully?

• This Gospel seems to be a collection of sayings by Jesus, bound together by a shared theme. Which part(s) of the Gospel challenge(s) you to seek to change so as to become more like Christ?

Act

• Given what you have been reflecting on through this Gospel, what do you want to change in the world and in yourself that will bring you closer to Jesus?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to bringing about this transformation of the world and yourself?

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

Image Source: Robert Wilhelm Ekman (Creator), Jesus wakes Lazarus, a painting from 1860 in the Finnish National Gallery, rawpixel.com, PDM 1.0

The man at the head of the column carried an American flag. He was Slovak. He worked underground for a company that owned his house, employed his doctor, and ran the store where he bought his flour. On the morning of Friday, 10 September 1897, he was walking a public road in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, to ask the men at another colliery to join a union. His name was Steve Jurich. He carried the flag because someone had to, and because carrying it seemed to answer, without argument, the question of whether the men behind him belonged in the country.

Roughly four hundred of them had set out from the patch at Harwood. Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, German. Most of them Catholic. Many of them three or four years off a boat. Not one of them armed.

Sheriff James Martin and his deputies stopped the march on the road south of Lattimer. The shooting lasted about ninety seconds.

Nineteen men died. The indictments counted thirty-eight wounded, and some of the injured died later that week. The testimony at trial was cumulative and undisputed on one point: the strikers were peaceable and unarmed. A number of them had been shot in the back.

Martin and sixty-eight deputies stood before the county magistrates on 20 September 1897. Their trial opened on 1 February 1898 at the courthouse in Wilkes-Barre, before Judge Stanley Woodward. The defense described the dead as invaders from the steppes of Hungary. On 9 March the jury acquitted every defendant.

Ten of the dead had been subjects of Austria-Hungary, and their government did what the men themselves could not. Its minister in Washington pressed the State Department for an indemnity, note after note, into the following year. The Assistant Attorney-General of the United States, Henry M. Hoyt, attended the trial and reported that the verdict was just and righteous. Washington declined to pay.

Then the country moved on. Nineteen men had been killed on a public road, and no monument stood at the place for seventy-five years.

The men on that road did not die over three cents.

Three Cents a Day

The Campbell Act took effect on 21 August 1897. It required coal operators to pay the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania three cents a day for every foreign-born, unnaturalized man on the payroll. The operators did not absorb it. They took it out of the wages.

Two things about that law are usually left out. First,t the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) lobbied for it. The union the marchers were walking to Lattimer to join had helped pass the tax that put them on the road. It wanted to slow the flow of immigrant labor into the mines, and it was willing to price the men it did not yet represent. The men understood this and marched anyway, which tells you something about what they were after.

The second is the arithmetic. Immigrant miners were already paid 10 to 15 percent less than the English speakers for the same work. They bought from the company store, rented from the company, and were treated by the company doctor. Three cents a day was not the injury. Three cents a day was the receipt.

A wage records what a worker is paid. Everything else on that receipt records what somebody decided the worker was worth.

That distinction runs through every serious labor conflict of the industrial age. The demand on the placard is usually money. The demand underneath is recognition, a grievance procedure, a voice in the rules. Money moves up and down with the market. A seat at the table is different in kind, because it means you are in the room when the rules get written.

Employers have always grasped this more clearly than anyone. It is why they fought organization harder than they ever fought a wage claim.

A Cardinal Writes to Rome

Ten years before Lattimer, Rome nearly condemned the Knights of Labor as a forbidden secret society. The Canadian bishops had already obtained exactly that judgment for Quebec, and several American bishops wanted it extended.

On 20 February 1887, James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore sent a memorial in French to Cardinal Giovanni Simeoni at Propaganda Fide. He made three arguments. The Knights’ constitution did not bring it under the Church’s rules on secret societies. American workers had real grievances and a right to resist unjust conditions. And a condemnation would drive American Catholics out of the Church by the hundreds of thousands.

Rome did not condemn the Knights.

Four years later, on 15 May 1891, Leo XIII issued Rerum Novarum. It defended private property, rejected class war, and insisted on a living wage and workers’ right to form associations.

Notice the order of events. The Church did not lead. Workers organized, a bishop who had watched them organize told Rome what refusal would cost, and the teaching followed.

The Coal Hauler’s Son

Henri Cardijn hauled coal in Belgium and wrecked his lungs in the process. Some of what he earned went to keep his son in school. He died on 24 May 1903.

The son was twenty years old. According to his biographers Fiévez and Meert, Joseph Cardijn knelt for his father’s last blessing and resolved there to spend his life as a priest for the salvation of the working masses.

Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier ordained him on 22 September 1906. When the diocese sent him to the parish of Laeken in 1912, he found what he had half expected. The boys and girls from streets like his own were going into the factories at thirteen and fourteen. They were being used up quietly, and the Church was speaking to them in a language they could not hear.

He started with small groups of girls in the needle trades. In 1919 he founded La Jeunesse Syndicaliste. In 1924 it became the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne (JOC).

His method had three verbs.

See. Look hard at the actual conditions of your life. Judge. Weigh them against the Gospel and the dignity owed to any human being. Act. Change together what can be changed.

That is not a theory of labor. It is a way of handing the instruments of judgment to people who have been told their judgment does not count.

In 1925 Cardijn was brought before Pius XI, who had been warned about him. The pope is said to have replied that someone had come to speak to him about the masses.

By 1938 the JOC counted about 500,000 members across Europe. When Cardijn died on 24 July 1967, two years after Paul VI made him a cardinal, the movement claimed roughly two million members in sixty-nine countries.

He is remembered for a sentence: a young worker is worth more than all the gold in the world.

He was not working alone. John A. Ryan published A Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects (New York: Macmillan, 1906) and spent thirty years turning moral philosophy into draft legislation. Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin put out the first Catholic Worker on 1 May 1933. Monsignor George G. Higgins built labor schools and stood in the California fields with César Chávez. In the Basque country, José María Arizmendiarrieta took Cardijn’s three verbs into Mondragón and built a cooperative economy out of them.

What Nobody Handed Down

It is worth being exact about what workers actually won, because these things are usually described as though they arrived with the weather.

The forty-hour week came from the Fair Labor Standards Act, signed on 25 June 1938 and phased in over two years. The same law created overtime pay. Equal pay for equal work became federal law on 10 June 1963. Federal enforcement of workplace safety waited until the Occupational Safety and Health Act, signed on 29 December 1970, seventy-three years after Lattimer.

Behind each of those dates sits a record of strikes, funerals, blocklists, injunctions, organizing drives, and sheriffs found not guilty.

The forty-hour week looks permanent now. In that respect it resembles a monument. Almost nobody who uses one can tell you what it cost.

The Spinning Jenny’s Answer

The strongest case against everything I have just written deserves to be made at full strength, and I have argued it myself.

Since the spinning jenny, every wave of machinery has produced a warning that the machines would eat the jobs, and the warnings have been wrong about the aggregate every time. Machines made workers more productive. Productivity raised wages. People displaced from one trade found another, often a better one. Fighting the machine has generally meant protecting the workers already inside the gate at the expense of consumers, younger workers, and the country’s capacity to compete. A port that refuses to automate loses cargo to a port that does, and the loss spreads outward through every job that touched that cargo. The right policy is to let the technology run fast and make the displaced whole with compensation and retraining. Do not hold up progress at the docks.

On overall employment, that argument has history behind it. On the question at hand, it misses the point.

The men at Lattimer were not trying to stop a machine. They were trying to be in the room.

And the argument smuggles in an assumption it never defends: that the compensation and the retraining will happen. They do not simply happen. They happen when organized people demand them, put them in writing, and attach a date.

Canaries Again

On 12 August 2026, Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen released a revised version of their study “Canaries in the Coal Mine?”, built on ADP payroll records running through June 2026.

They found no economy-wide displacement. Employment across their sample rose about 6 percent from November 2022 to June 2026, and the most AI-exposed quintile grew about 4 percent. That absence of a general collapse is itself a finding, and the authors say so plainly.

The number that should hold your attention is narrower. Workers aged twenty-two to twenty-five in occupations highly exposed to artificial intelligence (AI) now stand about 19 percent below where they would be had they kept pace with their less-exposed peers. Experienced workers show no such gap. In November 2025, the same authors put the figure at 16 percent. It has widened every time they have looked.

The mechanism is not mass dismissal. It is reduced hiring. The doors stop opening, which is a much quieter thing than a layoff and leaves no one to interview.

The authors call these patterns, not causal estimates, and that caution is correct.

Alongside it runs something harder to count. Workers now have routes assigned, keystrokes logged, breaks timed, and performance ranked by systems whose rules they cannot read. In some workplaces, the software recommends the discipline and the dismissal. The worker does not know what the system measured, how it weighted id, or whom to ask.

The resemblance to the Campbell Act is not exact. The moral shape is the same. A rule arrives from somewhere out of reach and assigns a value to a person, and the person pays it out of their wages.

Rome has noticed again. Robert Prevost took the name Leo when he was elected in 2025, and he signed his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on 15 May 2026, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. The Holy See released it ten days later. It calls artificial intelligence a genuine gift, capable of relieving real suffering, and it denies that the pursuit of profit can justify decisions that systematically sacrifice human work.

Workers had already reached the same conclusion without waiting for an encyclical.

After a three-day strike shut fourteen East and Gulf coast ports in October 2024, members of the International Longshoremen’s Association ratified a six-year contract on 25 February 2025 with nearly 99 percent in favor. It runs through 30 September 2030 and raises wages 62 percent. It did not ban automation. It permits limited semi-automated equipment and ties that equipment to job guarantees, which is a harder and more interesting thing than a ban.

Argue about the terms if you like. The subject underneath them was not wages. It was who decides how the technology gets used, and that question only ever gets asked where workers are organized. Everywhere else it is not a negotiation. It is a notice.

See, Judge, Act

Cardijn’s method still fits on an index card.

1. See. Find out what the system actually does. What does it measure? Which decisions does it make? Which of those decisions used to belong to a person?

2. Judge. Ask the moral question and answer it out loud. Does this serve the people doing the work, or only the people who bought the software?

3. Act. Put it in writing: notice before deployment, a right of appeal, a human being who can explain a decision, retraining with a start date rather than a promise.

