Here comes the son, Vance in Rome, and less human
The Friday Pillar Post
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Happy Friday friends,
We’re in the home stretch of Lent. One week to go before we enter Holy Week.
I don’t know how the season has been going for you, but it’s been a bit of a mess for me.
In my family, we’re stuck in a kind of housing limbo, not really sure if our landlords are going to cancel our lease, offer to sell us the house we live in, or boot us out.
A week ago, at around midnight, some boy racer came screaming down our little street, lost control and slammed into the side of my car. The damage, which to my unschooled eye is purely cosmetic, certainly looks grim enough to make driving it an act of humility. But, because the car itself is older than most high school students, our insurance company is calling the car a total loss. Given what they are offering for it, and the state of the automotive market just now, that’s less than ideal.
Meanwhile, work has been piling up behind the scenes. We have been going hell for leather trying to get a big new project here at The Pillar over the line — hopefully more on that to come in the next few days. But, for family reasons, I ended up with primary charge of our daughter for the last week, when I would be most disposed to barricade myself in my office and bury myself in work.
I say all of this not to recount a tale of woe. On the contrary. The Lord has sent me the Lent I needed, and I am grateful — if not always effusively so. I have a lot of sins, but like most American men of my age and upbringing, the greatest of them is to deny Providence, in my heart and with my actions, if not out loud.
Faced with the above, my instinct is to panic. To complain. To work longer hours. To commit myself to my own strength and efforts to save me.
Lent is about spending time in the spiritual desert, a place of discomfort not for discomfort’s sake but for clarity.
Yeah, I’m not exactly sure where we will be living come June, or how we will get there. But the truth of my existence is that I am made not for this or that house or apartment, but for a home in heaven — the great power of which is rising for me at Easter, hovering now just below the horizon. No car in any condition is going to get me there.
This coming week, this last week of Lent, is a final chance to trust in the Lord, to run to meet him. The proper response to all my petty suburban cares is written in bold across the season: prayer, fasting, almsgiving. To live, not just say, the truth that I and my family live not on bread alone, still less by my efforts, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.
Living this truth with faith isn’t the “mission,” or the “job,” the “challenge,” or the “test” of the next week. It is the invitation open to me, to all of us, in the run up to Holy Week — an invitation not to prove myself worthy of Christ in some Pelagian sense, but to allow him to reveal his power and love for me.
It is going to be great.
Here’s the news.
The News
Today is the 20th anniversary of the death of Pope St. John Paul II — one of the most significant figures in global affairs of the last century and probably the most profound and pervasive influence on my faith and understanding of the Church.
Cardinal Antonio María Rouco was one of Saint John Paul II’s closest collaborators in Europe, leading the transformation of the Spanish episcopacy as Archbishop of Madrid after a turbulent post-conciliar period in the country.
This is a seriously interesting conversation. Don’t miss it.
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The Catholic Church in the Philippines currently has a record five members of the College of Cardinals — three young enough to elect the next pope.
Some of them, like Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, are well known to the global Church; others you may have never heard of. But as our Philippines correspondent Jason Baguia wrote this week, all of them of formed by a powerful, and distinctly local history.
So who are they, and how are they thought of in their homeland?
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The incoming Archbishop of Cincinnati has declined to discuss his term as the rector of a controversial Chicago formation house shuttered by Cardinal Blase Cupich in 2016.
There is no indication that Archbishop-elect Robert Casey is implicated in a long pattern of misconduct at Casa Jesus, the now-closed house of formation at which he worked from 1998 until 2003.
“It could be seen by Catholics as an indication that while nods to ‘transparency’ have become de rigueur for bishops, few expect to actually discuss the concerning questions raised by Catholics about sexual misconduct and ecclesial reform.”
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A U.K. government bill poses a threat to the sacramental seal of confession, a Catholic academic said this week.
Professor David Paton told The Pillar that the Crime and Policing Bill “represents a serious attack on the seal of confession and freedom of religion for Catholics” in creating a new duty to report suspected cases of abuse including those revealed during a sacramental confession.
