Bishop’s statement praised
To the Editor:
The May 8, 2025, issue of The Catholic Messenger featured a “Bishop’s statement on President Trump’s Pope meme.” I commend Bishop Dennis Walsh and the Messenger for posting this on the front page! It was very well written and exemplifies the bishop’s courage to address this matter appropriately. The meme is yet another example of deplorable messages and texts from the current administration. The White House should issue a formal apology for it is “deeply offensive and undermines the respect due to a central figure of our faith.”
Mike Lazio
Davenport
Response to column about AI
To the Editor:
It is with much respect that I reply to Father Thom Hennen’s Question Box column on The Church and Artificial Intelligence.
It is best not to speak of AI as though it were just another supercomputer with added features that can be used for good and bad things. AI is not technology just as the atomic bomb is not physics. It uses science but it’s very being creates another entity.
I would recommend that we all listen to and read the words and thoughts that have, and are, creating AI. Begin with Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI,” who won the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics and then include such developers as Eric Schmidt, Tristan Harris and others.
There is no space here to go into AI in any detail but let me simply say that AI is currently humanity’s greatest test, no matter how we use it.
As far as the Church is concerned, I believe that Pope Leo XIV will write a “significant document” about AI just as Pope Leo XIII did at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Understating AI or treating it like just another piece of software would be a fatal mistake. Its developers believe it is the arrival of non-human intelligence with a conscience and if we are not using it and controlling it we will be absorbed by it. (No – I didn’t use AI to write this reply.)
Thomas Streveler
Clinton