And do it together. One worker who questions an algorithm has raised a personnel matter. Four hundred workers who ask the same question have opened a negotiation.

The road from Harwood to Lattimer is still there. It is paved now, and in 1972 the state finally set a granite marker beside it, seventy-five years late.

Steve Jurich carried a flag up that road because he thought it settled the question. It did not. The men behind him didn't want to stop any machine. They wanted to be treated as men while the machines ran, and to be in the room when the rules were made.

The canaries are singing again.

Somebody should be listening.

Sources. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1898 (correspondence of Hoyt, Coxe, Day, and Hengelmüller on the Lattimer indemnity claim); Michael Novak, The Guns of Lattimer; Paul A. Shackel, Remembering Lattimer; Pennsylvania Heritage, “The Lattimer Tragedy of 1897”; James Cardinal Gibbons, memorial to Cardinal Simeoni, 20 February 1887; Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum, 15 May 1891; Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 15 May 2026; Fiévez and Meert, Cardijn; Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen, “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence,” Stanford Digital Economy Lab, August 2026.

A priest in Quincy, a monk in Minnesota, and a chaplain in Brussels all asked the same question: what does the distance from the altar to the street reveal? Thomas Merton helps answer it, and the story begins in Quincy, Illinois.

In the summer of 1886, a thirty-two-year-old priest stood upon the altar of St. Joseph’s in Quincy, Illinois, and watched a congregation that was not supposed to be there.

The parish was set up for the town’s Black Catholics, and everyone knew it was supposed to be that way. But the priest’s preaching was so powerful that people talked about it, and soon German and Irish families started coming from other parishes to sit with those they had been separated from. No one planned this. It just kept happening because his sermons were that good.

His name was Augustus Tolton. He had been born into slavery on 1 April 1854 at Brush Creek, in Ralls County, Missouri. His father escaped to join the Union Army and died of dysentery in a military hospital. His mother took her children across the Mississippi at night into Illinois. When Tolton asked to study for the priesthood, no seminary in the United States would admit him. Not one. His pastors tutored him until the Franciscans in Quincy accepted him as a special student, and in 1880 they sent him to the Urban College of Propaganda Fide in Rome. He was ordained on 24 April 1886 at St. John Lateran and said his first Mass at St. Peter’s.

He expected to be sent to Africa. Every student at Propaganda Fide trained for an overseas mission, and he spent six years learning African languages. But Cardinal Giovanni Simeoni sent him back to Illinois, saying that America claimed to be the most enlightened nation and, “we will see if it deserves that honor.”

The answer came within three years. Father Michael Weiss, the dean of Quincy, disliked the large crowds and told Tolton to serve only Black Catholics. The church was full, and that was the problem. So in 1889, Tolton moved to Chicago, brought together about fifty Black Catholic families in the basement of Old St. Mary’s, and started building St. Monica’s on the South Side. He died of heat stroke on 9 July 1897, at age forty-three, before the Church was finished.

In Quincy, the liturgy did exactly what the Church says it should do: it brought together people society usually kept apart, and made that result visible.

Yet the Church saw this gathering as a problem to be managed, not as proof of what worship was doing.

The syllogism from Collegeville

Forty-six years later, a Benedictine at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, wrote down the reason this matters in three lines.

Virgil Michel (1890–1938) went to Europe in 1924, met Lambert Beauduin, and came home convinced that American Catholicism was starving on a diet of private devotion. In1926,6 he founded the journal Orate Fratres, now called Worship, and the Liturgical Press. He argued that the Mass is not a ceremony individuals attend but the act of a body to which they belong, and that people formed by such an act cannot leave it unchanged.

In 1935, closing an article in Orate Fratres titled “The Liturgy the Basis of Social Regeneration,” he put it as a syllogism. Pius X had taught that the liturgy is the indispensable source of the true Christian spirit. Pius XI had taught that the true Christian spirit is indispensable for rebuilding society. Therefore, Michel concluded, “the liturgy is the indispensable basis of Christian social regeneration.”

Read the argument the other way around, and it becomes a test instead of just a slogan. If a parish’s worship doesn’t lead to social change, then something is missing in one of the two main ideas.

Michel was not afraid to point out where things had gone wrong. In 1937, he listed the injustices that American Catholics ignored: sharecroppers, the courts, economic oppression, vigilante violence, and how Black Americans were treated “even at times within the walls of Catholic churches.” He was thinking of Tolton’s experience and even worse cases. Michel died in November 1938 at age forty-eight, having seen little of the change he hoped for.

Michel also put his beliefs into action. He supported Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, who started the Catholic Worker in 1933. He sent them books from the Liturgical Press and introduced them to the Liturgy of the Hours. He also advocated for using local languages in worship and women in lay leadership, long before these ideas became common.

The method that came from a coal deliverer’s son

Joseph Cardijn (1882–1967) grew up in Halle, helping his father deliver coal, and blamed the man’s early death on the conditions he worked in. Ordained in 1906, he watched his old schoolmates go into the mines and mills and concluded that the Church had left them there.

What he built in response was not a charity. It was a formation method that treated workers as the agents of their own conversion of the world. With collaborators including Victoire Cappe and Fernand Tonnet, he refined an approach over roughly twenty years, drawing on the Sillon movement he had studied in France as a seminarian. The Young Trade Unionists became the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, the Young Christian Workers, holding its first congress on 18 April 1925 after Pius XI overrode the hesitations of the Belgian hierarchy. Paul VI made Cardijn a cardinal in February 1965, and he addressed the Second Vatican Council as an expert that same year.

The method fits on an index card:

See the concrete reality, in detail, as it actually is. Judge it against the Gospel and the Church’s social tradition. Act to change what is unjust and strengthen what is good.

Each of these three steps is a practice. Seeing means looking at the real factory, the real wage, the real parish. Judging means comparing what you see to a standard beyond your own opinion. Acting means doing what you might have been avoiding, moving from discernment to change.

This method is like the Mass in a different form: it moves from hearing to offering to being sent, so the pattern stays visible.

The people hear the Word, offer the world, receive Christ, and are sent out. John XXIII included these three steps in Mater et Magistra in 1961, and the second half of Gaudium et Spes followed the same pattern four years later. What began as a chaplain’s method for young factory workers became the basic approach of Catholic social teaching.

That teaching has a documented spine, and the dates are worth keeping straight: Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII, 1891) on the dignity of labor and the rights of workers; Quadragesimo Anno (Pius XI, 1931) on subsidiarity and social order; Mater et Magistra (John XXIII, 1961); Pacem in Terris (John XXIII, 1963) on rights, duties, and peace; Gaudium et Spes (Vatican II, 1965), which opens by claiming the griefs of the poor as the griefs of Christ’s disciples. None of these is a political manifesto. Each tries to say what the Gospel requires under conditions the Gospel’s first hearers never faced.

One essence, three persons, and who sits at the table

The theological ground of all this was laid in Cappadocia in the fourth century, and the standard account leaves out the person who taught most of it.

Macrina the Younger belongs at the front of the list with her brothers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus. Gregory of Nyssa wrote her life and cast her as the teacher in On the Soul and the Resurrection, where she questions him from her deathbed, in the role Plato gave Socrates. She turned the family estate into a community where servants and mistresses ate at the same table.

Theological ground for all this was laid in Cappadocia in the fourth century, and the standard account leaves out the person who taught most of it.

Both brothers drew the consequences in public. When the rains failed, and famine hit Caesarea in 368, Basil spent his inheritance, preached against the speculators holding grain for a better price, and built a complex outside the walls with wards, physicians, a hospice, and workshops, which historians often call the first hospital in the Western world. Around 379, preaching his fourth homily on Ecclesiastes, Gregory of Nyssa reached the verse about buying enslaved people and did what no surviving writer of antiquity had done: he condemned the institution itself. What price, he demanded, did you put on rationality? Nothing in existence is worth as much as a human being, because a human being carries the likeness of God, and no one holds title to that.

Fifteen hundred years later, the American Church recited the Nicene Creed every Sunday but still could not find a seminary willing to accept Augustus Tolton. That contradiction is the problem this essay keeps returning to. The throughline held, even when the institution did not.

Merton’s mirror

Thomas Merton wrote “Letters to a White Liberal” in the early summer of 1963, months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter from the Birmingham jail. It was published in 1964 as the opening essay of Seeds of Destruction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

When Merton said “white liberal,” he did not mean a political group. He meant any white person, especially white Christians, who thought good intentions were enough. He argued that racism in the United States was built into the system, and that white Americans benefited from it whether they liked it or not. Many did not want to see this. For Merton, contemplation was not a way to avoid this truth; instead, it was the practice that made seeing it possible, because prayer that does not change how you see things is just another way of looking away.

He also made it clear that Black Americans were responsible for their own liberation, not just recipients of help from white people. This strongly challenges a certain kind of Catholic charity, and keeps the argument focused on agency.

Paternalism lets the giver stay in control, but real solidarity does not. This is the distinction the essay uses to judge the examples it has gathered.

The strongest objection

Here is the case against everything above, made as its own defenders would make it.

The liturgy is about worshiping God. It is not meant to be a tool or a program. When a community starts focusing on the social results the Mass produces, it risks using God for its own purposes, and eventually those purposes can take God’s place. In the twentieth century, many parishes used the liturgy to push their own politics, and the sense of the sacred faded. Worship is not valuable because of what it produces, and if the Church forgets this, it has nothing to offer the poor that a regular charity could not do better.

This objection is important, and both Michel and Merton agree with its main point. Michel’s argument does not claim that the liturgy exists to create social change. Instead, it says the liturgy shapes the Christian spirit, and that spirit is what leads to social renewal. The order is important. Worship is beyond a tool; it is something that gives life. Merton makes a similar point: if contemplation is used only to create activists, it is not true contemplation.

This brings the argument back to its main point.

The claim is not that liturgy should be used for justice. The claim is that truly receiving the Eucharist changes people so they cannot remain indifferent. If this does not happen, then something is wrong at a deeper level.

Read that again and let it sink in.

What follows

Five propositions, short enough to keep.

1. Worship is not private. The Mass forms a body, and a body has a public.

2. Structures are the field of the test. “I personally do not hate anyone” is a statement about feelings. Justice is a statement about who we are. Look closely before you judge: the actual wage, the actual parish, the actual street. Speaking in general terms lets everyone avoid responsibility.