Paton submitted written evidence to the parliamentary committee scrutinizing the bill March 31, said that two clauses impinged on confession.
He also told The Pillar that the bill “seems to put Catholic bishops and others in authority over priests at risk of criminal prosecution” if they tried to enforce the sacramental seal among their clergy.
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Cardinal Juan Cipriani has publicly clashed with the bishops’ conference of Peru, demanding they rectify a January statement claiming abuse allegations against him are “verified.”
In an open letter the cardinal insisted that it was a “lie” and a “grave mistake” for the country’s bishops’ conference to say his resignation as Lima’s archbishop was connected to the abuse allegations he’s facing at the Vatican.
Cipriani’s case, which we have reported on before, is yet another example of the absolute mess you get when allegations are made and then the necessary canonical process either isn’t followed properly, or just stops cold in its tracks.
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The Vatican's delegate to the Institute of the Incarnate Word accused members of resisting the Institute’s reform, and suggested that defiance could lead to dissolution of the religious order.
Bishop José Satué, appointed recently by the Vatican to oversee reforms in the embattled Argentinian congregation, said in an open letter that he is “encountering strong resistance to admitting something obvious: the Institute of the Incarnate Word, like any ecclesial institution and like the Church itself— semper reformanda.”
The bishop added that the institute’s leadership has failed to acknowledge troubling issues in its life and governance, including past sexual abuse by its founder, Fr. Carlos Buela.
Given the drastic action the Vatican has taken against religious orders that get labeled as “problems” or especially resistant to reform, Satué’s letter could be a warning of something drastic to come if he doesn’t see a change of attitude — and fast.
Vance in Rome
I read with interest this week that Vice President JD Vance looks set to visit Rome for Easter. Bloomberg reports, on the strength of official correspondence they have seen, that VP JD is aiming to arrive in town on Good Friday and depart on Easter Sunday itself.
It is not clear if this trip will go ahead, though if it does it looks to be a working weekend — Bloomberg report his team have been trying to set a meeting with the Italian PM.
Vance is, of course, a rather public Catholic. He keynoted the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast a few weeks ago and he has engaged in some rather notable public exchanges on the Catholicity of the administration’s policies and concepts like the ordo amoris — even drawing a direct response from Pope Francis.
It’s unlikely, then, that he’ll be skipping the liturgical life of the Church across its most solemn three days. Who knows, maybe he’s angling for an excuse to write off a mini personal pilgrimage as a work expense. I could respect that.
Either way, given the very real antagonism between the Trump administration (and indeed Vance personally) and the hierarchy, should the VP end up in the eternal city for the Triduum, and if he ends up in the pews at St. Peter’s for Easter, it will be taken by many as a political moment, as much as a personal spiritual one.
I’m not saying that’s necessarily fair or ideal. People who have serious, even public disagreements with bishops and cardinals want and need to go to Mass, too, you know.
But it's a reality of American Catholic life that Catholic politicians have their policy positions critiqued in the light of the Church’s teachings — and that the volume gets turned up in line with the prominence of their position and their practice of the Catholic faith.
Joe Biden’s term as president was singled out as a source of such scandal to many — including many bishops — not just because of the barbarity of what he pushed for on the subject of abortion, but because he insisted on flashing around his rosary while giving stump speeches, and splicing B-roll of nuns into his campaign videos.
If Vance goes to the Vatican, it will be interesting to see if he goes quietly, or if it becomes a media event.
On a recent trip to Paris, he brought the whole family to tour the recently reopened Notre Dame cathedral, video of which made the rounds on TV and social media. If he angles for similar VIP treatment at the Vatican, it is unlikely he’d be denied, but it would reraise the discussion of his points of conflict with the Church — not least the U.S. bishops, who are suing the administration for tens of millions of dollars.
