Prince of Peace Parish

CNA Staff, May 6, 2024 / 07:00 am (CNA).

Catholic dioceses around the U.S. are setting ambitious goals and launching environmental programs inspired in part by the Pope Francis-led effort to make ecological care a priority for the global Church.

The Holy Father has made environmentalism a major focus of his pontificate. His 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ was heralded at the time of its publication as a revolutionary papal document for its emphasis on Catholic ecological responsibility and for its call for “swift and unified global action” in the “care for our common home.”

In October of last year, Francis published a new apostolic exhortation titled Laudate Deum, meant as a further call to address what he called the “global social issue” of climate change. The pope said that in the eight years since Laudato Si’ was published, “our responses have not been adequate” to address ongoing ecological concerns.

‘Our brothers and sisters around the world are impacted by this’

In the Diocese of San Diego, the diocese’s Creation Care program says it seeks to “spread the Catholic teaching” concerning “our duty to be good stewards of our common home.”

Christina Slentz, the director of the program, told CNA that the diocese launched Creation Care in 2022 using the pastoral guidelines of “See, Discern, Act” to guide its undertakings. 

Among its offerings, the program promotes the movie “The Letter” — a 2022 film that “tells the story of a journey to Rome of front-line leaders” to discuss Laudato Si’ with Pope Francis. 

Slentz said the San Diego program has offered workshops on the film and also offers twice-yearly workshops that present “the ecclesial context, the science, and the eco-spirituality of Laudato Si’.”

The diocese further gives “Laudato Si’ Action Planning Hands-On” workshops at which “parishes, schools, families, businesses, and universities” are guided through “the Vatican’s online platform for taking action to lessen your impact” on the earth. 

Slentz said the diocese also hosts an annual Feast of St. Francis Tree Festival at which saplings are distributed for planting. “I think we planted 730 acorns last year,” Slentz told CNA with a laugh. She noted that the overall program is “not about just some abstract love for trees.” 

“This is love of neighbor at a global scale,” she said. “Our brothers and sisters around the world are impacted by this so much more seriously than any of us.”

‘Excited and encouraged by Laudato Si‘’

Laudato Si’ has had a major effect on Catholic environmental awareness around the world and in the U.S. The Archdiocese of Seattle, for instance, last month announced the launch of a new Care for Creation Ministry that will be based on the Vatican’s Laudato Si’ action platform. 

That initiative, launched by the Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, promotes seven goals that “provide guidance on urgent and immediate actions each one of us can take in the care of our common home.” Among those goals is the “adoption of sustainable lifestyles,” the promotion of “ecological spirituality,” and a “response to the cry of the poor.” 

Terri Nelson, the director of the Seattle Archdiocese’s Integral Human Development and the new leader of the creation ministry, said last month that the archdiocese would “use the foundation of the Laudato Si’ action platform … so that our parishes, schools, and the people of God can learn more about this urgent crisis and take action.”

The initiative will “develop and execute a strategic plan to educate and inspire people to act — at home, in their communities, workplaces, parishes, and more.”

Similar programs have been launched in the Archdiocese of Washington, the Archdiocese of Atlanta, the Diocese of Syracuse, and other bishoprics around the country.

‘Not just environmentally sound but financially so’

In New York, meanwhile, Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens is using its affordable housing portfolio to develop green energy infrastructure in line with the Church’s environmental goals. 

The diocese said the effort works to reduce carbon footprints and provide affordable and energy-efficient homes to low-income seniors and families.

Tim McManus, the senior vice president of the charity’s Progress of Peoples Development Corporation, which oversees the affordable housing program, told CNA that several years ago the charity “created a sustainable nonprofit entity [the Laudato Si’ Corporation] that is under the housing arm, from which we are launching and leading the sustainable initiatives.”

David Downs, the director of the Laudato Si’ Corporation, told CNA that the mission-aligned sustainability program is currently “utilizing our existing portfolio of affordable multifamily housing in Brooklyn and Queens by leveraging public financing resources to create new forms of renewable energy for our residents and New York City as a whole.”

About 75% of the charity’s portfolio is senior housing, typically subsidized voucher programs that assist elderly residents with rent. The charity also offers supportive housing for individuals coming from facilities such as shelters; the portfolio also includes traditional family housing. 

McManus said he and Downs “had always been looking at figuring out how to work [environmental care] into the affordable housing work we do.” 