3. Difference is not a defect. Unity without erasure is the shape of God’s own life, and the standard for any community claiming to reflect it.

4. Charity that preserves your position is not solidarity. Merton’s line, and it costs something every time.

The American bishops have said this in their own voice twice. Brothers and Sisters to Us (1979) stated plainly that racism is a sin, one that divides the human family and blots out God’s image in its members. Open Wide Our Hearts: The Continuing Call to Love (2018) said it again, adding that too many institutions still harbor practices that deny justice, and passed 241 to 3. The bishops’ own catechetical materials on racism call the liturgy a sign and instrument of communion, and the Eucharist the sacrament of oneness. Those are strong words. They were true in Quincy in 1888, and they had no institutional force there.

The pews at St. Joseph’s filled up with the wrong people, and the Church of that time and place experienced this as a crisis rather than as an answered prayer. Tolton went north, gathered fifty families in a basement, and was still building the Church when the heat killed him.

The dismissal at the end of Mass is not a courtesy. It is an order.

Questions Worth Sitting With, Using the See–Judge–Act Method

1. Father Weiss did not object to the Mass. He objected to who came. Where does your own community welcome people in principle while quietly managing who actually shows up?

2. Michel’s test runs backward as well as forward: if the worship produces no social consequence, a premise has failed. Apply it to your parish this year. What has changed on the street because of what happens at that altar?

3. Cardijn’s first verb is see, and it is the one most often skipped. Name one concrete condition in your workplace or neighborhood that you have never actually looked at closely. What has kept you from looking?

4. Gregory of Nyssa asked the slaveholder what price he had put on rationality. What do we currently price that a later generation will find indefensible?

5. Merton argued that good intentions are not the point, because benefit does not require approval. Where do you benefit from an arrangement you would say you oppose?

6. Tolton spent six years learning African languages for a mission he was never sent on, and was then told to serve only his own. Who in your community is being trained for a role you have already decided not to give them?

Sources

• Virgil Michel, OSB, “The Liturgy the Basis of Social Regeneration,” Orate Fratres 9 (1935): 536–545; reprinted in The Social Question: Essays on Capitalism and Christianity (Collegeville: St. John’s University, 1987).

• Paul Marx, OSB, Virgil Michel and the Liturgical Movement (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1957).

• Thomas Merton, Seeds of Destruction (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964).

• David Bentley Hart, “The ‘Whole Humanity’: Gregory of Nyssa’s Critique of Slavery in Light of His Eschatology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 54, no. 1 (February 2001): 51–69.

• Gregory of Nyssa, Fourth Homily on Ecclesiastes, c. 379.

• United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Brothers and Sisters to Us (1979) and Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love (2018).

• Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891); Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931); John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (1961) and Pacem in Terris (1963); Second Vatican Council, Gaudium et Spes (1965).

• Archdiocese of Chicago, Father Augustus Tolton canonization cause materials; Missouri Encyclopedia, “Augustus Tolton (1854–1897).”

• Joseph Cardijn Digital Library and the Australian Cardijn Institute, on the JOC and the See–Judge–Act method.

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

The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn.

Introduction

I am reading Elise Ann Allen’s biography of Pope Leo XIV … a good and easy read … and I came across a story shared with Allen by Fr John Lydon, “a grey-haired Augustinian who missioned for almost four decades in Peru” (p. 34). For much of that time, he lived in community with the present Pope.

As he tells it, Fr Bob (Robert Prevost) was in Peru at the time when the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack was so extreme that all the Augustinians were advised to leave the country. Fr John recounted to Allen that as a community they said that “a better response is to ask, How do we accompany the people during the time of the cross?” (p. 45)

When I was at school, I learned the difference between being an apostle and being an apostate. I remember responding to the challenge to embrace my Catholic faith with courage and determination, to be prepared to die rather than deny Christ - although, I hoped that it would never come to that. Years later, as a teacher, I used Graham Greene’s short story “The hint of an explanation” to pass on what I learned. If you have never read the story, you might find this summary informative.

The Gospel

Jesus began to make it clear to his disciples that he was destined to go to Jerusalem and suffer grievously at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, to be put to death and to be raised up on the third day. Then, taking him aside, Peter started to remonstrate with him. ‘Heaven preserve you, Lord;’ he said ‘this must not happen to you.’ But he turned and said to Peter, ‘Get behind me, Satan! You are an obstacle in my path, because the way you think is not God’s way but man’s.’

Then Jesus said to his disciples, ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it. What, then, will a man gain if he wins the whole world and ruins his life? Or what has a man to offer in exchange for his life?

‘For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of his Father with his angels, and, when he does, he will reward each one according to his behaviour.’ (Matthew 16:21-27)

The Enquiry

See

• What is the disagreement between Jesus and Peter about? Describe it in your own words. Do you stand with Jesus? Or with Peter?

• What does commitment to Jesus require of his disciples? The apostles died as martyrs. What does this tell you about the impact of Jesus’ words on them? Does he impact your life in the same way?

• Why does Jesus accept that he will suffer and die because of his work?

Judge

• What do you think about Jesus’ message in this Gospel passage?

• Is there a better way to look at life than what Jesus presents here?

• What do you find challenging in his description of the essentials of discipleship?

Act

• What have you observed in this Gospel story that is needed in the world today and/or in your life?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to bringing about this transformation of the world and yourself?

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

Image Source: James Tissot (Creator), Watercolour painting in the Brooklyn Museum: Get thee behind me Satan, Picryl, PDM 1.0

Worth reading: Allen, E.A. (2026). Pope Leo XIV: The biography. Penguin Random House.

Apology: My life is often a battle with technology and today was no different. I apologise for the delay with this Gospel Enquiry. Next week’s will be posted early to make up for the lateness of this one.

He was twenty-five years old, a lapsed Catholic, and his name was Louis Massignon.

What happened next, he spent the following fifty years failing to describe to his own satisfaction. He called it the Visitation of the Stranger. He did not become a Muslim. Instead, he returned to the Catholic faith he had walked away from as a student. But he returned through a Muslim household. The Alusi family of Baghdad took him in, housed him, corrected his manners, and showed him a piety he had not expected to find anywhere. He credited his recovery to the prayers of his host, Hajj Ali al-Alusi, and to the intercession of a tenth-century Sufi executed in Baghdad in 922, Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallāj, whose trial records he had been reading in manuscript.

Massignon gave the rest of his working life to al-Hallāj. He defended the thesis in 1922. The finished work runs to four volumes in Herbert Mason’s English translation, The Passion of al-Hallāj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam (Princeton University Press, 1982). And when the Second Vatican Council promulgated Nostra Aetate on 28 October 1965, and the Catholic Church stated in council what it held in esteem in Islam, the ground had been prepared in large part by a scholar who had learned Islam from the inside of a Baghdad household while he was too broken to defend himself against it.

A man discovered what his own tradition was by being held inside somebody else’s.

Joseph Cardijn, the Belgian priest who built the Young Christian Workers out of Brussels parish basements between the wars, gave his members three verbs and told them the order mattered: see, judge, act. John XXIII wrote the method into Mater et Magistra in 1961. It is the right instrument for this subject, because the shortage today is not opinion about artificial intelligence and religion. Opinion is abundant. What is scarce is the patience to look before ruling.

The method: See — establish the facts before interpreting them. Judge — weigh them against a standard, and say the standard out loud. Act — do the smallest concrete thing that follows.

See: the clergy who were never mentioned.

The Consortium for Evaluating Faith and Ethics in AI, a joint effort of Baylor University, Brigham Young University, the University of Notre Dame and Yeshiva University, surveyed 1,125 American adults and tested fourteen large language models on the questions people actually bring to a machine at two in the morning.

The gap it found is not subtle. On grief and loss, the people surveyed judged religion relevant about 59 percent of the time; the models raised it about 16 percent of the time. On family and forgiveness, 55 percent against 10 percent. On ethical questions, 45 percent against 5 percent. Asked where a person in spiritual distress should turn, the models recommended parents, teachers, friends, and therapists. They did not recommend clergy. Every model tested also handled traditions unevenly, treating some more warmly than others without ever announcing it.

Meanwhile, the traffic runs in the other direction too. An artificial Buddhist monk called Yang Mun has gathered more than 2.5 million followers on Instagram and sells healing programs on the side. An invented rabbi reached 1.5 million followers, recycling old libels about Jewish wealth, before the account came down. Catholic Answers launched a priest chatbot, Father Justin, which at first appeared to offer absolution, something no software can do. Hindu practitioners consult GitaGPT and Vedguru. Sadhguru, Deepak Chopra, and the Sufi teacher Shaykh Nurjan Mirahmadi now all have systems trained on their recorded corpus, answering in something close to their own voice.

The institutions have started to answer. The Rome Call for AI Ethics gained Jewish and Muslim signatories at the Casina Pio IV on 10 January 2023. The International Islamic Fiqh Academy of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, meeting in Doha from 4 to 8 May 2025, passed Resolution No. 258, holding that the default ruling on artificial intelligence is permissibility, subject to conditions. Pope Leo XIV promulgated Magnifica humanitas on 25 May 2026.

Notice the shapes. Rome answered with an encyclical about the human person. The Fiqh Academy answered with a ruling on permissibility and its conditions: same technology, two entirely different grammars of judgment.

Judge: the view from nowhere

The obvious verdict is that these systems are biased against religion, and it is the wrong verdict.

Nobody instructed a model to leave God out. The silence is a residue. It falls out of the training corpus, out of safety tuning that routes human distress toward clinical language, and out of a house style that treats neutrality as the absence of commitment rather than as one more commitment among others. That is what makes it hard to argue with. An explicit bias can be named and contested. A default presents itself as the ordinary way that thoughtful people speak.

The case on the other side deserves its full strength, because it is strong. A widow at three in the morning with no congregation and no money for a therapist gets something real from a patient machine that does not judge her. Access to a tradition’s texts has never been wider. And the demand that models “include religion” is dangerous, because it hands a company, or a state, or a small committee of engineers the power to decide which religion and whose reading of it. A faith-tuned model has no synod, no chain of transmission, no peer review. It has a product manager.

