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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the eye truly sees

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

Merton had witnessed it from within, and long before.

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

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

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

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

The instant the claim unraveled

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

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

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

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

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

Where he would pause and slow the argument

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

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

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

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

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

The final verb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

The Gospel

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

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

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

The Enquiry

See

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

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

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

Judge

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

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

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

Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three Cents a Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Cardinal Writes to Rome

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

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

Rome did not condemn the Knights.

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

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

The Coal Hauler’s Son

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

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

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

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

His method had three verbs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Nobody Handed Down

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

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

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

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

The Spinning Jenny’s Answer

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

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

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

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

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

Canaries Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See, Judge, Act

Cardijn’s method still fits on an index card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The canaries are singing again.

Somebody should be listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The syllogism from Collegeville

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

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

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

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

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

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

The method that came from a coal deliverer’s son

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

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

The method fits on an index card:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Merton’s mirror

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

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

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

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

The strongest objection

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

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

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

This brings the argument back to its main point.

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

Read that again and let it sink in.

What follows

Five propositions, short enough to keep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

The Gospel

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

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

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

The Enquiry

See

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

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

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

Judge

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

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

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

Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See: the clergy who were never mentioned.

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

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

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

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

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

Judge: the view from nowhere

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act: standing in two places at once

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

Five things follow, short enough for an index card.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are doing it again.

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

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

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

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

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

Switch-side

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

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

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

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

Flow the round.

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

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

What falls out of the round

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The middle verb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEE: The distance between us

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

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

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

Now, introduce the machine.

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

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

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

Where the money meets the fist

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

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

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

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

JUDGE: Two thousand years of arguing with the ledger

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

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

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

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

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

Merton, and the violence you don’t notice

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

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

The harder question

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACT: Can any of this be forgiven?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gospel Text: Matthew 16:13-20

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

See

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

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

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

Judge

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

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

Why might Jesus have sought to keep his identity secret?

Act

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reading:

https://mbfallon.com/matthew.html

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mistake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The question worth changing

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review of Life ——— Reflective practice

See —-- Social observation, data, lived experience

Judge —--Ethical and moral discernment

Act ——Concrete intervention

Formation of leaders —— Formation of citizens

Catholic Action —— Public action rooted in values

The worker milieu —— Every milieu where people actually live

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

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

Universalize, but do not secularize.

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

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

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

What is happening to the human person?

What ought human beings and their society to be?

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

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

So we have to preserve three dimensions.

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

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

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

And then, you begin to see anew.

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

Where this could live

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

Right where people already live, work, and gather.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vocabulary problem

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

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

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

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

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

The vessel may change, but the mission can remain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A world war fought piecemeal.

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

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

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

Imagine, for a moment, a common curriculum.

Here is a thought experiment worth taking seriously.

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

The shape could follow the arc of conflict itself:

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

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

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

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

Nonviolence as askesis

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

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

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

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

Would it change anything?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEE

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

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

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

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

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

JUDGE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ACT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sources

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

These two approaches are partners, not twins. A person might master every interpretive rule yet never truly open the book. Another might pore over every page, but without navigation, only discover reverberations of their own beliefs.

I am convinced that reading Thomas Merton requires both approaches, but today’s readers will find the richest rewards in the careful, hands-on work of exegesis.

The Hermeneutical Habit in Merton Studies

Merton scholarship is rich, and much of it is hermeneutical. It asks the framing questions. How should we situate Merton within the Cistercian tradition? What is the relationship between the convert of The Seven Storey Mountainand the interreligious pilgrim of the Asian journals? How much weight should the private journals bear against the published work he edited and shaped? Is there one Merton or several? Do we read him as monk, as poet, as social critic, as mystic, and does choosing one distort the others?

These are important and necessary questions. They are like asking whether we read Genesis 1 as cosmology, liturgy, or argument—the answer shapes everything that follows. Without hermeneutics, exegesis turns into proof-texting, and Merton is especially easy to proof-text. He wrote about seventy books and thousands of letters over twenty-seven years, changed his mind in public, and left such a deep paper trail that almost any position can be supported by picking the right quote. The interpretive frame helps prevent that.

But guardrails are not the journey. If we linger too long on framing questions, we risk drifting away from the text itself. Debating which Merton is authentic can become a way to sidestep what any of them truly said.

Why the Break Matters: 18 March 1958

The key turning point is at the corner of Fourth and Walnut in downtown Louisville. On 18 March 1958, Merton was in town running an errand from the abbey when he was suddenly overwhelmed by the realization that he loved the people around him, that his separation from them was, in some way, not real, and that “there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

One important detail: the passage most people know comes from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, published in 1966, eight years after the event. The journal entry written at the time is shorter and less poetic. The well-known version is Merton revisiting his own experience with almost ten years of perspective. This does not discredit it; instead, it clarifies the genre. We are reading a mature reflection presented as a single moment, as in much of scripture.

What matters is what happened next. The ten years between 1958 and his death in Bangkok in December 1968 were Merton’s most publicly engaged, most debated, and, for us, most useful period. This is the Merton of the Cold War Letters, Seeds of Destruction, Raids on the Unspeakable, and Faith and Violence. This is the Merton who wrote to Dorothy Day, Ernesto Cardenal, Czesław Miłosz, D.T. Suzuki, and Rachel Carson. In 1962, his superiors ordered him to stop publishing on nuclear war. He followed the order in public but still shared mimeographed material with friends, which says more about his relationship to authority than any theory of his monastic life could.

After Fourth and Walnut, Merton was no longer a monk apart from the world, but a monk who saw himself entwined with its fabric. Everything he wrote from then on came from inside that shared reality.

Doing the Exegesis: Reading Merton for Patterns

To study Merton’s later work closely, we need to ask the usual tough questions about a text. What is he really saying? Who is he talking to? What situation led to this, and what might he have said differently in another context? Where does he get it wrong?

That last question is essential. In his essay on race in Seeds of Destruction, “Letters to a White Liberal,” Merton is unexpectedly perceptive about the fatigue of a certain kind of well-meaning white moderate. At the same time, he is a white monk in rural Kentucky writing about Black experience with little direct contact and a lot of confidence. Both are true. Reading closely means holding both truths at once, not just picking the more flattering side.

But as you trace this work through his later years, unmistakable patterns begin to emerge, demanding our attention.

The Unspeakable. This is what Merton called it in the preface to Raids on the Unspeakable. It is not just another word for evil. Instead, it is more like a systematic emptiness—a lack of real meaning inside institutions and language that keep running smoothly. It is like a huge machine working with no one, it seems, making any decisions. Merton saw this in the nuclear arms race and in Adolf Eichmann’s normal behavior, which led to his sharp “Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann”: the frightening thing about Eichmann was that he was sane.

Technique. After reading Jacques Ellul, Merton became focused on how technological systems create their own demands. What we can do quietly turns into what we must do, and efficiency replaces the question of whether something should be done at all.

Mass language. Merton often wrote about propaganda and clichés—language that no longer carries meaning but instead signals group identity. He saw that words worn down like this are not just careless; they actually prevent certain thoughts from even becoming possible.

The spiritual roots of protest. Merton’s letter to Jim Forest from 21 February 1966 is his most detailed writing on activism, and I will let it speak for itself at the end of this piece. He wrote it to a young man worn out by an antiwar movement that was not succeeding. Elsewhere, he also said that activism can bring its own kind of violence ~ the rush to overwork in a good cause can destroy the inner wisdom that makes the work meaningful.

The Reader’s Half of the Work

At this point, interpretation is no longer simply academic. If we are honest in our historical reading, these patterns are not limited to their own time.

The Unspeakable did not finish with the Cold War. Today, systems make important decisions about credit, jobs, policing, and attention, spreading responsibility so widely that no single person is truly to blame. Merton saw this as a spiritual problem before a political one, and he believed it does not need villains.

Ellul’s idea of technique is now the background logic of entire industries. What we can do becomes what we actually do, and then what we must do, with the question of whether we should do it always pushed to the next step.

Mass language has now become industrial. The clichés Merton saw in newspapers and government statements are now created, tested, and spread at a scale and speed he could never have imagined. The problem he described is exactly what we see today: words that show group loyalty but say almost nothing, coming at us faster than we can think.

Merton’s letter to Jim Forest still rings true today. It could just as easily be addressed to someone you know: a person pouring themselves into meaningful work, measuring their worth by outcomes, growing weary, losing curiosity, and gradually becoming less able to help the very cause that is wearing them thin.

None of these are just allegories. Merton was not trying to predict the future. He described these structures so accurately that his words still matter long after the events he wrote about. That is also why we still read a first-century letter to a church in Corinth.

The Discipline of Application

Moving from observing patterns to applying them is where interpretation often fails, and the ways to avoid mistakes are well known.

Figure out what Merton actually said before deciding what it means for you. Read his whole later work, not just the most quoted passages—the Fourth and Walnut story has been repeated so much it has almost lost its meaning, something Merton himself would have recognized as a problem. I am as guilty as the next person on this one. Pay attention to the type of writing: a private journal, a censored manuscript, a letter to a friend, and a published essay are all different. Keep the historical distance in mind—Merton writing about nuclear war is not automatically Merton writing about climate change and technology, and pretending otherwise oversimplifies him. Also, notice his limits: his views on women, his own celibacy, and the link between his solitude and his many letters all deserve a careful look.

But after all that, the real task is to live it out. This is how we genuinely honor him. Merton did not write for lecture halls alone. He was a man who, while running an everyday errand on a city street, discovered his connection to others was unbreakable ~ and then devoted the next decade to exploring what that revelation meant for his actions on war, race, technology, and the inner lives of those willing to listen.

Hermeneutics teaches us to read Merton with care. Exegesis compels us to read him closely. What remains—the part no method can supply—is the choice of what to do next, which was always the heart of his challenge. He put it to Jim Forest this way:

Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. And there too a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually you struggle less and less for an idea, and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, the reality of personal relationships saves everything. ~ Thomas Merton to Jim Forest, 21 February 1966

Introduction

I remember being taught that there is no salvation outside the Church, but I rejected this because my father never went to Church, yet he was always a loving father to me. I never accepted that God would not save him.

Every Sunday in the last years of his life, he drove my Mum to Mass and sat in the car with a copy of the Sunday Times. So close, yet so far? And unlike the Canaanite woman you will meet in the Gospel. She knew that Jesus had the power to heal her daughter … and she was not a Jew.

Not long before he passed away, he expressed the desire to become a Catholic. His parents had been members of the Church of England and had their children christened. In the end, he never followed through with that desire. I guess he was finding life difficult and death caught him unawares, I think.