The developers said making more of their properties environmentally friendly also coincided with increased green requirements in New York City itself. “We were trying to identify strategies and get ahead of new building requirements,” McManus said. 

Much of the effort, Downs said, is “really focusing on retrofit work on existing buildings.” 

“We’re thinking about solar,” he said. “We’re also really excited about exploring adding battery or backup power options with those solar arrays. That’s something we’ve not done to this point.”

“The goal here is producing income, credits from the solar itself — that money and those proceeds help to keep self-investing in the project as it grows,” he said. 

Then-Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio said in 2021 that the affordable housing initiative “rests upon the Church’s teaching and reflects the dignity of the human person and the value of the family,” while the new environmental initiative “reflects our commitment to the planet and our future.”

McManus said it was clear when the program launched that the newest green energy measures were not just environmentally sound but financially so. “From a bottom line perspective, some of these technologies started to really pencil out across our portfolio,” he said.

The Church’s new vigorous devotion to the environment underscores the sustainability work, McManus said.

“We were very excited and encouraged by Laudato Si’, to see the pope and the Catholic Church recognize and acknowledge the importance of bringing sustainability efforts to the people we serve,” he said.

CNA Staff, May 6, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).

If you have a question about a teaching of the Catholic Church in 2024, where do you go for a solid answer? You can crack open the catechism yourself, ask a trusted personal source like a priest or theologian, or you can delve into that famously infallible repository of knowledge — Google.

A friendly arms race of sorts has arisen among Catholics around the world to provide Catholics with another option, however — one based around artificial intelligence (AI). In the past year or so, several online AI tools have been released that generate authoritative-sounding answers about Catholic teaching based on users’ questions.

You may also have heard about one recent and unfortunate misfire: an AI “priest” created and unveiled last week by the California-based apologetics apostolate Catholic Answers, which was criticized by some users for its video game-like priestly avatar.

Moreover, at least one user managed to goad the character into providing “absolution,” prompting a statement from the apostolate in which it promised to replace the priest character with a lay character named “Justin.” Catholic Answers’ leaders have expressed optimism about the project, despite the initial public setback. 

Meanwhile, Catholics looking for AI-powered answers have other, avatar-less options, like CatéGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot designed to provide accurate and thorough answers to questions about Catholic teaching by drawing on authoritative documents. 

Nicolas Torcheboeuf, a 31-year-old Swiss engineer and a Catholic, developed CatéGPT in his spare time and launched it in the late spring of 2023. (“Caté” is French for catechism, and the name is also a play on the name of the groundbreaking secular chatbot “ChatGPT.”) 

The simple online tool accepts a user’s question related to the Church’s teaching — “Why is baptism necessary?” for example — and provides a succinct summary of the answer, citing sources and categorizing the sources by type, making distinctions between encyclicals, Scripture, canon law, various writings of popes and Church Fathers, and other authoritative Catholic sources. 

This concept might sound familiar — Torcheboeuf concocted the idea for CatéGPT around the same time that the similar U.S.-based Magisterium AI made its debut. Also in the online ether is Catholic.chat, an interactive platform that allows users to engage with the catechism in a natural, conversational format. The similarities between the various projects, Torcheboeuf said, “goes to show that our intuition was right and meets a real need.”

Despite the free tool’s impressive ability to summarize answers to complex questions about the Church’s teaching, Torcheboeuf said his invention primarily aims to encourage Catholics to read the relevant Church documents for themselves. 

“In addition to providing clear answers, [CatéGPT provides] a list of reference documents to encourage the user to read them,” he explained.

“The main aim is above all to invite the user to rediscover the wealth of documents that the Church has produced over the course of its existence, and which constitute a formidable heritage for understanding the world in which we live,” Torcheboeuf said. 

Torcheboeuf presented his invention, which is available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, and Portuguese, at the 58th World Day of Social Communications at the Vatican in February. He said the project was initially “born out of the craze surrounding ChatGPT,” OpenAI’s powerful chatbot that burst onto the scene in late 2022. 

“I was quickly impressed by the power of artificial intelligence and the number of tools that could be developed using this technology,” he said. 

Tinkering with the tech, he started creating chatbots that used customized databases to provide answers within specific fields. 

