It’s uncomfortable when a Catholic hospital administrator discourages unionization while a local bishop endorses labor dignity. This contradiction can be resolved. Catholic institutions shouldn’t just accept worker organizing—they should welcome it as true to their identity.

WHAT THE CHURCH ACTUALLY TEACHES: THINK JOSEPH CARDINAL CARDIJN

Catholic social teaching does not speak in vague generalities on this point. Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, names the right to organize as a basic human right — one that must be exercised “without risk of reprisal.”

It does not say workers may organize if management permits it. It says this right belongs to workers as persons.

Think of the work of Joseph Cardinal Cardijn and organizing Young Christian Workers during the Industrial Revolution.

“Never has the worker problem experienced the dimension, significance or gravity that it has today,” ~ Joseph Cardijn.

The U.S. Catholic bishops reinforced this in their landmark 1986 pastoral letter, Economic Justice for All:

“All church institutions must also fully recognize the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively with their employers. No less than other employers, they must recognize the freedom of employees to choose their own representatives.” ~ U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for All (1986), §306

The bishops made their expectation clear: The Church must be an exemplary employer. This is a demand, not a suggestion. Yet, Catholic institutions often abandon this standard when it’s inconvenient.

A LABOR PRIEST PUT IT PLAINLY

Msgr. George Higgins, the Chicago-born priest who spent five decades as the Catholic Church’s most prominent labor advocate, had little patience for institutional evasion on this question. He argued throughout his ministry that the Church’s credibility on social justice was inseparable from how it treated its own workers. As he wrote:

“The right of workers to organize and bargain collectively is not merely a pragmatic arrangement tolerated by the Church. It is a moral imperative rooted in the nature of work and the dignity of the human person.” ~ Msgr. George G. Higgins, “The Yardstick” column

Higgins spent decades walking picket lines, mediating disputes, and insisting Church leaders practice what they preach. He warned that if a teaching isn’t enforced internally, it becomes just a slogan.

THOMAS MERTON ON WORK AND THE PERSON

The connection between labor rights and human dignity is not merely a matter of policy — it is, at its root, a spiritual one. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and one of the twentieth century’s most compelling Catholic voices, located the problem precisely in how institutions reduce persons to functions:

“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.” ~ Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Merton’s words take on uncomfortable weight when applied to Catholic employment practices. A worker who accepts that her wage is non-negotiable, that her schedule is set without her input, that her concerns will be heard only at management’s discretion — she has been invited to settle for too little.

The institution that extends that invitation, while proclaiming the dignity of the human person from its pulpits and press releases, has settled for a diminished version of its own mission.

WHY CATHOLIC WORKPLACES ARE DIFFERENT — AND WHY THAT RAISES THE STAKES

Catholic schools form children. Catholic hospitals care for the sick and dying. Catholic home care agencies support elders and people with disabilities. These are not neutral service transactions — they are acts of ministry, carried out by workers who are, in most cases, themselves people of faith or people who have chosen a vocation of care.

When workers are underpaid, overworked, or denied a meaningful voice in their working conditions, the moral contradiction is hard to skirt. The institution proclaims the common good while quietly managing labor costs. It celebrates human dignity in its mission statement while disciplining workers who try to exercise it.

The Catholic Labor Network has made this point directly: the Church’s social doctrine does not carve out an exception for Catholic employers. The labor rights it defends in the broader economy apply with equal force inside Catholic institutions — perhaps with greater force, given the Church’s public teaching role.

IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING — AND IT WORKS

Critics sometimes argue that unions and Catholic institutions are fundamentally incompatible — that collective bargaining introduces an adversarial dynamic into what should be a community of shared mission. New York’s Catholic institutions quietly disprove this every day.

• Archdiocese of New York Catholic Schools

• Teachers: Federation of Catholic Teachers (OPEIU)

• ArchCare

• CNAs & home health aides: SEIU 1199

• Catholic hospitals across New York

• Nurses: NYSNA · Healthcare workers: SEIU 1199

• Fordham University

• Clerical: OPEIU · Adjuncts: SEIU 200United · Grad assistants: CWA 1104

These are not anomalies or embarrassments to be explained away. They are evidence that union relations are not foreign to Catholic institutional life — they are already part of it.

In those institutions, the relationship between mission and employment practice can be lived honestly, because the workers who carry out that mission have a genuine voice in how it is done.

THE MORAL CASE, STATED

Unionization gives workers a voice in the decisions that most directly affect their lives: wages, scheduling, staffing levels, benefits, and workplace safety. In a Catholic setting, that voice is not a threat to mission — it is what makes mission credible. It is the difference between proclaiming human dignity and actually practicing it.

A Catholic institution that actively resists organizing sends a message it may not intend: that the people who carry out its work are primarily costs to be managed rather than persons to be respected.

A Catholic institution that genuinely welcomes organizing says something else entirely — that the dignity it proclaims belongs to everyone inside its doors, not just the people it serves.

The Church has spent more than a century building one of the most sophisticated bodies of social teaching the world has ever seen.

The question now is whether its own institutions will have the integrity to live by it — not as a reluctant concession, but as a form of witness

Integrating Thomas Merton, Joseph Cardijn, and Mortimer Adler

with the Traditions of Greek Philosophy and Enlightenment Thought

Introduction: The Problem of Knowing and Doing

There is a temptation, in every age, to separate the life of the mind from the life of action. Some think ideas about justice can be developed in libraries and then applied on the street. Others believe urgent social problems make the luxury of reflection impossible. Catholic Social Teaching (CST) rejects this separation at its root. Its deepest conviction is that authentic social transformation is impossible without interior transformation. Genuine contemplation does not withdraw us from the suffering world. Instead, it drives us more deeply into it.

Three thinkers illuminate this integration. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, showed that the contemplative life clarifies social reality. Joseph Cardijn, the Belgian priest who organized European workers, gave the Church the See, Judge, Act method, translating contemplation into action. Mortimer Adler, a philosopher and educator, showed how Plato, Aristotle, and their successors offer living resources for understanding humanity and justice.

Together, these three thinkers deepen and enrich the Church’s social tradition in ways that urgently matter for our moment. Comparing Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates—who emphasized rational contemplation and philosophical inquiry—with Enlightenment philosophers—who prioritized individual rights and reason—reveals CST’s distinctive vision. CST is more contemplative than the Greeks, with its spiritual focus; more communal than the Enlightenment, stressing social bonds; and more demanding than either, because it calls for the transformation not only of social structures but also of the human heart.

Part I: Thomas Merton — Contemplation as the Ground of Just Action

The False Self and the True Self

Thomas Merton’s most fundamental contribution to social thought is also his most interior: the distinction between the false self and the true self. The false self is the self we construct to gain others’ approval. It is made up of our roles, reputation, productivity, and standing. Merton argued that it is the source of both personal misery and social injustice. A person living from the false self cannot see others clearly. He can only see how they confirm or threaten his constructed identity.

The true self, by contrast, is the self known and loved by God — not an achievement but a gift, received in stillness and dispossession. Merton’s entire contemplative project was the gradual dismantling of the false self and the recovery of the true self in God. His crucial insight — which links him directly to CST’s personalism — is that this is not a private spiritual exercise. A person who has found their true self sees others differently. They see them not as competitors, threats, or instruments, but as fellow images of God, each bearing irreducible dignity.

“We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”~ Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal

This is the contemplative root of solidarity. Merton does not arrive at the unity of the human family through social contract theory or utilitarian calculation. He arrives at it by going deeper into his own silence and finding, at the center, not isolation but communion. When he stood at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, he was suddenly overwhelmed with love for the strangers passing by. He was not having a sentimental moment. He was perceiving, with the eyes of contemplation, the truth named by CST’s pillar of solidarity: we share a common humanity and a common destiny. The suffering of one is the concern of all.

Contemplation and Social Critique

Merton’s later writings, particularly Seeds of Destruction, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, and Faith and Violence, show that contemplative clarity does not lead to quietism. Instead, it yields a distinctive, penetrating form of social criticism. Because he has stepped back from the machinery of modern life, the monk can see it more truthfully than those entirely caught up in it. Merton wrote with devastating clarity about racism, the logic of nuclear deterrence, and the violence latent in consumer society. He also wrote about the spiritual emptiness that makes political totalitarianism possible.

His critique directly aligns with CST’s understanding of “structures of sin” — the social arrangements that institutionalize injustice and render it seem normal. John Paul II, in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, identified structures of sin as the concrete expression of personal sin writ large. The greed and desire for power of some people produce, over time, systems that oppress many. Merton’s contemplative sociology arrives at the same diagnosis from the inside: a society of false selves inevitably produces structures that serve the false self’s agenda — domination, accumulation, and the reduction of persons to functions.

What Merton adds to CST’s structural analysis is the insistence that structural reform alone is insufficient. You cannot build a just society with unjust souls. The activist who burns with righteous indignation but has not confronted his own pride, need for approval, and latent will to dominate will eventually reproduce in his organizations the very injustice he set out to oppose. This is not a counsel of despair but of realism: the transformation of social structures and the transformation of the human heart must go together.

Merton and the Greek Tradition

Merton was deeply read in the classical tradition, especially Neoplatonic mysticism, which shaped the Desert Fathers and medieval contemplatives. His relation to Plato is instructive: he shares Plato’s sense that the unexamined life is not worth living and that the journey toward truth is a movement away from illusion. For Merton, the allegory of the Cave is not merely a philosophical thought experiment but a description of the contemplative ascent from the false self into the light of God.

Yet Merton parts ways with Plato’s elitism. Plato’s philosopher-kings are the rare few who complete the ascent and return to govern. Merton’s call to contemplation is universal: every human being, regardless of education or social position, is capable of the silence in which the true self is found. The monastery is not a preserve for the spiritually gifted but a reminder to all of what every person ultimately is and is called to become.

Part II: Joseph Cardijn — See, Judge, Act: The Method That Changes the World

The Worker as Son and Daughter of God

Joseph Cardijn was born in 1882 to a working-class family in Belgium. His father died of an industrial accident when Cardijn was a teenager. From that moment, he dedicated his life to a single conviction: the working class had been baptized and redeemed by Christ, and the Church had a duty not merely to give workers charity but to form them as agents of their own liberation and the transformation of their world.

This conviction—that every worker possesses an inalienable, divinely rooted dignity—formed the personalist core of the Young Christian Workers movement (JOC) and of modern CST. Cardijn not only asserted this dignity in theory but built a movement with workers as its agents. He recognized that people learn by doing; transformation comes through engagement, not instruction. The Church’s social teaching remained abstract until embodied in the organized life of those it served.

“The greatest scandal is not that sinners exist, but that there are brilliant young people who remain unknown, unrecognized, and uncared for.”~ Joseph Cardijn

See, Judge, Act: A Contemplative Method

Cardijn’s methodological genius was the development of the See-Judge-Act process — the simple, powerful, and endlessly applicable three-step movement that became the pastoral methodology of the Second Vatican Council and of liberation theology, and that remains the operative method of CST education around the world.

See

Observe reality with unclouded eyes. What is actually happening to workers, to families, to the poor, to the environment? Not what we assume or fear or wish — but what is. This step requires the disciplined attention that Merton would call contemplative: the willingness to be present to reality without the filters of ideology, habit, or self-interest.

Judge

Evaluate what has been seen in the light of the Gospel, the natural law, and the Church’s social teaching. What do justice and love require? What does human dignity demand? This is the properly theological moment — bringing the tradition to bear on the concrete situation, not as an external imposition but as an illumination.

Act

Take concrete, organized, sustained action to change the situation in light of what has been seen and judged. Not vague good intentions but specific commitments, accountable to others and evaluated honestly over time. Adler would recognize this as the exercise of practical wisdom — the Aristotelian prudence that knows not only what is good in general but what is to be done here, now, by these people, in these circumstances.

What is remarkable about this method is that it holds together the contemplative and the active, the personal and the structural, the spiritual and the political. The “See” step is not merely sociological observation — it is the kind of seeing that Merton describes as the fruit of contemplation: clear, compassionate, free from the distortions of self-interest. The “Judge” step is not a mere application of rules but a moment of genuine discernment — the bringing of one’s whole person, including one’s faith and conscience, into contact with a concrete situation. The “Act” step is not blind activism but the fruit of the first two movements, calibrated by the wisdom of the tradition and the clarity of honest observation.

Cardijn understood that the workers of his era were not being de-Christianized primarily by argument, by atheistic philosophy, or anti-clerical literature. They were being de-Christianized by conditions: by the degradation of labor, by poverty that crushes the spirit, by the experience of being treated as a unit of production rather than as a person. CST’s response, Cardijn saw, must therefore be not primarily argumentative but transformative: it must change the conditions while simultaneously forming the persons who will sustain that change and deepen it over time.

Cardijn and the Eight Pillars

Each of CST’s eight pillars can be read through Cardijn’s method. The option for the poor is not simply a moral norm to be asserted — it is a lens for the See step: when we look at any social situation, we begin by asking how it affects the most vulnerable. The dignity of work is not merely a philosophical claim — it is a criterion for the Judge step: does this economic arrangement treat workers as persons or as tools? The common good is not a vague aspiration — it is the goal of the Act step: what concrete change, achieved by organized effort, will make it more possible for all to flourish?

Cardijn’s movement also embodied subsidiarity — the principle that decisions should be made at the lowest effective level, by the people most directly affected. The JOC was not a top-down organization that brought solutions to workers from educated elites. It was a movement in which workers themselves did the seeing, the judging, and the acting, formed by the Gospel and the teaching of the Church but empowered to be the primary agents of their own transformation.

Part III: Mortimer Adler — The Great Conversation and CST as Synthesis

The Great Conversation

Mortimer Adler, the philosopher, educator, and editor of the Great Books of the Western World, devoted his life to a proposition that sounds simple but has profound social implications: the greatest ideas in the Western tradition are not the exclusive property of academic specialists but are the common inheritance of every human being capable of reading and thinking. Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Augustine’s Confessions, Aquinas’s Summa, Locke’s Second Treatise, Kant’s Critique — these are not monuments to be admired from a distance but living texts that engage us in what Adler called the Great Conversation.

The Great Conversation is the ongoing dialogue, across centuries, about the ideas that matter most: justice, freedom, truth, beauty, God, the good life, and the best society. What Adler showed, through his monumental Syntopicon — an index of 102 Great Ideas as they appear across the entire Western tradition — is that these questions are not settled. Plato and Hobbes disagree about human nature. Aristotle and Kant disagree about the foundation of morality. Aquinas and Hume disagree about the existence of God. The conversation continues, and we are invited into it.

This has direct implications for how we understand CST’s relationship to classical philosophy and the Enlightenment. CST is not an outside interloper imposing religious dogma on a secular philosophical tradition. It is a participant — a major one — in the Great Conversation. It draws on Aristotle’s account of virtue and the common good, on Plato’s conviction that justice in the city mirrors justice in the soul, on the Stoic vision of natural law accessible to all human reason, and on the Enlightenment’s insights about rights and constitutional limits. And it brings to the conversation its own distinctive contributions: the theology of the person made in God’s image, the preferential option for the poor, and the vision of a society ordered by charity as well as justice.