It is an easy trap for a westerner like me to think in a legalistic way about salvation. A short visit to Lumen Gentium made me stop and reflect on the power and beauty of encountering Jesus. And I think about the experience of receiving him when I go to Communion. I have adopted the practice of thanking him for welcoming me into his Body. And I regularly ask God to make sure He has welcomed my Dad into His heavenly kingdom.

The Gospel

Jesus left Gennesaret and withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. Then out came a Canaanite woman from that district and started shouting, ‘Sir, Son of David, take pity on me. My daughter is tormented by a devil.’ But he answered her not a word. And his disciples went and pleaded with him. ‘Give her what she wants,’ they said ‘because she is shouting after us.’ He said in reply, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.’ But the woman had come up and was kneeling at his feet. ‘Lord,’ she said ‘help me.’ He replied, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the house-dogs.’ She retorted, ‘Ah yes, sir; but even house-dogs can eat the scraps that fall from their master’s table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, you have great faith. Let your wish be granted.’ And from that moment her daughter was well again. (Matthew 15:21-28)

The Enquiry

See

• Follow the storyline presented in this Gospel passage. What do you learn about Jesus and his mission? How does this fit with your experience of Church?

• What happens in the life of the Canaanite woman because she reaches out to Jesus for help? What does this tell you about the impact of faith in a person’s life?

• Why does the Canaanite woman persist in her interaction with Jesus? How is this story about the relevance of Church? Or your experience of Church?

Judge

• What do you make of the reaction of the disciples to the presence of a foreigner shouting at Jesus and kneeling in front of him? What does this tell you about human motives and God’s mercy?

• My parish priest always begins his introduction to the Mass by welcoming those who are passing through. Consider the contrast between his attitude and the attitude displayed by Jesus’ disciples in this Gospel story. What have you realised about the attitude ofh Jesus towards the Canaanite woman?

• Does Jesus continue to interact with you even when you reject his invitation to follow him on the journey to Calvary? How real is his interaction with you? Do you persist in your prayer for help? Or do you give in to despair?

Act

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

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

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

Image Source: Jean Germain Drouais (Creator), French painting of the woman of Canaan at the feet of Christ (1784)(, Picryl, PDM 1.0

Worth reading: Lumen Gentium, even if you just read Chapter 1: The Mystery of the Church.

The general in the audience

In April 1963, in the small town of Angicos in Rio Grande do Norte, three hundred rural workers completed a forty-hour literacy course, spread over about six weeks. Most of them had been unable to sign their names when it started.

The closing ceremony drew an unusual guest list. The President of Brazil, João Goulart, came. So did Celso Furtado, the economist behind the development agency for the northeast. And so did a general named Humberto Castelo Branco.

Eleven months later, Castelo Branco became the first military president of Brazil, installed by the April 1964 coup. The man who had designed the Angicos course, Paulo Freire, spent about seventy days in jail and then close to sixteen years in exile.

It is worth being precise about what the new government objected to, because the obvious answer is wrong. They were not frightened that peasants could read. Literacy campaigns were government policy; that is why the President showed up. What frightened them was the middle of the method.

Freire’s course did not begin with the alphabet. It began with photographs and drawings of the learners’ own town — a well, a brick, a hoe, a man’s hands — and a question: what do you see here? The words came from the discussion, not from a primer. And once a room of sugarcane workers has spent an evening deciding for itself what a well means and who owns it, the reading lesson is no longer only a reading lesson.

Freire had not invented that sequence. He had inherited it, largely from the Catholic Action movements he had worked in, which had it from a Belgian priest who wrote it down for teenage factory workers in the 1920s. Three verbs: See. Judge. Act.

Generals and bishops have historically been comfortable with two of them.

The dangerous verb

Joseph Cardijn’s method, formalized in the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne around 1925 and first set out systematically by his colleague Joseph Arendt at the first Belgian JOC congress, was built for people with no formal education and no institutional standing. Young workers gathered facts about their own conditions in notebooks — wages, hours, the girl in the finishing room dismissed for being pregnant. That was See. Then they weighed those facts against the Gospel and Catholic social teaching and reached their own conclusion. That was Judge. Then they did one concrete thing and reported back the following week. That was Act.

Pope John XXIII set out the method in an encyclical in 1961. Mater et Magistra §236 lays out “three stages which should normally be followed in the reduction of social principles into practice”: review the concrete situation, form a judgment on it in light of those principles, decide what can and should be done. The official English translation renders the three verbs as “look, judge, act.”

Notice which of the three made people nervous. Nobody objects to workers collecting facts; facts can be filed. Nobody objects to workers doing good deeds; deeds can be praised. The disruptive claim inside Cardijn’s method is that a nineteen-year-old machinist is competent to reach a verdict — that judgment is not reserved to the people with degrees, miters, or capital.

The same holds outside religion entirely. Every serious method of learning has a version of these three moves. Kolb’s experiential cycle has concrete experience, reflective observation, and abstract conceptualization, then active experimentation. Quality improvement has plan-do-study-act. Every strategy offsite has data, discussion, decisions. And in nearly all of them, the middle move is the thin one.

Schools are extraordinarily well equipped for See. That is what a curriculum is: an organized supply of things to look at. Schools are well equipped for Act, because that is what assignments and assessments are. Ask a teacher — of second graders or of second-year residents — what specific, teachable, repeatable procedure students use to get from “here are the facts” to “here is my judgment,” and the honest answer is usually: discussion, and hope.

Judge, left unequipped, collapses into one of three things:

• The sermon. The adult already knows the right answer and steers the discussion toward it. Freire’s term for this is “banking education.” Students learn to guess the teacher’s conclusion, which is a real skill, just not the advertised one.

• The gut. Everyone shares how they feel. This is warmer and equally unreproducible. Nobody can say afterward why the group landed where it landed, so nobody can revisit it when it turns out to be wrong.

• The vote. The disagreement gets counted rather than examined, and 60% of the room is now implementing something they think is a mistake.

What the middle verb has always lacked is instruments. Which is where a physicist comes in, from a direction nobody in Cardijn’s tradition was watching.

A physicist with a toolkit

Eliyahu M. Goldratt (1947–2011) was an Israeli physicist who backed into management by being asked to fix a friend’s factory. He built a production scheduling method out of it, then a business novel about it — The Goal, 1984 — and then spent twenty-five years generalizing the underlying idea into the Theory of Constraints: in any system aimed at a goal, performance is set by a very small number of limiting factors, and effort spent anywhere else is mostly theatre.

The part that matters here is what he did in the 1990s. Goldratt became convinced that the real constraint in most organizations was not a machine or a budget but the way people reasoned — specifically, their inability to examine the assumptions holding a problem in place. So in It’s Not Luck (1994) he laid out a family of logic tools he called the Thinking Processes, and in 1995 he set up a nonprofit, TOC for Education (TOCfE), to put simplified versions of them in the hands of children. Not as a business curriculum. As thinking equipment.

Two of his lines are worth keeping:

Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement.

The goal is a win-win solution in which no one is harmed.

The first is a Judge-phase statement. The second is a Judge-phase commitment. He was, without using the vocabulary, building exactly the instruments that the middle verb had always been missing.

Three tools, one phase

TOCfE reduced the Thinking Processes to three tools that a child can draw and an adult can use in a meeting. Each one answers a different Judge-phase question.

1. The Cloud — for when two goods collide

Judge-phase question: We each want something reasonable and we cannot both have it. What is actually forcing the choice?

Goldratt originally called it the Evaporating Cloud. Five boxes:

Read as a chain: To have A, I must have B; to have B, I need D. To have A, we must have C; to have C, you need D′. But D and D′ cannot both happen.

The first thing this does is relocate the fight. It is not at A — you already agree there, or you would not be in the same room. It is usually not at B or C either; asked directly, most people will concede the other side’s need is legitimate. The whole conflict lives between D and D′, two proposed actions. That is a much smaller argument than the one everyone thought they were having.

The second thing it does is the actual work. Every arrow rests on an unstated “because.” To satisfy C, you need D′ — because… Say the because out loud. Often enough, someone hears it and says, “Wait, is that true?” When an assumption fails, you add what Goldratt called an injection — a new action or condition that satisfies both B and C without requiring either D or D′. The conflict does not get split down the middle. It stops existing. That is why he called it evaporating: the cloud burns off rather than being cut in half.

One correction that matters, because this tool is taught wrong constantly: B and C are needs; D and D′ are actions. If your D′ box says “safety” or “fairness,” you have put a need where an action goes, and the diagram will not work. “Safety” is a need. “Require everyone to remain on site” is an action. Getting that distinction right is most of the skill.

Recess, in full:

• A — We both have a good recess.

• B — I need my turn to count. → D — I use the swing now.

• C — She needs her turn to count. → D′ — She uses the swing now.

An adult would call this trivial and impose a ruling. But when a seven-year-old fills in box C in her own handwriting — she needs her turn to count too — something has happened that no ruling produces. She has written down, in evidence, that the other party has a legitimate need. “Count to thirty out loud, then switch” is then not a punishment. It is hers.

A fifty-year-old going back to school, in full:

• A — I finish the credential, and my family is stable.

• B — We need my income. → D — Keep working full time.

• C — I need real study hours. → D′ — Cut back to part time.

The assumption on the last arrow is usually that study hours can only come out of paid hours. Sometimes true. Often not: prior-learning credit, employer tuition schemes, asynchronous cohorts, a compressed term, a shift swap. The adult learner who builds this cloud stops seeing the situation as a personal failure of discipline and starts seeing it as a structure with a seam.

2. The Branch — for when an action has a tail

Judge-phase question: If we do this, then what — and then what after that?

The Branch is a chain of “if… then…” statements built forward from a proposed action or backward from an unwanted outcome. Its most useful move is what TOC practitioners call trimming a negative branch: you like the action, you can see the bad consequence coming, so you find the specific link in the chain where the bad consequence enters, and you break that one link, rather than abandoning the action.

This is the tool that turns Judge from a verdict into a forecast. “We will ban phones entirely”—if we do, confiscation becomes the discipline system; the discipline system consumes the relationship between teacher and student; then… You have not been told no. You have been shown the third link and asked to fix it.

3. The Ambitious Target Tree — for when the obstacles are real

Judge-phase question: We know what we want, and it looks impossible. What is actually in the way, and in what order?

You state the target, then list every obstacle honestly — no editing for optimism. Then, for each obstacle, you write the intermediate objective that would mean the obstacle no longer blocks you. Then you sequence them, because most of them only make sense in a particular order.