But even if Vance does get the full five-star tour, and it does kick off a round of (justified) criticism for his support for the Trump administration’s program of mass deportations, that conversation will almost inevitably get bogged down in a back-and-forth about how and why Vance has already been singled by the pope compared to other U.S. Catholic politicians.
When she was Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, managed to secure a photo-op with Pope Francis at St. Peter’s before receiving Communion at a papal Mass, despite being banned from doing so in her home diocese over her public statements on abortion.
As Speaker, Pelosi arguably held a much more formally powerful office than Vance does as Vice President. And, however morally objectionable in principle and procedurally grotesque the current administration's deportations program is, the taking of innocent human life via abortion is of an objectively different moral order.
Of course, given the pope’s ill health, there’s no likely prospect of the vice president getting the chance to press the papal flesh, and no official slight can be implied from it.
And no bishop has tried to bar Vance from receiving Communion over the administration's immigration policies — though the new-in-post Archbishop of Detroit, Edward Weisenburger, once suggested the bishops consider doing so for ICE officers.
But the Vatican already has to contend with the problem of a perceived double standard in how it has treated U.S. politicians — while Francis has been an unambiguous teacher on the issue of abortion, he hasn’t issued a full letter to U.S. bishops on the urgency of subject, or issued a personal corrective to the likes of Pelosi or Biden.
Even without the pope being available for a photo-op, how Vance is or isn’t seen to be made welcome, and given the full diplomatic treatment, during an Easter stop in Rome will be a point of fierce interest, and debate.
And in Francis’ absence, it will likely fall to the Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, to deputize — or not — in receiving the vice president. What he chooses to do may end up telling us more about him, and his own views about the pope’s posture towards the Trump administration, than anything else.
Less human
I read this week that the most recent iteration of Chat GPT, Microsoft’s AI program, has passed the Turing Test — generally held to be the standard at which artificial intelligence can be said to appear “human.”
Now, to be clear, the Turing Test isn’t a metric for assessing sentience by a machine. It does not and cannot detect or prove algorithmic self-awareness — as if lines of code could be alive.
Of course, a computer program doesn’t have to be literally alive to go rogue and do us all some cataclysmic mischief, so the practical ramifications remain very concrete, even if the philosophical implications are debatable. But I do think they should be debated.
The Turing Test essentially boils down to a human judge having simultaneous interactions with another person and the machine. If he or she cannot identify — or identifies incorrectly — which one is which, the machine passes. And, according to UC San Diego's Language and Cognition Lab, people are no more accurate than a coin toss at distinguishing between ChatGPT 4.5 and another person.
If you are of a paranoid state of mind, as I am, this is bad news. The more competent and amazing AI appears to people, and the more cost effective and efficient it shows itself to be, the more we put it in charge of vast swathes of the hidden logistics and decision making which shapes our world.
They may be able to think fast and cheap, but machines break, programs glitch, and artificial logic can and often does lead to some manifestly inhuman outcomes. That should be a much bigger cause for concern than I am seeing. That’s the practical, but as for the philosophical, how “human,” exactly, are these AI programs becoming?
It’s hard to say, really, because unlike software development, there is no objective or constant standard of humanity to measure — on the contrary, it is in constant flux and, unlike AI, we can and do move backwards.
Not for nothing has the explosion in Large Language Model AI, which is essentially a giant exercise in predictive text messaging, tracked the ubiquity of social media and the rise of a generation and a half of people whose entire life is relentlessly online.
We’ve long since moved from feeling to knowing that Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and so on are at least as bad for us as any number of common recreational drugs, and very likely worse than most for our common society in the long run.
All of them have contributed to a coarsening of public discourse, the profusion of viral false facts, and —far worse — a reshaping of how we see ourselves, turning people and relationships into “content” for consumption.
We have, in short, adopted and installed at the heart of our daily lives utilities which dehumanize us. That has to affect the bar any AI program needs to clear to sound “human.”
I thought of this first a few weeks ago, in the light of the result of a different kind of Turing Test at Cornell, in which people were given a blind selection to rate and decided that AI made funnier, more shareable memes than people.
