An AI 'priest' gets defrocked almost immediately. Good.

After some 11 years, the senior pastor of my congregation left almost three years ago to become the senior pastor of the American Church in Paris. Months later we hired a transitional pastor, whose excellent work will wrap up at the end of July when we install a new senior pastor.

All of this seems like a lot of human moving around, especially when we could have chosen the path that a group called Catholic Answers took, which was to create an artificial intelligence priest who would answer theological questions.

But perhaps that wouldn't have been a wise choice. After all, as this National Catholic Reporter column describes, that organization "decided to pull their 'Father Justin' (pictured here) chatbot character only two days after showcasing him. The chatbot was subjected to scathing criticisms from Catholics of diverse ideological persuasions." (And, just for the record, there really are Catholics of diverse theological persuasions.)

As Rebecca Bratten Weiss writes in the column to which I've linked you, "Of course, 'Father Justin' was not exactly a robot. Nor was he ever actually ordained, as Catholic Answers president Christopher Check hastened to note when he explained in a public statement that the app had been taken down and would be replaced with a new non-clerical character."

As Weiss also notes, congregations need a lot more than a mechanical device to answer their theological questions, especially when, as with "Father Justin," he often seemed not to know what he was talking about: "The AI priest's confusion on doctrinal matters highlights the problem with approaching catechesis as though theology and church teaching were reducible to a set of simplistic rules to be memorized and regurgitated. In this respect, poor confused 'Father Justin' could be regarded as an avatar for a whole religious subculture that fixates on legalistic formulations to the neglect of actual theologica or pastoral practice."

Congregations, of course, need much more in ordained leaders than someone who can explain complicated theology. Otherwise the French writer Denis Diderot never would have written this: "I have only a small flickering light to guide me in the darkness of a thick forest. Up comes a theologian and blows it out.”

In Weiss' analysis of the "Father Justin" issue, she also makes a point about the role of women in some faith traditions: "I don't really believe that an AI chatbot is going to lead to a sci-fi-esque android invasion of the magisterium. But I have to wonder whether some Catholics would be more likely to welcome a robot pope overlord than they would be to accept a woman in a position of ministerial leadership. At any rate, the priestly chatbot is a reminder to Catholic women that many of our co-religionists would rather turn to an AI figure in the guise of a male than treat a real, live woman as a religious authority."

Sad to say, even in such Christian branches as the Presbyterian Church (USA), of which my congregation is a member, women (who weren't allowed to be ordained as pastors until 1956) still often struggle to break through the stained-glass ceiling.

That's a bigotry that hurts the whole church, especially the non-AI flesh-and-blood people in the pews. Sigh.

(When the photo here today appeared with the NCR column I've quoted above, it had these cutlines: "This is a screenshot of 'Father Justin,' an AI chatbot simulating a priest in order to answer questions for the conservative apologetics platform Catholic Answers. Hours after the April 23 launch, Father Justin was 'laicized' after his responses to questions about the faith sparked social media furor. (OSV News screenshot/Catholic Answers)"

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QUESTIONING THE MORALITY OF IVF

The other day I wrote here about the need for moral and ethical oversight of science and technology. Here is an example of a faith group trying to do that. The top ethicist for the Southern Baptist Convention says invitro fertilization is an immoral method of having a baby. This is important evidence that not all of us will agree with what representatives of religious groups will say about how to create moral and ethical boundaries for science. But it's only by listening to all views on these difficult matters that we can come to some broad agreement about how to use and how to restrain technology and science. IVF has given many couples the opportunity and privilege of being parents. In my view that outweighs the SBC objections. But our culture as a whole -- not the SBC and certainly not me -- should have the final say on all this.

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P.S.: The United States is not the only country in the world struggling with election campaigns and questions about future and present leadership. The government of India is currently led by a man (in the midst of a re-election effort) with authoritarian tendencies and who has made a series of disastrous decisions that favor Hindu Nationalism. My friend Markandey Katju, a former justice on India's Supreme Court, has written this piece about Prime Minister Narendra Modi and why Indians should reject him for the good of the subcontinent. Markandey and I don't always agree on things, but he's right about this and, thus, I commend this article to you. By the way, the good news as of late Tuesday is that it looks as if Modi's party may barely get a majority in the government, much less the super majority he was predicting. So that's excellent news. In fact, Markandey, a committed atheist, sent me this email note about Modi's election results last evening: "God (who does not exist) has saved us."

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A FINAL SAD P.S.: I've just learned of the death Monday of the great German Reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann at age 98. I have read several of his books and once had the privilege of hearing him speak. He had a fascinating history and contributed a lot to the world of theology -- theology that was much more than day-dreaming about God but was directed at helping people live examined and generative lives. Here is the announcement of his death from the World Council of Churches.