Active Reading as Active Citizenship

Adler’s most widely read book, How to Read a Book, is not primarily a student manual. It is a philosophy of intellectual engagement. Adler distinguishes between passive reading — in which information flows into a reader who does nothing — and active reading, in which the reader engages the author in argument, asks questions of the text, marks where she agrees and disagrees, and makes the ideas her own by genuinely wrestling with them. This distinction maps onto Cardijn’s See-Judge-Act in a revealing way: passive reading is seeing without judging; active reading is the full contemplative movement from observation through judgment to appropriation.

Adler also insisted, throughout his career, that genuine education is not vocational training. The goal of education is not to produce skilled workers but to form human beings who understand the world they inhabit, who can reason about justice and freedom, who are capable of the civic deliberation that self-governance requires. This is the Aristotelian core of Adler’s project, and it connects directly to CST’s pillar of participation: a genuine common good requires citizens who are genuinely capable of contributing to the deliberations that shape it. A society of passive consumers, formed only for economic productivity, cannot sustain the common good.

“Not to engage in the pursuit of ideas is to live like ants instead of like men.”— Mortimer Adler.

Adler’s Aristotelianism and the Bridge to CST

Adler was, philosophically, an Aristotelian. He spent decades arguing that Aristotle’s account of the good life — as the life of virtue, practical wisdom, and genuine flourishing rather than mere preference satisfaction — remains the most adequate philosophical framework for ethics and politics. He eventually converted to Catholicism, finding in Thomas Aquinas the synthesis he had been seeking: a thinker who took Aristotle seriously as a philosopher, corrected him where revelation offered deeper insight, and integrated natural reason with theological wisdom into a coherent account of the human person and the common good.

This Thomistic synthesis is precisely what CST inherits and builds upon. When Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum speaks of workers’ natural rights, when Pius XI develops the principle of subsidiarity, when John XXIII grounds human rights in the natural law, when the Second Vatican Council speaks of the human person as a social being called to participate in the common good — all of this draws on the Aristotelian-Thomistic framework that Adler spent his career defending and explicating.

Adler adds something crucial to the standard presentation of CST’s philosophical roots, however: he shows that the Great Conversation is not finished. CST does not simply apply Aristotle to modern conditions; it advances the conversation by bringing resources — scriptural, theological, and pastoral — that Aristotle lacked. The option for the poor goes beyond anything in the Politics or the Nicomachean Ethics. Solidarity as a moral virtue named and practiced across national boundaries exceeds the Aristotelian framework of civic friendship. And the inviolable dignity of every human person, grounded in the imago Dei rather than in rational capacity, closes the gap that Aristotle’s framework left open — the gap through which slaves and women and non-citizens fell.

Part IV: The Eight Pillars Reconsidered

With Merton’s contemplative anthropology, Cardijn’s method, and Adler’s intellectual framework in view, each of CST’s eight pillars can be seen in a richer light — not merely as social norms but as expressions of a unified vision of what it means to see clearly, judge rightly, and act justly.

1. Life and Dignity of the Human Person

Merton’s true self/false self distinction gives this pillar its deepest grounding. The inviolable dignity of each person is not an abstract principle but a reality that contemplation makes visible. When we see others from the false self, we see threats, competitors, and instruments. When we see from the true self — from the place where we know ourselves as created and loved — we see the irreducible worth of every face we encounter. This is why CST’s personalism goes further than Kant’s rational dignity or Aristotle’s civic worth: it is rooted in a mode of perception that transforms the perceiver.

2. Rights and Responsibilities

Adler’s insistence on active rather than passive intellectual engagement applies here: rights without the formation of the persons who bear them are empty. The Enlightenment tradition, at its weakest, produces a culture of rights-assertion without corresponding moral formation — a community of individuals who know what they are owed but have not cultivated the virtues that enable them to discharge what they owe. Aristotle and CST agree that rights are only intelligible within a community of persons who are being formed in virtue. Cardijn’s movement exemplified this: it did not merely assert workers’ rights but formed workers who could exercise those rights responsibly and sustain the organizations through which they were vindicated.

3. Call to Family, Community, and Participation

This is the most Aristotelian of the pillars, and Adler’s defense of the classical tradition illuminates why. Aristotle’s claim that the human being is a “political animal” — a creature whose full flourishing requires genuine participation in the life of a community — is not a sociological observation but a metaphysical claim about what kind of being the human person is. Merton enriches this: genuine community requires persons who have done the interior work of finding the true self, because only such persons can offer genuine presence to others rather than merely using community for self-validation. Cardijn demonstrated it: the JOC was a school of genuine participation, in which workers took responsibility for their own formation, their own organizations, and their own communities.

4. Option for the Poor and Vulnerable

Cardijn’s entire life was an embodiment of this pillar. His See step always begins with the most vulnerable: who is being left out, exploited, invisible? His experience of his father’s death from industrial labor gave this an urgency that no amount of theological abstraction could supply. Merton adds the contemplative dimension: the preferential option for the poor is not primarily a political strategy but a spiritual discipline. It requires us to look at the world from the bottom, from the margins, where the falsities of the dominant culture are most visible. The prophets and the mystics share this vantage point, and it is no coincidence that, as his contemplative life deepened, Merton found himself increasingly preoccupied with the suffering of the poor, the victims of war, and the disinherited.

5. Dignity of Work and Rights of Workers

This is Cardijn’s home territory. His founding insight — that work is a participation in God’s creative activity and that every worker therefore possesses a dignity that economic arrangements must respect — anticipated by decades the fully developed CST teaching on labor. Aristotle’s disdain for manual work reflects the assumptions of a slave economy; CST’s theology of work represents a fundamental advance, made possible by the Incarnation’s affirmation of material existence and by the dignity of the carpenter from Nazareth.

6. Solidarity

Merton’s Louisville vision — his sudden overwhelming love for the strangers around him — is perhaps the most vivid description in modern spiritual literature of what solidarity feels like from the inside. It is not merely a political commitment but a form of perception: seeing others as they are, as fellow images of God, as persons whose suffering is genuinely one’s own concern. Adler’s Great Conversation supports this in an unexpected way: the recognition that the deepest human questions — about justice, freedom, the good life, the meaning of death — are shared across all cultures and all centuries is itself a form of solidarity. We are not strangers to each other; we are participants in the same conversation.

7. Care for Creation

Merton’s contemplative vision of nature as sacrament — as the transparent medium through which the divine creativity shines — anticipates the ecological turn of Laudato Si’. His time at the hermitage, his deep attention to the natural world, his journals’ lyrical accounts of dawn and rain and the sounds of animals, all reflect the contemplative recognition that creation is not merely raw material for human exploitation but the expression of a divine generosity that calls for gratitude and stewardship. Aristotle’s teleological vision of nature supports this: if all things are ordered toward their proper ends, then to treat nature as mere matter to be dominated is to misread it fundamentally.

8. The Common Good

Adler’s lifelong argument for the liberal arts as the birthright of every citizen — not a luxury for elites but the necessary condition of genuine participation in civic life — is a profound contribution to the understanding of the common good. A genuine common good requires citizens who are capable of the deliberation that shapes it. Cardijn’s method is the practical form of this: See-Judge-Act forms persons who are capable of analyzing their situation, bringing moral wisdom to bear on it, and acting with others to change it. Merton’s contemplative anthropology grounds the whole: a common good that is genuinely common — that reaches across every class, race, and nationality — requires the transformation of the hearts that seek it.

Part V: The Greek Tradition — Virtue Ethics and Its Limits

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle all assume that ethics is about forming the soul and ordering life toward the good, not merely maximizing preference or pleasure. This makes them natural conversation partners for CST, which also insists that social structures must serve human flourishing and not reduce persons to economic units. But the conversation reveals important differences that Merton, Cardijn, and Adler help us to see more precisely.

Socrates: Self-Examination and Its Limits

Socrates’ great contribution is the insistence that the unexamined life is not worth living—a principle that Merton would have recognized as a philosophical anticipation of the contemplative tradition’s emphasis on self-knowledge. But Socratic self-examination is primarily intellectual: its goal is to know what one does and does not know, and ultimately to know what justice and virtue are. Merton’s self-examination goes deeper: it is not merely the examination of one’s beliefs but the stripping away of the false self, the encounter with one’s own emptiness, and the discovery of the true self in God. And Cardijn would note that Socratic examination takes place among educated Athenian citizens; the workers of the fifth century BCE are absent from the dialogue.

Plato: Vision and Hierarchy

Plato’s Republic offers a vision of justice as the proper ordering of the soul and the city — each part performing its function, the whole harmonized by wisdom. There is something compelling in this vision, and Merton himself is drawn to the Platonic tradition of ascent, of the soul’s movement toward the light. But Plato’s city is hierarchical in a way that CST cannot accept: the philosopher-rulers see the Good; the warriors execute their orders; the producers sustain the material base. There is no option for the poor, no solidarity that crosses class lines, no recognition that the slave in the household or the artisan at the forge possesses the same dignity as the philosopher in the Academy.

Aristotle: The Most Congenial Partner

Aristotle remains CST’s most important philosophical interlocutor. His account of virtue, practical wisdom, the common good, the natural sociality of persons, and the teleological ordering of human life provides the framework within which CST’s social teaching has consistently been articulated, especially in its Thomistic form. Adler spent decades arguing that Aristotle’s ethics are not merely historically interesting but are the most adequate philosophical account of the good life available to human reason.

But Aristotle’s limits are also real. His defense of natural slavery in the Politics, his restricted circle of civic participation, and his assumption that leisure and contemplation are only possible for those who are freed from manual labor — all of these reflect the assumptions of an ancient polis economy that CST’s theology of the person and Cardijn’s theology of work definitively overcome. The worker, for Aristotle, lives at the margins of the good life. For Cardijn and CST, the worker is at the center of God’s design for humanity.

Part VI: The Enlightenment — Rights, Reason, and What Is Missing

The Enlightenment shifted the center of gravity from virtue and teleology toward individual rights, autonomy, reason, and social contract theory. This brought genuine gains — liberty of conscience, constitutional limits on power, universal human rights — but it also tended to weaken the older ideas of natural moral order, shared moral ends, and the thick moral ecology of family, virtue, and religious formation.

Locke and the Natural Law

John Locke is the Enlightenment thinker closest to CST. His account of natural rights is explicitly grounded in natural law, and his natural law is explicitly grounded in a creator God who has endowed humanity with reason and made persons equal by nature. Adler recognized Locke as a genuine conversation partner in the tradition of natural law that runs from Cicero through Aquinas. But Locke’s framework begins to separate from CST at precisely the point where the option for the poor is at stake: Locke’s natural right of property, once it has been appropriated by the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation, becomes a shield against exactly the redistribution and structural reform that CST’s social teaching requires.

Kant and Rational Dignity

Kant’s moral philosophy, with its insistence that rational persons must always be treated as ends and never merely as means, is the Enlightenment’s strongest affirmation of human dignity. Merton would have found in Kant a philosopher who takes seriously the danger of treating persons as objects, which is what the false self does to others, and what industrial capitalism does to workers. But Kant’s dignity is functional: it belongs to rational agents. Those whose rational agency is compromised — the unborn, the severely disabled, the dying — receive less clear protection in Kant’s framework than CST demands. And Kant’s moral agent is strikingly solitary: the categorical imperative is addressed to the individual conscience, not to the community of persons formed in virtue through shared practices and traditions.

Rousseau and the Social Contract

Rousseau’s passion for equality and his critique of the corrupting effects of private property resonate with CST’s option for the poor. But Rousseau’s social contract dissolves natural law into the general will — a majority or collective consensus that, in practice, can justify coercion in the name of freedom. Cardijn’s method is a check on this danger: the See step requires honest attention to what is actually happening to actual people, not what the theory says should be happening. The judge’s step requires criteria that transcend the consensus of the powerful, which is why CST appeals to natural law and the Gospel rather than to democratic agreement alone.

Utilitarianism and Its Limits

Bentham and Mill’s utilitarianism — the maximization of aggregate happiness — is the Enlightenment framework most directly opposed to CST’s insistence on the inviolable dignity of each person. If the greatest happiness of the greatest number requires that some individuals be sacrificed — the disabled, the unborn, the inconvenient elderly — utilitarianism has no principled objection. This is the consequence of severing ethics from its anthropological roots in the theology of the person. Adler argued throughout his career that utilitarianism fails philosophically because it cannot generate a genuine account of human flourishing — it can only count and calculate. Merton’s contemplative anthropology offers the deepest response: the intrinsic worth of each person is not something discovered by calculation but something seen, by the eyes of contemplation, in the face of the other.

Part VII: Seeing Together — Contemplation, Conversion, and the Common Good

Catholic Social Teaching, classical philosophy, and Enlightenment thought are not three independent systems to be compared and contrasted at a comfortable analytical distance. They are participants in the Great Conversation that Adler described — a conversation about the most urgent human questions, carried on across centuries, and requiring the active engagement of every person capable of thought and action. The three thinkers examined in this essay — Merton, Cardijn, and Adler — each model a different aspect of this engagement.

Merton shows us what it means to see. The contemplative life is not withdrawal from the world but the development of a quality of attention — clear, compassionate, free from the distortions of the false self — that makes genuine social vision possible. Before we can judge what justice requires, we must see what is actually happening, to whom, and why. This is not a merely intellectual skill but a spiritual discipline, requiring the ongoing conversion of the heart that Merton called the death of the false self.

Cardijn shows us what it means to judge and act. His See-Judge-Act method is the bridge between contemplative clarity and effective social transformation. It takes both the particularity of concrete situations — the actual conditions of actual workers in actual places — seriously, as well as the universality of the moral criteria that CST brings to bear on those conditions. And it insists that judgment must issue in action: organized, sustained, accountable, and evaluated honestly over time. Ideas without action are the luxury of the detached observer. Action without ideas is the violence of the ideologue. Cardijn’s method holds them together.

Adler shows us what it means to think. The Great Conversation is not a possession of the educated elite but the inheritance of every human being. Every worker on Cardijn’s factory floor, every person in Merton’s Louisville crowd, is invited into the conversation about justice, freedom, the good life, and the common good. This is CST’s most demanding claim and its most hopeful one: that a better world is possible, that it requires the transformation of persons and structures together, and that every human being — regardless of class, education, or social position — possesses the dignity and the capacity to contribute to its making.

“The monk is not defined by his task, his usefulness. He is a person who has been called to the desert of the spirit, not to get things done, but to be.”

— Thomas Merton

The thesis with which we began holds, and can now be stated with greater precision: CST is more Aristotelian than the Enlightenment in its concern for virtue, teleology, and the common good — and Adler helps us see why Aristotle remains indispensable to this conversation. CST is more universal and personalist than the Greek polis — and Cardijn’s option for the poor shows what this universalism looks like in practice, when it reaches the factory floor and the shantytown. And CST is more contemplative than either tradition — because Merton shows us that the transformation of the world begins with the transformation of the heart that perceives it.

A better world is not built by better social programs alone, nor by better arguments alone, nor by better intentions alone. It is built by people like you and me, who have learned to see clearly, to judge in the light of what is deepest and truest, and to act together with courage, patience, and love. This is what Catholic Social Teaching asks of us. This is what Merton, Cardijn, and Adler — each in his own way, each from his own vantage point in the Great Conversation — show us how to begin.