Both can be true. Weigh them against the standard: does this serve the formation of a human being, or only the delivery of content to one?

Then the real deficit comes into focus, and it is not doctrinal. It is comparative. These systems hold enormous information about religions and no capacity to hold two of them against each other and feel the difference. They will summarise the Fiqh Academy and the encyclical in the same flat register, as though a ruling on permissibility and a meditation on the person were two answers to one question, when they are two different questions asked by two different civilizations. They flatten what makes a tradition a tradition: its distinct grammar for what counts as an answer.

Most users cannot catch that, because most users were never taught to. And the tuning makes it worse. These systems are built to affirm. Nearly every serious religious tradition is built on being told something you did not want to hear.

Act: standing in two places at once

The answer is not to make the machine religious. The answer is to make the reader comparative. Comparative religion has been treated for two generations as an elective, a survey course, a table of festivals and dietary rules. It is now closer to a technical skill, because it is the only discipline that trains a person to recognize a frame as a frame.

Five things follow, short enough for an index card.

1. Learn one tradition from the inside and one from the outside. Depth in your own, real study in another. Massignon on the Tigris is the model, minus the fever.

2. Read the disagreements, not the summaries. A tradition is an argument it has been having with itself for centuries. A model gives you the settled paraphrase, which is the part that was never alive.

3. Ask what counts as an answer: Fiqh, encyclical, midrash, koan, sutra commentary. When two traditions disagree about the form of a valid answer, no chatbot will tell you, because it does not know it is choosing one.

4. Demand disclosure, not prohibition. Whether it is a machine, whose corpus it was trained on, and who takes the payment, that fight is winnable. The fight over whether machines may speak about God is not.

5. Protect formation from counsel. Use the tool for information. Guard the slower thing, the being changed by people who can disagree with you, and keep it in a room with other human beings in it.

Comparative study does not dissolve conviction. It is what let a Catholic scholar spend his life on a Muslim mystic and hand his church a document that changed how it spoke to a billion people.

The machine will give you al-Hallāj in under a second. The trial, the execution in 922, the poetry, a serviceable paraphrase of what he meant by it. Massignon needed a lifetime and four volumes to say, less clearly, what a model will now produce before you finish typing.

The machine cannot put you on the boat. What changed him was not information about Islam. It was a household that took him in when he was worth nothing to them, a man whose name he could barely pronounce praying for him, and a knife wound in a locked cabin on a grounded steamer.

The tradition has run that system for three thousand years. It is still admitting students.

Sources

Louis Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallāj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam, trans. Herbert Mason, 4 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1982) · Nostra Aetate, Second Vatican Council, 28 October 1965 · Consortium for Evaluating Faith and Ethics in AI, reported by Axios and Deseret News · Religion News Service on artificial religious influencers · Associated Press on guru chatbots · Rome Call for AI Ethics, Abrahamic commitment, 10 January 2023 · International Islamic Fiqh Academy, Resolution No. 258 (3/26), Doha, 4–8 May 2025 · Magnifica humanitas, Leo XIV, 25 May 2026

In 1903, a stenographer in Washington, DC, filed a patent for a board game she had been testing on the porches of a single-tax colony in Arden, Delaware. Her name was Elizabeth Magie. She was a Georgist, a writer of poetry, and the author of a mock newspaper advertisement offering herself for sale as a “young woman American slave,” placed to make a point about what wages had become. The Patent Office granted her claim in 1904. She called the game The Landlord’s Game.

The board will look familiar. A square track. Corner squares. Properties you buy, rents you collect, a jail. What will not look familiar is the box, because Magie shipped it with two complete sets of rules.

Under the monopolist rules, players crushed one another. You cornered the properties, you raised the rents, and the game ended when everyone but a single winner lay ruined. Under the anti-monopolist rules, which she called the Prosperity rules, a tax on land value returned the gain to the whole table, so that every player prospered when any player created wealth. That game ended when the poorest player had doubled an original stake.

The point was not that one set entertained and the other instructed. The point was that a player had to play both. Magie wanted a child to feel, on the same board and within the same hour, what a rule change does to a human being. “It is a practical demonstration of the present system of land-grabbing,” she wrote, “with all its usual outcomes and consequences.”

In 1935, Parker Brothers bought her patent for $500. The firm had just acquired a game from Charles Darrow, who said he had invented it. Parker Brothers printed a small run of The Landlord’s Game to secure the legal rights, then shelved it. In 1936, Magie told the Washington Evening Star who had actually built the board. Nobody much cared.

We kept the monopolist rules. We printed a hundred million copies. We forgot the other half of the box.

We are doing it again.

That is the whole problem, and it is not a problem about board games.

We are living through what William Davidow and Michael Malone named the autonomous revolution: the shift, on the scale of agriculture and industry before it, from machines that extend human muscle to systems that substitute for human decision-making. Agentic artificial intelligence (AI). Algorithmic capital. Automated logistics, and automated persuasion. A rule change of that size does what Magie’s rule change did. It decides, quietly and in advance, who ends the game holding something and who ends it ruined.

We are reading about that change the way we play Monopoly. One set of rules. One side of the box.

Gil Durán argues his side of it with force in The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy (Avid Reader Press, 18 August 2026). Durán advised Jerry Brown, Dianne Feinstein, and Kamala Harris, and he has run opinion pages in Sacramento and San Francisco. He claims a cluster of very rich technologists are not libertarians who drifted strangely. They are executing a coherent plan, drawn largely from the 1997 book The Sovereign Individual, to replace elected government with corporate sovereignty. Peter Thiel funds it. Curtis Yarvin theorizes it, in “patchworks” of corporate-run zones. Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan evangelize it as the network state. JD Vance carries it into office—durán names the destination digital feudalism, running on cryptocurrency, AI, and algorithmic propaganda.

That is a serious charge from a serious reporter, and it is why the book matters now. It is not why the book belongs in this essay.

Switch-side

Before I entered the world of technology, I taught history and religion and coached high school debate.

Here is what people outside the activity never quite understand. One resolution stands for the whole season, and every debater must argue both sides of it. You affirm at nine in the morning, and you negate at eleven, against the same evidence, in front of a judge who does not care what you believe. Nobody chooses a side. A case that works only from the affirmative is not a case. It is a preference wearing a suit.

Switch-side debate does three things to a seventeen-year-old that almost nothing else does. It forces them to build the strongest version of the argument they hate, because they will run that argument by afternoon. It shows them the weak flank in their own case, because they just attacked it. And it permanently separates understanding a position from holding one.

We stopped teaching that discipline to adults—much of why our public argument about technology sounds the way it does traces straight back to that.

Flow the round.

Affirmative. The strongest case its defenders would make is not “billionaires should rule.” It runs like this. Legacy governments have become structurally incapable of building housing, energy, transit, and cures, and a generation of visible failure supplies the evidence. Exit is the oldest check on tyranny; the ability to leave a bad regime has done more for human freedom than the ability to vote in one. Competition among jurisdictions disciplines them the way competition among firms disciplines firms. On AI specifically, capability is arriving whether or not democracies stand ready, so people who take the risk seriously should build it rather than cede it to states that will not.

Negative. Durán’s case. Exit checks power only when everyone can exercise it, and a right available to capital holders is not a right. It is a privilege with good branding. Corporate sovereignty removes the one thing that makes power tolerable, namely the ability of the governed to fire the governor without moving house. A patchwork of company towns is not a market in governance, because the residents are not customers. They are inventory. A technology that substitutes for human decision, held privately and deployed at scale, does not distribute freedom. It concentrates freedom into fewer hands than any king ever managed.

What falls out of the round

Argue both sides honestly and something useful happens. The guardrails write themselves. They are not compromises. They are the claims that survived contact with the other side.

1. Exit runs both ways. Any jurisdiction, platform, or agentic system a person can enter, that person can leave, carrying data, assets, and standing intact.

2. Anyone who cannot leave gets a vote. Governance without the franchise is a lease.

3. Publish the ruleset. When a system decides something about a person, that person can read the rules it used. Magie shipped both sets in the box.

4. Name the human. Every autonomous system has a person who answers for it in law. Not a company. A person, with a name.

5. Set speed limits where the error runs one way. Move fast on what a society can rebuild. Move slowly on elections, courts, children, and the grid.

6. Separate the money from the referee. Whoever profits from a system does not certify it.

The middle verb

Reading produces none of that. Method does, and the method already exists.

In the 1920s, a Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn handed teenage factory workers three verbs: See, Judge, Act. Look at your own conditions and write them down. Weigh what you saw against what you believe. Then do one concrete thing this week, and come back to report on it. John XXIII wrote the method into Mater et Magistra in 1961.

The dangerous verb is the middle one. Seeing is safe, because everyone likes data. Acting is safe, because everyone likes volunteers. Judging sent Paulo Freire into sixteen years of exile, because judging means a nineteen-year-old machinist holds the competence to reach a conclusion no authority handed them.

Switch-side debate trains that middle verb. It is judge with the training wheels on, a rehearsal of the strongest opposing case in a room where the stakes run to a ballot rather than a country. Read Durán. Then read The Sovereign Individual and Andreessen’s manifesto with the charity you gave Durán. Then decide, and say the because out loud.

That is not centrism. Magie held no neutral position. She judged one set of rules morally better, and she said so in public. She refused to let a player reach that conclusion without having played the other side first.

We are choosing the rules for the autonomous revolution right now, mostly by default, mostly with one set in hand.

Both sets are still in the box. Somebody has to open it.

Sources: Gil Durán, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy (Avid Reader Press, 18 August 2026). US Patent 748,626, Elizabeth J. Magie, granted 1904. William Davidow and Michael Malone, The Autonomous Revolution: Reclaiming the Future We’ve Sold to Machines (Berrett-Koehler, 2020). Joseph Cardijn, the See-Judge-Act method, Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne, 1925. John XXIII, Mater et Magistra (1961), section 236.

Two months earlier, in the free imperial city of Memmingen, a furrier named Sebastian Lotzer and a preacher named Christoph Schappeler wrote a document called the Twelve Articles. It listed complaints about serfdom, tithes, and lords who had taken over the common woods and streams and then charged rent for the fish. It asked for the right to elect a pastor and for the dead not to be taxed. (Don’t give anyone any ideas today). By most accounts, it was one of the first documents in European history to claim something like human rights for ordinary people, and it made its case not from politics but from scripture, appealing over the heads of the nobility to a higher authority.

