I am a priest, and I have drawn a hard line on artificial intelligence. Insofar as I can, I avoid it. I am aware of course that A.I. has already become so much a part of ordinary modern life and that I cannot truly forgo its use. So when I say that I avoid it, I mean that I refuse to engage with the large language model chatbots available to me: ChatGPT, Claude, Grok. I have many reasons for this decision. Here, I will only present one directly connected to my vocation.

Let’s begin with a thought experiment. For Catholics, the ordinary way to receive forgiveness of sins is by individual sacramental confession to a priest. We believe that Christ instituted this sacrament when he said to his apostles, “whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” But what is the reason which stands behind Christ’s decision to make forgiveness dependent on a direct interaction with a priest? One can give psychological motivations: confessing sins to another person promotes self-examination and sharpens awareness of sin; hearing spoken words of mercy gives experiential knowledge of forgiveness. One can also give ecclesiological reasons: reconciliation with God is simultaneously reconciliation with the Church, and besides, confessors are theologically trained to judge repentance, to resolve moral doubts, to answer spiritual questions, and so on.

Now imagine for a moment an A.I. chatbot that can mimic a priest confessor. A penitent still confesses his or her sins out loud. The priestly chatbot, which never lags in attention or patience, speaks back words of encouragement, guidance, and absolution. This chatbot can adjust its counsel to match the age, state of life, and language of any penitent. It is trained to operate only from principles of the best Catholic moral and spiritual theology, and it even remembers and applies the relevant intricacies of canon law. Perhaps it is even regulated by Church authorities, approved by the D.D.F. and made available by the local bishop in times and places he considers most advantageous. The chatbot engages with proper amounts of compassion, humor, and rigor—only using a male voice, of course.

Every catechized Catholic knows that even if such a chatbot existed, it could never replace absolution granted by a priest. Why? Why must the Church forgo a tool which could be powerful and effective in facilitating an essential Christian experience? And what does that tell us about who we are, and how we should judge other uses of A.I. in our ecclesial life?

To answer these questions, we must return to a more basic one: what is the purpose of our Christian lives? I think it is important to avoid framing the answer in terms of “going to heaven,” at least insofar as this is taken to mean arriving at some disembodied existence “up there” which we attain by believing correct theological propositions or by exteriorly following a set of commandments. Without denying the survival of the soul after death, we must remember that this disembodied survival is temporary and less-than-human. The Creed, in fact, does not speak about “going to heaven” but rather professes faith in the “resurrection of the body.” In a similar way, Scripture ends with a vision of a new heaven descending to a new earth. These embodied eschatological realities are already participated in here and now through the life of grace, mediated by and lived out in the Church. The Kingdom of God is at hand—admittedly, in a scandalously imperfect form, marred by sin and suffering, darkened by death, groaning in travail until the end—but at hand, nevertheless.

When we think in these terms, we protect ourselves from conceptualizing our spiritual and ecclesial goals as a set of formulae. The Church is not just the source of correct information, and it is not a vending machine to which we queue up every time we need a hit of grace. Her work cannot be measured in terms of mere efficiency or pure quantity, nor is it brought to fruition through mechanical or material actions. She does teach the truth and mediate grace, but She does so as the Body of Christ, as a network of members hierarchically organized and woven together in love. The importance of charity is impossible to overstate: it is at the heart of every authentically ecclesial action. A parent imperfectly teaching a child the faith with love offers more than a hyper-knowledgeable A.I. trained on Catholic principles; a priest offering rambling guidance and quick absolution with love gives infinitely more than a conversation with an A.I. chat-bot.