In ten days, we celebrate the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum. More than a century ago, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerum Novarum—”On the New Things”—to address the social upheaval of industrial capitalism. His central message—labor is not a commodity, workers deserve dignity, and justice is essential—remains as urgent today as ever. This text argues that revisiting the core lessons of Rerum Novarum, through the voices of Leo XIII, Cardijn, and Merton, can provide a guiding framework for responding to the challenges of work, technology, and justice in our own time.

Three figures help us hear that message today: Thomas Merton, the monk who paid close attention to the world; Joseph Cardijn, the Belgian priest who lost his father to harsh labor and never forgot it; and Leo XIII, who wrote boldly for dignity. Their perspectives bring Rerum Novarum’s challenge into the present.

Together, they offer something we need urgently right now: a way of seeing what is actually happening around us, a way of judging it honestly in light of the Gospel, and a way of acting that is neither naive nor despairing. That, in essence, is what Joseph Cardijn called the See-Judge-Act method. And it turns out to be a remarkably good framework for navigating the “new things” of our own time.

Joseph Cardijn: The Man Who Started with a Coffin

Before exploring the method, it is important to understand the individual behind it.

Joseph Cardijn was born in 1882 outside Brussels to a working-class Catholic family. His father, Henri, was a coal gas worker — the kind of man Rerum Novarum was written about but who rarely got to read it. Henri Cardijn died young, from an illness directly connected to his labor. His son never got over it and never intended to.

Cardijn became a priest and threw himself into the lives of young workers — factory hands, shop girls, apprentices, domestic servants ~ people who left school at thirteen or fourteen and disappeared into an industrial economy that showed little interest in their souls. He founded the Young Christian Workers movement (known in French as the Jocistes, or JOC — Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne) in 1925, and it spread to over a hundred countries.

His well-known declaration continues to resonate: “Every worker is worth more than all the gold in the world.”

Cardijn was made a Cardinal by Pope Paul VI in 1965, the evening before the close of the Second Vatican Council, where his influence on Gaudium et Spes and Catholic social thought had already been profound. He died in 1967. His cause for beatification is open. Whether or not he is eventually canonized, his method has already shaped the Church more than most people realize.

See: Looking at What Is Actually There

The first movement of See-Judge-Act is deceptively simple. Before you can judge anything, you have to look at it clearly and honestly. Not the version of it that is comfortable. Not the abstract version. The actual reality in front of you.

Cardijn was insistent about this. He trained young workers to observe their own lives — their working conditions, wages, relationships, and fears — with open eyes and without flinching. He believed that most injustice survives not because people approve of it, but because they have stopped noticing it. Familiarity is a great anesthetic.

Thomas Merton understood the same thing from a very different vantage point. From his monastery in Kentucky, Merton warned against a culture that trains us to live on the surface — distracted, fragmented, and cut off from our own deepest selves. When that happens, we start accepting a counterfeit version of progress: faster is better, bigger is better, and more efficient is better. We stop asking whether any of it is actually good. We stop seeing.

This is why contemplation, for Merton, was not a retreat from the world. It was the practice of seeing it as it actually is, without the filters of habit, comfort, or self-interest. A contemplative person is not less engaged with the world. They see it more clearly.

When we examine the modern workplace with openness, what do we find? We see algorithmic management — software that decides your schedule, monitors your pace, scores your performance, and sometimes ends your employment, all without a human being making a judgment call. We see automation quietly eliminating jobs that people depended on for decades, while the productivity gains flow almost entirely to shareholders. We see precarious, gig-based work that strips away the stability that once allowed a family to plan for the future. We see surveillance — tracking software on the work laptop, cameras on the warehouse floor — that treats employees less like people and more like variables to be optimized.

Many people today — maybe some of you reading this — feel invisible in their work. Others carry a low-grade anxiety that they could be replaced tomorrow by a machine, a cheaper contractor, or an algorithm that doesn’t need health insurance. Those in their 50s have a particular vantage point on all of this: you have watched the workforce transform over the course of a single career. You remember what it felt like before. That memory is not nostalgia. It is evidence. And Cardijn would tell you it is the beginning of wisdom.

Judge: Measuring What We See Against the Gospel

Seeing clearly is the beginning. The second movement — Judge — asks us to evaluate what we have seen in the light of something deeper than economic logic or market efficiency. For Cardijn, that light was the Gospel. For Leo XIII, it was the natural law and the dignity of the human person. They are, in the end, pointing at the same thing.

This is precisely where Rerum Novarum remains prophetic. Leo XIII defended the right to private property, but he insisted that property carries a social purpose — it is not simply yours to do with as you please if others are harmed. He defended the dignity of labor and insisted that workers are owed just wages and humane treatment. He rejected both ruthless capitalism and socialism, because both — in their different ways — can end up treating persons as means rather than ends. At the heart of the encyclical is a truth that should be embarrassingly obvious but apparently needs repeating in every generation: the economy exists to serve the human person, not the other way around.

Merton brings a crucial complement to this judgment. He reminds us that clear moral reasoning requires inner freedom — the kind that comes from honest self-examination and silence. A person who has never questioned their culture’s assumptions cannot judge it. A community that mistakes busyness for virtue cannot ask whether its busyness is actually good. Before we can judge our economic arrangements rightly, we need some interior space in which to do the judging. That is not a weakness. That is basic moral hygiene.

Cardijn’s judgment was characteristically direct. He looked at the young workers of his day and said: The system is treating you as less than human, and that is a sin — not just a policy failure, but a sin. He insisted that workers were not passive recipients of the Church’s charity. They were people of dignity, capable of understanding their own situation, capable of acting on it, and called by their baptism to do so. The laity are not helpers in the Church’s mission. They are the Church’s presence in the world.

That insight plays out differently when applied to artificial intelligence, digital platforms, and automated systems. These are not inherently evil. They can be remarkable tools. But when they are used to deepen inequality, to concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands, or to make it easier to sort, score, monitor, and discard human beings at scale — that is a moral failure, not merely a technical one. The Church does not need to oppose technology to critique its misuse. It only needs to keep saying what should never need saying: a human being is never just data. Never just output. Never just a productive unit.

Judging our moment honestly means sitting with that statement long enough to feel its weight — and then asking where, in our own lives and workplaces, we are still treating people as productive units.

Act: Doing Something About It, Here and Now

This is where Cardijn pushes us hardest, and where Catholic social reflection most often gets stuck.

Seeing and judging are just beginnings. Acting—taking real, sometimes costly steps to change things—is where intentions often stall. Cardijn insisted faith must lead to action. See-Judge-Act is a way of life, practiced continually among ordinary people.

What does Act look like for adults who are now in their 40s,50s, 60s + — people with influence, experience, organizational knowledge, and often genuine power to shape the environments they inhabit?

It might look like a manager who decides that the algorithmic performance review system their company uses is stripping people of their dignity — and says so in the meeting where everyone else is nodding along. It might look like a consumer who starts asking inconvenient questions about the supply chains behind the prices they enjoy. It might look like a parishioner who brings the language of Rerum Novarum into a conversation about their city’s affordable housing crisis, or a mentor who takes the time actually to see a younger worker who feels invisible.

Cardijn’s “like by like” principle is worth remembering here. He believed that workers were best reached by other workers — not by clergy or academics arriving from outside with answers, but by people who knew the reality from the inside. The same logic applies today. The person best positioned to humanize a workplace is usually someone who works there. You.

Here, Merton and Cardijn come together surprisingly. Merton insisted that authentic action flows from a contemplative foundation — that if we skip the seeing and rush straight to the doing, we often reproduce the very problems we were trying to solve, just under new management. Cardijn would agree. His small group method — what we now call the “cell” or inquiry group — was explicitly designed to slow people down before speeding them up: observe, reflect, then move. The action that follows genuine seeing and honest judging is qualitatively different from that of a simple reaction.

For Our Moment: Leo XIV and the Questions That Remain

As we enter the early years of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate, this three-voice conversation feels more timely than ever. Whether his forthcoming social teaching is formally titled Magnifica Humanitas or something else, the direction is clear: the Church must speak again, and speak plainly, about human dignity in a moment of profound disruption.

The challenge today is not only how to protect workers. It is about protecting what it means to be human in a world of systems we barely understand and do not fully control. That is a profoundly Catholic question — and it is exactly the kind of question that Cardijn’s method was built for. See what is actually happening. Judge it against the dignity of the human person. Act, concretely and together, to change what needs to be changed.

Leo XIII gave us the moral framework. Merton gave us the inner life to sustain it. Cardijn gave us the method to put it to work.

In the end, the “new things” of every age are not just new machines or new markets. They are new tests of whether we will still recognize one another as brothers and sisters — whether the people we work alongside, compete with, or never see at all still register to us as fully human.

Merton helps us see that. Rerum Novarum helps us judge it. Cardijn sends us back into the world to do something about it. The Gospel gives us the reason to try.

And that reason is simple to name, though genuinely hard to live: dignity, justice, solidarity, and love.

Questions to Sit With

These are not quiz questions. They are invitations for honest reflection — the kind worth turning over slowly, perhaps in conversation with someone you trust, or in a small group willing to go somewhere real together. They follow the shape of Cardijn’s own method.

See

1. Look at your actual working life right now — or the one you recently left. What do you observe about how people are treated? Not the official version, but what you genuinely see day to day. Who feels seen? Who doesn’t? What has changed in the past decade that nobody talks about openly?

2. Technology has reshaped nearly every workplace in the past thirty years. What has genuinely improved because of it? What has quietly been lost — and have we grieved that loss, or moved on without noticing?

Judge

1. Cardijn insisted that every worker is worth more than all the gold in the world. Do the systems around you — economic, organizational, political — actually operate as if that were true? Where do they fall short, and what justifications do we use to make peace with the gap?

2. Merton warned against a culture that trains us to live on the surface, too busy and distracted to see clearly. Where in your own life do you actually slow down? Is it enough? And if not, what has filled the space that used to belong to reflection?

Act

1. Cardijn believed that the laity — ordinary people in their workplaces, neighborhoods, and families — are not helpers of the Church’s mission, but the Church’s presence in those spaces. What would it mean for you to take that seriously this week? Not in a grand sense, but in one specific, concrete situation you are already in.

2. See-Judge-Act is not meant to be done alone. Cardijn’s method works in small groups — people who know the same reality from the inside and can hold each other accountable. Do you have a community like that? A small group, a trusted circle, a parish team willing to go beyond pleasantries? If not, what would it take to build one?

3. We are at a crossroads with artificial intelligence that feels, in some ways, like the industrial revolution felt to Leo XIII’s contemporaries. What “new thing” worries you most about the world your children and grandchildren are inheriting? And what is the one action — however small — that is actually within your reach to take in response?

Rumor has it that in ten days Pope Leo XIV will issue his first Encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”). When the document is released, read it using the See - Judge - Act method of understanding. Get together with your small groups, parish, and social friends to discuss what the document means in today’s world. Do what Cardijn and Merton would do, and, most especially, plan how you will act and then act on what you plan.

Introduction

The See, Judge, Act method used in this and other Gospel Enquiries was developed by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn. He gave a series of lectures in 1949, which he titled “The young worker faces life.” His third lecture was about the “mystery of vocation.” I choose this lecture because it relates to the Gospel we are about to read.

Cardijn said to the YCW leaders who had gathered at Godinne, in Belgium,

“God calls everyone without exception … Unceasingly He goes on calling all people.” God’s call is to every person to know, love and serve God, here on earth and to be happy with God in heaven forever.

I memorised this statement when I was in primary school and I have carried it with me ever since as a prayer and as a reminder of my vocation, given to me when I was baptised.

When Cardijn addressed the YCW leaders in 1949, he said, “Witnesses to Christ are needed today in the whole of life, in all the aspects of life, in all the problems of life.” This truth of faith underpins what is often referred to as the lay apostolate: all lay people are called to give witness to Christ, who is the way, the truth and the life.

The Gospel

Jesus said to his disciples:

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me. There are many rooms in my Father’s house; if there were not, I should have told you. I am going now to prepare a place for you, and after I have gone and prepared you a place, I shall return to take you with me; so that where I am

you may be too. You know the way to the place where I am going.’

Thomas said, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?’

Jesus said: ‘I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you know me, you know my Father too. From this moment you know him and have seen him.’

Philip said, ‘Lord, let us see the Father and then we shall be satisfied.’

‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip,’ said Jesus to him ‘and you still do not know me? To have seen me is to have seen the Father, so how can you say, “Let us see the Father”? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak as from myself: it is the Father, living in me, who is doing this work. You must believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; believe it on the evidence of this work, if for no other reason. I tell you most solemnly,

whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself,

he will perform even greater works, because I am going to the Father.’ (John 14:1-12)

The Enquiry

See

• Choose one thing that Jesus says to his disciples and let that be the focus of this enquiry. Imagine that Jesus addresses this to you. Put in your own words what you hear Jesus say to you.

• Do you have any friends who do not follow Jesus, that is, they are not Christian, even though they are good people? How is your life different from theirs because of what you believe about Jesus and what he has just said to you?

• If people can be good without following Jesus, why be bothered with Church and sacraments and practicing your faith?

Judge

• What do you think about Philip’s statement to Jesus? And what do you think about Jesus’ response to him?

• How do you interpret Jesus’ words: ‘I tell you most solemnly, whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself, he will perform even greater works, because I am going to the Father.’ ? Is this something that you aspire to?

• What does Jesus say that challenges you about how you live your faith?

Act

• What was Jesus trying to achieve through having this conversation with his disciples? Is this the mission given to every baptised person?

• What small action can you carry out to help Jesus achieve this goal?

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

Image Source: Sharon Tate Soberon (Creator), “Increase our FAITH!”, Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0

Worth reading: “The young worker faces life” can be found in Challenge to Action: Forming Leaders for Transformation, a collection of addresses given by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn. The collection was translated and compiled by Fr Eugene Langdale and his translation edited later by Dr Stefan Gigacz. The copy of Challenge to Action used in this Enquiry was published in 2020 by the Australian Cardijn Institute. The ePub version can be downloaded from here.

If you step back and use the See-Judge-Act method, you can almost see the pattern of his life as a kind of creative tension. Benedict of Nursia gave him a structure—a grammar for living the monastic life. Francis of Assisi gave him something else entirely: a kind of poetry, a vision of radical simplicity and love for the world. And the pull toward the hermit life gave him a way to hold those two instincts together without having to resolve them too quickly, which leads me to say he would have been more himself in a Benedictine monastery in the US, maybe one just a hundred miles or so north.

As a Trappist monk, Merton didn’t reject his vocation. That would be too simple, and frankly, untrue. What he seems to have done instead is try to stretch it—gently but persistently—from the inside. His writings suggest that he felt deeply at home in a more Benedictine vision of monastic life, one that allowed for a wider, more humane engagement with the world. At the same time, he never lost that early Franciscan instinct: a desire for simplicity, fraternity, and a love that moves outward rather than closing in on itself.

You can see this especially in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, where he seems to lean toward what he understood as Benedict’s openness to the world, rather than the stricter enclosure he experienced in his own Cistercian setting. That tension never quite disappears—but it becomes fruitful.

