FaithNews

Catholic Answer’s AI ‘priest’ laicized after backlash

Gina Christian - Catholic News ServiceApril 25, 2024

This is a screenshot of “Father Justin,” an AI chatbot simulating a priest in order to answer questions for teaching apostolate Catholic Answers. (OSV News screenshot/Catholic Answers).

(OSV News) -- A new AI priest, launched by a Catholic teaching apostolate to answer questions about the faith, has been “laicized” after sparking more backlash than belief online.

The nonprofit apologetics website Catholic Answers debuted a “Father Justin” interactive AI app April 23, aiming “to provide users with faithful and educational answers to questions about Catholicism,” according to an announcement that day by the organization.

Father Justin -- a bearded, bushy-browed white male in clerical attire, who sat placidly overlooking the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Italy’s Perugia province -- was named for St. Justin Martyr, a second-century convert and apologist, said Catholic Answers in its release.

Your Letters: Women's ordination, church growth, Louisiana excommunication, and live-streamed Mass

 

Your Letters: Women's ordination, church growth, Louisiana excommunication, and live-streamed Mass

Letters to the Editor  ncr

Paulist summit targets 'toxic polarization' in US Catholic Church, society

 

News

Paulist summit targets 'toxic polarization' in US Catholic Church, society

Jeannine M. Pitas  ncr

From blasphemous to blessed: Pope's Venice visit will spotlight Corita Kent's art

View from the Vatican

From blasphemous to blessed: Pope's Venice visit will spotlight Corita Kent's art

Vatican

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  Christopher White

 

 

FaithFaith and Reason

Cardinal Cupich: 3 ways the synod’s ‘conversations in the Spirit’ can revolutionize the church

Blase J. CupichApril 24, 2024

(iStock)

Before the month-long meeting of the Synod on Synodality last October in Rome, delegates were invited to a pre-synod retreat led by Timothy Radcliffe, O.P. Part of the purpose of the retreat was to prepare us to participate in “a conversation in the Spirit,” to use Pope Francis’ definition of the synodal process.

I consider this reframing of synodality to be nothing short of revolutionary. Father Radcliffe’s reflections convinced me that the pope’s reframing of the scope and meaning of synods will also have staying power because this reframing opens up a new “model for the church,” to use a term coined by the late Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., 50 years ago.

Will Trumpism Spare Catholicism?

Emerging alignments are cause for concern

Massimo Faggioli

April 22, 2024

Bishop Joseph E. Strickland, then head of the Diocese of Tyler, Texas, speaks from the floor during the 2019 fall general assembly of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore (OSV News photo/CNS file, Bob Roller).

In a hopeful but also worrying article published in the April issue of this magazine, Thomas Geoghegan wrote that “as a Catholic, I can take some comfort in the fact that Trump has yet to liquidate the U.S. Catholic Church.” Trump hasn’t absorbed it the way he has conservative white Evangelicals (in a kind of para-Christian political-religious entrepreneurialism), and that is something to be thankful for. But Catholicism hasn’t been totally spared by Trumpism. And there’s little comfort to be gained from the fact that his main opponents in the Catholic political realm—President Biden and Pope Francis—are increasingly at odds over the wars in Ukraine and Israel and Gaza. The other looming concern: What happens after Biden and Francis are no longer on the stage?

Catholic students, theologians, ministers write an open letter to Pope Francis

Catholic students, theologians, ministers write an open letter to Pope Francis

Guest Voices  ncr

 

'It's a different time': Relations between US sisters, Vatican have changed radically

 

'It's a different time': Relations between US sisters, Vatican have changed radically

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