The AI tidal wave is set to crash over America’s business and medical communities, and the Catholic Church wants to be ready.
St. Carlo Acutis can help.
Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, is launching the Center for Technology and Human Dignity, promoting Catholic digital and biomedical ethics, on Sept. 7 to coincide with Pope Leo XIV’s canonization of the Italian saint who was proficient with digital technology.
On that day, the pope who wants to direct the Church’s intellectual firepower at the problem of artificial intelligence will give the world a new saint who was a digital apostle — and Benedictine College will give that saint patronage over a work dedicated to training students to follow in his footsteps.
Catholic students have to be first in addressing questions surrounding Artificial Intelligence. “Students who are graduating from Benedictine College today face a totally different world from what my generation faced,” said President Stephen D. Minnis. In his day, fax machines were the new technology. Today, it’s Large Language Model programming models. “It is crucial for Catholic colleges to prepare students who can enter the world as experts, understanding artificial intelligence and knowing how to use it responsibly.”
He said the college chose Benedictine College theologian Dr. Mariele Courtois to be the director of the new center for Technology and the Human Person because she has been tapped by the Vatican Dicastery for Culture and Education to research AI.
“Mariele is remarkable,” he said. “She is a real leader in the Church’s response to cutting edge questions of bioethics and technology, and speaks all over the world. We are lucky to have her, and she is attracting top-tier scholars to participate in her center. ”
At the same time, Courtois is a favorite with students.
“Dr. Courtois’ class introduced me to various discussions and technological problems that I had never heard of before,” Julia Ferdinandt, a senior from Loretto, Minn., said, adding that Courtois “gave me a lot of insight on AI and has allowed me to form my own opinions in a way that makes it possible to participate intelligently in discussions on the topic.”
AI is so disruptive and untested, there is a need to be very aware of its dangers. Just as St. Carlo Acutis used the Internet with great care in light of its massive dark side, it is necessary to use Artificial Intelligence with eyes wide open.
AI is raising a whole new set of questions. “It’s causing us to reflect on what makes us unique as human persons,” Courtois said. “If it is presumed that algorithms are able to mimic how we evaluate the world and interact with the world, then we have an important task to better explain the wide difference that exits between AI and the human person.”
Courtois is assembling a board of collaborators, including international leaders such as University of Notre Dame theologian Paul Scherz and Pontifical Academy for Life member Christopher Kaczor. Affiliated Benedictine College Faculty scholars include Deacon Kevin Tulipiana, the Associate Dean of the proposed Benedictine College medical school. The key is to go beyond fear to responsible engagement.
In some ways, Courtois says, AI shares a lot in common with other technologies.
“We should always be critically aware of how we’re engaging with technology. We need to form communities that will help us to cultivate and fortify virtues for engaging in a highly technological landscape,” she said.
One of her students, senior John Kline from Hillsboro, Va., said he appreciated how Courtois assigns articles from both Catholic and secular AI experts, saying this “helps students to develop a cohesive understanding of what AI is — and isn’t — while at the same time letting them debate and form opinions on … acceptable use of AI.”
Courtois stresses that “The human person not only is more by nature but is also called to more — a vocation to participate in God's loving plan.” She plans to use the Center to introduce students to St. Carlo Acutis at an event at a local bookstore after the Center launches.
She wants to form more young people in the model of the millennial “computer geek” who mastered coding at a young age to evangelize and to help others — including an order of religious sisters — to go online.
But he avoided making the merely digital his goal. “Our aim has to be the infinite and not the finite,” St. Carlo said. “The Infinite is our homeland. We have always been expected in heaven.”