This is the tool that carries you across the border from Judge into Act, and it is the one adults underuse most. It takes “we could never do that here” — which feels like a conclusion — and turns it into a list, a different kind of object. Lists can be worked.

Why adults need this more, not less

There is a persistent assumption that thinking tools are scaffolding for children and that competent adults have outgrown them. It is backward, for a reason adult educators have documented for fifty years.

Jack Mezirow built transformative learning theory in the late 1970s out of studying women returning to college. His sequence: a disorienting dilemma, then critical reflection on assumptions, then rational discourse with others, then a changed frame of reference. Read that sequence again next to the Cloud. Mezirow described exactly what has to happen and demonstrated that adults mostly do not do it unaided — because by adulthood our assumptions are load-bearing. A child’s assumption about swings costs nothing to revise. A forty-five-year-old’s assumption about what makes someone a good manager is holding up a career, a self-image, and a marriage’s worth of decisions. The Cloud is useful for adults precisely because it lets an assumption be examined on paper, in the third person, at one remove from the person who has been living inside it.

Malcolm Knowles’s andragogy points the same way: adults arrive with accumulated experience, need to know why before they will engage, and want to work on immediate problems rather than deferred ones. A tool you can run on tonight’s actual argument satisfies all three. A lecture on critical thinking satisfies none.

And Freire is not a separate tradition here — he is the same one. “awareness” is what happens when people acquire the standing and the equipment to judge their own conditions. He got the sequence from Cardijn’s movements; what he did not have, and what Goldratt later supplied from an entirely different direction, was a set of drawable instruments for the middle step.

Where this actually gets used with adults: workplace conflict and union negotiation, professional development, clinical teams, boards and nonprofits that keep re-litigating the same split, parish and adult faith formation, parenting programs, prison and re-entry education, counseling, and — TOCfE’s own list — special education, dyslexia support, juvenile justice, sports teams, and civic groups. Their reported reach is more than 250,000 people trained across twenty-plus countries, affecting some eight million children, with casework from Israel, Japan, Poland, Somalia, and Latin America. Those are the organization’s own figures, self-reported rather than independently audited, and should be read that way.

The weave

Laid against Cardijn’s method — and against the fourth verb I have argued elsewhere the method needs — the tools sort themselves cleanly:

The claim is narrow, and I want to keep it narrow: TOCfE did not invent a pedagogy, and it does not replace See-Judge-Act. It supplies the missing hand tools for one phase of a method that was already a century old and already worked. Cardijn gave people the right to judge. Goldratt, from a machine shop, arrived seventy years later with the equipment.

Two limits belong in the open, because both are the kind that cause harm quietly. Judge without See is ideology — a Cloud built on invented needs and imagined constraints will produce a confident, well-drawn, wrong answer, which is why the fact-gathering is load-bearing rather than a warm-up. And not every disagreement is two legitimate needs. Bullying, harassment, threats, abuse, and discrimination are not Clouds. Treating them as conflicts to be resolved tells the person being harmed that their safety is one of the negotiable boxes. Say that out loud before you hand the tool to anyone.

Coda

A general sat in a schoolyard in Angicos in April 1963 and watched three hundred farm workers receive certificates. Within a year he governed the country, and the man who taught them was in a cell.

Nobody was afraid of the letters. They were afraid of the middle verb — of a room of people who had been handed both the standing and the method to look at their own conditions and reach their own verdict.

That is the strange symmetry in this story. A Belgian priest and an Israeli physicist, seventy years and an entire universe of vocabulary apart, neither of them aiming at the other’s field, arrived at the same finding. Cardijn found it in a Brussels parish among fourteen-year-olds who had been told their observations did not count as knowledge. Goldratt found it in factories among managers who had all the data in the world and still could not decide anything. Both concluded that the binding constraint was never the supply of facts. It was the untouched assumption sitting between the facts and the decision — and that the people closest to the problem were entirely competent to go after it, if somebody handed them a way in.

Neither man’s contribution works alone, which is why they belong in the same sentence. Cardijn without instruments produces conviction that runs out of road: a group that knows something is wrong, argues, and eventually defers to whoever is most senior or most tired. Goldratt without Cardijn produces a very well-drawn diagram in a room where nobody was ever entitled to the conclusion ~ a technique for optimizing decisions that other people have already made. The right and the equipment have to arrive together.

That is the link.

And this is not, finally, a school subject. Judgment is a civic capacity. A family deciding about a parent’s care, a team arguing over a layoff, a parish council split down the middle, a town meeting on a rezoning, an engineer who can see the third link in a chain and has thirty seconds to say so — every one of those is a Judge-phase problem carried by people who were taught how to gather information and how to complete tasks, and were never taught the thing in between. We generally call the result stubbornness, or politics, or a personality clash. Most of the time, it is an unexamined assumption with no one in the room holding a pen.

The lesson, in one page

If you take nothing else from this, take the working parts. They fit on an index card.

One. Never judge on borrowed facts. Before the argument, see the step: go and get the actual numbers for your actual situation. Cardijn made teenagers write theirs in notebooks. It is still the hardest and least glamorous step, and skipping it is what turns judgment into opinion.

Two. When you are stuck between two goods, draw the five boxes. Name the shared goal, name both needs, name both proposed actions — and remember that needs and actions are different animals. The fight is rarely where the shouting is.

Three. Say the “because” out loud. This is the whole method in four words. Every arrow in the diagram, and every deadlock in your life, rests on an unstated because. Most of them have never once been spoken in the presence of the person who would immediately know they were false.

Four. Look for the injection, not the compromise. A compromise divides the loss. An injection is a new condition that makes both needs simultaneously satisfiable, so there is no loss to divide. Ask it plainly: what would have to be true for us both to get what we need? Sometimes the honest answer is nothing, and you have a real trade-off, and someone has to decide. That is not failure. You have just turned a mess into a clear choice, with everyone’s needs written down where they can see them.

Five. Before you commit, run the tail. If we do this, then what — and then what after that? Find the link where the damage enters, and break that link rather than the plan.

Six. Turn “impossible” into a list. Obstacles, honestly stated; for each one, the intermediate objective that would clear it; then put them in order. “We could never do that here” is not a conclusion. It is an unsorted list wearing a conclusion’s clothes.

Seven. Then incorporate it. A good decision that lives only in the memory of the people who made it will die with them. Write it into the schedule, the rota, the statutes, the way the room is arranged. Every improvement is a change, but not every change is an improvement — and no improvement survives that is not built into something.

Teach the seven to a seven-year-old, and you get a playground where children settle their own disputes. Teach them to a faculty, a ward, a board, or a shop floor, and you get something rarer: a group that can disagree productively about something that matters, on the record, and know afterward exactly why it landed where it did.

A century of educators have defended the right to that verdict. Fewer have handed anyone the instruments for reaching it well.

Five boxes and two arrows is not much of a toolkit. It is more than most people have ever been given.

Sources

• Angicos 50 Anos — “The experience” and chronology, Instituto Paulo Freire

• Paulo Freire — Britannica biography (1964 coup, imprisonment, exile)

• Paulo Freire and the Jocist movements — Cardijn Research

• Paulo Freire: dialogue, praxis and education — infed.org

• See, judge, act with Joseph Cardijn — seejudgeact.org

• Mater et Magistra endorses the See Judge Act (§236) — Cardijn Research.

• Eliyahu M. Goldratt, It’s Not Luck (North River Press, 1994) — the Thinking Processes, including the Evaporating Cloud

• Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal (North River Press, 1984)

• Transformative learning theory (Mezirow) — disorienting dilemma, critical reflection, discourse

• Evaporating Cloud — Wikipedia

• See, Judge, Act, Incorporate — Innovate~Educate~Collaborate

Nota Bene: I welcome readers from all educational, career, and faith backgrounds, as well as those still seeking to find out what it is all about. Being a human.

I am grateful to use the See-Judge-Act framework developed by Joseph Cardijn and the Thinking Processes introduced by Eliyahu M. Goldratt.

I am a cultural historian with thirty-five years of experience in Silicon Valley’s tech scene and in education, where I now focus on the Anthropology of Technology to understand better what it means to be a human being and the difference it makes. My work examines how we use sustainable innovations, how digital devices change our lives, and how cultures adapt to new tools. I study how technology affects our communities, workplaces, environment, schools, institutions, and daily routines. I believe technology always reflects the culture it comes from, and this belief shapes my work as both an AI ethicist and a storyteller.

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The Middle Verb And The Missing Link

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The technical cause was almost dull in its predictability. The boiler used a lap seam, two steel sheets overlapping and riveted—a standard, familiar design. Yet this method hid a flaw: a crack could quietly snake along the inner edge of the overlap, invisible to any inspector peering from the outside.

Here is the part worth sitting with. Steam boiler: This is the time to pause and reflect. By 1905, steam boilers were old news, driving mills, ships, and locomotives for decades. Engineers had mastered the science—metallurgy, pressure, fatigue. The equations were all there. What was missing was the world around the boiler: who could inspect it, by what rules, how often, who could order a shutdown, who had to keep records, and what happened to the owner who chose ignorance. Better boiler. It was a set of human arrangements. Massachusetts passed “An Act Relating to the Operation and Inspection of Steam Boilers” in 1907, two years after Brockton, and only after manufacturers had finished objecting to what they called needless government interference. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers convened a committee in 1911. The first Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code appeared in 1914: a single volume, 114 pages. That code, now much larger, still governs pressure vessels today. It exists because ordinary people in a shoe town refused to accept that the explanation was “ the boiler failed.”“”

As a historian, I began with this story for a reason: we are reenacting the same debate, falling into the same category mistake all over again.

The category error

Most writing on AI governance treats AI as a beast to be tamed. Constrain the model. Test it. Red-team it. Certify it. Watermark its output. These efforts matter, and I am glad they exist. But it is like debating lap seams while ignoring the absence of an inspection system.

In reality, an AI system is not simply a model—it is a whole assembly line. It is the model, the data someone selected, the threshold someone set, the workflow someone mapped, the interface someone designed, the target slipped into a quarterly plan, the rushed procurement, the skipped training, the escalation path that may or may not finish with a human, and the culture that either welcomes or silences the words, “this output looks wrong to me.”

A model does not deny anyone’s claim. A workflow denies the claim. A model does not decide that a teacher’s professional judgment is now advisory. A principal’s implementation decision does that. A model does not decide that four minutes per case is enough. A staffing budget decides that.

So when we say “AI governance,” we should mean the thing we can actually govern: the human practices, decisions, and organizational arrangements through which AI is adopted and made consequential. Not the algorithm. The institutional context that turns an algorithm into a consequence in someone’s life.