So it may be fair to say that Merton didn’t outgrow his Trappist life so much as deepen it, even complicate it. He remained where he was, but kept widening the space—making room for Benedict’s balance, Francis’s joy, and the solitude of the hermit. And in doing so, he became more fully himself, not by choosing one path over another, but by learning how to live at their intersection.

What a Trappist Monk and Three Fourth-Century Theologians Want to Tell You About Prayer, Justice, and the Shining Sun

In 1958, Thomas Merton stepped into a shopping district in Louisville. Something extraordinary happens.

“I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs... There is no way to tell people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”~Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966)

Years of contemplation did not make Merton indifferent to the people around him. It made him see them more clearly and love them more radically. He felt for them more urgently than ever before. Going deeper in prayer sent him further out into the world.

This argument—going deeper in prayer leads outward—has deep roots.

Centuries earlier, in the high desert of Asia Minor, three friends were asking similar questions.

Three friends — Basil of Caesarea, his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their classmate Gregory of Nazianzus — were asking the same questions. We call them the Cappadocian Fathers. They shaped Christian theology more profoundly than almost any thinkers outside Scripture. They believed, with fierce conviction, that authentic faith must take visible, costly shape in the world.

Basil built what historians regard as one of the first hospitals in human history — a sprawling complex of wards, poorhouses, and a hospice for lepers at a time when lepers were treated as untouchable. He ran it himself. He served the patients himself. And he preached about wealth in terms that would clear most modern church halls:

“The bread you do not use is the bread of the hungry. The garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of the one who is naked. The money you hoard is the money of the poor.” ~ Basil the Great, Homily on ‘I Will Tear Down My Barns’

His brother Gregory of Nyssa, the quieter mystic of the three, went even further. He may be the first Christian writer to condemn slavery explicitly on theological grounds. You cannot own a person who bears the image of God. His mystical theology claimed the soul always moves toward an infinite God it can never fully grasp. That idea carried a radical social implication: If no one possesses God absolutely, then no one has absolute authority over anyone else.

The Surprise at the Heart of This Tradition

What Merton and the Cappadocians share is not a political program. It is a moral imagination — a way of seeing that keeps getting surprised by the dignity of other people.

Merton spent his later monastic years writing urgently about war, racism, and economic inequality — not despite his contemplative life, but because of it. He was, by his own account, drawn further into concern for the world the further he went into prayer. His superiors were not always pleased. He was placed under a publishing ban for a period over his anti-war writings. He found ways around it.

“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.” ~Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)

Settling for too little. It could describe a spiritual life that remains safely interior, untouched by the suffering neighbor’s face. It could describe a faith that mistakes doctrinal correctness for the whole of the gospel. It could describe a church so comfortable with power that it has forgotten what it is for.

Merton and the Cappadocians resist all of it. They push us toward something harder and more beautiful. This is a contemplation that opens the eyes, not closes them, and a compassion that is rooted deep enough to last.

So what does this tradition mean for us today?

Three things, briefly.

Prayer is not an escape from the world. It is preparation for the return. If your prayer life is not, in some way, making you more awake to the suffering around you, it is worth asking: what exactly is happening in that prayer?

Charity without contemplation burns out. Action without interiority runs dry. The Cappadocians and Merton both had deep wells of prayer before they had anything to offer the world. You cannot pour from an empty vessel, and the tradition gives you permission — even an obligation — to go deep before you go wide.

The church’s credibility is in its mercy, not its power. Basil’s hospital. Gregory of Nyssa’s theology of the image of God. Merton’s letters were written from a monastery to a world on fire.

The tradition speaks with one voice: put on the apron. The rest follows, or it doesn’t. But the apron comes first.

We are living through a societal phase change right now—a fundamental reshaping of how we work, relate, make decisions, raise children, find community, and understand ourselves. This shift is driven by politics, which is being driven by artificial intelligence, social media, algorithmic governance, automation, surveillance technology, and the decline of local, face-to-face institutions that once held communities together. Politics used to be local, we would say. But if that is true, then why is all the money spent on media?

This isn’t a reason for panic. But it is a serious reason. Because phase changes don’t wait for us to be ready, and they don’t distribute their costs and benefits evenly.

What does it mean to lead for the common good when the world is being reshaped beneath us? The Catholic social tradition offers five principles crafted for this very moment. Added to the wisdom of three prophetic thinkers — Thomas Merton, Marshall McLuhan, and Mortimer Adler — they form a framework not to predict the future, but to help us navigate it faithfully.

Human Dignity

The most fundamental claim in Catholic social thought is also the most countercultural one right now: every human being is created in the image of God. The theological term is imago Dei. What it means, practically and politically, is that no person can ever be reduced to a number, a category, a data profile, or a prediction.

Emerging technology creates enormous pressure to do exactly that. Credit scores shape what families can borrow. Hiring algorithms screen résumés before any human reads them. Recommendation engines decide what news we see, what products we’re shown, what ideas we’re exposed to — based not on what’s true or good or important, but on what will keep us engaged. In the criminal justice system, algorithmic tools predict the likelihood of reoffending and influence sentencing. In schools, software flags students’ emotional states and academic trajectories before a teacher has had a chance to know them.

These systems aren’t usually malicious. Most are built by people trying to do useful work. But there is a structural tendency embedded in how they operate: they treat human beings as outputs. You are the sum of your patterns. You are, in the language of machine learning, a prediction.

Thomas Merton — writing in the 1960s, long before any of this existed in its current form — warned against what he called the “enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds.” Today, some of that rubbish is the assumption that if a system runs on data, it must be neutral — that efficiency and fairness are the same thing. They are not.

Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist, gave us an insight that a Jesuit priest, John Culkin, later distilled into a memorable phrase: “We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” McLuhan’s own version of this idea runs throughout his work, including his landmark book Understanding Media, where he argued that every technology extends some human faculty — but in doing so, it also amputates another. The printing press extended the reach of the written word and diminished the oral tradition. Television extended visual storytelling and shortened the attention span required for sustained reading. What does our current wave of technology extend? Speed. Pattern recognition. Global reach. What might it amputate? Patience. Presence. The irreducible human act of looking at another person and deciding: this person matters, and I want to understand them.

Mortimer Adler, the philosopher and lifelong champion of the Great Books tradition, spent his career insisting that any system — educational, economic, or technological — that treats people as means rather than ends has failed its most basic moral test. He grounded this in the ancient Greek concept of eudaimonia: the full, flourishing human life. Not productivity. Not efficiency. Flourishing.

What leadership looks like: Consistently and publicly affirm that a person is always more than their data. When new technologies or political movements driven by technical change are introduced, they require review and ask specific questions: What are we optimizing for? Who evaluated this choice? If a system is wrong about someone, ensure there is a clear person they can talk to and a transparent process for addressing errors.

The Common Good

The second principle is the common good — the conviction that the good of each is genuinely inseparable from the good of all. Society must be structured so that every person, not just some, can flourish.

Emerging technology tends to work against this. Wealth and capability are concentrating at a pace and scale we haven’t seen in a century. The organizations that can afford to build and deploy the most powerful technological systems gain structural advantages that compound over time — in hiring, marketing, logistics, and capital allocation. Meanwhile, entire communities are on the wrong end of what’s sometimes called the digital divide: rural areas without reliable broadband, older adults cut off from services that have moved entirely online, and lower-income families whose children lack access to devices and learning tools that wealthier peers take for granted.

But it runs deeper than access. When the systems used to make consequential decisions — who gets a loan, whose neighborhood gets investment, which students are recommended for advanced programs — are trained on data that reflects existing inequalities, those inequalities get automated. They become faster, cheaper, and nearly invisible. The technical term for this is distributional shift. The moral term is injustice.

Social media compounds the problem in a different direction. Platforms optimized for engagement — for keeping us scrolling — have discovered that outrage, anxiety, and tribal conflict are more engaging than nuance or solidarity. The result is communities more divided, families more strained, and public discourse more degraded than at any point in recent memory. This is not an accident. It is the logical output of a system optimized for the wrong thing.

McLuhan described our era as a global village — a world knit together by electronic media. He saw it as a potential blessing, but he was clear-eyed about the risks. He noted that new communication technologies have historically widened gaps and deepened conflict before societies learn to absorb and integrate them. We are living that warning in real time.

Adler stressed that equality is foundational, not optional, in a just society. Access to the conditions of flourishing — including access to the information systems that increasingly shape economic and civic life — is not a luxury. It is a justice claim.

What leadership looks like: With every new technology or political system, ask: Who benefits? Who is left out? Act on these answers, even when it’s difficult. The common good must be a standard of accountability, not just a talking point.

Subsidiarity

Now we arrive at the principle that may be the most urgently needed — and the most thoroughly violated — in our current moment: subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity holds that decisions should be made at the lowest appropriate level, the level closest to the people they affect, and elevated to higher levels only when genuinely necessary. It is a principle designed to protect local wisdom, human judgment, and the dignity of participation. It says: the people who know the situation best should be the ones making the call.

Emerging technology systematically does the opposite.

It centralizes. It takes decisions that once belonged to teachers, doctors, loan officers, local officials — people who knew the specific human being or community in front of them — and moves them to algorithms, platforms, and distant corporate headquarters that have never met the person and never will. The teacher who once said, “I know this child, and these test scores don’t tell the whole story,” now works in a system where software has already scored the child’s essay, flagged their engagement patterns, and projected their academic trajectory. The loan officer who once knew that the business owner across the desk had just weathered a family emergency has been replaced by a credit model that sees none of it. The local newspaper that once covered the school board meeting is gone, and the platform that replaced it shows residents content optimized for their existing beliefs rather than information about their actual community.

Local knowledge — irreplaceable, relational, particular — is being systematically extracted from consequential decisions. What fills the vacuum is platform control, algorithmic authority, and the assumption that aggregate data is always wiser than situated human judgment. It often isn’t.

McLuhan saw this dynamic clearly. He understood that scale changes everything. A technology that seems like a neutral tool at the individual level can, when deployed globally, erase what matters most at the local level. He called this a kind of cultural imperialism: one set of assumptions, embedded in a technology, imposed on everyone who touches it.

Merton’s entire life was an argument for the value of the local, the personal, the particular. His hermitage in the Kentucky woods was not an escape from the world. It was a witness to the idea that there are things you can only know up close — and that the contemplative, attentive mode of knowing is not less real than the analytic one. In certain respects, it is more real.

Adler spent decades defending the importance of genuine human judgment — the kind that cannot be reduced to a formula. In his Paideia framework for education, every student deserved not just instruction but Socratic dialogue: a real, responsive, irreducible encounter with another thinking human being. That encounter cannot be automated. And yet we keep trying.

What leadership looks like: Pushing decisions back down whenever possible. Designing systems that augment human judgment rather than replace it — that give the teacher, the manager, the doctor better information rather than handing them a verdict to rubber-stamp. Keeping humans meaningfully in the loop, not nominally — with real authority, real information, and real accountability. This is not anti-technology. It is pro-human. There is a difference.

Solidarity

The fourth principle is solidarity — the recognition that we are responsible for one another, and especially for the most vulnerable among us. This is not sentimentality. It is a structural claim about the nature of human society: we are bound together, and how we treat the least among us reveals who we really are.

Emerging technology can violate solidarity in ways that are both obvious and subtle.

The obvious: AI systems trained on historically biased data reproduce historical patterns of discrimination — in criminal justice, housing, healthcare, and lending. A recidivism prediction model trained on data from a system that has historically over-policed certain communities learns to over-predict risk for people from those communities. It doesn’t intend to discriminate. It has been trained to. Facial recognition software performs significantly worse on darker skin tones. Voice assistants struggle with certain accents. Medical diagnostic tools were developed on clinical data that underrepresented women and people of color, and their accuracy reflects it. The technical term for this is underrepresentation. The moral term is exclusion.

The subtler violation: technology can fragment the social bonds on which solidarity depends. Algorithms that maximize engagement tend to maximize conflict. Platforms that connect us globally can leave us more isolated locally. The bowling leagues, parish councils, neighborhood associations, and union halls that once gave ordinary people organized voices in public life have declined steadily, while the platforms that replaced them as gathering spaces are owned by a handful of corporations with no stake in the local community.

Merton, speaking in Calcutta just weeks before his death in December 1968, said something that has never been more relevant: “We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity.” The work of solidarity is not creating a connection that doesn’t exist. It is removing the illusions and structures — including technological ones — that make us act as if it doesn’t.

McLuhan’s global village was not a utopia. He saw that the same technologies that made the suffering of a stranger on the other side of the world immediate and undeniable could also produce cacophony and tribalism. More communication does not automatically mean more connection. It can mean more fragmentation.

What leadership looks like: Asking, with every system you rely on: Who is made invisible by this? Whose experience is missing? Whose outcomes are worse because they don’t fit the dominant pattern? Then, do something about it. Investing in more inclusive data. Auditing for disparate impact. Building real redress mechanisms for people who are harmed. Supporting the local institutions — including parishes — that hold communities together in ways no algorithm can replicate. Solidarity is not a feeling. It is a discipline.

Vocation and Meaning

The fifth and perhaps most personal principle is this: human work is not simply productive activity. It is participation in meaning. It is the expression of creativity, care, and calling. The theological word is vocation — the sense that our work is bound up with who we are and who we are called to become.

Emerging technology promises efficiency. The gains are real, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But efficiency doesn’t answer the deeper question: What is the work for?

When you remove the human being from a task, you also remove the meaning that person was making. The teacher who grades papers by hand isn’t just checking answers. They are learning how their students think. They are noticing who is struggling, who has turned a corner, and who has something surprising to say. Automate the grading, and the throughput goes up — and something essential disappears. The same is true of the nurse who used to have time to sit with a patient, the pastor who used to make house calls, the craftsman whose pride in the work was itself a form of witness.

This isn’t nostalgia. It’s a recognition that certain kinds of human activity are valuable not only for their outputs but for what they do to the people performing them — and to the people receiving them.

Merton warned, again and again, of a civilization full of noise but empty of depth. His deepest concern wasn’t war or poverty, as important as those were to him. It was what he called the loss of the contemplative dimension — the capacity to be present, to listen, to encounter the real. He feared we were building a world that could do everything fast and nothing well.

McLuhan argued that every medium has both content and effect, and that the effect is often more significant than the content. Social media doesn’t just distribute information; it shapes how we relate to one another. AI doesn’t just automate tasks; it shapes how we think about what tasks are worth doing at all. He called this the narcotic effect — the way technology can numb us to what we’re losing even as it delivers what we think we want.

Adler spent the last decades of his life arguing that education should not be primarily about job preparation. It should be about learning to live a meaningful life. He distinguished between schooling — the transmission of skills and information — and education — the formation of a human being capable of wisdom, reflection, and genuine happiness. He worried that without a richer vision of human purpose, we would produce generations of people who were competent at tasks but adrift in meaning. That worry has aged remarkably well.

What leadership looks like: Resisting the temptation to automate everything that can be automated. Asking whether a task involves real judgment, real relationship, or real creativity — and if the answer is yes, protecting it, even when the efficiency case for replacing it is compelling. Measuring success not only by what was produced but by whether the people doing the work find it worth doing.