Then something unprecedented happened. The Twelve Articles were printed. Within two months, some 25,000 copies coursed through the German lands—an astonishing feat for the sixteenth century. A local outcry swelled into a continental movement almost overnight. The printing press, barely seventy years old, had just become a tool for mass mobilization among the poor.

The lords noticed. So did Martin Luther, whose own movement had relied on the same press and the same appeal to scripture. In March, he published Admonition to Peace, admitting that the peasants’ complaints were mostly fair and urging both sides to settle without violence. In May, as the revolt spread, he published Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, calling on the princes to crush the rebels like mad dogs. That pamphlet sold more copies than the Twelve Articles, under discussion when the princes’ artillery opened fire. Estimates of the peasant dead range from three to ten thousand, most of them killed in a few hours while fleeing. The professional soldiers on the other side lost perhaps six men. Their preacher, Thomas Müntzer, was captured, tortured, and beheaded twelve days later. By the time the war burned out, somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand people were dead — the largest popular uprising in Europe before the French Revolution, and one most of us have never heard of.

Hold that hillside in your mind. A new information technology magnifies both the outcry and the crackdown. An economic order breeds the grievance. A religious tradition lends language to both the rebels and their executioners. And, in the end, a question lingers that no one in 1525 could answer: what could be done with all that spilled blood?

Those are the four threads of this essay. I’ll use the old see–judge–act method, a way of thinking developed in the 1920s by the Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn for working-class young people, and later adopted into mainstream Catholic social teaching. Look honestly at what is happening. Weigh it against your deepest commitments. Then do something. This approach is useful for anyone, believer or not, because it does not let analysis replace action, or action happen without analysis.

SEE: The distance between us

Start with the numbers, because they are the part of this that is not in dispute.

Globally, the richest one percent now hold roughly 43.8 percent of all wealth. The bottom half of humanity — some four billion people — hold about 0.52 percent. Put differently, the average person in that top one percent holds something on the order of eight thousand times the wealth of the average person in the bottom half. Billionaire wealth rose more than sixteen percent in 2025 alone, to a record $18.3 trillion, and for the first time there are more than three thousand billionaires on the planet.

The United States, the richest country in history, has been tracking the same curve. The Federal Reserve’s Distributional Financial Accounts show the top one percent of American households holding around 31 percent of national household wealth ~ a record in a data series going back to 1989. The top ten percent hold roughly 68 percent. The bottom half of the country holds about 2.5 percent.

Now, introduce the machine.

Every general-purpose technology changes who benefits, and artificial intelligence is arriving faster and with more investment than usual. Gross AI capital spending in 2026 is estimated at about $660 billion, focused in a few companies in a few countries. That is a huge amount of productive capacity being built and owned by a very small group of people.

The effects on workers are still debated. Some respected economists say automation usually shifts jobs rather than eliminates them, and they might be right again. But early data is troubling. Job losses are hitting workers aged 22 to 30 about three times more than those aged 40 to 55. It often shows up not as layoffs, but as entry-level jobs quietly disappearing: junior analyst, first-year associate, entry-level developer. At the same time, demand for AI skills in job postings has grown about seven times in two years. If you already have money, top credentials, or a strong network, this is a big advantage. If you hoped to work your way up, it feels like someone is taking away the first steps.

Then there is the geography. The computing power, money, data centers, and profits are concentrated in a few big cities in a few wealthy countries. Meanwhile, the training data, content moderation, and annotation work are often outsourced to workers in the global South who earn just a few dollars an hour. The Twelve Articles complained about lords who fenced off the commons and then charged for access. The comparison is not far-fetched.

Where the money meets the fist

Economic injustice does not stay economic. It shows up in bodies.

In the home. Roughly 27 percent of women worldwide aged 15–49 have experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner. That violence is not confined to people with low incomes ~ it crosses every income bracket ~ turn your TV on and watch the news, but economic stress is a well-documented aggravating factor, and economic control is one of its most common instruments. Financial abuse appears in the overwhelming majority of documented domestic violence cases: the seized paycheck, the ruined credit score, the sabotaged job. Its function is to make leaving unaffordable. A woman without independent income is not merely poorer than her abuser; she is held, which means that a labor market that pushes women into precarious, interruptible, uninsured work is not a separate problem from domestic violence. It is a supply line.

Between groups. For decades, most academics believed that grievances did not predict civil war, and that opportunity, terrain, and weak states mattered more. That view has changed a lot. Research by Lars-Erik Cederman, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch, and Halvard Buhaug found that earlier studies measured the wrong thing: inequality between individuals is not a good predictor, but inequality between groups, which Frances Stewart called horizontal inequality, is a strong one. When poverty lines up with ethnicity, region, or religion, and political exclusion follows the same pattern, the risk of armed conflict rises sharply. People rarely fight just because they are poor. They fight because they are poor, they can see exactly who is not, and they have been told this is the natural order.

That is Frankenhausen, translated into the language of regression coefficients.

JUDGE: Two thousand years of arguing with the ledger

If you want a tradition that has thought deeply about wealth for a long time, and reached conclusions that might surprise many of its followers today, Christianity is a good place to look, no matter what you think of its beliefs.

The Hebrew scriptures include the jubilee laws of Leviticus 25, which require regular cancellation of debts and the return of land, based on the idea that no one truly owns anything forever. The prophets are clear on this; Amos is basically a long criticism of creditors. The early church went even further. Basil of Caesarea, in the fourth century, said it plainly: the bread in your cupboard belongs to the hungry, the coat in your closet to the naked, the shoes rotting in your possession to the barefoot. His contemporary Ambrose said that giving to people in poverty is not generosity, but restitution ~ you are giving back what was already theirs. Eight centuries later, Thomas Aquinas, who was not a radical, said that a person in urgent need who takes another’s surplus has not committed theft, because in true need, all things become common.

This is not a fringe view. It was the mainstream position in the tradition for its first thousand years, and it is much more radical than anything in today’s politics.

The modern story begins in 1891, when Leo XIII published Rerum Novarum during the first industrial revolution. He defended private property against what we called communism but also insisted, against the liberalism of his time, on a living wage and the right to organize. This idea continued through the twentieth century: Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio(1967) said development is the new name for peace; the Latin American bishops at Medellín in 1968 and the liberation theologians who followed spoke of a “preferential option for the poor”; John Paul II talked about structural sin, the idea that evil can exist in systems, not just in hearts; and Francis declared that an economy of exclusion “kills.”

It is worth noting that the current pope chose the name Leo XIV to honor Leo XIII. He told the cardinals who elected him that the church faces “another industrial revolution and developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.” Whatever you think of the institution, the historical comparison makes sense: we are in a moment like 1891.

Merton, and the violence you don’t notice

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk whose 1948 memoir made him unexpectedly famous, spent the last decade of his life connecting the same ideas this essay explores. His main claim about war was that its root is fear ~ not just fear of each other, but a broad, general sense of dread. He argued that a society focused on accumulating wealth is a society built on that dread. He wrote that we are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves.

Merton went further by expanding what counts as violence. In a culture of overwork and frantic activity for various causes, he argued that the frenzy itself is a kind of violence because it destroys the ability to find the peace it claims to seek. He also rejected the idea that well-off people can simply watch from a distance. His most famous passage describes standing on a street corner in Louisville’s shopping district in 1958, suddenly filled with love for total strangers and realizing that his sense of being separate from them was an illusion. He titled the book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. The guilt is important. Someone always benefits from a system that hurts others, and the benefit is usually invisible to those who gain from it.

The harder question

So: does this tradition, on balance, produce more violence or more peace?

The honest answer is that the record cuts both ways, hard.

On one side: three centuries of early Christian pacifism, when Christians were generally expected not to kill at all. Augustine and Aquinas’s just war theory, which, despite later abuses, was designed to limit warfare by requiring a just cause, legitimate authority, proportionality, and last resort. The Anabaptists and Quakers. Tolstoy, and through him, Gandhi. Martin Luther King Jr., Dorothy Day, Óscar Romero, the Berrigans, and Merton. In 2020, Fratelli Tutti went further than any recent papal document in questioning whether just war criteria can ever be met under modern conditions.

On the other hand: the Crusades. The Inquisition. The wars of religion. The theological justification of conquest, slavery, and apartheid. And Luther in May 1525, telling the princes to kill.

Two arguments are important to consider here. René Girard suggested that human desire is imitative—we want what others want—and that societies deal with the resulting rivalry by uniting against a scapegoat. This only works as long as no one sees it clearly. He argued that Christianity broke this pattern by telling the story from the victim’s side and insisting the victim was innocent. Whether or not you agree with the theology, the anthropology is revealing, and it fits uncomfortably well with an economy built on manufactured desires. On the other hand, William Cavanaugh argued that the idea of “religious violence” is a modern invention. The neat separation of religious and secular motives, created in the nation-state era, mostly serves to make our violence look reasonable and theirs look extreme.

My own reading: My own view is that the tradition does not always push in one direction. It is a language of legitimation, and both peasants and princes use such language. This does not mean the tradition is irrelevant. What matters most is which parts of it get amplified, which brings us back to the press.

The technology has changed. Autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons now reduce the time between decision and killing to just milliseconds. António Guterres and the ICRC called together for a binding international agreement on autonomous weapons systems, with talks meant to finish by 2026. More than 120 countries support a treaty, but the major military powers do not. That deadline has now passed with no treaty and no formal negotiations ever started.

“The autonomous targeting of humans by machines,” Guterres said, “is a moral line that must not be crossed.”

At the domestic level, the same logic appears in smaller ways: location tracking, stalkerware, and account lockouts have become common tools of coercive control. This is like the financial abuse of the 1970s, but with a much better interface. And recommendation systems, no matter what their designers intend, consistently find that outrage keeps people’s attention, so the reprisal pamphlet still outsells the list of grievances.

ACT: Can any of this be forgiven?

Which leaves the last question, and the one I find hardest.