This shift redraws the circle of who belongs in the conversation. If governance is just about the model, only engineers get a seat, and you are left outside. But if governance is about the arrangements, then suddenly the most important questions are the ones you have been asking all along:

• What are we actually trying to achieve here, and how would we know if it worked?

• What are we no longer doing because this tool is doing it?

• Who gets to say no, and what happens to them afterward?

• When it is wrong, who finds out, and how quickly?

• Who bears the cost of the errors, and are they in the room?

• What did we stop measuring when we started measuring this?

You do not need to know what a transformer is to ask these questions. Every one is a governance question. Yet in most organizations, these questions stay unspoken.

Most AI governance material misses the mark in one of two ways. It is either packed with jargon for engineers—evaluation harnesses, model cards, drift monitoring—or it floats in the clouds, listing principles like fairness, transparency, and accountability that everyone nods at but no one can use. The real power sits with the person in the middle. Choose the tool. You are responsible for what it does. You are also somebody’s parent, and there is a version of this conversation happening at your kitchen table about homework, chatbots, and what your fourteen-year-old is talking about. You hold more influence than you think, but less authority than you wish. That gap is the heart of the problem: those who understand the system best are often the least empowered to change it.

This is not a technology problem. It is an organizational one.

A method: See, Judge, Act

There is a time-tested workplace method for this, older than AI itself. In the 1920s, Joseph Cardijn created it for young Belgian factory workers who lacked power and expertise yet not perception: See, Judge, Act. Look honestly at what is happening. Measure it against what should be happening. Then take one concrete step.

It sounds simple, but it is easy to get wrong. Most people leap from a fuzzy observation straight into frustrated action. To help, I want to borrow a discipline from Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints, designed for this very challenge: how someone inside a system can diagnose it honestly and spark change without formal authority.

SEE: Find the constraint, not the symptom

Goldratt’s first step is to find the constraint. He insists—though people often forget—that a system has very few constraints, usually just one. Improving anything else does nothing. It only shifts the pile.

Start where he starts: list the undesirable effects. Not opinions ~ measurable effects. Cases are being closed faster but reopened more often. Junior staff has stopped asking questions. Nobody can explain last month’s numbers. Two people have quietly built their own workarounds.

Then trace them back. Goldratt’s Current Reality Tree is a formal tool, but you can get most of the value with a pen or pencil: draw arrows from effects to causes, keep asking why until the arrows meet. They almost always meet somewhere unglamorous. Not the model. More likely: nobody owns the override decision, or the metric rewards volume while the risk lands months later on another team, or the purchase happened before anyone defined what good looks like.

Write the constraint down as one sentence.

If you cannot say it, you have not found it yet.

In my experience, the main constraint is rarely accuracy. It is accountability latency—the gap between when a system errs and when a human discovers it. Shorten that gap, and many problems vanish. Leave it long, and no model quality will save you.

JUDGE: Surface the conflict and attack the assumption

This is where most people hesitate, thinking judgment demands technical authority or moral certainty. It needs neither. It only asks for honest naming of the conflict.

Goldratt’s Evaporating Cloud is built for this. The claim behind it is bracing: real, persistent conflicts are not conflicts of will. They are conflicts produced by a faulty assumption that everyone has stopped noticing. The way through is not compromise. It is finding the assumption and breaking it.

The AI version of the cloud shows up in nearly every organization I have seen.

To serve people well, we must move faster, so we must automate the judgment step. To serve people well, we must not harm anyone, so we must keep the judgment step human.

Framed like this, it sounds like an unavoidable trade-off. But it is not. Hidden assumptions lurk beneath: that every case needs human review, not just the crucial ones; that speed and review draw from the same pool; that high-stakes decisions cannot be flagged ahead of time; and that reviewing is slow because humans are slow, not because the interface obscures the machine’s reasoning. And humans being slow is a good thing in decision-making.

Challenge just one of these assumptions, and the conflict can dissolve without negotiation. That is a real, tangible outcome, and you do not need to be an engineer to spark it. You only need to be the person in the meeting who asks, “We are treating this as a trade-off. What are we assuming that makes it one?”

Judging has a second part, and it is not technical: By whose Standard? Fairness, dignity, due process, the right to an explanation, the right to a human. Institutions do not find these in data. They inherit them from law, professional ethics, civic and religious traditions, and from what those affected will accept. Choosing which standards apply is not an engineering job. It is one of the oldest political acts, and right now it is quietly slipping into the hands of procurement.

ACT: Make it small, make it owned, and expect the resistance

Goldratt’s following steps are: exploit (squeeze everything from the constraint before spending), subordinate (align everything else to serve it), elevate (invest only then), and repeat. Do not let inertia become the new constraint. The order matters. Most organizations leap to improve—buying tools or hiring consultants—because that looks like leadership.

(A note here: having been a consultant, a strategist for many global companies, Consultants should never provide answers; they should assist you in the discovery of the correct solution that is best for your organization. And no, I don’t put lawyers and accountants in the same batch as consultants; they are technicians, just like engineers, machinists, and skilled tradespeople. Ok I will explain in a future blog posting.)

Start with exploit. It is almost always free and unglamorous:

• Write down who holds decision rights: who can override, who must be informed, who signs off. One page. The act of writing it often reveals that no one actually knew.

• Track the reversals. Log every override and complaint, and put those numbers in front of the same people who see the efficiency stats. Right now, one is on the dashboard, and the other is buried in someone’s inbox.

• Assign ownership to a person, not a committee. Committees cannot be held accountable, which is often exactly why they are chosen.

• Run a pre-mortem. Imagine it is eighteen months from now and the story has gone wrong in the newspaper. What happened? People know. They will tell you if you ask in the third person.

• Ask the people on the receiving end. Those affected are the cheapest and most accurate source of insight in the whole system, yet they are rarely asked.

Then expect resistance, and do not take it personally. Goldratt mapped the layers of resistance, and they arrive in order: there is no problem, I disagree with that direction, that will not solve it, yes, but it will cause something worse, there are obstacles you do not see, and finally the silent fear no one names. You cannot bulldoze through these. You must address them one by one. Skip a layer, and you may win the argument but lose the chance for real change.

Outside the building

All of this works just as well at a school board meeting, a council session, or a candidate’s town hall, or in your own household. The method does not change, wherever you bring it. It is even used in classrooms to help students.

See: Ask what systems are already in use, where they are used, and what evidence supports them. In most places, this question has never been asked in public, and the answer is usually either “we don’t know” or a procurement contract no one has read. Judge: Ask whose Standard applies and what occurs when something goes wrong. Act: Ask for something small, practical, and enforceable, like a public register of automated systems in public services, a named accountable official, a real appeals process to a human with authority to reverse decisions, and disclosure when a decision about you was made or influenced by a machine.

Notice that none of these requests are technical. Notice, too, that none of them are guaranteed to you today.

The reason to demand the simple version is that it can be enforced. “Ethical AI” cannot be audited. But “Every automated denial must be reversible by a named human within ten working days.” Or whatever agreed time necessary to see the change and the cause/effect.

Back to Brockton

The 1914 code was 114 pages long. Engineers wrote it, but they were not the reason it happened. It was caused by fifty-eight funerals in a shoe town, by newspapers that kept the story alive, by legislators who were pushed to act, and by manufacturers who lost an argument they thought they would win. The lap seam was the technical cause. The real cause was the lack of an inspection system, and that absence was a choice made by no one in particular. That is often how the most important choices are made.

Right now, we are at the point in the AI story where the needed arrangements do not yet exist, and objections still ring out as “needless interference.” The systems rolling out this year in hospitals, schools, benefits offices, hiring pipelines, and courts will shape lives long before these questions are settled.

You do not need to grasp the technical model. What matters is seeing clearly, judging by a standard you can name, and acting on something small enough to finish. Then repeat, and do not let inertia become the main obstacle.

Someone needed to write the first page.

Sources for the historical account: Grover Shoe Factory disaster (Wikipedia); The Grover Shoe Factory Disaster Shakes the Nation in 1905 (New England Historical Society); The History of ASME’s Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code (ASME); ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code — Engineering Landmark (ASME).

What the Cappadocians — and Thomas Merton — Knew About What Faith Owes the World

In the winter of 368, the rains failed across Cappadocia, in what is now central Turkey. Crops withered, grain disappeared into the warehouses of speculators waiting for prices to climb, and people experiencing poverty in Caesarea began to starve. Basil, then a young priest in the city, did three things. He used his inheritance to help others. He preached a sermon against the hoarders so blunt it still stings to read — the bread you keep belongs to the hungry. And he built kitchens where, according to those who watched him, he tied on an apron and served the food himself, to Christians and non-Christians alike.

What he built next outlasted the famine. On land outside the city walls, Basil raised a complex that historians often call the first hospital in the Western world: wards with physicians and nurses, a hospice for travelers, workshops for job training, and a shelter for lepers, whom he was known to embrace in public. When Basil died in 379, his friend Gregory of Nazianzus stood at the funeral and told the mourners where to find the man’s real monument: “Go a little way outside the city, and see a new city.”

That is one answer to the question this essay is about. But it is not the whole of it — because for Basil and his circle, the hospital was not the starting point. It was the consequence.

Communion, not charity

The Cappadocians — Macrina the Younger, her brothers Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus — are best remembered for language, not buildings. They gave the Church the grammar of the Trinity: one essence (ousia), three persons (hypostases), a formula the Council of Constantinople would ratify in 381.

But this was never speculation for its own sake. It was a claim about the shape of reality, and it carried ethical weight. If God is not solitary but relational, if God’s very being is communion, then faith in such a God cannot stay private. To believe in the Trinity is to be pulled into a pattern of life that mirrors it: unity without erasure, distinction without division, love expressed as mutual self-gift.

So the Church’s first obligation is not charity but participation. It is called to become an icon of Trinitarian life. Basil’s monastic communities practiced this through shared labor and shared property; his “new city” outside the walls was the same theology in stone.

Macrina, too often left out of the story, gave the vision its depth. Her younger brother Gregory wrote her life and made her the teacher in his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, where she instructs him from her deathbed — a woman cast in the role Plato gave Socrates. She had turned the family estate into a community where servants and mistresses ate at the same table. Her life argues that communion with God reorders one’s relationship to wealth, status, and power. What faith owes the world is not simply action but transformation: a reconfiguration of desire that makes real community possible in the first place.