Of course, the love which binds the Church together flows from the sacrifice of Christ on Calvary. In His sacrifice, Jesus offered up his body and poured out his blood for us, even to death. The bodily nature of His sacrifice—insisted upon by the early Church—is not incidental to our question. Christ’s flesh and blood afford the very possibility of an offering of sacrificial love. What does it mean to lay down a life, if there is no living body to offer? Our highest participation in Christ’s sacrifice is likewise embodied in word and sacrament: words pronounced with human breath, sacraments celebrated by ordained men using water, oil, bread, wine. These actions, however routine they might seem, are opportunities for minister and recipient to embody Christ’s charity through their flesh-and-blood encounter with one another. A.I. chat-bots simply cannot reproduce this encounter. This is perhaps the deepest reason for the human encounter required by the sacraments: only then can divine love reveal itself fully: “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst.”

I doubt that any practicing Catholic would object to my argument if it were limited to the liturgical or sacramental aspects of ecclesial life. Nobody is seriously proposing A.I. confessors. But I suspect many Catholics would have fewer qualms with the Church adopting A.I. for other, less sacred, activities. I would be more cautious. The logic of charity which excludes A.I. confessors should make us suspicious of our desire to use A.I. in other ecclesial contexts, no matter how convenient or helpful such technology may appear.

Let’s examine another situation, still connected to the liturgy, but one step removed: the preparation of homilies. We have all heard homilies which could use serious improvement, and I have no doubt that A.I. could provide some assistance. A.I. could enrich homiletic content by drawing on a vast source of scriptural, theological, and spiritual texts. Think how much more it “knows” or “remembers” than your average priest! It could help structure or organize homilies and—if we’re lucky—limit their length. A.I. could provide ideas for a pertinent story, quotations from saints, a connection to whatever the pope has said on the topic or to whatever is happening in the news. Again, why not get the D.D.F. involved, create a magisterially approved A.I. that is trained on the best preachers and approved theologians? Wouldn’t this help priests who are often overworked and underprepared? How much better could our Catholic “content” become? What is there to lose?

What we stand to lose is love. An A.I.-generated or assisted homily, rather than a potential act of love from a shepherd to his sheep has become an act of propaganda. The priest is no longer sharing himself with or sacrificing himself for his people, he is delivering something he does not possess. He is preaching a disembodied gospel. He may have captured great knowledge, but as Saint Paul reminds us, without love he remains merely a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. A bad homily by a caring and prayerful priest who lacks talent but not humility can radiate love. A bad homily from a lazy and uncaring priest provides the opening for forgiveness by his congregation. Any homily prepared by a real priest who prays is an opportunity for communion, for authentic encounter, for a glimpse at the invisible unity between head and body.

Someone might reasonably object that good priests use all kinds of tools to prepare homilies: scriptural commentaries, theological works, podcasts, other homilies available online. But these tools do not replace his humanity. Books or commentaries do not produce or modify homilies; they provide information or insight which must be prayed or wrestled with, reflected on, and digested. The homily must still emerge from the heart of the priest. Unlike A.I., these other tools do not replace the activity of man. And in some cases, engagement with other sources may even promote a kind of remote communion with their authors. Perhaps a priest could use A.I. in this way, without slowly abdicating his personal vocation to preach the gospel as an act of love. I doubt it. Power and comfort have long been the enemies of the priesthood.

So much for sacraments and preaching. At the risk of sounding radical, I believe that the same logic that leads us to exclude A.I. from the sacraments and preaching should also exclude it from any ecclesial action, even the most mundane. Perhaps there is no immediate or obvious harm in producing the parish bulletin using A.I. But are we certain that such an act will have no influence on how we understand the nature of the parish or its mission? Are we sure that our understanding of a parish community will not slowly be eroded, even more than it already is? When we treat any community of love as an object of efficiency or quantity, when we treat it as a machine to manipulate, we risk whittling away our humanity and warping the very soul of that community. If we are not attentive, before long, the use of A.I. within the Church could smuggle in modes of organization, communication, or encounter which are less-than-human, which are ordered not toward love, and which increase distance and darken the veil between the members of Christ.

For most of the world, motivations to develop and adopt A.I. are so strong that I do not hope for any serious resistance to its ascendancy. But I do not believe this need be the case for the Church. Our efforts at evangelization do not need technical power or better messaging; we need real human communion rooted in the love of the Incarnate Word.