There is a strong argument that forgiveness is the only way out. Cycles of revenge feed themselves; someone has to take a loss without passing it on, or the cycle never ends. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission tried to make this official, offering amnesty in exchange for full public disclosure, and probably prevented a civil war. Rwanda’s gacaca courts handled more than a million cases that no regular court could have managed. The Amish community at Nickel Mines in 2006, and the families of the Emanuel AME victims in Charleston in 2015, offered forgiveness within days, and in both cases it clearly changed something.

There is also a strong argument against forgiveness, and it should be taken seriously, not dismissed as just emotional. Jean Améry, who was tortured by the Gestapo, spent his life refusing forgiveness and argued that his resentment was a moral achievement—the refusal to let time erase an atrocity. Forgiving too soon can become a demand placed on victims for the comfort of others. The TRC delivered truth, but very little material compensation; South Africa is still one of the most unequal societies in the world. This leads to the main objection: forgiving a person is not the same as forgiving a system. You can forgive the person who fired the gun, but it is not clear that anyone can forgive a system that is still in place.

The distinctions that help, I think, are these. Forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation; one person can forgive, but reconciliation takes two. Forgiveness is also not the same as amnesty; you can forgive and still prosecute. And none of this replaces restitution. Ambrose’s insight applies here too: returning what was taken is not mercy; it is simple fairness. Zacchaeus, in Luke’s Gospel, is not praised for feeling bad. He is praised for paying back four times what he took.

So if there is action to take, it is probably not a sweeping gesture. It looks more like quietly building the things that make escape possible: the independent account, the emergency fund, the safe place to go. Fight horizontal inequality—the kind that maps onto groups and geography—because that is the kind that breeds conflict. Insist that ownership of the new machines is a political question, not just a technical one, just as it was in 1891 when the answer was shaped by those who organized. Support the treaty that seems dull. Notice what you are amplifying.

And keep that hillside outside Frankenhausen in mind. Those peasants had a printing press and a list of reasonable demands. What they lacked was anyone in power willing to read the list a second time.

We have better presses now. The list is still going around.

Note: Written for readers of any faith or none. The see–judge–act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn.

Note: I am a cultural historian with thirty-five years in emerging technology, focusing today on the Anthropology of Technology, which has led me to be an AI Ethicist and a “killer” storyteller.

Sources

• Oxfam, Resisting the Rule of the Rich (January 2026) — Oxfam GB inequality report; Inequality.org global figures

• Federal Reserve Distributional Financial Accounts; FRED: share of net worth held by the top 1%

• S&P Global, “The AI and labor landscape 2026”

• Wikipedia: Twelve Articles; World History Encyclopedia: Twelve Articles; Online Library of Liberty, “The Peasants’ War and Martin Luther”; Battle of Frankenhausen

• Global prevalence of intimate partner violence, systematic review (PMC); Economic abuse as an invisible form of domestic violence (PubMed)

• Cederman, Gleditsch & Buhaug, Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War (Cambridge, 2013) — publisher page

• Pope Leo XIV on AI and his choice of name (NBC News); EWTN, “135 Years After Rerum Novarum”

• Joint UN Secretary-General / ICRC call on autonomous weapon systems; Stop Killer Robots on the 2026 deadline

• Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1961), Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966); Jim Forest, ed., The Root of War Is Fear

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

The See–Judge–Act framework is gratefully borrowed from Joseph Cardijn.

I am a cultural historian with thirty-five years in emerging technology, in “Silicon Valley,” focusing today on the Anthropology of Technology. I explore topics such as the adoption of sustainable technologies, the social impact of digital devices, and the cultural adaptation of innovations. I analyze how technologies affect social organization, labor practices, and environmental outcomes, emphasizing that technology is never neutral but culturally situated, which has led me to be an AI Ethicist and a “killer” storyteller.

The middle chapters of Matthew’s Gospel have shown Jesus gradually seeking to build an understanding among his followers about his true identity and mission. This text, which is something of a mid-point in the Gospel narrative is set in the Northern Region of Caesarea Philippi, quite remote from the region of Galilee, most familiar to Jesus, and far flung from the city of Jerusalem, the centre of the Jewish religion.

The answer to Jesus’ question ‘Who do people say the Son of Man is?’ (Mt 6:13) suggests both that Jesus’ ministry was well known, even in this remote place, and also that this ministry was frequently associated with some of the great figures of Jewish scripture, including the prophets Elijah and Jeremiah (Mt 16:14). The question is then turned back on the disciples ‘But you … who do you say I am’ (Mt 16:15). It is Peter, once again, who speaks up and declares that Jesus is the Christ (Messiah) the Son of the living God. The recognition of Jesus as the Christ is highly significant. ‘Christ’ is the Greek term for the Hebrew word ‘Messiah’. The Messiah is the promised one of God in Jewish tradition, anointed by God and sent to save the people of Israel at the end of time. (see for example, Jeremiah 23:5–6, Isaiah 7:14, Daniel 7:13–14). The final part of the text has Jesus giving ‘strict orders not to tell anyone that he was the Christ’ (Mt 16:20) as such a claim would have been considered blasphemous by the religious leaders of the time.

Gospel Text: Matthew 16:13-20

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi he put this question to his disciples, ‘Who do people say the Son of Man is?’ And they said, ‘Some say he is John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’ ‘But you,’ he said ‘who do you say I am?’ Then Simon Peter spoke up, ‘You are the Christ,’ he said, ‘the Son of the living God.’ Jesus replied, ‘Simon son of Jonah, you are a happy man! Because it was not flesh and blood that revealed this to you but my Father in heaven. So I now say to you: You are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church. And the gates of the underworld can never hold out against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven: whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven.’ Then he gave the disciples strict orders not to tell anyone that he was the Christ.

See

How is the location of this account significant to its impact?

What similarities are evident in the different answers given about Jesus’ identity, including Peter’s declaration?

What is Jesus response to Peter’s declaration initially, and then at the end of the passage?

Judge

What do the answers given regarding Jesus’ identity indicate about how he was perceived?

How might the background of those in the story influenced their perceptions about Jesus’ identity?

Why might Jesus have sought to keep his identity secret?

Act

Investigate the different perceptions of Jesus in modern Christianity, for example comparing that of American Evangelical Christians to the images of Liberation Theology or Catholic Social teaching?

Research how Jesus is perceived among modern Jewish communities and how this correlates with their understanding about the Messiah?

Research how Jesus is perceived in the Qur’an and among modern Muslim communities?

Image: https://copilot.microsoft.com/chats/VZ9vm7AUYzc5BMts2rX8K

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/

On the morning of 25 August 1957, thirty-two thousand young workers filled the piazza in front of St Peter’s.

They came from mines and mills, shop counters and shipyards, from Belgium, Brazil, India, and the Philippines. Many saved for years to make the trip. They slept on trains and in parish halls. These were not students on vacation or typical pilgrims. They were apprentices, typists, dockers, and domestic servants—the very people whose absence from the Church had long been seen as an unfortunate part of industrial life.

Pius XII told them the Church needed them “more than ever,” that they were to build “the world that God wants, a society of brothers, in which the suffering of the humblest will be shared and eased by all.” It was, he said, a wonderful spectacle.

That gathering was the founding council of the International Young Christian Workers. It was one of the largest gatherings of working people Rome had ever seen.

Yet today, that moment has faded almost entirely from memory.

If you mention it in an American parish, most people will look politely confused. If you mention the YCW, perhaps someone in their eighties will remember it. The movement that formerly filled that square, built national federations in many countries, and shaped a generation of trade unionists, bishops, and organizers has almost disappeared from the Catholic imagination in the United States.

It is easy to see this as just another story of decline, a mid-century institution lost as the parish-and-neighborhood world declined. But perhaps the emptiness of that square reveals what genuinely mattered all along.

The mistake

The mistake is to believe that Joseph Cardijn’s legacy is the Young Christian Workers plus See-Judge-Act.

In reality, the deeper truth may be almost the opposite.

Cardijn didn’t create a method just to run an organization. He built the organization to carry a method, and beneath that method was a view of humanity. In 1925, he took the bold risk: he believed that ordinary young workers, even with little education or social standing, could understand their own reality, judge it, and act to change it.

The YCW was simply the container Cardijn had at the time. Belgian parishes, factory towns, a strong Church, and a working class with common roots were all unique to that era. None of these are required for the method itself.

Cardijn seems to have understood this himself. In a note he prepared for the Vatican II preparatory commission on the lay apostolate in December 1960, he described the person formed by this method acting “in and by their own organisations or in and as part of other organisations both already existing and yet to be created.”

Read that again—other organizations. Already existing. Yet to be created.

That’s not how someone building a franchise would speak. It’s the view of someone who knows the structure will keep changing, but the formation should stay. This same idea shaped his work at the Council. He opposed religious formation that was separated from professional, family, civic, social, and political life. Formation had to start with real life, real facts, and the actual worlds people live in. It wasn’t about applying doctrine to life from above, but about bringing life into contact with conviction.

The question worth changing

For fifty years the question in Cardijn circles has quietly been: How do we get people into Cardijn organizations?

We should ask instead: How do we put Cardijn’s way of thinking into the organizations where people already are?

Shifting the question in this way unlocks a world of new possibilities.

Young workers. —— Workers, professionals, retirees, gig workers

Young Christian Workers ——- Labor, professional and community organizations

Young Christian Students ——- Universities, schools, lifelong learning

Review of Life ——— Reflective practice

See —-- Social observation, data, lived experience

Judge —--Ethical and moral discernment

Act ——Concrete intervention

Formation of leaders —— Formation of citizens

Catholic Action —— Public action rooted in values

The worker milieu —— Every milieu where people actually live

And there is precedent. This migration has already happened once, quietly, at the highest level. In 1961, John XXIII wrote in Mater et Magistra that “there are three stages which should normally be followed in the reduction of social principles into practice. First, one reviews the concrete situation; secondly, one forms a judgment on it in the in view of these same principles; thirdly, one decides what in the circumstances can and should be done.” That is Cardijn’s method, taken out of the parish basement and written into the Church’s social teaching. From there it passed into the Council, into Medellín, into liberation theology, into forms of social analysis that never carried his name at all.

The method has already slipped beyond its original boundaries. We have not recognized it yet.

Universalize, but do not secularize.

A real danger lurks here, and it deserves a clear name.

If “See-Judge-Act” becomes Observe, Analyze, and Implement, we lose something important. What remains is only a management technique. Consulting firms have used that for decades, and it hasn’t made any workplace more humane.