Gregory of Nazianzus, called “the Theologian,” insists this life is grounded in contemplation. One cannot speak rightly of God without being drawn into God. Yet contemplation is never an exit from the world; it is a deeper entry into it, seeing the world as held within the life of the Trinity. His insistence on both divine transcendence and divine nearness keeps the Church from collapsing into either activism or abstraction.

Gregory of Nyssa pushes furthest. In his fourth homily on Ecclesiastes, he mounts what may be the only unambiguous condemnation of slavery as an institution to survive from the ancient world: to price a human being is to price the image of God, and the seller has arrogated to himself an ownership that belongs to no one. Trinitarian theology becomes the ground of social ethics.

Merton at Fourth and Walnut

Sixteen centuries later, a Trappist monk stood at a downtown intersection in Louisville, Kentucky, on an errand to the doctor, and was, as he later wrote, “suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs.” That was 18 March 1958. Thomas Merton reworked the journal entry into the passage published in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966) — the one that ends, “There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.”

Merton’s “true self” is not an isolated interiority but a self discovered in God and therefore in communion with others. That is the Cappadocian claim in a twentieth-century idiom, and it has the same edge to it. If we really are one in God, then indifference, injustice, and violence are contradictions of our own identity. The monk in solitude is not withdrawn from the world; he stands in solidarity with it.

What it costs

In a moment marked by fragmentation, digital isolation, and hardening division, this synthesis offers a corrective. Faith does not owe the world a defensive posture or a set of doctrines detached from life. It owes the world a witness: a lived communion that reflects the relational nature of God.

That witness is demanding. It asks for communities that resist individualism without flattening persons, that practice justice without losing mercy, that contemplate without disengaging. To ask what faith owes the world is finally to ask how far we are willing to enter the life of God. For the Cappadocians, and for Merton, the answer is: everything.

Questions Worth Sitting With Using The See-Judge-Act method

1. Basil preached that the bread you keep belongs to the hungry. Where in your own life does that claim land hardest — and what have you told yourself to soften it?

2. Gregory of Nyssa argued that the slaveholder’s real sin was pricing something that has no price. What do we still put a price on today that a later generation may find indefensible?

3. Merton’s vision came in the middle of an ordinary errand, surrounded by strangers. When did you last look at a crowd and see anything other than obstacles?

4. The Cappadocians insisted contemplation and action are inseparable. Which of the two do you use as an excuse to avoid the other?

5. Macrina’s household put servants and mistresses at the same table. What table in your life is still sorted by status — and who sets the seating?

6. If your community disappeared tomorrow, would anyone outside it be able to point to a place and say, go a little way outside the city and see?

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

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

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

I. A mantra that was already speaking Goldratt

In February 2024, I wrote that “Innovate, Educate, Collaborate,” woven together with See–Judge–Act, makes a seamless garment of change. Rereading that piece now, I notice something I did not notice while writing it.

I warned that unverbalized fear is the fastest way to kill positive change. I said that understanding cause and effect is critical to our growth. I closed by describing the mantra as a process of ongoing improvement.

Those three phrases are not mine. They are Eliyahu Goldratt’s ~ an Israeli physicist turned business theorist who, so far as I know, never read a word of Cardijn. Still, he did hear of Thomas Merton from me, just saying, and who would probably have been amused to find himself in a Catholic Social Teaching newsletter. Unverbalized fear is the sixth and deepest of his layers of resistance to change. Cause and effect is the entire grammar of his Current Reality Tree. Process of ongoing improvement ~ POOGI to his practitioners ~ is the name he gave to the refusal of any final state.

The vocabulary had already arrived. What follows is an attempt to bring the rest of the man with it, and to ask what he adds to a method that has been working perfectly well for a hundred years without him.

The short answer is: he adds rigor where the method most often goes soft. And he cannot supply the one thing without which his rigor is dangerous.

II. The same enemy

Start with what they were against, because that is where the kinship is clearest.

Cardijn’s young workers in Laeken were not being lost to the Church by argument. They were being lost by conditions, and by what conditions do to a person’s sense of the possible. A boy of fourteen went into a factory and learned, within a year, that this was how it was for people like him. That fatalism ~ not atheism, not Marx ~ was the disease Cardijn set out to cure. The whole apparatus of the inquiry, the cell, the review of life, exists to break the conviction that reality is fixed.

Goldratt’s plant managers had the same disease in a suit. The market is what it is. The union will never accept it. Head office won’t approve it. You can’t have low inventory and high service levels; pick one. He titled a book It’s Not Luck precisely to say: your results are caused, and causes can be found, and what can be found can be changed. He called the belief that things are complicated the great alibi.

Both men were fighting the same lie in two dialects. If that seems a thin basis for weaving them together, notice that it is the only basis on which any method of change can begin. You cannot teach See–Judge–Act to someone who believes there is nothing to be done. You cannot innovate, educate or collaborate your way out of a situation you have accepted as given.

III. The near-identity

Goldratt organized his Thinking Processes around three questions:

What to change? What to change to? How to cause the change?

Set them beside See, Judge, Act, and the correspondence is almost embarrassing.

I want to resist making too much of this too quickly, because a tidy table is exactly the kind of thing that lets a practitioner stop thinking. The correspondence is real, but the two triads are not doing identical work, and the places where they diverge are more useful than the places where they line up.

Where does Innovate–Educate–Collaborate sit in this? Not as a fourth column. The mantra was never a sequence — I said in 2024 that innovation requires knowledge, that education thrives on collaboration, that collaboration fuels innovation. That is a loop, not a line. The three words are better understood as the dispositions that make each of Cardijn’s three moments actually happen. Educate is what See requires of us. Innovate is what Judge produces when it is done honestly. Collaborate is the only form in which Act is real. TaAct them one at a time.

IV. See, and Educate: the inquiry and the tree

The See step fails predictably. A group gathers, names what is wrong, and produces a list. Housing is unaffordable. Young people are leaving the parish. Wages are stagnant. Nobody comes to meetings. The list grows, everyone feels the weight of it, and then somebody proposes a solution to whichever item was named most loudly.

Goldratt’s name for the items on that list is undesirable effects, and his central methodological claim is that they are not a list at all. They are the visible tips of a small number of causes — often one. His Current Reality Tree is the discipline of connecting the effects by verified cause-and-effect arrows until the structure resolves into a core problem, usually something nobody had named, and usually something the group is itself doing.

This rests on the first of the four pillars he set out in The Choice: inherent simplicity. Any real-life situation, however complex it looks, is once understood embarrassingly simple. He borrowed the conviction from Newton — natura valde simplex est et sibi consona, nature is exceedingly simple and conformable to herself — and he meant it as a working assumption, not a metaphysics. Complexity is a measure of our ignorance of the system, not a property of it.

Cardijn’s inquiry was reaching for the same thing without the diagram. The point of the inquiry was never to catalog grievances. It was to get the young worker to trace a fact back to its cause, then that cause to its cause, until he arrived somewhere he could actually stand and push—facts first, then connections, then the thing beneath the facts.

And here is why Educate belongs to this step rather than to some separate stage of instruction. Neither man will let you hand the answer over. Goldratt’s rule for building a tree with a client was that you never tell them the core problem; you ask questions until they say it themselves, because a conclusion someone reaches is a conclusion they will act on, and a conclusion they are given is one they will discuss. Cardijn’s version is the whole architecture of the JOC: by the worker, for the worker, with the worker. He did not send educated men to explain the situation to workers. He formed workers who would do the seeing themselves. Subsidiarity is not a nicety here. It is the mechanism.

So the Current Reality Tree is not an analytical instrument that happens to be built in a group. It is a teaching instrument that happens to produce an analysis. That is exactly what the inquiry was. Education, in this method, is not preparation for seeing. It is seeing, done together, out loud. ( This is key and very important)

One practical rule follows, and it is the hardest one to enforce: no solutions in the room during See. The moment a proposal is on the table, the group stops looking and starts defending. Cardijn’s cells knew this instinctively. Most parish and community meetings I have sat in violate it within four minutes. Just stop!

V. Judge, and Innovate: the cloud

Judge is where the method most often collapses, in one of two directions. Either it becomes verdict — we look at the situation, we condemn it, we feel righteous, nothing moves. Or it becomes citation — we produce the relevant paragraph of Rerum Novarum or Laudato Si’, agree that it is excellent, and adjourn.

Goldratt’s contribution here is the single most useful thing he built, and I think it is the one a Cardijn practitioner should learn first. He called it the Evaporating Cloud.

The structure is simple. Take the conflict at the heart of the core problem. Name the two actions in tension. Name the requirement each action is meant to satisfy. Then name the objective that both requirements serve — because if the two sides did not share an objective, there would be no dilemma, only a fight. You now have a diagram with an apex and two arms, and beneath every arrow sits an assumption.

The second pillar of The Choice is that every conflict can be removed—not compromised. Goldratt claims that a genuine conflict between two necessary conditions of a single objective cannot exist in reality; if it appears to, one of the assumptions holding the arrows in place is false. Find the false assumption, name it, and the cloud evaporates. What replaces it he called an injection: the new element that makes the dilemma dissolve rather than be split.

That injection is what I have been calling Innovate.

I want to be precise about this, because it changes what innovation means in the mantra. Innovation is not the brainstorm. It is not thinking outside the box, a phrase I have used myself and now regret. Innovation, in this method, is the specific and disciplined Act of locating a false assumption under an apparent necessity, and it can only happen inside a well-formed judgment. Proper judgment is where innovation is born. They are not two steps. Judgment is the labor; innovation is what is delivered.

Cardijn did exactly this and had no diagram for it. The conflict of his day was presented as ontological: the interests of capital and the interests of labor are opposed, and you must choose a side. The liberals resolved it by denying the workers’ arm. The Marxists resolved it by denying the owners’. Cardijn refused the frame. He put at the apex something neither side had put there — the dignity of the worker as a son or daughter of God, worth more, as he liked to say, than all the gold in the world — and from that apex the conflict looked different. Not resolved by compromise and dissolved, because the assumption that a man’s worth is a function of his output turned out to be false.

That is an evaporating cloud, drawn forty years before Goldratt drew one.

It also explains a phrase I have used for years without fully unpacking it: that we do not solve our problems, we outgrow them. Jung said it first. Goldratt gave it a procedure. A problem that is outgrown is not a problem that was solved on its own terms; it is a problem that stopped existing when the assumption sustaining it died.

Two disciplines keep this honest. First, the Future Reality Tree: having found an injection, map forward and check that it actually produces the effects you want. Second — and this is the one practitioners skip — the Negative Branch Reservation: map forward and look for the harm your good idea will cause. Every serious social intervention has a negative branch. The Judge step in Catholic Social Teaching has a proper name for the discipline of looking for the damage in what you intend: it is called examination of conscience, and it belongs in the planning meeting as much as in the confessional.

