I was at a loss of what to write about this week. So I asked AI to write me a 500 word article on ‘What it Means to be a Good Catholic.’ I never considered publishing the AI article, or even a portion of it. However, I was curious to see how accurate the article was, and if it could gain some writing inspiration.
The result was generally positive. It was a free AI tool so expectations were tempered on my end. The AI article said that Catholicism was all about prayer, the sacraments, community involvement, and service to others. It expanded on these issues to fill out the 500 words, and there were no heretical statements. I was impressed with the paragraph that called for constant conversion through the sacrament of reconciliation. But if I were grading this paper as if it were a middle school assignment, it would probably receive a low B.
Where I found the AI article lacking was its view of what the Church is, or rather who it is. It treated the Church as a social group, emphasizing active participation for the sake of forming a community. The more the community did good works of service, participated in study groups, and attended mass, the stronger it would be. All of these are true, but the heart of what (or who) the Church is, The Body of Jesus Christ, was completely skipped over.
In fact, very little was said about Jesus at all. The Holy Trinity was mentioned, and the article did call for us to be more like Christ every day. But the God man who assembled the Church, who gave the Church His Body, and who is head of the Church was barely mentioned. This is unfortunate because it could be argued that ‘What it means to be a Good Catholic’ is to be in relationship with Jesus and to fall deeper in love with Him through participation in His Body, the Church. We are called to become one in Him. Reading the scriptures and receiving the sacraments are essential for knowing and being a part of Jesus, and being in Jesus will drive us to love our brothers and sisters through acts of service. We love, worship, and serve in the community of the Church to lean on each other for strength, and in this way, we are deified and become who we are meant to be.
We can only do this through one action that is also not mentioned by the AI article: Sacrifice. Self sacrificial love is who God is. He proves this to us through Jesus’s life on this Earth. If we do not know self sacrificial love, then we do not know Jesus. If we do not know Jesus, we do not know what it means to be a good Catholic. Jesus is the best and only true example of Catholicism, and we, His Church, are to become holy by being in Him. If we want to be in Him, we have to self sacrifice like him.
How did AI get it wrong? Well AI only teaches us what we teach it, and the sinful world fundamentally does not know or understand Jesus. If they did, they would not have crucified Him. But even within Western Catholicism there is a lack of understanding on how self sacrificial love needs to drive our time in prayer and our acts of service. We have accepted the mediocrity of a social work mentality of service and an obligatory attitude towards attending Church functions. This transactional way of thinking is how the world works. I do good things for others because it makes me feel good to help them. Or I go to Church or Bible studies because I am a member, and my time there is part of my ‘membership fee.’ This is the lens in which this AI tool has been taught to evaluate the Church. But self sacrificial love takes on a new mode of thinking and motivation. It sees the world as God sees it. He does nothing out of obligation, but sees the good in giving Himself completely to another.
While going to Church functions and doing acts of service are not only good but admirable, we are fundamentally called to something deeper and greater. We are being formed by God for eternity with and in Him. This means that for all eternity, we are going to live in the self sacrificial love of Jesus. But if we do not know Him, we do not know self sacrificial love. And if we do not know self sacrificial love, AI cannot know it either. Thus, as long as the human race and even members of the Catholic Church sees the Church as one transactional social institution among many, then AI will continue to miss the mark in writing articles on Catholicism. Because at the heart of Catholicism is a relationship with Jesus in which we become Him. AI could be used to inform this in minor ways (synthesizing the writings of the saints, etc), but we must know Him first in His sacrifice, which cannot be understood by the sinful world let alone AI.