“That’s when I came up with the idea of creating a chatbot that uses the teachings of the Catholic catechism and the texts of the magisterium: These texts exist completely freely and don’t change too much over time, which means that the answers are reliable and stable over time,” he noted. 

The idea for CatéGPT, which is kept afloat entirely by donations, didn’t come out of nowhere — Torcheboeuf said his motivation for the project “corresponds to a concern I’ve had for a long time.” He said the area where he lives in Switzerland, while economically prosperous, lacks a vibrant practice of the Catholic faith. 

“I’ve noticed that young Catholics today have a fairly low level of education; we’re often called upon to debate fairly complex social issues, and unfortunately we don’t have enough intellectual knowledge to do so properly,” Torcheboeuf said. 

“Before trying to reform everything, we need to rediscover the fundamental texts of the Church. When we read these texts, we realize that many of the questions we ask ourselves are answered in encyclicals and catechisms.”

Torcheboeuf’s tool isn’t infallible, of course — no AI is. But the fact that CatéGPT makes use of publicly available documents on the Vatican website means that its curated sources are virtually guaranteed to be solid, and also that the tool’s database is far less complex than a massive AI like ChatGPT, which might be called on to opine on any topic imaginable.

Still, if the idea of asking an AI for guidance on the Church’s teaching makes you wary, you’re not alone — Catholic Answers’ AI, though well-intentioned, was less than favorably received. 

Catholic Answers’ “Father Justin” — clearly an attempt to give a Catholic AI a more pastoral, human face — may have misfired, at least in its initial form. But the idea of making AI more pastoral is one that Torcheboeuf endorses. After all, he said, AI in its current form can be great as a training tool, but “it won’t be able to fully assist the Church in the way that priests, religious, or people fully invested in the Church can.” He said he is in the process of integrating video clips from “Catholic influencers” into CatéGPT’s answers in an attempt to “put a human face behind the theoretical answers.”

The Church under Pope Francis has been engaging with the idea of AI long before the release of ChatGPT. The pontiff, on numerous occasions, has called for the ethical use of the technology and is scheduled to speak at the G7 summit in June in Italy about the ethics of artificial intelligence, amid much talk in the wider world about the threats that AI could pose to humanity.  

The explosion of generative AI tools and applications in recent years constitutes a revolution, Torcheboeuf said — and like any revolution, “it can be dangerous.” 

Still, Torcheboeuf is quick to point out that “artificial intelligence is only intelligent if there’s a real human intelligence behind it.”

“I think that rather than being afraid of this technology, let’s try to be a player in this field and exploit its positive aspects. Right now, this technology is in full expansion, and there are places [for it] to be taken while remaining careful of course.”

Torcheboeuf said he expects that CatéGPT users will be surprised by the answers they get, in the sense that they will realize, perhaps for the first time, that “the Church has already asked itself most of the contemporary questions and answered them, with great wisdom and coherence.”

“Little by little, we hope that with the help of the references given at the end of the answers, they will read the fundamental texts of the Church and come to understand and reappropriate this heritage,” he said. 

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Vatican City, May 5, 2024 / 17:00 pm (CNA).

For the newest class of 34 Swiss Guards who will be sworn in on Monday, their service is based on faith and a love for the Church and the pope, as storied as the uniform itself. 

“For me it was something, first and foremost, to give something to the Church, because the Catholic Church gave us a lot when I was a child and with this service, I can give something back,” explained Nicolas Hirt, one of the new guards who hails from the Swiss canton of Fribourg. 

The cadets, joined by their instructors, gathered for a media event on April 30 in the courtyard behind the barracks adjacent to the Sant’Anna entrance, which was adorned with the flags from each of the Swiss cantons. 

The Swiss Guard's annual swearing-in ceremony will take place on Monday, May 6, in the San Damaso courtyard of the Apostolic Palace. There, the new guards will solemnly raise their right hands, with three fingers extended, representing the Holy Trinity, and proclaim their oath: “I swear I will faithfully, loyally, and honorably serve the Supreme Pontiff and his legitimate successors and I dedicate myself to them with all my strength. I assume this same commitment with regard to the Sacred College of Cardinals whenever the Apostolic See is vacant.”

There was a palpable sense of pride, perhaps even a hint of nervousness, as the young men marched last week in the storied corridors, perfecting the ancient rites ahead of a day that will mark a milestone in their lives. 