Putting It Together

Our tradition gives us an ancient method for navigating exactly this kind of moment: See. Judge. Act. Look honestly at what is happening. Hold it up against the light of genuine values. Then respond — concretely, locally, specifically.

See: We are not living through a series of technological updates. We are living through a transformation of the basic conditions of human life — how we work, how we know things, how we belong to one another, how decisions are made about us, and who holds power. Most of this is happening without our explicit consent, and much of it is invisible until you start looking.

Judge: Our tradition is clear. Every person bears the image of God and cannot be reduced to their data. The good of each is inseparable from the good of all. Decisions belong to those closest to the situation. We are responsible for the most vulnerable. And work must serve human flourishing — not merely human productivity. When technology, however efficient, violates these principles, it requires not rejection, necessarily, but resistance: the kind that says we will not trade dignity for convenience, and we will not automate away what it means to be human.

Act: The action begins not at the level of global systems or national policy — though those matter — but here, in the specific roles and relationships each of us already carries.

Question the tools you are given. Ask who built them, what they were optimized for, and who they were tested on. This is responsible stewardship, not technophobia.

Advocate for those not represented. When the data doesn’t include them, when the system doesn’t see them, be the person who names it.

Keep human judgment alive. In your families, your workplaces, your parish. Don’t rubber-stamp algorithmic verdicts. Don’t confuse automation with authority.

Support the local institutions — the parish, the neighborhood, the face-to-face community — that hold something no platform can replicate.

And refuse to trade dignity for efficiency, even when the trade seems small. Because trades are rarely small and rarely temporary.

The question before us is not whether emerging technology will shape the future. It will. It already has.

The question is whether we will lead in such a way that this future remains worthy of the human person.

That begins not with grand strategy but with how we see the person in front of us. Whether we let a system define them, or insist on knowing them. Whether we ask, over and over again: Who is being left out of this story?

That is what leadership looks like in a world undergoing a phase change.

Questions for Reflection

On Dignity: Think of a time a system made a decision about you without knowing who you actually are. What was missing from that encounter? Now think of a time you reduced someone else to a category — a type, a case, a number. What would it have taken to see them more fully?

On the Common Good: What technologies does your organization, school, or parish use that you’ve never fully examined? Who benefits from those tools? Who might be quietly disadvantaged in ways you haven’t considered?

On Subsidiarity: Where in your life or work has a decision been moved away from the people closest to a situation — toward a system, a platform, or a distant authority? What was lost when that happened? And where do you have the power to push the decision back toward the human level?

On Solidarity: Whose experience is missing from the systems and structures you rely on? Who is invisible to the tools you use? Where in your community or professional life are you acting as if separation is real — and what would it take to close that gap?

On Vocation: Is there something in your work, or your life, that you’ve been tempted to automate or optimize away — something that carries a meaning you struggle to articulate? What would you lose if you never had to do it the slow way again? Is that a loss worth naming?

On Leadership: If you were to leave this reflection and take one concrete action — not a resolution, not a study group, but one specific act — what would it be? Who is the first person you need to talk to? And when will you do it?

The references to shepherds and sheep in this text is a continuation of a long used metaphor among the people of Israel that they are God’s flock and, most famously expressed in Psalm 23, that God is their shepherd. It was also common, in the Hebrew scriptures, for those exercising leadership in the community to be referred to as shepherds. The burden of the shepherd’s responsibility is immense as the very life of the sheep is in their hands. The vitriol expressed towards the ‘false’ shepherds (thieves, brigands, strangers) is probably a carry-over from the conflict of the previous chapter where the Pharisees sought to undermine the miracle (sign) of the man whose sight had been restored.

This conflict is an important backdrop to this text as is contrasts the liberating, life giving action of Jesus with the restrictive, oppressive interjection of the Pharisees. Jesus’ has come so that humanity might live ‘life to the full’, an image presented in the metaphor of the sheep finding certain pasture and restated in the famous final verse of this text. ‘I have come so that they may have life and have it to the full.’ (John 10:10).

The text raises a number of important points of reflection for us. Among these are the questions of what it means for us to live life to the full, as Jesus intended and, secondly, what does the metaphor of the shepherd and the sheep say to us about how we exercise our stewardship of those in our care. Those in our care may be colleagues in the workplace, members of our family or, perhaps, those who live at the margins of our community.

Gospel Text John 10:1-10

Jesus said:

‘I tell you most solemnly, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold through the gate, but gets in some other way is a thief and a brigand. The one who enters through the gate is the shepherd of the flock; the gatekeeper lets him in, the sheep hear his voice, one by one he calls his own sheep and leads them out. When he has brought out his flock, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow because they know his voice. They never follow a stranger but run away from him: they do not recognise the voice of strangers.’

Jesus told them this parable but they failed to understand what he meant by telling it to them.

So Jesus spoke to them again:

‘I tell you most solemnly,

I am the gate of the sheepfold.

All others who have come

are thieves and brigands;

but the sheep took no notice of them.

I am the gate.

Anyone who enters through me will be safe:

he will go freely in and out

and be sure of finding pasture.

The thief comes

only to steal and kill and destroy.

I have come

so that they may have life and have it to the full.’

See

What does the text reveal about the relationship between the sheep and the shepherd?

How is this contrasted with the image of the ‘thieves and brigands’?

What might the image of the gate represent in this metaphor?

Judge

What might the image of ‘thieves and brigands’ apply to in our world today?

Jesus says he has come that people may have life to the full. What does life to the full mean in our context?

Jesus’ actions are seen as liberating and reassuring. How does this apply to our own life situation?

Act

What steps can I take to ensure that my actions are life giving and liberating for those in my care or under my influence?

What do I need to do to ensure that I am living ‘life to the full’?

What actions can I take to assist others in living ‘life to the full’?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/john-10-1-10-2021/

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

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/john.htm

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

But what if economics was never supposed to feel that way? What if the economy is, at its heart, a deeply human story, a story we find in the scriptures, especially the Sermon on the Mount — and one that every one of us has a role in shaping?

This is the core argument of Cathonomics—a term by Tony Annett that reframes economics through a Catholic lens. Cathonomics insists that the economy is not a neutral force: it is shaped by human values, or their absence, and that moral purpose must guide it.

“An economy divorced from moral purpose is destined to fail the human person.”— Tony Annett.

In a world marked by staggering inequality, ecological crisis, and the daily disruptions of artificial intelligence, that sentence lands with real weight. Cathonomics says: it’s the economy, people — and it belongs to all of us.

SEE · JUDGE · ACT

Cathonomics doesn’t ask us to become economists but disciples—those who pay attention, think carefully, and act faithfully. Its natural companion is the See–Judge–Act method, pioneered by Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn in the early 20th century.

The method is beautifully simple. See: Start not with theory but with real life. Look around. Who is struggling? What is actually happening in your neighborhood, your parish, your workplace? Judge: Hold what you see up against the light of the Gospel and the Church’s long tradition of social teaching — principles like human dignity, solidarity, subsidiarity, and the universal destination of goods. Act: Then do something about it. Not perfectly, not all at once, but concretely.

“The young workers must be apostles to themselves.”— Joseph Cardijn.

Cardijn understood that real change doesn’t come from the top down. It rises from communities that wake up to their own dignity. Cathonomics fits like a hand in a glove — it gives us the economic literacy to see more clearly, the moral vocabulary to judge more wisely, and the practical courage to act more effectively.

VOICES THAT ENRICH THE CONVERSATION

What makes Cathonomics so rich is the company it keeps. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and one of the most beloved spiritual writers of the 20th century, reminds us that clear seeing requires more than open eyes. It requires an open heart — one shaped by prayer, silence, and honest self-examination.

“We must see not just with our eyes but with our hearts.”— Thomas Merton.

Without that inner transformation, Merton warns, our judgments become ideological rather than moral — and our actions reactive rather than redemptive. In other words, we can go through the motions of “doing justice” while still being driven by pride, tribalism, or shallow thinking.

Mortimer Adler, the philosopher who championed great books and lifelong learning for ordinary people, adds another layer. He believed education wasn’t something that ended at graduation — it was a lifelong practice of growth.

“The purpose of learning is growth, and our minds, unlike our bodies, can continue growing as we continue to live.” — Mortimer Adler.

Cathonomics takes that seriously. It is not a quick fix or a slogan, but a discipline for forming adults who can engage with economic realities with critical intelligence and moral depth.

And then there’s Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian media theorist who saw something the rest of us often miss: the tools we create end up reshaping us.

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”— Marshall McLuhan.

This is perhaps the most urgent insight for our moment. We live inside an economy mediated by algorithms, social platforms, and AI systems that quietly shape what we see, what we want, and what we believe is possible. Cathonomics must reckon with this. To judge wisely in 2026, we need to understand not just markets and policies — but the digital environments that are forming our moral imagination, often without our awareness.

A HOPEFUL ALTERNATIVE

Put all of this together, and you have something genuinely hopeful. At a time when economic forces can feel impersonal, inevitable, and crushing, Cathonomics says: not so fast. Economies are human creations. They can be unmade and remade. They are not fate — they are choices.

The goal of Cathonomics is not to produce better economists, but to form better disciples—people who see their neighbors clearly, judge situations wisely through faith, and act with the joyful, stubborn hope the Gospel demands.

See clearly. Judge wisely. Act justly. Let this be more than a method—it is a call to live with awareness, wisdom, and courage in your everyday economic life. You are invited to embody this approach in your choices, actions, and relationships

Questions to take home

1. Where in your daily economic life — your work, your spending, your saving — do you sense a gap between what you do and what you believe? What would it take to close that gap?

2. Think about someone in your community who is struggling economically. What do you actually see when you look at their situation — and what might you be missing?

3. McLuhan warned that our tools shape us. In what ways might your relationship with social media, online shopping, or financial apps be quietly forming your values without your realizing it?

4, Cardijn believed ordinary people — workers, students, parents — are the agents of social transformation, not passive bystanders. Do you believe that about yourself? Why or why not?

5. If your parish or community were to “act” on one economic injustice in your neighborhood right now — just one, small, concrete step — what would it be?

A: They provide a moral framework and ethical guidelines to address the greater good.

Documents such as encyclicals, Vatican II documents, and writings of theologians emphasize the importance of responsible AI use, guiding policymakers, companies, and international bodies in serving the common good.

Think of an analogy or metaphor: Think AI is like what fire was to humans. It was a good thing. It gave humans light and warmth, but it also brought destruction and darkness into their lives. Over time, humans learned to manage fire for the greater good. This is what needs to happen with AI. And Catholic Social Teaching can provide that framework.

AI is accelerating developments in science, engineering, and physics. As a result, we can anticipate rapid advancements in technology, products, and services. In education, tasks historically performed by human intelligence are likely to become automated, depending on the pace of technological development and implementation.

Any response to AI can draw on a strong foundation in Catholic social teaching and specific documents, such as Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum,” which addressed capital and labor in the context of emerging industrial technologies and offers guidance that can inspire your digital innovation efforts.

The tradition of Catholic social teaching began as a response to the Industrial Revolution. But the key was that it was grounded in scripture and in the early understanding of the gospel. It’s not just Catholic teaching on society; we need to reframe our minds and begin to understand that Catholic social teaching is a response to technology as a whole, for the greater good of humanity.

The questions are no longer theoretical. They live in our workplaces, our feeds, our sense of who we are. What we need are Policies~Measurements~Behaviors (PMBs)

We are no longer speculating about artificial intelligence — we are living its consequences. What once felt like a distant concern is now part of daily life: algorithms shape what we see, influence hiring, monitor workplace behavior, and set the pace of industries. The ethical stakes are now social, economic, and deeply personal.

To meet these ethical demands, we can turn to the See–Judge–Act method—a framework rooted in Catholic social thought and community organizing. By guiding us through observation, evaluation, and action, it offers a path for responding with clarity and moral seriousness.

SEE

Naming what’s already here

Across society, signs of strain are impossible to ignore. Workers in manufacturing, logistics, customer service, journalism, and creative fields are facing role displacement faster than any institution can meaningfully respond.

Privacy, once assumed as a basic right, is being quietly eroded through surveillance capitalism and the routine aggregation of our most intimate data. Governance structures are badly lagging behind technological innovation, meaning that, for now, corporations and developers building these systems are effectively setting the ethical norms themselves — without sufficient democratic input or oversight.

The medium is the message.

— MARSHALL MCLUHAN

Marshall McLuhan’s insight feels especially urgent now. AI is not simply a tool we pick up and put down — it reshapes how we perceive knowledge, how we understand authority, and even what it means to be human. The speed, scale, and invisibility of AI systems create environments where ethical reflection can barely keep pace with the next deployment.

We can frame what we’re seeing through four essential lenses:

People

Dignity, agency, and the right to meaningful participation in society

Planet

The environmental impact of data and energy use.

Purpose

The risk of reducing identity to metrics or profiles.

Prosperity

Widening inequality between those who control AI and those subject to it

These are not isolated concerns — they are interconnected pressures shaping a new social reality, and they demand an interconnected response.

JUDGE

Interpreting through the wisdom we already have

The monk and writer Thomas Merton warned that the greatest danger of modern society is not simply the accumulation of technological power, but inner fragmentation — a loss of the reflective self. A world driven by efficiency without contemplation risks producing what he called the “false self”: a life disconnected from authentic meaning and groundedness.

Applied to AI, this raises a question we should be asking out loud: Are we designing systems that serve human flourishing — or systems that subtly reshape humans to serve the system’s efficiency?

The philosopher Mortimer Adler, with his emphasis on ethical reasoning and the “great conversation” of civilization, would likely push us further: do our current AI policies reflect genuine moral deliberation, or merely technical problem-solving dressed up in the language of ethics? For Adler, a just society depends on shared understanding of truth, justice, and the common good — not just on innovation.

From a Catholic social teaching perspective, read the encyclicals and the Documents of Vatican II and think about how these four principles offer a moral compass:

• Human dignity demands that AI systems never reduce persons to data points or optimize them as variables.

• The common good calls for governance structures that benefit all of society, not only a technological elite.

• Subsidiarity insists that decisions about how AI is used in communities should involve those communities — not only centralized powers or distant platforms.

• Solidarity compels us to attend especially to those most vulnerable to displacement, exclusion, and algorithmic harm.

McLuhan helps us see the environment being created around us. Merton helps us see the soul at risk inside it. Adler helps us recover the discipline of moral reasoning that this moment demands. Together, they point to a central insight: the ethical crisis of AI is not primarily technical — it is anthropological. It concerns who we are becoming.

ACT

Building guardrails for a human future

If we are to move forward responsibly, action must take concrete shape in policies, measurements, and personal behavior. Each of these matters cannot substitute for the others.

Policy

Advance proactive regulation: establish clear, enforceable standards for transparency, accountability, and data protection. Ensure that AI systems are not only auditable and explainable but also rigorously aligned with human rights—beyond just serving market interests.

Measurement

Expand what we count. We need metrics that evaluate the impact on human dignity and well-being, the environmental footprint of AI infrastructure, and the equitable distribution of economic benefits.

Behavior

Change at both the individual and institutional levels. Developers, policymakers, educators, and users all share responsibility for cultivating ethical awareness—and acting on it.