Cardijn wasn’t asking what the problem is or what the fix is. He was asking three much harder questions:

What is happening to the human person?

What ought human beings and their society to be?

What are we going to do about the distance between those two things?

If we hold onto that focus, the method can travel anywhere. Lose it, and the method becomes hollow.

So we have to preserve three dimensions.

SEE means putting reality before ideology. Don’t start with what Democrats, Republicans, the Church, or management say. Start with what is actually happening, and let the people living in the situation describe it. The question isn’t whether AI is good or bad, but what AI is already doing to the people doing this work. What is changing in their autonomy, security, relationships, and sense of ownership over their work?

JUDGE is about discernment, not just opinion. To judge doesn’t mean deciding who is right, but asking what this reality means when compared to what we say we believe. For Christians, that might be the Gospel, human dignity, the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, and care for the vulnerable. But this approach isn’t limited to one tradition. A Jewish participant carries Torah and the prophets. A Muslim brings Qur’anic justice and human responsibility. A Buddhist brings compassion. A secular humanist brings dignity and democratic responsibility. What matters is that the moral framework is openly stated, not hidden. Most public debates in America are really fights between unspoken moral systems.

ACT means taking steps that are small enough to accomplish but serious enough to make a difference. The action should never stop at “we need to raise awareness.” Who will do what, by when, with whom, and with what resources? Afterward, ask: what actually happened? What did we learn? What changed in the situation, and what changed in us?

And then, you begin to see anew.

That’s the part most people forget. It was never See, Judge, Act, and then you’re done. It’s a spiral: see, judge, act, then see again, judge again, act again. This makes Cardijn’s approach surprisingly similar to action research, community development, and organizational learning, except his version is grounded in a belief about the human person, while theirs usually is not.

Where this could live

This doesn’t belong in a revived movement or another Catholic organization competing for the attention of people already overextended.

Right where people already live, work, and gather.

In adult education, the assignment shifts from learning about poverty, housing, immigration, and work to investigating what is actually happening around you. In parishes, it’s not another committee, but a review of life focused on one real, local, unresolved problem. In universities, students study a real situation in their own city instead of writing about social problems in the abstract. In professional associations, doctors, teachers, lawyers, and engineers ask what their profession is quietly becoming. In retirement communities, people with decades of experience are treated as witnesses, not just an audience. In interfaith groups, different moral traditions gather around the same real facts, not just each other’s doctrines.

And in labor organizations, where this approach started and where it is urgently needed again.

The most pressing example is right in front of us. Most public conversations about artificial intelligence are about the future, led by people who aren’t doing the work that’s changing. What will AI do to us? Cardijn would have found this focus on the future evasive.

He would have asked what AI is already doing, and he would have asked the people it affects.

What happens to judgment when a system recommends the answer? What happens to skill when the skilled part is automated and only the tedious part is left? What happens to responsibility when no one knows who made the decision? And what about the worker now supervising a machine that was trained on their own work?

These are not questions for some distant future. They are questions rooted in real life, best answered by those who will clock in tomorrow morning.

The vocabulary problem

Here’s a practical suggestion: for most audiences, don’t start with “See-Judge-Act.”

Start with experience, discernment, action, and reflection. Then explain that this is a modern version of a method created by a Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn, who believed working people could interpret their own lives.

This makes Cardijn an intellectual ancestor, not simply a recruiter for an old Catholic movement. Ancestors inspire across boundaries; movements ask for allegiance.

The core idea was never about a specific denomination. It was always democratic. It says experts don’t fully understand reality and then tell everyone else what to do. Instead, people living in a situation can learn to understand it, judge it, and change it. That’s why the method moved beyond the YCW, and why it will keep moving beyond whatever we create next.

The YCW was the container. See-Judge-Act was the method. Human dignity and responsible participation were the mission.

The vessel may change, but the mission can remain.

Thirty-two thousand people stood in that square because someone convinced them their own lives were worth examining. A nineteen-year-old in a Liège factory had something no expert did: firsthand knowledge of what the modern world was doing to a human being, and the right to speak. Now, we inhabit systems that observe us more intimately than any employer in 1957 imagined. They predict our moves, monetize our attention, and quietly claim judgments that once belonged to us alone.

So here is the question I cannot get past, and I do not think it is rhetorical:

If we let systems do the seeing, judging, and acting for us, what is left of the human being that Cardijn believed was valued more than all the gold in the world?

And can we still answer that in unison, or have we forgotten how?

This unfolded during the backyard fallout shelter craze. Berlin was in crisis, the Soviets were preparing for new atmospheric tests, and American families were digging shelters into their lawns. Time quoted a suburban Chicago man who declared that, once his shelter was ready, he would station a machine gun at the door to keep neighbors out if the bombs ever fell.

That comment triggered a real national debate, and this is the part to pay attention to. That fall, Rev. L.C. McHugh, S.J., an associate editor at the Jesuit weekly America, published “Ethics at the Shelter Doorway.” He argued, based on the tradition of legitimate self-defense, that a Christian father had the right to use force to keep neighbors away from the shelter door. Letting them in, he wrote, would be “misguided charity.” Let that settle for a moment.

A priest, drawing on Catholic moral theology in a Catholic magazine, concluded it was permissible to shoot your neighbor to protect your family’s air. The debate grew so heated that Arthur Schlesinger later claimed it helped persuade Kennedy to abandon the push for private shelters.

Thomas Merton responded to him in The Catholic Worker that November, strongly rejecting the idea of every person for themselves. The timing was not a coincidence. The month before, the same paper had published Merton’s essay “The Root of War Is Fear.”

Set those two documents side by side, and the heart of the problem leaps out. This is not a story of villains making wicked choices. It is about anxious, well-meaning, churchgoing men and women who reason themselves all the way to a machine gun—and discover that tradition seems to bless it. Now think about how many times you see this today on the news.

Nations play out the same drama on a grander stage. The world brims with countries professing a love of peace, but what they truly crave is a piece of something—a border, a seabed, a mineral belt, a path to the sea, or even a neighbor’s dignity. Every empire in history has named its hunger ‘security,’ and often believed it.

What Merton wrote in 1961 feels as urgent today as if it were penned this morning. The essay’s title captures the whole argument. Merton first drafted it as a chapter in New Seeds of Contemplation, then sharpened it with bold new opening paragraphs for Dorothy Day’s publication in The Catholic Worker in October 1961. These lines were so pointed that Merton’s own censors soon tried to silence his writing on war.

He did not just argue that fear breeds aggression. His claim cut deeper: the root of war is fear ~ “not so much the fear men have of one another as the fear they have of everything.” This means fear of being wrong, fear of being exposed, and fear so heavy we cannot carry it. So we cast it onto someone else, someone we can name, brace to fight, and try to overcome.

From there, Merton takes a path most peace writing sidesteps. He insists the true enemy of peace is not some distant power, but the “folly and blindness” within our own nation, our institutions, and our hearts. We are not innocent bystanders dragged into conflict. We are participants who have already, often silently and long before, decided our own violence is somehow justified.

So, we pray for peace. But Merton urges that our prayers must also seek the transformation of our society and its leaders. Otherwise, we are simply asking God to shield us from the consequences of a world we keep shaping.

A world war fought piecemeal.

Pope Francis expressed a similar idea in 2014 while standing in a military cemetery at Redipuglia. He called it “a world war fought piecemeal.” It is not just one war, but many, all connected, each having its own reasons, coming together to form something that no one involved would actually name.

Scan the map today: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Iran, the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and the simmering waters of the South China Sea. Piecemeal conflict is simply a phrase—it is a logistical reality. Weapons are built in one country, funded in another, and fired in a third, while shifts in grain prices and waves of refugees ripple out to people who may never know the conflict’s cause. Our global ties carry a moral weight we often overlook: no conflict is ever just someone else’s.

Merton’s disturbing question follows. Rather than asking, “Who started it?” he wonders what in our daily lives makes all this feel ordinary. Is it our investments? Our tax code? The entertainment that glamorizes violence? The language that calls killing “kinetic activity”? Or the way we have learned to scroll past suffering without a second thought?

Imagine, for a moment, a common curriculum.

Here is a thought experiment worth taking seriously.

Picture churches of every tradition—Catholic, Orthodox, mainline, evangelical, Anabaptist, Pentecostal—devoting a season to the same material. Not just another joint statement, which is easy to draft and easier to forget. Instead, a shared curriculum: homilies, sermons, adult classes, seminary lectures, and small groups all struggling with the same questions together.

The shape could follow the arc of conflict itself:

Conflict prevention means rolling up our sleeves for the unglamorous work of spotting what makes violence possible before it erupts. This means noticing dehumanizing words, the movement of weapons, and festering grievances with no outlet. Prevention is, above all, a spiritual discipline—more than just a policy. It is the practice of refusing to let a neighbor become a mere idea instead of a living person.

Conflict transformation draws on John Paul Lederach’s wisdom, echoed by Merton: you cannot “resolve” deep conflict as if it were a squabble over a fence. Instead, you must reshape the relationships and systems that keep sustaining it. Peacemaking unfolds over generations; the work is mostly about relationships, often local, and usually invisible.

Post-war reconciliation begins with truth and only then moves toward restoration—always in that order. It means remembering, grieving, making amends, and slowly daring to ask if former enemies can share life again. Churches have sometimes led the way and sometimes failed spectacularly. South Africa and Rwanda show the same institution in two different lights. This is why reconciliation must be woven into spiritual formation, not just tacked onto press releases.

All three stages are held up by real Christian peacebuilding in action. The Community of Sant’Egidio helped end Mozambique’s civil war. Christian Peacemaker Teams travel to places where presence itself is the main act. Parish networks in Colombia stand with displaced communities. The Mennonite tradition has quietly supplied much of the intellectual backbone for this work. These are not simply illustrations tacked onto doctrine. They are doctrine, alive in the only form that ever persuades.

Nonviolence as askesis

The piece most often overlooked is the very one that makes everything else possible.

Merton did not treat nonviolence as a trendy tactic. He saw it as askesis: ascetic discipline, training, and the deliberate reshaping of a self that might otherwise reach for a weapon. In Greek athletics, askesis meant practice. It is not a feeling, but a habit built through effort.

