Matthew Harvey Sanders

Grateful to Jason Deuterman and the team at @OSV for inviting me to give an OSV Talk, "AI and the Work That Remains". I believe AI is about to give us back more time than we have ever had, and the real question is what that time is for. In this talk, I argue that the Church has been answering that question for two thousand years, and that the parish is where we learn it again. You are needed because love still needs hands. I hope it's helpful. Link to full talk in comments.

For dioceses: magisterium.com/catholic-int… For parishes: magisterium.com/catholic-int… Video: youtu.be/0icVDD_a4xQ?si=tnQY…

Finally! Catholic Intelligence is live. It's our first major effort to off-ramp people from AI to a real parish. People are already asking AI about coming back to the Church, becoming Catholic, or baptism. Now @magisteriumai can point them to a parish nearby, using its current Mass times and ministries. For dioceses and parishes, it also brings their directory, statistics, reports and pastoral insights into one dashboard. This one is close to my heart. AI should lead people to a living community, not keep them on a screen. Hope it's useful. Links in comments.

Link to video: youtube.com/watch?v=6qO_Yw6c… Link to speech: longbeard.com/blog/what-it-c…

Grateful to Mike Nall and Saint Clement Parish in Chicago for the invitation to speak at their Men's Executive Series. The question on the program was what these men will build when machines can build "almost anything except a man willing to give his life for something". In this speech, I tell the story of Isaac Hecker, who spent his life trying to bring America to Christ with the printing press among his tools, and of the Jesuit martyrs Jean de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues (@jesuitnews), who kept going back to the people who would kill them. As a convert who studied with the @PaulistFathers Hecker founded, his story is close to my heart. I hope it's helpful. Link to video and speech in comments.

We just launched the new Library in @magisteriumai. You can now search Church teaching, theology and the spiritual classics by title or author, save books to read next, and organize them into your own collections. There are audiobooks too, with a choice of voices, and it remembers your place in each book. A new way to return to the great works. Try it out. Link in comments.

Very grateful to @PhilipLarrey for the kind mention in his interview with @VaticanNews, and to @DeborahLubov for the piece. His view on AI and cloistered nuns is worth reading. It can't do much for prayer, which is a direct relationship with God, but it can help with the practical business of dealing with lawyers, suppliers and the wider world. His advice on reliability is the one I'd give anyone: check the references and verify they're real. Never take an AI's word on faith alone. Link to article in comments.

Grateful to the Diocesan Fiscal Management Conference for inviting me to speak to the people who keep the books for America's dioceses. In "A Century in a Decade: Diocesan Finance and the Age of AI and Robotics", I cover the risks already on a finance officer's desk, from AI voice-cloning fraud to staff pasting parish data into consumer chatbots, and why a clear policy works better than a ban. I also make the case for sovereign AI: a model running on a machine the diocese owns, grounded in its own documents, with its data never leaving the building. And I argue that once reporting is automated, there's little reason not to open the books to the faithful. I hope it's useful. Link to speech in comments.

It was a privilege to give the keynote at @RC_Southwark's Day for Catechists in London. Grateful to @aecsouthwark, the Agency for Evangelisation and Catechesis, for organizing the day. I came into the Church as an adult through the RCIA, so this one was close to my heart. In "Handing On the Faith When the Machine Has the Answers", I explain how these AI systems are built, where they can help in a parish, and what should never be handed to them. I argue that catechists will matter more in the years ahead than at any time in living memory. I hope it's helpful. Link to speech in comments.

Grateful to @RC_Southwark for giving me a second session with its clergy at the Day of Formation in London. Pope Leo XIV has asked priests to resist preparing homilies with AI. In "AI: Ongoing Dialogue and Papal Teaching", I explain what I think that means in practice. AI can help a priest find what the Fathers and Doctors said about a passage, and once he's prayed and decided what to say, it can help him say it well. What it can't do is write the homily for him. Only he can share his faith with the people he knows. I hope it's helpful. Link to speech in comments.