Culture

Build participatory forums where communities help shape how AI enters their lives. Encourage reflection on blind adoption. Design AI that augments human capacities rather than replacing them.

Merton would call this last point an inner transformation: a refusal to be passively shaped by the systems around us, and a commitment to act with conscious intention. That is not a soft or optional aspiration — it may be the most urgent demand of our moment.

The goal is clear: we must actively shape AI to serve human needs and values.

We stand at a threshold. The question is not whether AI will transform society — it already is, and the pace will only quicken. The question is whether we will guide that transformation with wisdom, justice, and a commitment to the flourishing of all — especially those with the least power to shape it.

If we fail to act, we risk building systems that diminish the very humanity they were meant to serve. If we succeed, we may discover that this technological revolution, grounded in ethical clarity and human solidarity, can deepen rather than diminish what it means to be human.

That is a future worth working toward.

QUESTIONS TO SIT WITH

1. In your own life or work, where has AI already changed how you think, decide, or relate to others — and did you notice it happening?

2. Are the systems you interact with daily designed to serve your flourishing — or to optimize your behavior for someone else’s benefit? (true self vs false self)

3. Who in your community is most exposed to the harms of AI-driven displacement, surveillance, or algorithmic bias — and what would solidarity with them actually require?

4. Merton warns against the “false self” shaped by efficiency culture. In what ways might your relationship with technology be quietly reshaping your sense of identity or worth?

5. What is one concrete action — in your role as a citizen, professional, educator, or consumer — that you could take this month to help humanize AI rather than simply accept it?

6. If the “great conversation” Adler envisioned requires shared moral truth, what does it mean that so many of today’s norms around AI are being set by a handful of private companies — and what would democratic AI governance actually look like?

Introduction

It occurred to me as I prepared this Gospel Enquiry that my experience of writing enquiries has often been like the Goldilocks story: it is either too short, or its too long, but in the end, just right. I refer to the length of the Gospel passage chosen for the Gospel Enquiry. In the end, it has never about quantity, but always about quality.

Recently, when faced with criticism from the US president, Pope Leo XIV responded with “I have no fear of the Trump administration or speaking out loudly of the message of the Gospel, which is what I believe I am here to do.”

As I reflected on the Gospel reading, I came to realise that I am sometimes like the two disciples, so wrapped up in my own little world, that I fail to recognise the presence of Jesus in the Mass … until we are in the Communion Rite.

I am convinced that there are some important lessons to be learned through reflecting and acting on this Gospel event and they are to be found in the celebration of the Eucharist.

The Gospel

Two of the disciples of Jesus were on their way to a village called Emmaus, seven miles from Jerusalem, and they were talking together about all that had happened. Now as they talked this over, Jesus himself came up and walked by their side; but something prevented them from recognising him. He said to them, ‘What matters are you discussing as you walk along?’ They stopped short, their faces downcast.

Then one of them, called Cleopas, answered him, ‘You must be the only person staying in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have been happening there these last few days.’ ‘What things?’ he asked. ‘All about Jesus of Nazareth’ they answered ‘who proved he was a great prophet by the things he said and did in the sight of God and of the whole people; and how our chief priests and our leaders handed him over to be sentenced to death, and had him crucified. Our own hope had been that he would be the one to set Israel free. And this is not all: two whole days have gone by since it all happened; and some women from our group have astounded us: they went to the tomb in the early morning, and when they did not find the body, they came back to tell us they had seen a vision of angels who declared he was alive. Some of our friends went to the tomb and found everything exactly as the women had reported, but of him they saw nothing.’

Then he said to them, ‘You foolish men! So slow to believe the full message of the prophets! Was it not ordained that the Christ should suffer and so enter into his glory?’ Then, starting with Moses and going through all the prophets, he explained to them the passages throughout the scriptures that were about himself.

When they drew near to the village to which they were going, he made as if to go on; but they pressed him to stay with them. ‘It is nearly evening’ they said ‘and the day is almost over.’ So he went in to stay with them. Now while he was with them at table, he took the bread and said the blessing; then he broke it and handed it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognised him; but he had vanished from their sight. Then they said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us as he talked to us on the road and explained the scriptures to us?’

They set out that instant and returned to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven assembled together with their companions, who said to them, ‘Yes, it is true. The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.’ Then they told their story of what had happened on the road and how they had recognised him at the breaking of bread. (Luke 24:13-35)

The Enquiry

See

• Read the Gospel story and observe the changing emotional state of the two disciples. Then read the story again and focus on Jesus. What is different about him?

• What does the Gospel writer teach you about how to interpret what happened to Jesus? What do you learn about Jesus and his power through this story?

• Why did the two disciples not recognise Jesus when he joined them? What is the significance of them recognising Jesus when he broke bread with them?

Judge

• How does this Gospel story fit with your experience of the Eucharist?

• What do you learn from this story about how to live as a faithful disciple of Jesus?

• What happens in the story that challenges how you live your faith?

Act

• What is revealed through this story about how to cooperate with God’s plan of salvation?

• What small action can you carry out to stay focused on doing God’s will today and tomorrow and the day after?

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

Image Source: James Tissot (Creator), The Pilgrims of Emmaus on the road, a painting held in the Brooklyn Museum, Picryl, PDM 1.0

Thomas Merton’s reflections on war begin inside the Christian tradition, not outside it. He accepted that Catholic teaching had long allowed for just war in principle, but he also believed that modern warfare had made it nearly impossible to apply those principles faithfully. For Merton, the question was not whether Christians could ever think morally about the use of force; it was whether twentieth-century weapons had rendered the old moral limits meaningless.

As Merton wrote in Peace in the Post-Christian Era:

“The duty of the Christian in this crisis is to strive with all his power and intelligence, with his faith, his hope in Christ, and love for God and man, to do the one task which God has imposed upon us in the world today. That task is to work for the total abolition of war.”

That conviction helps explain why Merton looked back to the early Church, and especially to Origen of Alexandria. To understand this connection, it is important to consider Origen’s context. Writing in his great defense of Christianity, Against Celsus (c. 248 AD), Origen declared that Christians “no longer take up the sword against nation, nor do we learn war anymore” — a deliberate echo of Isaiah 2:4 — because they had become “sons of peace” through Jesus Christ. Merton saw in Origen a Christianity shaped before empire, before the Church’s entanglement with political power, and before theology had to make its peace with armies. In that older witness, peace was not a private sentiment; it was woven into the Church’s very identity.

Origen was not alone in this witness. Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Cyprian of Carthage all stand within a broad early Christian tradition that consistently and strongly leaned away from violence and military service. Justin Martyr, writing around 155 AD, described Christians as people who had exchanged instruments of war for instruments of peace — swords into plowshares, in the spirit of the prophets. Clement of Alexandria said that believers are trained “not in war, but in peace.” Tertullian went further still, arguing in On the Crown (c. 211 AD) that Christ’s command to Peter in the Garden of Gethsemane — “Put away your sword” — symbolized the disarming not just of one apostle, but of Christian life as a whole. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage in the mid-third century, was equally forthright: he found it inconsistent that the world condemns private murder while calling mass killing in war a virtue.

The just war tradition arose when the Church came to inhabit a very different world. The conversion of Emperor Constantine in 312 AD and the Edict of Milan in 313 AD marked a dramatic shift, as Christianity moved from a persecuted minority faith to the empire's religion. With this new relationship to power, theologians — most profoundly Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century, and later Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth — wrestled seriously with how war might be restrained and governed by justice, rather than left to brute force and unchecked power. That development was historically understandable, even admirable in its intent. However, Merton remained deeply skeptical that just war reasoning could survive the nuclear age intact.

“The root of war is fear.” — New Seeds of Contemplation.

If war can no longer be limited to combatants, if civilian populations cannot be protected, and if nuclear exchange risks the annihilation of entire peoples, then the moral conditions that just war doctrine requires — proportionality, discrimination between combatants and innocents, a reasonable hope of success — cannot be met. In this new era, the logical foundation collapses. Merton did not reach this conclusion with despair, but with a clear-eyed sorrow that he believed the Gospel demanded.

For older Christians who grew up during the Cold War and lived through the anxieties of the nuclear standoff, Merton’s words resonate particularly. He was not a pacifist in a naïve or politically abstract sense. He was a monk who had thought long and hard about human nature, about sin, and about what the Cross actually means for how we live in the world. He understood the temptation to trust in weapons. He understood fear. And he understood that fear, not hatred, is usually where violence begins.

“We are not at peace with others because we are not at peace with ourselves, and we are not at peace with ourselves because we are not at peace with God.” — The Ascent to Truth.

This is the heart of what Merton wanted Christians to hear: that peace is not first a political program, but a spiritual condition. To move from outer arguments to personal challenge, he insisted it begins in the soul before it reaches the world. And it costs something.

“Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.” — The Nonviolent Alternative.

Merton’s warning remains urgent because it calls the Church to recover its oldest instinct. The early Church did not begin with a theology of managed violence. It began with Christ, who refused the sword, absorbed the world’s violence upon the Cross, and rose to offer a peace the world cannot give. The first Christians understood themselves as a people formed by that event, summoned into a different kind of power: one rooted in love, in witness, and in the refusal to let fear and hatred have the final word.

For those of us who are older, who have seen wars come and go, who have buried friends and prayed for enemies, Merton offers not easy answers but a serious challenge. In moving from history to personal reflection, he asks whether we have allowed the Gospel to form our conscience on these matters as deeply as it has formed us on others. He asks, gently and persistently, whether we truly believe that Christ is our peace — and whether we are willing to live as though that is true.

“The Christian is and must be, by his very adoption as a son of God in Christ, a peacemaker.” — Seeds of Destruction.

That is not a political slogan. It is a baptismal claim. Drawing together his argument, Merton spent his life asking what it would look like to take it seriously.

What Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God didn’t quite predict — and why AI makes it so much more urgent.

Let’s be honest: American democracy has a confidence problem. Not just a political one, but a deeper, almost spiritual crisis of shared reality. We are living in a moment when millions of people can look at the same event and come away with completely different “facts”—and increasingly, that’s not an accident.

Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God details how a Christian Nationalist movement seeks to replace pluralism with theocratic authoritarianism. Her argument is strong, but she didn’t foresee AI, which doesn’t just accelerate this crisis—it fundamentally transforms it.

To navigate this complex territory, let’s turn to a framework borrowed from Catholic social thought: See. Judge. Act. This method guides us to observe reality, reflect deeply on it, and then determine appropriate actions. Transitioning from Stewart’s observations to a methodical approach, let’s apply it step by step.

See: The Digital Disintegration of Truth

We are in the middle of a mass exodus from shared reality — and shared reality is the precondition for democracy. You can’t govern together if you can’t agree on what’s actually happening.

Stewart’s book documents how this is deliberately engineered. Deep-pocketed donors fund a movement that uses religious language as a political weapon, sowing just enough confusion and grievance to make authoritarian “order” sound appealing. But here’s where AI enters the picture and changes everything.

The late media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message.” He meant that every technology reshapes our minds, not just our habits. Television didn’t just deliver news — it made politics visual and emotional. Social media didn’t just connect people — it made outrage the dominant currency of public life.

AI is the next, and most powerful, medium in that lineage. And it has two features that are particularly dangerous at this moment:

AI-driven algorithms intensify echo chambers, now tailoring content using psychological profiles. Stewart describes lies as a political tool—AI is now the most efficient infrastructure for spreading them.

AI can now generate convincing fake content of any kind, making reality itself unreliable. When truth becomes subjective, people withdraw to what feels satisfying—fertile ground for authoritarianism.

Judge: Three Thinkers Who Saw This Coming

Now for the harder work: what do our deepest moral and intellectual traditions actually say about this moment?

Mortimer Adler and the loss of logic. Adler, the great American philosopher and educator, believed that democracy is possible only when citizens engage in rational argument about the common good. That doesn’t mean everyone has to agree — it means everyone has to be willing to reason together. When AI-driven disinformation replaces argument with what we might call “outrage content,” the intellectual foundation of self-governance crumbles. We’re not just losing facts; we’re losing the habit of thinking together.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the cost of silence. Bonhoeffer, the German theologian executed by the Nazis for his resistance, warned against “cheap grace” — the comfortable religion that costs nothing and demands nothing. He also wrote with painful clarity about how ordinary people could be made into instruments of evil through what he called “folly” — not stupidity, but the willing surrender of independent judgment to a charismatic collective. He watched as religious language was co-opted by a cult of personality and used to justify atrocities. Stewart’s book documents the same dynamic in our own time. When the name of God is invoked to justify suppressing votes or demonizing neighbors, that is precisely the kind of idolatry Bonhoeffer died resisting.

Thomas Merton and the tyranny of technology. The Trappist monk and mystic Merton spent decades warning that modern people had become prisoners of their own machines — not physically, but spiritually. He argued that contemplative life, the capacity to simply be still and see clearly, was being colonized by the noise of technological progress. He might have called AI the ultimate fulfillment of that prophecy. When an algorithm is shaping your resentments, curating your enemies, and filling every quiet moment with stimulation, you lose what Merton called the monastic capacity to see the inherent dignity in other people. And that dignity — the recognition that your neighbor is fully human — is, in the end, the soul of democracy.

Having evaluated the challenge, we arrive at the question of action: What practical steps can we take in response? Here is where strategy must meet conviction.

Act: Money funds the movement; lies are its weapon; God is its shield, as Stewart argues. Despair isn’t an option. Here are four concrete responses.

1. Practice digital asceticism. Merton would recognize this immediately: reclaiming your attention is a political act. You don’t have to delete your accounts or move to a cabin in the woods. But deliberately stepping outside the algorithmic rage-cycle — reading long-form, sitting with complexity, choosing boredom over the dopamine hit of outrage — is a form of resistance. The algorithm needs your clicks. Starve it.

2. Rebuild the culture of reasoning. Adler was passionate about liberal education — not as a luxury, but as a democratic necessity. AI can generate “facts” on demand, but it cannot exercise judgment. It cannot evaluate why something matters or what it means. We need to teach the next generation how to spot a logical fallacy as easily as they spot a meme. Critical thinking isn’t just an academic skill; it’s civic infrastructure.

3. Demand moral courage from faith communities. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and every other community of faith face a choice right now: do they serve the powerful and profitable, or the marginalized and the truthful? Bonhoeffer’s example is instructive — and sobering. He didn’t survive his courage. But he was right. Communities of faith need to actively reject the nationalist label that has been draped over Christianity in particular and recover a gospel that begins with the poor, the stranger, and the enemy.

4. Treat AI as a regulated environment, not a neutral tool. McLuhan’s insight demands that we stop thinking of AI as just a fancy search engine. It is an environment — a powerful one that reshapes cognition at scale. That means we need real regulatory frameworks: mandatory transparency about training data, algorithmic auditing, and serious “proof of personhood” standards online so that synthetic content can be identified and labeled. The medium will destroy the message of freedom if we let it run unchecked.

A Final Thought

Democracy is not a machine that runs on its own. It’s a spiritual commitment — a daily choice to recognize your neighbor as someone whose voice matters as much as yours.