(For those who don’t know, a meme is a captioned image meant to convey humor via social media posting.)
Here’s a selection of top line results.
Now, presumably you see what I see here: None of these are actually funny. Yet this is the sort of thing we as a society call humor and to which we assign value, in terms of our attention and willingness to circulate and amplify it.
It’s not exactly Armando Iannucci or Larry David, is it? It has the semblance of observational humor, a kind of anchoring in the human experience, but none of the winners, human or machine, show a spark of real originality, personality, real creativity, or (crucially in comedy) the ability to surprise.
It’s insipid, color-by-numbers stuff. The results aren’t a vindication of artificial intelligence but an indictment of human creativity — the very terms of the test, creating visual gags for twitter, reward understanding the animalistic algorithms of people’s online expectations and standards.
We’ve moved our culture into the machine’s world, so small wonder if they are beating us at what is essentially their game.
To be clear, I’m not immune to or above any of this.
As some of you might remember, last Thanksgiving I took the day off and, as a joke, Michelle wrote my newsletter for me in the character of me. It wasn’t bad work. People, generally speaking, thought it a more than fair impression of me, maybe winkingly tweaked a little in places for comedic effect. I was flattered by the caricature. You have to know someone well to effectively send them up.
What none of you know, though, is that at about the same time, as a joke, JD fed a topic I was writing about in another newsletter into an AI program and asked it to write it as me in the style of these Friday newsletters.
The results were sufficiently terrifying that I wanted to spend the rest of the evening in a darkened room with a bottle of whiskey.
All this is to say that I have spent a few years now worried about AI and its rising ubiquity, and what the physical, external consequences might be for our world. Now, I am increasingly more concerned about what the rise of AI is screaming at us about the internal consequences for us of our online life.
The machines aren’t beating us in the Turing Test because they are becoming more human, they’re winning because we’re becoming the algorithm. We are made to be so much better than that.
See you next week,
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
As far as I can tell The US immigration policy is more in tune with the Catechism than other "social teaching" on migration uttered by religious figures. CCC 2241, for instance" “Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants’ duties toward their country of adoption.” And, "Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws and to assist in carrying civic burdens."
That last observation about AI is the correct one: computers aren't becoming more human, we're becoming more mechanical. I think there's a parallel to be drawn with this country's obsession with pets as quasi-children: we're becoming more like animals, like pets.
With regards to the seeming inconsistency of Pope Francis, I would encourage people to look up some of the writings of a Substacker going by the name N. S. Lyons. While I won't vouch for everything the man says, I think his basic theory of the open society vs. the closed society is the correct interpretation of what has been happening during the last century on the global political stage. Read through this lens, Pope Francis is certainly a man of the open society, and I think that is his highest priority. In fact, I suspect that this is how he reads the entire Spirit of Vatican II, so-called: Vatican II was the Church's entry into a compact with the world powers for the building of an the open society, and there's no going back. It didn't really have to do with the church so much, but the churches place in the world, and therefore it's orientation towards and investment in the world. ("Latin Mass," anyone?)
Pope Francis's overwhelming concern with the Trump administration, and other "right wing" administrations throughout the world, is that they are contrary to the open society. The Democrats named in this article, however, were definitely believers in that vision. Look also at the variable treatment of different ecclesiastical figures throughout the world. Therefore, I suspect that Pope Francis thinks he is taking the broader view of what is necessary for world peace and justice, and this must be prioritized. Perhaps he feels he can overlook a relatively localized problem as abortion in the United States for the sake of the bigger picture of the global order.
I'm not saying this is justified, BTW, only that this might be how he thinks through things. I also think that it explains the mindset of a few of generations of clergy and religious. With the open society international order breaking down, see if the lens I've sketched out helps you think through the reactions you're seeing from people on both sides of the aisle. This lens has helped me quite a bit, especially when it comes to being patient with people. There is a lot riding on the two different visions of what makes for a good political order, i.e. closed vs. open society.