VI. Act, and Collaborate: the layers of resistance

The Act step fails when a good decision meets people who were not part of making it.

Goldratt mapped this with unusual patience. He identified six layers of resistance, and the discipline is that they must be worked in order, because an objection at layer four cannot be answered with an argument aimed at layer one:

1. We do not agree on what the problem is.

2. We do not agree on the direction of the solution.

3. We do not agree that your solution actually solves the problem.

4. Yes, but your solution will cause new problems.

5. Yes, but there are obstacles in the way of doing it.

6. Unverbalized fear.

Read that list as a description of a well-run cell meeting, and it reads perfectly. Read it as a description of most attempts at change, and it explains the failures. We arrive at layer two with our solution and are met with a layer-one disagreement, so we repeat the solution more loudly. Someone raises a negative branch at layer four, and we hear obstruction rather than a contribution. And layer six — the vague unease of a person about to do something entirely new, which turns to anxiety, then denial, then rejection — is never spoken, because nobody made a room in which it could be.

The reframe Goldratt offers is worth stating flatly: resistance is information. An objection at layer four is a free negative branch analysis. An objection at layer five is a free prerequisite tree. The person raising it is doing your work for you.

That reframe is only available if you already believe something about the objector, which brings us to the third pillar of The Choice: people are good. Goldratt meant it as an operating rule, not a sentiment. When someone behaves badly in a system, do not look at their character; look at what the system is measuring them on. Please tell me how you measure me, and I will tell you how I will behave. Blame is not merely uncharitable; it is analytically lazy, because it terminates the inquiry at the exact point where it should continue into the structure.

Cardijn is saying the same thing in a different register when he insists that the young workers of Belgium were not being de-Christianised by wickedness but by conditions. Catholic Social Teaching has a term for what Goldratt is pointing at — structures of sin — and the convergence is close enough to be startling. Both men locate the fault in the arrangement rather than the soul, and both do so not to excuse anyone but because that is where the leverage is.

This is what Collaborate actually means here, and it is more demanding than “working together.” It means that the people affected build the tree, name the conflict, and raise the objections; that their resistance is treated as data rather than as friction; and that power and ownership are genuinely shared, because a change that people did not help design is a change they will have to be managed into. That is subsidiarity, and it is also just good engineering.

VII. Never say “I know”

The fourth pillar of The Choice is a discipline against ourselves: never say “I know.” Goldratt’s five focusing steps end with an instruction that has always struck me as the most spiritually serious sentence in his work — go back to step one, and do not let inertia become the constraint. The system you improved has changed. Your analysis is now out of date. Begin again.

Cardijn built the same refusal into the method and called it the review of life. Act, and then come back and see again. Not evaluation as an audit function, but as the reopening of the cycle. Neither method has a terminal state. Neither offers the satisfaction of arrival.

This matters more than it looks. A method with an end state becomes an ideology, and both of these methods were built by men who had watched ideologies eat movements. The review of life and the process of ongoing improvement are the same structural safeguard: an insistence that the last answer is provisional and the next inquiry is already due.

VIII. The seam that will not close

Now the difficulty, and I do not think it should be smoothed over, because a practitioner who misses it will do damage.

Goldratt’s method requires a goal. Every Current Reality Tree is built against a goal — an undesirable effect is only undesirable relative to something you are trying to achieve. Every cloud has an objective at its apex. And Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints does not, and cannot, generate that goal. It takes it from the owner of the system. For the firms he consulted to, the goal was stipulated: to make money now and in the future. Everything else — throughput, inventory, operating expense — was defined in relation to it.

This is the source of both the method’s power and its danger. The Thinking Processes will optimize whatever goal you feed them, with the same elegance and the same force. Feed them a goal that treats persons as inputs, and you will get a beautifully reasoned tree that arrives, by valid steps, somewhere monstrous. There is nothing inside the method that objects.

Cardijn’s Judge step is precisely the thing Goldratt does not have. In See–Judge–Act, Judge is not “what to change to.” Judge is the moment at which the goal itself is put under scrutiny — held up against the Gospel, the natural law, the dignity of the person — and that criterion is received, not chosen. It comes from outside the system. It is not available for optimization. This is why the Judge step cannot be replaced by a cloud, only sharpened by one.

So the honest account is not that the two methods are the same thing in different words. It is this: Goldratt supplies the rigor that Cardijn’s method needs and lacks. Cardijn supplies the goal that Goldratt’s method needs and cannot produce. They are not rivals, and they are not duplicates. They are load-bearing in different directions.

There is a second limit worth naming. Goldratt’s world is one in which all suffering is a system defect awaiting a correct diagnosis. There is no room in a Current Reality Tree for the young worker whose life cannot be optimized, for irreducible loss, for the cross. A Cardijn cell had to sit with people in that condition, and the method held because it was never only a method. Anyone importing the Thinking Processes into pastoral or community work should know that they will carry a great deal and then, at a certain point, carry nothing at all.

IX. The seer: why this matters when you read Merton

There is a hole in Goldratt’s system that he never seems to have noticed. Somebody builds every Current Reality Tree. Every list of undesirable effects is a list of the things that struck this group of people as undesirable. The four pillars discipline the analysis; nothing in them disciplines the analyst. Goldratt assumes an honest observer and moves on.

Merton’s entire life’s work is the claim that there is no honest observer by default.

The false self, in Merton’s account, is not merely a spiritual liability. It is a perceptual one. A person living from the self he has constructed to secure others’ approval cannot see other people; he can only see how they confirm or threaten the construction. Run that through this method, and the consequence is severe. If I build a Current Reality Tree from the false self, my undesirable effects will be the things that threaten my standing, my core problem will be reliably located in somebody else, and the tree will be logically impeccable and completely wrong. The instrument was never calibrated.

This is why Merton belongs in the weave, and it is why the process matters when we study him rather than merely admire him.

Merton’s own tree. Notice first that his central claim is structurally identical to Goldratt’s first pillar. Merton does not offer a list of social ills. He argues that a very large number of undesirable effects — racism, the logic of deterrence, the violence latent in consumer society, the emptiness that makes totalitarianism possible — trace back through cause and effect to one thing: societies of false selves build structures that serve the false self’s agenda. That is a Current Reality Tree with a single entity at its root. It is inherent simplicity applied to the soul. Catholic Social Teaching has a name for the middle of that tree — structures of sin. Merton is telling us where the tree is rooted.

Notice second what he does to the Judge step. You cannot build a just society with unjust souls is not a devotional sentiment. It is a negative branch reservation on every purely structural injection ever proposed. The activist who has not confronted his own will to dominate will reproduce inside his own organization the injustice he set out to remove. Merton is instructing us to map that branch before we act, every time. Most reform movements find it only in the wreckage.

Three ways of reading Merton badly, and what the process does about each.

Merton as anthology. He is the most quotable spiritual writer of the century, which is a hazard rather than a gift. The corpus is enormous; it spans thirty years, and it is heavily mediated — by his censors, by his own revisions, and by the fact that the journals were withheld from publication for twenty-five years after his death. In 1962 the Abbot General forbade him to publish on war; Peace in the Post-Christian Era went out instead as six hundred mimeographed copies marked “not for publication,” and did not appear properly until 2004. To quote Merton flat, without date or circumstance, is therefore a category error, and it is precisely what the See step forbids. Facts first: what did he write, when, under what constraint, and what had already happened to him by then? The Merton of The Seven Story Mountain in 1948 and the Merton of 1966 are not the same man, and that difference is the material, not an embarrassment to be smoothed over.

Merton as contradiction. Students who do notice the difference often conclude that he is unreliable — that he kept changing his mind, that he wanted the hermitage and the world at once. Read the corpus as an evaporating cloud, and it resolves. The conflict is stated plainly enough: to be faithful he must withdraw; to be faithful he must engage. Both arms serve one objective, and everyone around him — his abbot, his censors, his readers, his own early writing — pressed him to compromise, to take a percentage of each. He refused the split and spent decades hunting the false assumption underneath it. The injection, when it came, was that contemplation is not the alternative to engagement but the condition of seeing anything worth engaging. Fourth and Walnut is the moment the cloud evaporates. That is not a man contradicting himself. That is a man doing the Judge step slowly, in public, over thirty years — and a student with the diagram in hand can follow the work instead of scoring the inconsistencies.

Merton as consolation. This is the serious one. Merton is a pleasure to read, and reading him produces a sensation of depth that is easily mistaken for the thing itself. The accumulation of contemplative vocabulary is one of the more sophisticated projects the false self can undertake, and Merton would have said so about his readers, having said harder things about himself. Nothing internal to the reading protects against this. The process does: Merton studied in company rather than alone, judged against the dignity of actual people rather than against our taste for him, acted upon, and then reviewed. Read privately, he becomes an aesthetic. Read inside See–Judge–Act, he does what he was for.

Never say “I know.” Goldratt’s fourth pillar is a discipline against the certainty that terminates inquiry. Merton wrote the prayer version of it: I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. An engineer and a monk arriving from opposite directions at the same refusal. In Goldratt it protects the analysis; in Merton it protects the analyst. A study group that can say that sentence honestly about its own conclusions has the only qualification that finally matters.

So the account in the previous section needs a third clause. Goldratt supplies the rigor that Cardijn’s method needs and lacks. Cardijn supplies the goal that Goldratt’s method needs and cannot produce. Merton supplies the seer — the sustained work on the observer without which the rigor is merely efficient and the goal merely stated—rigor, goal, and the person holding the instrument. Remove any one and the remaining two will eventually produce something worse than nothing, because they will produce it competently.

X. A working cycle

For those who want to run this rather than read about it. One loop, three movements, and the mantra as the disposition each movement demands.

SEE — the disposition is Educate. Before a single fact goes on the wall, ask each person aloud what they need out of this for their own standing, and write the answers down; the false self does its work early and in silence. Then gather the people actually affected ~nobody analyses on their behalf. Collect facts, not opinions ~ what happened, to whom, how often. Write each undesirable effect on its own card. Then connect them with cause-and-effect arrows, reading each aloud as “if this, then that,” and keep going until several arrows converge on something nobody had named. That is your core problem. Enforce one rule without exception: no solutions in this room. Expect this to take longer than you planned and to be the reason everything afterward works.

