I write to you this week from the eternal city of Rome. I had the honor of helping to host a pre-press conference for the world press, alongside Cardinal Michael Czerny, Bishop Paul Tighe, and Professor Anna Rowlands. We gathered to prepare the world’s journalists for the release of the new encyclical of Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas. It was a profound honor to represent the Diocese of San Jose, St. Simon Parish, and indeed all of Silicon Valley at that table, and to bring to it the context of more than a decade of conversations I have shared with technology leaders as we try together to understand this moment of artificial intelligence.
We are at a genuinely important inflection point in human history. These powerful AI systems are going to change so much of our world: how we do business, how we learn, how we care for one another and how we consume information in the future. The Holy Father’s encyclical changes the reference point for how we receive artificial intelligence, placing it firmly within the context of human dignity and the common good. It asks every person of good will to enter into honest dialogue, so that the dignity of the human person is truly taken into account as these systems are developed, used, and regulated.
That is what makes today such a hopeful day. With Magnifica Humanitas, the Holy Father has done something the Church does at its best. He has not condemned this technology, and he has not blessed it uncritically. He has named it honestly, with its real promise and its real peril held in the same hand, and placed it inside the long tradition of the Church’s social doctrine, in the lineage of Rerum Novarum, whose 135th anniversary we mark this year.
When the document is released on Monday, I would ask you to read it as an invitation rather than a verdict. It calls all of us into what I think of as circles of wisdom: shared spaces of honest discernment where technologists and theologians, builders and pastors, can reason together about what we are making and who we are becoming. These questions are too large for any one discipline, company, or Church to answer alone. The encyclical offers principles, criteria for discernment, and a great deal of hope. I will share more once the document is publicly released.
It is no small thing that this conversation reaches us on the Feast of Pentecost. Today the Church celebrates her own birthday, the day the promised Holy Spirit was poured out on the frightened disciples gathered in that upper room. Saint Luke tells us there came a noise like a strong driving wind, and tongues as of fire came to rest on each of them. Whatever else we say about that morning, this is clear: the disciples did not summon the Spirit, and they did not engineer it. They received it. The Spirit came as gift.
That word, gift, is worth holding onto. In a culture that prizes what we can build, control, and produce, Pentecost reminds us of a different kind of power, one we cannot manufacture and can only welcome. Saint Paul tells the Corinthians that there are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit, and that to each person the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. The gifts are real and personal, and they are never simply for ourselves. They are given so that the one body of Christ might be built up.
In John’s Gospel, the gift comes in the gentlest way imaginable. The risen Jesus stands among his fearful friends, behind locked doors, and he breathes on them, just as God breathed life into the dust of the earth at creation. Receive the Holy Spirit, he says. The Spirit of God is not loud or coercive. The Spirit waits to be welcomed. One must be open to receive this gift, willing to say yes.
Here is where Pentecost meets the questions I have been carrying through these days in Rome. We live in an age of remarkable human ingenuity, an age that can do extraordinary things. Yet the deepest gift we need cannot be coded or purchased or scaled. The wisdom to use our power well, the courage to keep human dignity at the center, the love that refuses to leave anyone behind: these are gifts of the Holy Spirit. To be open to the Spirit is as urgent now as it was in that upper room two thousand years ago. Perhaps it is more urgent. The more powerful our tools become, the more we need to be a people led and guided by the Spirit of God rather than by our own restlessness.
So on this feast of fire and wind, I invite you to make the prayer of the psalmist your own: Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth. Pray it for the world being remade so quickly around us. Pray it for the leaders and engineers shaping these new technologies, that they may be guided by wisdom and conscience. And pray it for yourself, that whatever gift the Spirit has placed in you might be opened, welcomed, and spent for the common good. Come, Holy Spirit. Renew the face of the earth, and begin with us.
Before I close, a few words closer to home. This weekend, we celebrate Fr. Thanh on the first anniversary of his priestly ordination. What a joy it has been to watch his ministry grow among us this past year. Please join me in offering him your heartfelt congratulations. I am also holding in prayer all the high school and college students in our parish family who are graduating this month. You are in my heart, even from across the miles. And to everyone here at home: I hope you enjoy the Memorial Day weekend together. Take a moment to honor those who gave their lives in service to this country, and then enjoy the long weekend with family and friends.
God bless,
Fr. Brendan