What the Shepherds Aren’t Saying

The people sitting in Catholic pews this Sunday are carrying something their pastors have not named.

Not a vague cultural anxiety. Something specific: the vertigo that comes from watching the world accelerate past every framework they were given to understand it. Their work, their identity, their children’s future, their sense of what it means to be human — all of it is shifting beneath them, and no one in the places that are supposed to speak truthfully seems willing to say so out loud.

Superintelligent systems — AI that does not merely assist human thinking but surpasses it across every domain — are no longer a philosophical premise. The people building these systems are treating their arrival as a near-term engineering problem. The direction is not contested. The timeline is compressing faster than almost anyone outside a small circle of specialists has registered.

I have not heard one homily address this. Not one.

I have heard homilies about gratitude and forgiveness and trusting God’s plan. None of that is wrong. But it is being offered into a moment that is asking something far more specific — and the distance between what is said from the pulpit and what is actually happening to people is widening every week.

The Church Cannot Be Behind This Wave

Every major technological shift has eventually found some religious engagement — but rarely early, and rarely with theological depth leading rather than following. The response has usually come after the habits were already formed, after the damage was already done.

Artificial intelligence is different in kind from what came before. It is not a distribution technology — a faster way to move content. It is a formation technology. It is actively shaping how people think, what they attend to, how they understand themselves, and where they look for meaning. A parish that ignores this is not being neutral. It is ceding the formation of its people to a system that has no interest in their souls and every interest in their continued engagement.

The Church cannot afford to arrive at this conversation a decade late with a pastoral letter. The formation is happening now. The question is whether the Church is part of it.

Priests who use AI to research homilies, draft communications, and manage parish administration are not compromising anything. They are being good stewards of scarce time. The issue is not whether to use the tools. The issue is whether the Church is thinking theologically about what those tools are, what they do, and what they cannot do — and whether that thinking is making its way into the formation of ordinary people.

You Cannot Sugarcoat the Gospel. Not Now.

There is a pastoral reflex that surfaces when people bring their deepest anxieties into religious spaces. It is well-intentioned and genuinely insufficient. It goes something like this: don’t worry. God is sovereign. He works all things for good. Trust him.

All of that is true. None of it is enough.

The early Christians in Rome were not told simply to trust God and keep going. They were given a theology of suffering, a theology of identity, a theology of the body and work and community and hope — specific enough to live by when the empire was hostile and the future was genuinely uncertain. Paul’s letter to the Romans is not a collection of encouragements. It is an architecture. A way of standing inside a world that was coming apart.

That is what people need right now. Not less reassurance — more architecture. They need a framework specific enough to navigate a world in which machines may soon outperform them in every cognitive domain by which they have quietly measured their worth. They need anchors that do not depend on their productivity, their professional relevance, or their ability to compete with systems that do not sleep.

The watered-down homily — the one that leaves everyone feeling vaguely encouraged and essentially unchanged — has always been a pastoral failure. It is a more serious one now. The people in those pews are facing a disruption to human identity unlike anything the modern Church has been asked to address. Comfort that does not go deep enough to hold will not hold.

The Gospel has never been primarily a comfort. It is a claim — about who God is, who the human person is, and what is actually happening in history. When that claim is spoken with clarity into a moment of genuine crisis, it lands differently than it does when everything is fine. The moment is here. The claim needs to be spoken.

What Homilies Must Begin Saying

Let me be specific, because the moment requires it.

The first thing homilies must begin saying is that the human person cannot be reduced to what they produce or process. This is not a philosophical aside. In a world moving toward superintelligence, the implicit anthropology that most people carry — that their worth is tied to their cognitive output, their efficiency, their competitive usefulness — is going to be catastrophically destabilized. If your dignity is anchored in what you can do, and machines can do it faster and cheaper, you are facing an identity crisis that no amount of resilience coaching will survive.

The Church’s answer is not a consolation prize. It is a counter-anthropology. The human person bears the image of God not because of what they produce but because of what they are — embodied, relational, made for communion with a Person who is not interchangeable with any system. The Vatican’s 2025 document Antiqua et Nova states it plainly: AI has sophisticated abilities to perform tasks, but not to think in the full sense — not to love, not to choose morally, not to suffer redemptively, not to be sanctified. The gap between human intelligence and artificial intelligence is not a gap of quantity. It is a gap of kind. That needs to be said, plainly, from pulpits.

The second thing homilies must address is attention — what is being lost and why it matters eternally. The capacity for sustained interior attention is the precondition for every form of genuine encounter: with God, with other people, with one’s own soul. A person whose attention has been fragmented by years of algorithmic conditioning is not merely distracted. They are less capable of the specific acts by which they were made to know and love God. This is a spiritual emergency wearing the clothing of a lifestyle problem. Naming it as such is not moralizing. It is pastoring.

The third is vocation in a disrupted world. The people in those pews — the accountants, the writers, the paralegals, the programmers — many of them are already feeling the ground shift. The Church has a theology of work, of suffering, of meaning that speaks directly to what happens when the economic structures that gave life its shape are destabilized. That theology needs to be spoken into the specific anxiety, not offered as a general principle at a comfortable distance from the actual wound.

The Prophetic Office Has Not Been Revoked

In the letters to the seven churches in Revelation, the risen Christ does not offer generic encouragement. He names what is actually happening in each community — with precision, with urgency, with pastoral specificity — and then speaks directly into it. The refrain is the same every time: “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Revelation 2:7).

What the Spirit is saying to the churches right now is not hard to discern if you are paying attention. It is saying: your people are disoriented by an acceleration they cannot name. They are losing the interior capacities that faith requires. They are being offered meaning substitutes by systems that know their behavioral patterns but not their souls. They are asking the deepest questions of their lives outside the Church, because the Church has not yet signaled that it knows those questions are being asked.

Ezekiel heard the watchman’s calling as a moral obligation he was not permitted to ignore: if the sword is coming and the watchman does not sound the alarm, the blood of those taken is on his hands (Ezekiel 33:6). The watchman does not need to know everything about the sword. He needs to see it coming and speak.

The sword is visible. It is not coming slowly.

The people in the pews are still there. Still carrying the question. Still hoping, against everything the culture is telling them, that someone in the institution knows what is happening and has something true and specific to say about it.

That is the homily that needs to be preached.

• • •

The Inner Exodus publishes at the intersection of faith, psychology, and the questions modern life cannot answer by itself. If this found you at the right moment, share it with someone who needs to hear it. And to sow into this writing ministry, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.