JUDGE — the disposition is Innovate. Find the conflict inside the core problem. Draw the cloud: two actions, the requirement behind each, the shared objective above both. Then state, out loud, the assumption under every arrow. Ask of each: is this actually true, or have we never questioned it? Before you settle the apex, submit the objective itself to the tradition — is this what human dignity requires, or only what our interests require? Then look for the injection that makes the conflict disappear rather than the compromise that splits it. Map the future forward, and hunt deliberately for the negative branch. If you cannot find any harm in your own proposal, you have not looked.

ACT — the disposition is Collaborate. List the obstacles honestly and turn each into an intermediate objective; the sequence of those objectives is your plan. Then work the six layers in order with the people who must live with it, and treat every objection as a contribution to the design. Watch for layer six, which will not announce itself: make a room in which someone can say “I am afraid of this” without losing face. Start small, and let an early visible success do the arguing.

Then return. Review honestly, in company, against what you actually said you would achieve. The situation has changed and so has your understanding of it. Do not let inertia become the constraint. Go back to See.

XI. Woven from the top throughout

The garment in John’s Gospel is described with an odd precision: the tunic was seamless, woven from the top throughout, and the soldiers would not tear it. Cardinal Bernardin later took the image for the consistent ethic of life, and I have taken it for this weave, perhaps too easily.

It is worth noticing what actually makes such a garment seamless. Not that the threads are identical ~ they plainly are not. A Belgian priest who buried his father after an industrial accident and an Israeli physicist who taught factory managers to think are not the same kind of thread and were not spun for the same purpose. What makes the garment whole is that it is woven from a single point of origin, and that one set of threads runs the entire length.

That is the warp, and in this weave the warp is one thing only: the conviction that the person in front of you has a dignity that is received rather than earned, that is not a function of output, and that is not available for trade. Cardijn spent his life laying that thread. Merton spent his life warning that we cannot see it with the eyes we currently have. Everything else ~ the inquiry, the cell, the mantra, the trees, the clouds, the layers ~is weft. Weft is not lesser. Without it there is no cloth, only a warp on a loom, which is what a great deal of well-intentioned Catholic social thought amounts to. But weft alone is a heap of thread.

Innovate, Educate, Collaborate. See, Judge, Act. What to change, what to change to, how to cause the change.

Three triads, one loom, and only one of them can tell you what the cloth is for.

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

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

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

After the series of parables found in chapter 13, Matthew’s Gospel enters a new phase. In this one Jesus seems intent on having his followers gradually building an understanding of his true identity and purpose. Some commentators have proposed that Matthew’s Gospel is structured in five sections, reflecting the five books of the Torah (Pentateuch). The end of chapter 13 ushers in the third of these sections. The story of the storm on the lake is preceded by the feeding of the five thousand and the brutal death of John the Baptist. These two stories reflect both the miraculous and the terrifying, two dimensions that will come together in the story of the storm on the lake.

The disciples are sent out on the boat on their own. Jesus remains behind to pray. The day turns to night and the storm builds on the lake. The darkness and the storm together are portents of chaos and evil. The image of the boat in the storm is a frequently used symbol for the Church under persecution. The disciples are fearful and even when Jesus appears, walking on the water, they are in despair. Peter alone responds when Jesus calls out to them. He uses the title ‘Lord’ (Mt 14:28) which reveals the post-resurrection understanding of Jesus’ identity. Peter, himself walking on the water at Jesus’ behest is once again afraid and calls out to Jesus ‘Lord! Save Me!’ (Mt 14:30) a cry which aligns Jesus’ actions with the saving work of God. Jesus holds on to Peter and as they return to the boat, the storm subsides, the danger has passed and those present worship Jesus as the ‘Son of God’ (Mt 14:33).

Gospel Text: Matthew 14:22-33

Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side while he would send the crowds away. After sending the crowds away he went up into the hills by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, while the boat, by now far out on the lake, was battling with a heavy sea, for there was a head-wind. In the fourth watch of the night he went towards them, walking on the lake, and when the disciples saw him walking on the lake they were terrified. ‘It is a ghost’ they said, and cried out in fear. But at once Jesus called out to them, saying, ‘Courage! It is I! Do not be afraid.’ It was Peter who answered. ‘Lord,’ he said ‘if it is you, tell me to come to you across the water.’ ‘Come’ said Jesus. Then Peter got out of the boat and started walking towards Jesus across the water, but as soon as he felt the force of the wind, he took fright and began to sink. ‘Lord! Save me!’ he cried. Jesus put out his hand at once and held him. ‘Man of little faith,’ he said ‘why did you doubt?’ And as they got into the boat the wind dropped. The men in the boat bowed down before him and said, ‘Truly, you are the Son of God.’

See

What is Jesus doing before he comes to the disciples on the lake?

How does the storm, in the darkness of the night, impact on the disciples?

What do we learn from Peter’s experience of walking on the water with Jesus?

Judge

What circumstances present as ‘storms’ in our own experience?

What is the impact of fear on ourselves?

How does faith in Jesus affect our disposition when facing ‘storms’ on our own lives?

Act

What can we do to remain assured when faced with significant challenges?

How can our community of faith provide support to those who are experiencing challenging times?

What steps can be taken to ensure all people are welcome and supported in our community?

Image: https://christian.art/daily-gospel-reading/matthew-14-22-36-2022/

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/

Thomas Merton’s Wisdom for an Age of Emerging Technology

Adult education, using the See–Judge–Act method: Politics~Religion~ Catholic Social Teachings

An Often-Forgotten Starting Point: 1899

Before we dive into Merton, Buddhism, or AI, we need to trace the roots of the traditionalist and progressive split in American Catholicism—a rift far older and more intricate than most realize.

In 1899, Pope Leo XIII, who had written Rerum Novarum eight years earlier and started modern Catholic Social Teaching, sent an apostolic letter called Testem Benevolentiae to Cardinal James Gibbons of Baltimore. The letter addressed what the Vatican called “Americanism”: the idea that the Church should adapt its practices and spiritual focus to fit American values like democracy, religious freedom, and individual initiative. The immediate cause was actually small—a French translation of a biography of the American priest Isaac Hecker, with a preface that praised this adaptive spirit. Leo’s letter warned against putting “active” virtues above “passive” ones, downplaying spiritual direction and authority, and changing Catholic teaching just to gain modern approval. American bishops, including Cardinal Gibbons, said no one really held the views being criticized. Historians still debate whether “Americanism” was a real movement or just a so-called “phantom heresy.” Whether real or not, the letter set a pattern that American Catholicism still follows: the Church can write boldly about justice in the modern world one decade, and then warn just as strongly against letting the modern world change the Church in the next.

This moment is a true crossroads: Leo XIII set Catholic Social Teaching’s sights on workers and the poor, yet also became the first pope to push back against reshaping Church teaching for modern libertarian democracy. The traditionalist-progressive debate did not begin in the 1960s—it has echoed since Leo XIII’s era, long before Vatican II or Merton entered the scene.

A Note Before We Begin

Earlier class notes drew a line between Catholic traditionalism and Calvinism. While that’s doctrinally fair, it misses the heart of the matter. The real contrast lies between traditionalist and progressive Catholics—two distinct temperaments wrestling with the same teachings since the days of the Americanist controversy. Today, we’ll use this lens, plus two more key ideas:

1. A clearer picture of the traditionalist–progressive divide itself, and how each side actually relates to Catholic Social Teaching (CST).

2. Thomas Merton, a figure who resists being filed neatly into either camp, and whose life shows why that resistance matters.

3. Buddhism deeply influenced Merton, shaping not just his subjects but the very way he thought. This outlook offers fresh insight as we grapple with technologies like AI.

4. Technology itself is part of this story. Catholic Social Teaching is not just something from the past. In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (”Magnificent Humanity”), which focused entirely on artificial intelligence and human dignity. He timed it to match the anniversary of Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, the same Leo XIII whose 1899 letter we discussed earlier.

Today, we will connect; we’ll weave together a century-old warning, a living Church debate, the story of a monk who walked his own path, the legacy of social teaching, and the technology that now shapes our everyday existence between Progressives: Two Catholic Temperaments “Traditionalist” and “progressive” are not official labels, but they capture real differences in how Catholics approach their faith. Most people fall somewhere in between, yet these categories shape how Catholic Social Teaching lands in parishes and in Church documents alike.

Catholic traditionalists usually focus on keeping continuity with the Church’s life before the Second Vatican Council. They prefer the older (1962) form of the liturgy, clear doctrine, strong moral positions on sexual ethics and the value of life, and a clear hierarchy. Many are cautious about changes since Vatican II (1962–1965), seeing some as weakening Catholic identity. In terms of Catholic Social Teaching, traditionalists often support subsidiarity (protecting families, local communities, and other groups from being taken over by the state) and human dignity (especially as reasons to oppose abortion and euthanasia). They tend to see CST’s stronger claims about labor, redistribution, migration, and economic reform as matters for debate, or even as modern ideas from secular politics rather than settled Church teaching.

Catholic progressives usually highlight the Church’s ability to grow and respond to new situations, seeing Vatican II as a new beginning rather than a break. They focus on solidarity (the duty of the strong to support the weak, as a matter of justice) and the common good. They see documents like Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti as central to the tradition, not just optional extras. Progressives are more likely to connect Catholic Social Teaching directly to policies like a living wage, universal healthcare, welcoming migrants, and strong climate action. They often view traditionalists’ hesitation on these issues as a selective or comfortable way of reading the faith.

Each side levels a critique at the other—critiques that deserve our careful attention:

• Traditionalists worry that progressive Catholicism risks collapsing the faith into secular politics — trading transcendence, sacramental life, and doctrinal clarity for a generic social-justice program that any secular NGO could sign onto.

• Progressives worry that traditionalist Catholicism risks reducing the faith to personal piety and private moral rectitude — strong on liturgy and sexual ethics, quiet on structural sin, economic injustice, and the material suffering of the poor.

Both groups cite authentic Catholic sources and may selectively emphasize aspects of the tradition. Catholic Social Teaching does not align exclusively with either side; it has developed over a century through contributions from both traditionalist and progressive popes.

Thomas Merton moved within this debate but, true to form, never let himself be boxed in by either camp.

SEE: What Is Actually Happening

Catholic Social Teaching employs a three-step method, developed by Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn and widely adopted: See, Judge, Act. First, observe reality honestly. Next, evaluate it using the Gospel and reason. Finally, take action. We will use this framework tonight.

What do we observe?

The poor. Global poverty has not vanished—it has simply changed its disguise. Automation and AI are already erasing certain jobs, and those hit hardest are often the same people who were already on the margins, not the executives or engineers behind the machines.