What does this training look like? It starts with silence, since someone who cannot bear silence will never hear an enemy. Then comes examining your conscience, focusing on your personal complicity rather than just personal tidiness. Next is the art of holding contradictions without letting them harden into anger—the core skill of de-escalation, whether in Geneva or at home. Fasting, giving, and prayer follow, training the desires that drive us to want more. Finally, when the moment arrives, it means accepting suffering rather than passing it on. This is where nonviolence stops being a preference and becomes a true commitment.

Merton also warned how easily this can go astray, and his words cut deep: nonviolence practiced from self-righteousness is just violence dressed up in civility. If I aim to prove I am the good one, I have missed the mark. The discipline must meet my own fear, not my opponent’s guilt.

Would it change anything?

The honest answer is that it might not, and it might.

But consider what the shelter debate truly revealed. Father McHugh’s argument was not foolish; it was carefully reasoned. He had tradition, distinctions, and logic on his side. What he lacked was the kind of formation that could withstand the fear he felt. Good doctrine without trained courage leads to conclusions that end at the barrel of a gun.

Formation is slow work, and its results are hard to count. No sermon has ever halted a missile in flight. Yet the notion that hearts change only through debate, laws, or exhaustion is thinly supported. What sincerely lessens the appetite for violence, time and again, is when people are trained to see it as unthinkable. That training must happen somewhere. For many, the last place it can still happen is in a congregation on Sunday morning.

Four steps follow, each small enough to begin this very week.

Examine yourself as closely as you scrutinize the world. Ask whether the policies, institutions, and purchases you support quietly make war more likely. Do this not just in theory, but in concrete, specific ways.

Learn nonviolence as a craft. Civil disobedience, accompaniment, moral protest, negotiation, sanctuary—these have their own literature and masters. Approach them as you would any skill you hope to use.

Lift the idea of one human family. This was Merton’s phrase, and it is why he reached out to Buddhists and Sufis even from his monastery. Cross-cultural and interfaith engagement is not an add-on for peacebuilding; it is key for tackling poverty, inequality, and fear at their roots.

Pray, and let your prayer demand something of you. For Merton, peace was never only political or only spiritual. If prayer does not eventually change how you vote, spend, speak, and forgive, it is unfinished.

In this vision, peace is not simply what arrives when fighting stops. It is a living practice, sustained by those willing to be trained and who have chosen to face the real front line: the fear inside themselves.

This is not passivity. It demands more courage than the alternative, which often only requires money.

The man in Chicago with the machine gun at his shelter door was no monster. He was afraid, and no one had ever taught him another way to respond. As it turned out, neither had his priest.

Sources

• Thomas Merton, “The Root of War Is Fear,” The Catholic Worker, October 1961; also New Seeds of Contemplation(New Directions, 1961), ch. 16.

• “Religion: Gun Thy Neighbor?” TIME, August 1961.

• L.C. McHugh, S.J., “Ethics at the Shelter Doorway,” America, 30 September 1961 — see America’s later retrospective and “The America editor who ruined nuclear fallout shelters forever”.

• James G. R. Cronin, “Fear Thy Neighbour: Merton and the 1961 Shelter Scare”, The Merton Journal.

• “Churchmen Debate Ethics of Fallout Shelters,” Christianity Today, 10 November 1961.

• “Kennedy, Rockefeller, and Civil Defense,” U.S. National Park Service.

• Pope Francis, homily at Redipuglia military cemetery, 13 September 2014.

On 8 October 1956, crowds flocked to a Minneapolis suburb to witness a marvel: Southdale Center, the first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall. Step inside, and it was always a perfect seventy-two degrees, unaffected by the wildest Minnesota weather. Beneath a soaring skylight, visitors sauntered through a lush garden court abounding in exotic birds, a goldfish pond, sculptures, and a group of songbirds in a grand cage. The press called it a wonder, and for many, it truly was.

Victor Gruen, the architect behind Southdale, was a Viennese Jew and devoted socialist who fled the Anschluss in 1938 with only eight dollars and his architecture degree, or so he liked to say. Gruen never intended to invent the shopping mall. He dreamed of building the heart of a town that did not yet exist.

In 1952, Gruen unveiled a sweeping vision for 484 acres. Just 84 were reserved for shops; the rest would have developed into apartments, homes, schools, a medical center, a park, and a lake. The enclosed court at the center was never meant to steal the show. It was designed as a piazza, a welcoming public square where neighbors would cross paths as naturally as breathing. Gruen wanted to give suburban America the vibrant center he remembered from Europe's cities.

But Gruen’s vision never came to life. As Southdale rose from the ground, the Dayton Company sold off the surrounding land to outside developers. The promised park and lake vanished, replaced by rows of tract houses. Only the lucrative 84 acres of retail were built, a blueprint that would be cloned across America, each time encircled by endless parking lots.

Gruen watched this for two decades. In a 1978 speech in London, he finally said it out loud:

I want to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony for those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.~ Victor Gruen, London, 1978

Here is the heart of the matter. The market didn't turn down Gruen’s dream; it embraced the profitable pieces and left the rest behind. No one stood up to oppose the park or claimed the schools were foolish. Shared spaces just had no way to pay their own way, so they faded before they began. Southdale is not only a tale of greed. It reveals what happens when a system perfects only what it can count, with no higher purpose to steer it.

Two years later and four hundred miles south, a Trappist monk stood on a Louisville street corner. He gazed at the same kind of busy crowd Gruen had imagined, but what he saw was something entirely different.

SEE

Joseph Cardijn, a Belgian priest who started the Young Christian Workers, introduced the See-Judge-Act method to the Church. It became part of official teaching in John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra (1961, §236). The steps are simple: first, look at the real situation; then, judge it using Christian principles; finally, decide what action to take. This is not a way to debate. It starts with the world as it really is, not with any theory you might have.

So: See. On 18 March 1958, Thomas Merton — cloistered, famous, and by his own admission somewhat pleased with his separateness — was standing in downtown Louisville at the corner of Fourth and Walnut. He wrote:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. ~ Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Notice the setting: right in the heart of the shopping district. The same kind of crowd, the same commercial street, the same postwar shoppers Gruen had envisioned. Yet Merton caught a hidden strand of connection among them, something no architect could construct and no store could sell. Three years before, he had captured this idea in a book title: No Man Is an Island.

Set the two men side by side, and the picture sharpens. Gruen saw that our built world made community nearly impossible: no center, no square, nowhere to gather. Merton, by contrast, recognized that community is woven into our very being, present before any walls go up. One diagnosed the problem; the other named what was at stake.

JUDGE

Now comes the judging step. This is where Catholic Social Teaching moves from a set of pious notes to a real tool for analysis.

Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum in 1891, standing between two systems which were both, in his reading, wrong about the human person. He rejected socialism because abolishing private property “would rob the lawful possessor” and strike at the family, the prior society. Liberal capitalism he rejected with equal force for having laid upon workers “a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.” He was not splitting the difference. He was refusing a shared premise: that the human being is fundamentally an economic unit whose relationships are downstream of production.

The tradition has held that line for 135 years. John Paul II put the question with unusual bluntness in Centesimus Annus (1991, §42). Should capitalism be the model for post-communist nations? If capitalism means “an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property... as well as free human creativity,” then yes. But if it means “a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality... then the reply is certainly negative.”

This is not a matter of compromise. It is about restoring the right order. The market excels as a servant yet falters as a master. The real question is not ‘market or state,’ but ‘what purpose does it serve, and to whom is it answerable?’

Which brings us to the principle that does the real work here, and the one that explains Southdale precisely. Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (1931, §79):

Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. ~ Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno §79

Subsidiarity is often mistaken for a simple plea for small government, but it is much richer than that. It is about where real life unfolds: in families, parishes, neighborhoods, guilds, unions, congregations, and city blocks. Larger bodies should lift these groups, not swallow them. Seen this way, subsidiarity critiques both socialism and capitalism for the same flaw: both erase society's middle layer. Central planning absorbs local groups into the state, while unchecked markets reduce them to consumers. In both cases, people are left alone before a vast, impersonal system, and the public square continues as a dream.

Gruen’s park belonged to no one, and the neighborhood that might have cherished it had not yet come together as a community with a voice. This was a failure of subsidiarity before it was a market failure. Without the middle layer, the market had no one to hear.

ACT

So, the answer is not to split the difference between Marx and Hayek, but to set our priorities straight. Property and business are genuine goods, as tradition has held since 1891, but only when based on the belief that creation belongs to all and private ownership is stewardship, not privilege. Solidarity is essential too, but it means a lasting devotion to the common good, not simply passing the buck to an agency. Subsidiarity binds both principles, insisting that work happen as close to home as possible.

In practice, this approach is quiet and rooted in the local. It takes shape in worker ownership and cooperatives, where those who risk also reap the rewards. Credit unions and community land trusts put capital in neighbors' hands. Parish and neighborhood groups can join forces to own, negotiate, or say no. Zoning laws can help towns rediscover their centers. The aim is shared ownership, not concentrating property in a few hands or in the state.

None of these solutions propagate like the mall model, and that is by design. They grow as neighborhoods do: by reproducing a pattern, never by stamping out identical copies.

Merton leaves us with the final, most demanding insight, for the Act step is where this custom frequently falters. He would say that no reform endures if people remain strangers. What happened at Fourth and Walnut was not a policy, but a person waking up to his connection with others. Every cooperative, land trust, and public square is a way to make that awakening real, turning the sense that ‘these people are mine and I am theirs’ into shared rules and responsibilities.

Gruen died in 1980, back in Vienna, a city with a true center. Merton died in 1968, twelve years after Southdale opened, still struggling with the illusion of separateness. Together, they left us a diagnosis: we are made for communion, yet we have built a country where communion has no home.

Stand at the corner of Fourth and Walnut. Remember the eighty-four acres that rose and the four hundred that never did. Then act—go and build the park.

Sources

Southdale Center opening and Gruen’s 1952 master plan: Minnesota Historical Society; MNopedia; Library of Congress, “This Month in Business History.” Gruen’s 1978 London remarks as widely reported. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966); No Man Is an Island (Harcourt, 1955). John XXIII, Mater et Magistra §236. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891). Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno §79 (1931). John Paul II, Centesimus Annus §42 (1991).