Bishop Illuminates Church's "Best Kept Secret"

His Lordship is my Bishop, and we're blessed to have him as our Ordinary! He runs one of the most Tradition-friendly Dioceses in the US.

From Aleteia

By Caitlin Bootsma

From Nebraska, Bishop Conley shares how this secret can help us deal with AI and the changes already coming to our world.

Bishop James Conley of the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska, recently spoke to over 700 participants via livestream through the diocese's Institute of Catholic Culture.

Inspired by Pope Leo XIV’s papal name choice, Bishop Conley addressed what he calls “the best kept secret” of our faith - Catholic Social Teaching or Social Doctrine.

While Catholics may have heard of “Catholic Social Teaching,” few are really familiar with what it outlines and how it can direct our political choices.

Pope Leo XIV explained this past May that he chose his name in honor of the last Pope Leo, Pope Leo XIII, commonly known as the Father of Catholic Social Teaching.

Bishop Conley says that Pope Leo no doubt “sees himself as prophetically placed in history,” because “Catholic Social Teaching is going to play an increasingly important role in the next 20 to 30 to 40 years.”

From Pope Leo III to today’s Pope Leo

It is clear, Bishop Conley says, that we are going through “another seismic change,” just as Pope Leo XIII did.

Pope Leo XIII went through the huge societal transition of the Industrial Revolution, leading to his document Rerum Novarum -- "New Things."

For the Leo of our day, the seismic shift is the technological revolution.

In his accessible teaching style, Bishop Conley laid out how Pope Leo XIII outlined Catholic Social Teaching during his pontificate. He notes that of course Catholic Social Teaching didn’t start with the Industrial Revolution, it started with Jesus and has evolved from there.

“Moving from a rural economy and a rural culture to an industrialized culture –  this is what Leo XIII faced. How do we move from a primarily agrarian world where agriculture, farming, people living close to the land was evolving into an urban-centric world. And how do you gather people together to live harmoniously in big cities and urban settings. You have an explosion of economic development - economies growing at a fast rate.”

So in 1891, Pope Leo XIII wrote Rerun Novarum, an encyclical on Catholic Social Teaching that has been the foundation for the 10 popes following Pope Leo XIII to today. It guided popes through major world events like World War II and the Fall of Communism.

And now, our Pope Leo is suggesting, this teaching will help us confront Artificial Intelligence and the technological era.

What is CST anyways? 3 Basic Principles

Lots of popes have utilized it, but what is Catholic Social Teaching exactly?

Bishop Conley defines it by saying it “provides us with the principles so that we can form our consciences in a way that we are able to evaluate human society and make judgements and decisions in society.”

Basically, he says it's a framework to judge how to approach various situations as a society.

As an example, he considered the challenge of providing food. We should feed people, especially people who have trouble obtaining food for themselves. Further, he says, Catholic Social Teaching would direct us – to use the old adage – not only to give people fish, but to teach them how to fish.

Catholic Social Teaching is based on three main principles, he said.

The first is recognizing human dignity.
The second is solidarity or love of God and neighbor, which includes people we don’t even know.
The third is subsidiarity, which says that issues should be approached first at a local level to ensure that the common good is also actually good for individual people.

Bishop Conley emphasizes, “Catholic Social Teaching is not a political teaching, it is neither left nor right, rather it possesses valuable lessons for both sides of any political debate.”

Catholic Social Teaching and AI

In the question and answer period after the lecture, participants wanted to know how Bishop Conley thought Pope Leo would apply Catholic Social Teaching to tackling AI.

Bishop Conley shared his hunch that this is exactly what Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical would cover. (Many of the social encyclicals have used the anniversary of Rerum Novarum's publication as a release date. This coming May 5 will be the 135th anniversary of its publication and thus a likely date for an encyclical.)

The bishop shared some questions that Catholic Social Teaching could possibly address. How can we deal with AI while still respecting human intelligence? How can we ensure that humans don’t get replaced with machines? What do we really want when it comes to AI? What protection can we put in place “so we don’t create a world where humans are obsolete?”

In his own diocese, Bishop Conley has recently formed a technology commission to more seriously consider these questions. He’s gathered a diverse group together to answer the question “how can we get ahead of this?”

And he's expecting that Pope Leo's providential pontificate will guide us.