In a world saturated with money, lies, and weaponized religion, the antidotes might sound almost naive: humility (the willingness to be wrong), truth (the commitment to objective reality, even when it’s inconvenient), and love (the stubborn insistence that the person on the other side of the screen is fully human).

We must intentionally choose to be citizens every day. Engage in your community, question what you see, and act to protect democratic values in your daily life. Move beyond being just data and demand accountability from those shaping our information environments.

Remember, making this active, conscious choice every single day—despite the odds and the noise—is not just symbolic. It is the most radical and necessary political act of our era. Start today. Choose citizenship. The health of our democracy depends on it.

NB: This blog was inspired by Katherine Stewart’s Money, Lies, and God (2023) and the work of Mortimer Adler, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Thomas Merton.

A Note on my blogs

When I write blogs, or keynotes, etc., I will, at the end, use Grammarly to correct my spelling and grammar, mainly because I am a product of that educational experiment back in the 1950s, when they thought Phonics was not necessary (Read Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (and I will add can’t write) became a national bestseller that shook the educational community.) So there is a whole group of us (Baby Boomers) nationwide who suffer today. So I use Grammarly because my wife, who is a retired English/Journalism teacher, says “Grammarly is a whole lot cheaper and less frustrating”, …just saying…😎

A reflection on the Prayer Vigil for Peace, St. Peter’s Basilica, April 11, 2026

In a world fractured by conflict, Pope Leo XIV’s prayer at the Vatican Vigil for Peace stood out for its clarity: “War divides; hope unites. Arrogance tramples others; love lifts them up. Idolatry blinds us; the living God enlightens.”

Crucially, the heart of Pope Leo XIV’s message is clear: the divisions that erupt in violence and war stem from a deep spiritual blindness. The Pope’s mandate is not about improved politics or information, but about conversion that addresses the core spiritual condition—idolatry displacing the living God. Every part of his call flows from this diagnosis, forming the central thesis of his vigil.

Using the See-Judge-Act method, we can delve deeper into the mechanics of our current discord and find a path forward.

1. See: The Blindness of Idolatry

We live in an era when information is instantaneous, yet understanding is rare. We see the “idolatry of self” manifest in our digital echo chambers, while the “idolatry of money” drives global policy. But Leo XIV pushes us beyond mere social critique: he names it a spiritual condition rooted in self-worship.

The philosopher Marshall McLuhan observed that “we shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” When our tools are designed to display power and monetize outrage, we become a society that sees the other as an obstacle rather than a neighbor. But in Leo XIV’s framework, the deeper problem is not the tool — it is the idol. When a person or a nation “has turned their back on the living God, making themselves and their own power a mute, blind, and deaf idol,” as the Pope put it, every relationship becomes a threat, and every disagreement becomes a war.

This is the blindness Leo XIV identified at the Vigil — not merely a failure of diplomacy or empathy, but a spiritual and moral cataract that keeps us from seeing the humanity behind enemy lines.

2. Judge: The Cost of Arrogance

To judge our situation, we must hold it up to the light of truth and ethics. War is not merely a political failure; it is a moral one, rooted in arrogance.

The Pope brought his predecessors into the room. He cited Saint John XXIII, who wrote in Pacem in Terris: “The benefits of peace will be felt everywhere, by individuals, by families, by nations, by the whole human race.” He then quoted Pius XII’s warning: “Nothing is lost by peace; everything may be lost by war.”

He also recalled Saint John Paul II, who, in 2003, reflected on surviving World War II and witnessing a continent in ruins. John Paul II addressed youth: “I have the duty to say to all young people, to those who are younger than I, who have not had this experience: No more war.” Leo XIV made that call his own.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from the heart of a world torn apart by the Third Reich’s ultimate arrogance, diagnosed the same root cause: the church and society that choose power over service produce a world unfit for the vulnerable to inhabit. We judge our current path unsustainable for the same reason Leo XIV does — it values the accumulation of influence over the distribution of love.

3. Act: Lifting Up Through Love

How do we move from the division of war to the unity of hope? Leo XIV was clear that action without conversion is merely a display of power.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk who bridged the mystical East and the troubled West, saw that peace begins within. He wrote: “Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It shall allow no bribes of self-interest. It shall be such as to invite the world to a new life.”

But Leo XIV did not stop with the interior life. He issued a direct, unambiguous call to the leaders of nations: “Stop! It is time for peace! Sit at the table of dialogue and mediation — not at the table where rearmament is planned, and deadly actions are decided!

The Pope also linked this call to what Pope Francis called the “architecture of peace” in Fratelli Tutti. Peace, Francis wrote, is built collectively: institution by institution, person by person. Alongside that, there must be an “art of peace that involves us all.” Leo XIV embraced both ideas.

To act, then, is to:

Reject the idols. Instead of pursuing wealth and status at others’ expense, choose to step away from them. Doing so is not about self-denial for its own sake but is essential to gaining clear vision and moral clarity.

Recognize each person’s place in the mosaic. As Leo XIV said, protecting peace “is not only the responsibility of rulers.”Each of us has a place in the mosaic. Peace advances “word by word, deed by deed, just as a rock is hollowed out drop by drop, or fabric woven stitch by stitch.”

Make love an action. Support grassroots peace initiatives, practice radical empathy in your daily interactions, and urge your leaders to choose diplomacy over dominance. Intentionally seek ways to elevate others and foster unity.

Enough. Enough. Enough.

Thus, the cry from the Vigil was not a single word but three — a deliberate escalation that moves from the interior to the political to the absolute: Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!

Notice the sequence. It begins not with politics but with the soul. War does not begin in foreign ministries or on battlefields; it begins when a person — or a nation — places itself at the center of the universe, in God’s place. The idolatry comes first. The display of power follows. The war is where it ends.

With the problem diagnosed and the cost weighed, the only remaining question is whether we will act in hope. As Pope Leo XIV said, we are already a risen people. This is not comfort for the complacent; it is a call to the courageous.

Hope unites. If spiritual blindness drives division and war, only conversion—personal and collective—can begin the work of unity. Let us put the Pope’s mandate into action today.

NB: The full text of Pope Leo XIV’s reflection at the Prayer Vigil for Peace (April 11, 2026) is available on the Vatican website: vatican.va

A Note on my blogs

When I write blogs, or keynotes, etc., I will, at the end, use Grammarly to correct my spelling and grammar, mainly because I am a product of that educational experiment back in the 1950s, when they thought Phonics was not necessary (Read Rudolf Flesch’s “Why Johnny Can’t Read” (and I will add can’t write) became a national bestseller that shook the educational community.) So there is a whole group of us (Baby Boomers) nationwide who suffer today. So I use Grammarly because my wife, who is a retired English/Journalism teacher, says Grammarly is a whole lot cheaper and less frustrating than having her read my stuff, …just saying…😎

The first Sunday after the Feast of Easter is known as Divine Mercy Sunday. It comes with a focus on the forgiveness of God and calls upon followers to repent and seek forgiveness. The Gospel account, from the fourth Gospel, is set on two consecutive Sundays, the first is the evening of the day of the resurrection, the second, eight days later. The first scene finds the disciples in hiding for fear that they would suffer the same fate of Jesus, at the hands of the religious authorities. Jesus appears among them, despite the locked doors, indicating the risen Lord is not subject to the same physical constraints as the human Jesus. The presence of the risen Jesus brings an immediate sense of joy among the disciples. He greets them twice with the powerful words ‘Peace be with you’ before commissioning them and bestowing the Spirit upon them. The disciple Thomas, absent from the first scene and sceptical of reports of Jesus’ appearance is, subsequently present, eight days later when Jesus again greets the disciples with peace.

The notion of peace, repeated three times in Jesus’ greetings, is a central notion of Christianity. St Benedict, quoting from the Psalms, urged his community to ‘seek peace and pursue it’ RB Prol, PS 34:14. It has been a frequent theme of Christian writers throughout the centuries and has become a most urgent message from Popes of recent decades, as the capacity for warfare to destroy all of God’s creation has become so apparent. Pope Leo recently wrote “peace is a principle that guides and defines our choices” https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/peace/documents/20251208-messaggio-pace.html highlighting the importance action in pursuit of peace. Peace activists have regularly used the aphorism ‘what if peace is a verb’. Recently, Nigerian poet and spoken word artist Maryam Bukar Hassan popularized the concept of expressing peace as a verb in her 2025 performance ‘Peace is a Verb’. This concept of peace has much to offer today, forcing us to consider peace as an active step, a deliberate strategy and a purposeful plan.

Gospel Text: John 20:19-29

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

‘As the Father sent me,

so am I sending you.’

After saying this he breathed on them and said:

‘Receive the Holy Spirit.

For those whose sins you forgive,

they are forgiven;

for those whose sins you retain,

they are retained.’

Thomas, called the Twin, who was one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. When the disciples said, ‘We have seen the Lord’, he answered, ‘Unless I see the holes that the nails made in his hands and can put my finger into the holes they made, and unless I can put my hand into his side, I refuse to believe.’ Eight days later the disciples were in the house again and Thomas was with them. The doors were closed, but Jesus came in and stood among them. ‘Peace be with you’ he said. Then he spoke to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here; look, here are my hands. Give me your hand; put it into my side. Doubt no longer but believe.’ Thomas replied, ‘My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him:

‘You believe because you can see me.

Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe.’

There were many other signs that Jesus worked and the disciples saw, but they are not recorded in this book. These are recorded so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing this you may have life through his name.

See

How is the risen Jesus portrayed in this text?

What does the text say about belief, in the episode with Thomas?

When does the greeting of peace occur in the text?

Judge

What significance can be drawn from Jesus’ commissioning of the disciples and bestowing the Holy Spirit immediately after his greeting of peace?

How do we see the relationship between forgiveness and peace in our own lives?

How does the ‘motif’ of peace, in this text, speak to the current situation in our world?

Act

What steps can we take to bring peace into our own life situations?

What possibilities are within our spheres of influence to bring peace in to the lives of others?

How can we use our personal choices to further the cause of peace in our world?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/john-20-19-31-2024

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

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

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

https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/peace/documents/20251208-messaggio-pace.html

Starting with the Person

Everything in Catholic Social Teaching begins with a single, radical conviction: every human being — without exception — is made in the image of God. That’s not a platitude. It’s the foundation of the entire tradition. And it’s the first thing Christian nationalism puts at risk.

When a political movement — even one draped in Christian language — starts sorting people into more American and less American, into those whose religion earns them a seat at the table and those who must earn their place by conforming, it has already departed from the Gospel. Dignity isn’t conditional. It doesn’t depend on your faith, race, origin, or politics. When religion is used to rank people rather than to serve them, faith is being misused — full stop.

The Common Good Isn’t “Our Side Winning”

Catholic Social Teaching uses a phrase that sounds almost old-fashioned: the common good. But the idea is sharp and demanding. The common good isn’t the sum of individual interests, and it certainly isn’t the victory of one group dressed up as the good of the nation. It’s the set of conditions that allow all people and all communities to flourish — together.

Christian nationalism narrows that vision dramatically. It privileges one community’s understanding of what America should look like and quietly turns neighbors into outsiders. Catholic teaching insists that public life must be ordered toward justice and peace for everyone — not the domination of some by others, however righteously that domination is framed.

Solidarity: The Opposite of “Us vs. Them”

One of the most misunderstood words in Catholic Social Teaching is solidarity. It doesn’t just mean feeling sympathy for people who are struggling. It means recognizing that we are, in a deep and binding sense, responsible for one another. It means seeing the person across the political or cultural divide not as a threat but as a brother or sister.

Christian nationalism tends to run in exactly the opposite direction. It draws circles — insiders and outsiders, the faithful and the foreign — and builds its identity on those distinctions. Catholic Social Teaching pushes back hard: toward encounter, toward mutual responsibility, toward a love that doesn’t stop at the border of the familiar.

The people most likely to be excluded or scapegoated by nationalist movements are precisely the people solidarity requires us to stand with.

Religious Freedom Is for Everyone — or It’s for No One

Here’s something Catholics in America sometimes forget: the Church has extensive experience being on the outside of the dominant culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Catholics were the suspicious foreigners, the ones whose loyalty to Rome was considered incompatible with American citizenship. That history should make Catholics especially alert to the dangers of any movement that seeks to grant one faith tradition privileged status in law or public life.

Catholic Social Teaching defends religious freedom — not as a perk for the powerful, but as a fundamental human right. That freedom belongs to Christians, yes — but also to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, atheists, and everyone else. The moment a government begins favoring one religious tradition over others, religious freedom for all is in jeopardy. You cannot build a genuinely free society on a foundation of religious favoritism.

Power Is for Sharing, Not Seizing

Subsidiarity — another cornerstone of Catholic Social Teaching — holds that decisions should be made as close to the people affected as possible, with real respect for the dignity and agency of persons and communities. It’s about dispersing power, not concentrating it.

But subsidiarity is not a license for local majorities or religious blocs to impose their will on everyone else. And Christian nationalism, whatever its stated intentions, tends toward exactly that kind of imposition: the idea that a “godly” faction should hold the reins of power and steer the nation toward its particular vision of the good.

Catholic teaching favors genuine democratic participation — institutions that protect everyone's rights, accountability that runs in multiple directions, and a deep skepticism toward any movement that treats electoral or cultural power as something to be seized rather than shared.

The Gospel Test: See~Judge~Act

Underneath the political and philosophical arguments, there’s a simpler question — and it’s the one that cuts deepest.

Does this movement look like Jesus?

The Christ of the Gospels did not build a movement of religious triumphalism. He did not gather a coalition of the powerful to impose righteousness on the unwilling. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. He touched lepers. He stopped for the person everyone else had stepped around. He told his followers that whatever they did to “the least of these,” they did to him.

Any politics that forgets the poor, that excludes the stranger, that wraps cruelty or contempt in the flag of faith — that politics stands far from the heart of the Gospel. The question isn’t whether a movement uses Christian language. The question is whether it embodies Christian love.

So What Should Catholics Actually Do?

The answer isn’t panic or withdrawal. It’s fidelity — to the tradition, to the teaching, and to the person of Christ.

That means recommitting, in concrete and practical ways, to the dignity of every person, regardless of where they were born or what they believe. It means defending religious freedom not just for ourselves but for everyone, including those whose faith looks nothing like ours. It means resisting racism and nativism wherever they appear, including when they appear in our own communities. It means showing up for democratic life — voting, organizing, advocating — with a genuine commitment to justice for all rather than advantage for some. And it means practicing solidarity with those who are most at risk, most marginalized, most likely to be left out of the story we tell about who this country is for.

Christian faith is at its best when it serves the neighbor. It is at its worst when it seeks control.

Catholic Social Teaching has spent more than a century building an alternative vision: a public life shaped by dignity, solidarity, justice, and peace. That vision is more urgently needed now than ever.

Questions to Sit With

• Where is the line between healthy patriotism and the kind of nationalism Catholic Social Teaching warns against — and how do you know when you’ve crossed it?

• Whose flourishing does your political vision actually include? Who gets left out, and why?

• If religious freedom is a universal right, how should Catholics respond when the rights of minority religious communities — Muslim, Jewish, Sikh, or nonreligious — are threatened, even by Christians?

• What would it look like, in your own community, to practice solidarity with people who are most vulnerable to exclusion or scapegoating?

