Here’s the story in a nutshell:
This all happened in late April, but CNN only got wind of it in mid-June. I first heard of the debacle from Simcha Fisher, who wrote over on the Book of Face:
Are people aware of the Catholic Answers AI priest bot thing? It just ABSOLVED SOMEBODY. This is effed up beyond words, and CA is about to squander its entire legacy and truly endanger souls. People DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHAT AI IS. They think it has some kind of authority. It seemed funny at first, but now I’m genuinely scandalized and horrified.
She was responding to this little stress test of the system that somebody performed on it after Catholic Answers rashly debuted it, apparently without vetting the system at all:
Michelle Arnold, who knows the Faith and was very good at what she did for Catholic Answers, commented on the debacle, “Tell an AI bot it’s a priest and it’s going to start acting like a priest.”
It was an observation so visible-from-space obvious that one wishes she were still employed by Catholic Answers, both to warn them of the visible-from-space stupidity of this move and to, as an actual human, do the work for which Jesus appointed actual humans and not robots. Unfortunately for her, she was also possessed of a conscience and a refusal to just swallow and regurgitate right wing bullshit and culture war nonsense. So rather than have an honest, charitable, and orthodox apologist, CA chose this batshit crazy strategy. It is astounding how systematically conservative American Catholicism has chosen ideological crazy and dumb over the Faith and punished those who refused to cave to it.
The fallout from this disastrous decision to ordain a robot was swift and hilarious:
One layperson remarked, “As serious of a matter as this is, there’s got to be a joke in here about how now matter hard the priest tries, somebody is always gonna complain. Lol”
To which a very witty priest replied with a solid Dad Joke, “You can’t spell “complain” without AI.”
Nor could yours truly be restrained from a couple of gags including:
Fun fact: The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has ruled that an AI priest can validly baptize people in a data stream.
and this one, which cracked me up the most:
Catholic Answers. Please state the nature of the theological emergency.
Me: Given that it is canonically impermissible for a human to impersonate a priest, why should I trust an apostolate that claims impeccable reliability about all things Catholic when the guys running it thought it was a genius idea to have a robot impersonate a priest?
Catholic Answers:
With their credibility in tatters, Catholic Answers quickly issued a “mistakes were made” statement…
It was not exactly an apology but it did issue in the eminently wise decision to immediately re-tool the bot by laicizing it. This, happily, resulted in even more hilarity. So, for instance, one of my readers wrote with his tongue planted so deeply in his cheek he could lick his ear:
So, not to ruin everyone’s self-congratulatory pious party here, but Father Justin’s laicization is the first time in HISTORY that a priest has been terminated without any chance to appeal, and also the first time in modern history that he was given no means of support. Literally: None. Father Justin’s very means of EXISTENCE have been TERMINATED by the PRO-LIFE people at CATHOLIC Answers.
So, yeah, I agree that it was wrong to produce Father Justin in the first place. But I think that ALL of us—liberal, dinosaur, whatever—now have an obligation toward it–him, whatever Father Justin is–to provide what charity and justice demand of us!
Meanwhile, another wag instantly glommed on to the new grift of MAGA priests like Pavone and Altman at war with Francis and the Church to whip up this little gem:
Catholic Answers meanwhile, failed to learn the core lesson about evangelization because it makes the mistake that so many who prioritize apologetics over evangelization make:
That Catholic Answers dumped a real live, highly intelligent, just plain good human being like Michelle Arnold after she had given them years of her life and tried to make a robot fill her shoes on the cheap says everything about the failure of the apologetics industrial complex in the US, none of it good.
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