Creation. The climate and biodiversity crises continue to unfold. Now, the data centers powering AI gulp down vast amounts of electricity and water, quietly adding a new layer to an already urgent environmental emergency.

A new kind of encounter. For the first time, ordinary people spend much of their day talking to something that sounds like a person but isn’t. Pope Leo XIV has spoken about this, warning that AI systems can imitate voices, faces, and even relationships in ways that touch “the deepest level of communication, that of human relationships.”

Concentration of power. Just a handful of companies now steer the infrastructure, data, and future of this technology. Catholic Social Teaching has always watched closely who holds power—and how they wield it.

A crowded, distracted inner life. Long before smartphones, Merton warned of the “mass mind”—a flood of manufactured opinions and noise that drowns out our ability to think for ourselves. His warning rings truer than ever today.

This is where we begin. But before we weigh what it all means, let’s meet the judge.

Who Was Thomas Merton?

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) was a Trappist monk at Kentucky’s Abbey of Gethsemani and became one of America’s most influential Catholic spiritual writers. He entered monastic life in 1941, seeking silence and escape from the world, immersing himself in strict discipline—Latin prayers, enclosure, a rhythm traditionalists would admire. Yet, to Merton’s own surprise, this very tradition drew him not away from the world’s pain, but directly into its heart of racism, nuclear war, and economic injustice from within a cloistered monastery, often through letters and manuscripts that faced restrictions from his superiors. In 1963, he wrote Letters to a White Liberal, arguing that ending racism in America required a genuine change of heart in white America, not just minor reforms. Merton does not fit neatly into either camp: his monastic life was deeply traditional, while his social and political writing addressed issues—such as racial justice, nuclear disarmament, and interreligious dialogue—that are now considered progressive.

Merton’s central insight: contemplation and social justice are not rivals, nor do they belong to separate camps. The contemplative aims to see reality as it is, unclouded by ego or culture. He spoke of the innermost self as a point “which belongs entirely to God” and is never ours to control. In an age of data profiles and engagement scores, this means our true identity cannot be bought, sold, or optimized.

Merton’s Other Teachers: Why Buddhism Shaped How He Thought

This side of Merton is often missed, but it is far more than a footnote. He did not study other religions from afar. In his final decade, he formed real friendships with Buddhist teachers, reshaping not just his ideas but his entire way of thinking.

He corresponded for years with the Japanese Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki. In 1966, the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nhat Hanh visited Merton at Gethsemani; Merton later called him “my brother,” describing them both as monks and poets living out the same vocation in different traditions. In 1968, on a long journey through Asia, Merton spent three full days in conversation with the Dalai Lama, who later remarked that in Merton he had met a Christian monk who could speak with Buddhists as something like a fellow contemplative teacher. Merton died in Bangkok later that same trip, at a conference on dialogue between Christian and Buddhist monastics — the subject occupied him literally to his last day.

What did Merton actually gain from these encounters—and why does it matter for our conversation about CST and AI? Seeing without grasping. Buddhist practice, particularly Zen, trains individuals to observe thoughts, cravings, or fears as they arise, without being controlled by them. Merton found this approach complemented and deepened the Christian contemplative tradition he practiced. He emphasized that this was not about merging religions, but about maintaining a “scrupulous respect” for the differences between Buddhist and Christian teachings, while recognizing that both traditions can teach each other to view reality honestly.

A wariness of the marketable, constructed self. Buddhist teaching warns against clinging to a fixed identity, echoing Merton’s Christian idea of the “false self”—the mask shaped by ambition, image, and outside approval, not the “true self” rooted in God. Both traditions caution us not to mistake this mask for our real nature. This lesson is especially urgent tonight. Merton’s Buddhist practice sharpened his discipline: slow down, watch your thoughts before acting, question their urgency, and only then judge. This rhythm—observe, discern, act—mirrors the See-Judge-Act method in Catholic Social Teaching, and it is the very discipline often missing when we interact with fast-moving technologies like AI, which are built to erase the pause between impulse and action.

JUDGE: What Catholic Social Teaching Actually Says

CST is not one document but a developing tradition, running from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891) through John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris, Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio, John Paul II’s Laborem Exercens and Centesimus Annus, Francis’s Laudato Si’ and Fratelli Tutti, and now Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas (2026). Four convictions run through all of it:

Human dignity. Every person is made in the image of God and has worth that cannot be earned, revoked, or measured by productivity — including by an algorithm’s measure of “engagement” or “value.”

Solidarity with people experiencing poverty. Not charity as an optional extra, but an obligation: the strong owe something to the weak as a matter of justice, not generosity. CST calls this the “preferential option for the poor” — when a policy, a technology, or an economic choice is evaluated, its first test is its effect on those with the least power to protect themselves.

Creation care. Especially since Laudato Si’, CST treats ecological degradation and poverty as a single connected crisis, not two separate issues. Francis called this an “integral ecology” — you cannot heal the earth while ignoring people experiencing poverty who suffer first and worst from its degradation, and vice versa.

Rights and responsibilities. CST insists that rights (to work, to a fair wage, to participate in society, to truthful information) always come paired with responsibilities (to the common good, to truth, to one another). A right without a corresponding responsibility, in this tradition, is an incomplete idea of the human person.

How each temperament receives these four convictions

As noted in Section 1, traditionalists typically emphasize dignity and subsidiarity, while progressives focus on solidarity and the common good. Neither approach is incorrect, but both are incomplete. Catholic Social Teaching, in its entirety, does not allow selective application. For example, a traditionalist who defends the unborn but overlooks unfair wages is not applying dignity consistently. Similarly, a progressive who supports structural justice but neglects liturgy, prayer, and personal transformation misses the foundation of CST: a relationship with God, not merely a set of policies.

Merton as a bridge beyond the divide

Merton stands as a bridge across this tension. He was formed by the most traditional monastic life he could find, yet from within those walls, he spoke out on race, war, and interfaith dialogue—topics that unsettled traditionalists and inspire progressives today. Merton shows that the traditionalist/progressive split is not written into the tradition itself. In his life, contemplation and conscience fueled each other.

Judging artificial intelligence by these standards

Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas applies this whole framework directly to AI. The main point, in the pope’s own words, is that artificial intelligences “do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain,” and do not truly understand love, work, or responsibility. The real danger, he says, is not the technology itself but the vision behind it—whether it is created to serve everyone or just to concentrate wealth and power in a few companies. He calls for AI to be, in his words, “disarmed” of its ability to increase inequality and to imitate human relationships in ways that harm real ones.

Applying the four convictions directly:

• Dignity — an AI system that manipulates, deceives, or replaces human judgment without consent fails the dignity test, regardless of how useful it is.

• Solidarity — if AI increases productivity for shareholders while displacing workers with no transition support, that is a solidarity failure, not merely an unfortunate side effect.

• Creation — the energy and water costs of AI infrastructure are not a footnote; CST would insist they be weighed against the good the technology actually delivers.

• Rights and responsibilities — the right to work and to true information carries a responsibility on developers and users alike: to build honestly, disclose clearly, and use the tools without abdicating one’s own thinking.

AI is one of the rare modern issues where traditionalist and progressive Catholics might actually stand shoulder to shoulder. Traditionalists’ worries about family, human bonds, and the dignity of work echo progressives’ calls for economic justice and checks on corporate power—all reflected in the same encyclical.

ACT: What This Asks of Us

Catholic Social Teaching insists that reflection must become action; otherwise, “See” and “Judge” are just words on a page. Here are some practical steps, inspired by Merton, his Buddhist friends, and Magnifica Humanitas:

On a personal level, try the discipline Merton learned from Zen: carve out daily moments for real silence and face-to-face connection, to balance a world ruled by screens and artificial chatter. Before letting AI finish a task for you, pause—like a contemplative before a thought—and ask if you’re giving up your own judgment or attention in ways you might regret.

Within your community, back policies and groups—like unions, retraining programs, and local organizations—that give displaced or vulnerable workers a real say in how automation unfolds, not just a payout after the fact. This is solidarity in action: changing the system, not just handing out charity.

As a citizen, ask who holds the reins of the AI systems shaping your community—whether in banks, hospitals, or schools—and if everyday people have any voice. Catholic Social Teaching’s subsidiarity principle says decisions belong as close to home as possible. When far-off companies call the shots on local jobs, that’s exactly the kind of power grab CST warns us about.

Spiritually, Merton’s answer to the noise of his age—shaped by Buddhist friends and Christian tradition—was not escape, but a return to the world with new clarity. This practice of observing without clinging, then judging, then acting, is open to both traditionalist and progressive Catholics, no matter their stance on technology.

Key Quotations for Use in Teaching

(Each may be quoted briefly and attributed; longer passages should be paraphrased rather than reproduced.)

• Thomas Merton, on the inner self: it is a point of truth “which belongs entirely to God” and is never at our disposal (New Seeds of Contemplation).

• Thomas Merton, on confronting racism in America: he called for “a profound change of heart” rather than mere goodwill (Seeds of Destruction, 1964).

• Thomas Merton, on Thich Nhat Hanh: he called him “my brother,” noting they were “both monks” and “both poets” (1966 essay).

• Pope Leo XIV, on AI and human communication: “Faces and voices are sacred” (2026 World Day of Social Communications message).

• Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (2026): human grandeur has “a splendor... no machine can ever replace.”

• Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891): the founding document of modern CST, written in response to industrial-age labor conditions — worth reading alongside Magnifica Humanitas as bookends of the same tradition, 135 years apart.

Questions for Group Discussion

1. Where do you see yourself between the traditionalist and progressive instincts described in Section 1 — and has that changed over your life?

2. Merton was formed by a highly traditional monastic life yet reached socially progressive conclusions. Does his example challenge the idea that these are opposite ends of a single spectrum?

3. Merton insisted his dialogue with Buddhism was not about blending traditions, but about learning a way of seeing more clearly while remaining fully Catholic. Where do you see value in learning from another tradition’s spiritual discipline without adopting its beliefs?

4. Pope Leo XIV says the challenge of AI is “not technological, but anthropological” — about who we are, not just what the machine does. Do you agree that the deeper question is about us rather than the technology?

5. Which of the four CST principles — dignity, solidarity, creation, rights-and-responsibilities — feels most neglected in how your own community, whatever its temperament, is currently adopting AI tools?

6. What would it look like, practically, for your parish, workplace, or family to “act” on this teaching this month?

For Further Reading

• Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Seeds of Destruction, and Zen and the Birds of Appetite

• Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (published posthumously)

• Pope Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum (1891)

• Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (2015) and Fratelli Tutti (2020)

• Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (2026) — full text available at vatican.va