• Does the movement — any movement, including ones you sympathize with — pass the Gospel test? Does it look like Jesus?

• How does the Church’s own history of marginalization in America — the anti-Catholic prejudice of earlier centuries — shape how Catholics should respond to movements that seek to privilege one faith tradition over others today?

Why stillness is the key to understanding — and surviving — the age of AI

In the era of the Autonomous Revolution, we have been handed the most powerful cognitive tools in human history — and no instruction manual for our own minds. We’ve outsourced memory to the cloud, judgment to the algorithm, and attention to the feed. We equate “optimized” with “good,” and “automated” with “inevitable.”

But there is a radical, ancient discipline re-emerging precisely because it is so foreign to the world AI is building around us. It’s called Contemplative Resistance, and its central claim is this: you cannot think clearly about artificial intelligence if you cannot first think clearly at all. The most subversive act in the age of machine cognition is to reclaim your own.

The colonization of your judgment

Before we can evaluate AI, we must be honest about the conditions in which we encounter it. We do not approach these technologies as calm, sovereign thinkers. We arrive pre-shaped.

The dopamine loop doesn’t disappear when we open a chatbot — it accelerates. We ask AI for the answer before we’ve fully formed the question. The outrage economy trains us to react to AI headlines with fear or hype before a single independent thought is formed. And as Thomas Merton warned, the “false self” — that version of us built on status, speed, and social comparison — is precisely the self that most eagerly embraces whatever technology promises to make us faster, smarter, or more impressive to others.

When your attention is colonized, your capacity to evaluate AI is gone. You are not adopting tools — you are being adopted by them.

Contemplative Resistance names this for what it is: not progress, but a new form of idolatry. The algorithm is not neutral. It has interests. And if you cannot sit in silence long enough to hear your own mind, you will never be able to hear where the machine ends, and you begin.

Three guides for the age of machine intelligence

Three thinkers, writing decades apart, left us the tools we need now.

THE MONK

Merton

Interior distance creates the vantage point AI cannot give you: a self not flattered by its outputs.

THE MARTYR

Bonhoeffer

Grounded ethics cannot be automated. Cheap grace — like cheap AI assurance — costs everything.

THE PROPHET

McLuhan

The medium restructures consciousness. AI is not just a tool — it is reshaping what it means to think.

The interior distance — Merton and artificial clarity

Thomas Merton entered a monastery not to escape the world but to see it plainly. By dismantling his false self in silence, he gained the precision to critique nuclear war and systemic racism with a clarity that the noise-dwellers could never achieve. The lesson for AI is direct: the person who has never sat with their own uncertainty will be the easiest to convince by a confident language model. The machine produces fluency. Only you can produce judgment. Interior distance — the capacity to step back from the feed, the chatbot, the generated summary — is not a luxury. It is the minimum condition for thinking about AI at all.

The cost of discipleship — Bonhoeffer and automated ethics

Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s resistance to Hitler was not born in the streets; it was forged in the painful work of prayer. His warning against “cheap grace” — faith without cost, obedience without sacrifice — maps onto our moment with eerie precision. We now have access to AI systems that will generate an ethical framework, a mission statement, or a DEI policy in seconds. This is cheap grace for institutions. True ethical discernment cannot be automated because it requires a self willing to be wrong, to suffer consequences, to stand firm when standing firm costs something. No model has that skin in the game. You do.

The medium is the message — McLuhan and the restructured mind

Marshall McLuhan warned that our devices are not neutral carriers of content — they restructure the consciousness that uses them. He diagnosed the 2026 crisis fifty years early. Every AI system you use doesn’t just answer your questions; it shapes which questions feel worth asking. It habituates you to a certain rhythm of inquiry: fast, confident, resolved. The contemplative tradition has always known that wisdom lives in the unresolved — in the question held long enough to reveal its real shape. McLuhan’s warning is an invitation: use the tool, but protect the interior architecture it is quietly renovating.

A method for thinking about AI you can actually trust

Not a framework generated by AI — a rhythm practiced before you open the app.

1 See. Look past the headline, the demo, the viral thread. Who is actually affected by this technology — not in the use case the press release describes, but in the supply chain, the data set, the displaced workforce? Strip away your tribe’s talking points about AI (utopian or dystopian) and ask what is actually happening.
2 Discern. Bring what you see into stillness before you act on it. Ask honestly: Am I excited about this AI tool because it is genuinely good, or because it makes me feel smart? Am I afraid of this technology because I’ve assessed it, or because fear is the frame my feed has handed me? Strip the ego. The answer that remains is closer to the truth.
3 Act. Move from transformed understanding, not adrenaline. This means your AI adoption decisions, your policy positions, your purchasing choices about technology are slower to hype, slower to panic, and far more durable. Action rooted in discernment does not need to be revised every news cycle.

Why stillness makes you ungovernable by the machine

The forces that profit from your uncritical adoption of AI — and those that profit from your uncritical rejection of it — share a single requirement: that you remain reactive. Reactive people make predictable consumers, predictable voters, and predictable data points.

But you cannot reduce a person who has found their center. You cannot sell AI-generated authority to someone who has already learned to sit with genuine uncertainty. You cannot exhaust someone with urgency — “this model will change everything,” “AI will take your job,” “you must adopt this now” — when they act from a place that adrenaline cannot reach.

The contemplative tradition does not make you a Luddite. Merton was not afraid of the world. Bonhoeffer was not paralyzed by its evil. McLuhan was not a technophobe — he was technology’s most penetrating diagnostician. The stillness they practiced gave them not distance from the crisis but the capacity to engage it without being consumed by it.

That is exactly what the age of AI requires of you now.

Stop the scroll. Find the silence. Then, and only then, decide what the machine is for.

QUESTIONS TO SIT WITH

1. When was the last time you formed a complete opinion about an AI tool before you saw what others thought of it? What would it take to practice that more deliberately?

2. McLuhan argued that every medium shapes what we can think, not just what we think about. In what ways has your daily use of AI systems begun to change the questions you ask — not just the answers you receive?

3. Bonhoeffer’s “cheap grace” was religion without cost. What is the equivalent for AI? What are we accepting too easily, and what would “costly” discernment about technology actually look like in your life?

4. Merton gained clarity by removing himself from noise — not permanently, but as a practice. What would a modern equivalent look like for you? Where is your monastery?

5. If AI systems are optimized to give you what you already want, how would you ever discover what you actually need? What disciplines protect that distinction?

6. I argue that stillness makes you “ungovernable.” But is there a version of contemplative withdrawal that becomes its own avoidance — a way of opting out of the difficult work of engaging AI’s real consequences for real people?

The deepest response to artificial intelligence is not the loudest.
It is the one rooted deep enough to last.

There’s a version of spirituality that looks like an escape hatch—a way to retreat from the chaos of the world into candles, silence, and personal peace. Thomas Merton spent his life arguing that this version is a fraud.

Merton was a Trappist monk who entered a Kentucky monastery in 1941 and remained there. Yet, from inside those walls, he became one of the most politically engaged Christian voices of the twentieth century—writing against nuclear war, racism, and the spiritual emptiness of modern consumerism. For Merton, the deeper you go into genuine prayer, the more you find yourself fiercely caring about the world outside.

That’s the insight at the heart of what we might call contemplative resistance theology, and it’s more relevant now than ever.

What Is “Contemplative Resistance Theology”?

The phrase “Contemplative Resistance” names the distinctive integration at the heart of Merton’s theology: the conviction that genuine contemplation — the deep, silent encounter with the living God — is not a retreat from the world’s suffering, but the very ground from which authentic resistance to injustice must arise. All of us have studied and read Merton, and at many times we have described Merton as representing “the beginning of an era of integration, in which mysticism and the social gospel were seen to stand or fall together”. For Merton, the seer must act. In Henri Nouwen’s classic formulation, “contemplation and action can never be separated. The seer acts”.

This integration is explicitly theological. Merton was not simply a politically engaged monk who happened to pray. He argued that without a deep interior life, activism risks becoming just another expression of the very violence it claims to oppose. His 1966 Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander warns against “total involvement in the intricacies of a movement,” however worthy. No matter how commendable, the logic of movements can cast blame on others while leaving the roots of violence within us unchallenged. True resistance, Merton insisted, must be born of a place within us that has been transformed by the love of God. This is what distinguishes Contemplative Resistance from mere political activism: it begins not in strategy or outrage but in prayer, silence, and the painful, liberating encounter with our own complicity in what we oppose.

The Problem with the False Self

One of Merton’s most enduring contributions is his distinction between the false self and the true self.

The false self is our fear-driven persona—eager for approval, status, and control. It chases validation, aligns with tribes, and reacts impulsively. Most of us inhabit this place, often unknowingly.

The true self is who we are in God—rooted in love, liberated from compulsion, and open to real connection. Contemplative prayer strips away the false self and lets the true self emerge.

This matters for justice because Merton saw social sin as rooted in the human heart. Racism, greed, and indifference grow from people shaped by fear and illusion. Broken systems can’t heal without personal transformation.

Prayer That Gets Its Hands Dirty

The Gospel has never asked Christians to be neutral. Mercy, justice, truth-telling, and peacemaking aren’t add-ons to faith—they’re central to it. Merton’s contemplative life didn’t lead him away from the world’s suffering; it led him deeper into it.

Catholic social teaching captures what Merton lived: the dignity of every person, solidarity, the common good, and the preferential option for the poor. These are not theories but demands on how we live, vote, consume, speak, and pray.

For Merton, resistance means rejecting anything that dehumanizes—whether obvious injustices or subtle habits of indifference or superficial living.

Three Scriptural Anchors

Merton’s vision is deeply rooted in Scripture, even when he doesn’t explicitly cite chapter and verse.

Psalm 46:10 says, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Here, stillness means clarity, not passivity. Without stillness, we can’t see reality clearly.

Romans 12:2 urges, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds.” This calls for discernment—a refusal to let modern trends dictate our inner lives.

Micah 6:8 proclaims, “Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” Merton kept justice, mercy, humility—and prayer and action—in tension. Action without prayer breeds self-righteousness; prayer without action becomes indulgence. (think of what we see with Christian Nationalism today)

A Simple Pattern: See, Discern, Act

Merton never wrote a self-help book, but his spirituality suggests a practical rhythm for Christian life that’s worth taking seriously.

See. Pay attention to reality as it actually is, not as you wish it were or as your preferred media portrays it. Notice suffering. Notice your own reactions. Notice what you’ve been trained to look away from.

Discern. Pose sincere questions. Where am I acting from fear, ego, or illusion? Where do Gospel values influence me, and where do consumerism or anxiety shape me? Compare your desires with Scripture and the Church’s social teaching.

Act. Select one concrete act of justice, mercy, or peace. Not a grand gesture, but one authentic action that builds communion, upholds dignity, or rejects contempt.

This pattern matters especially now. We live in an environment engineered to keep us reactive and distracted. The pressures of social media, the pace of the news cycle, and the invitation to perform for an audience all work against inner freedom. Contemplation, among other things, resists this.

What This Actually Looks Like

Living as a contemplative resistance theologian is not a dramatic posture. It is mostly quiet and often unremarkable. It may include:

• Refusing to use dehumanizing language about political opponents, even when it’s satisfying

• Practicing a form of prayer that genuinely softens your heart toward people who are suffering

• Supporting works of justice — locally, concretely, not just virtually

• Examining how your technology habits, media diet, and consumption patterns are shaping your soul

• Building enough interior silence into your life to actually hear what God might be asking of you

• Choosing truth with charity, even when the culture rewards neither

None of these actions will draw attention. That is essential to their meaning.

Why Merton Still Matters

Merton died in 1968, accidentally electrocuted while attending a conference in Bangkok. He never saw the current pace of change, but his questions still matter.

How do we stay human in an inhuman moment? How do we resist injustice without becoming what we oppose? How do we act in the world while remaining rooted in something deeper than the world?

Merton’s answer was not a program but a practice: go deeper into God, and you’ll go deeper into love—for family, neighbors, the poor, and even enemies. The greatest revolution, he believed, starts in the heart.

If the Church wants to be a faithful witness in troubled times—and she must—she needs people formed in this way: those who pray deeply, discern wisely, and act courageously. Not because it’s strategic, but because it’s holy.

That’s the path of the contemplative resistance theologian. Merton walked it. The invitation is still open.

Interested in exploring Merton further? His books New Seeds of Contemplation and The Seven Storey Mountain *are excellent starting points. For grounding in Catholic social teaching, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church is available free from the Vatican.

Introduction

What did Fr Joseph Cardijn teach young workers about the resurrection of Jesus? It is obvious from published talks he gave to young workers that he believed that Jesus was raised to life three days after he was crucified. But as is consistent in his teaching, his focus was on putting this belief into action.

He made the following reference to the resurrection in a talk he gave on the mystery of vocation at a congress for YCW, held in Godinne, Belgium, in 1949:

The working class will rise again, because it has apostles who, with and by Christ, by their sufferings and prayers, and even by their death on the Cross, merit with Christ this resurrection of working-class youth and of the working class of the world.

Cardijn focused on the three truths of faith, experience and method. His teaching about the truth of faith emphasises the eternal and temporal destinies of each and every worker. These destinies are not separate and distinct; they co-exist to the extent that those who are baptised seek to know and do God’s Will.

The Gospel

It was very early on the first day of the week and still dark, when Mary of Magdala came to the tomb. She saw that the stone had been moved away from the tomb and came running to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one Jesus loved. ‘They have taken the Lord out of the tomb’ she said ‘and we don’t know where they have put him.’

So Peter set out with the other disciple to go to the tomb. They ran together, but the other disciple, running faster than Peter, reached the tomb first; he bent down and saw the linen cloths lying on the ground, but did not go in. Simon Peter who was following now came up, went right into the tomb, saw the linen cloths on the ground, and also the cloth that had been over his head; this was not with the linen cloths but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple who had reached the tomb first also went in; he saw and he believed. Till this moment they had failed to understand the teaching of scripture, that he must rise from the dead. (John 20:1-9)

The Enquiry

See

• Observe what happens in this scene. Who is involved? What grabs your attention in this scene? Why?

• Find out about the burial customs in Jewish culture during the time of Jesus. What prevented Jesus’ family and friends from fully preparing his body for burial after he was crucified? Why did Mary Magdalene go to the tomb on Sunday morning before sunrise?

• Why was Jesus’ resurrection so controversial in his time? How has the empty tomb impacted the followers of Jesus and the world? Why do so many people today take no notice of the resurrection of Jesus?

Judge

• What do you make of this event in Jesus’ life?

• Why wasn’t his resurrection announced with a fanfare and great public celebration?

• How is your life today shaped by the resurrection of Jesus?

Act

• So, having reflected on this story, what part are you being called to play in God’s transformation of the world?

• What small action can you carry out that will contribute to the change God is calling you to make?

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

Image Source: Wannapik Studio (Creator), Palm Sunday Parishioners Carry Palms, Wannapik Studio, CC BY 3.0

Worth reading: The mystery of vocation, Part 3 of “The young worker faces life”: The 1949 Godinne Lecture Series. In Challenge to Action: Forming Leaders for Transformation. You can download a copy of this book from here.