Renato Peter, who comes from a small village near St. Gallen (the first from his village to enter the guards), said he first developed a desire to enter into the service of the papal guards after a trip to Rome in 2012 with his diocese. 

“When you work in the Vatican, you have to feel like you go back in history because a lot of European history has been made here,” said Peter, who is mindful that those who wear the iconic tricolor uniform bear a great responsibility and represent a connection to the history of the Church. 

 “We are the smallest military in the world,” Peter continued, emphasizing that service in the Swiss Guards is like no other. “But, we are not training to make war. We are like the military, yes, but we’re for the security of the Pope.” 

The Swiss Guard is indeed the smallest standing army in the world, numbering only 135 members (Pope Francis increased its ranks from 110 in 2018), protecting not only the smallest sovereign territory in the world, Vatican City State, but also acting as the personal security force of the Holy Father. 

This year the Swiss Guard celebrated 518 years of service to the Apostolic See. Its history dates back to Jan. 22, 1506, when 150 Swiss mercenaries, led by Captain Kasper von Silenen from the central Swiss canton of Uri, arrived in Rome at the request of Pope Julius II.

But the swearing-in ceremony takes place on May 6, marking the anniversary of the Sack of Rome in 1527 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V when 147 guards died protecting Pope Clement VII. 

The Swiss Guards form an integral part of the history of the papacy, and a core component of the security apparatus of the Vatican, but they also occupy a special palace in the popular imagination, one underscored by a profound spirituality. 

“It's another world, another culture, and above all doing a fairly unique job, that is to say, there is the protection of the Holy Father,” said Vice-Corporal Eliah Cinotti, spokesman for the guards. 

“I don't think there are many of us who are lucky enough to have the opportunity to serve the Holy Father in that way, therefore the Swiss Guard is a quite unique institution.”

Cinotti observed that for many of the pilgrims coming to Rome, which is often a once-in-a-lifetime experience, the guards act as a point of encounter between the people and the Church, shedding light on an evangelical dimension of their mission. 

“Since we are Swiss Guards and represent the pope, we are also there to be Christians, to listen to these people. There is no specific training for this because it already comes from our Christian character to help others."

Service in the Swiss Guards is both physically and psychologically demanding, and the entry requirements are strict, even though the guards do not face deployment to active war zones, like conventional soldiers.

A prospective guard must hold Swiss citizenship, be Catholic, single, and male (after five years in service the guards are allowed to marry), and be at least 1.74 meters tall (approximately 5’8”). They are required to have completed secondary school (or the equivalent) and have completed mandatory military service. 

Despite what some may consider prohibitive entry restrictions, Cinotti noted, during the annual call for applications there are anywhere from 45-50 applicants, and there has not been a problem with recruitment. 

During the first round, prospective candidates go through a preliminary screening and, if selected, they will sit with a recruitment officer in Switzerland for an initial interview, which generally lasts anywhere from 30 minutes to one hour. Candidates also have to undergo an intensive psychological test, to assess whether they can withstand the demands of the job. 

Should their candidacy proceed, they are then sent to Rome where, for the first two months, they are exposed to the working environment of the Vatican, and around 56 hours of intensive instruction in Italian. Their instruction also includes an emphasis on their cultural and spiritual formation.

The cadets are then sent to the Italian-speaking canton of Ticino in Switzerland, where they are instructed in self-defense and the use of firearms by local police. While the guards carry medieval halberds — an ax blade topped with a spike mounted on a long shaft — during official papal events, each is equipped with a 9mm GLOCK 19 Gen4 pistol, taser, and pepper spray. 

There is also a two-year minimum service requirement after which they can decide to remain, or return to Switzerland. 

“About 80% return to Switzerland and 20% stay,” Cinotti said. "And the 80% who return to Switzerland go to the police or the army or return to their basic profession or go to study at university.” 

He also noted there have been some years where a guard will discern a vocation to the priesthood. “And we also had a certain point, people who entered the seminary at the time, one per year more or less.” 

He added: “We haven't had anyone for two years, but I think they will arrive, or rather it's a question of vocations.”

Cinotti spoke on the myriad security challenges that a guard will have to face in his day-to-day work, which can last anywhere from six to 12 hours of continuous duty, noting that there has been an uptick in the number of people coming to the Vatican for help. 

Cinotti also noted that for all of the guards, there has been the additional learning curve of adapting to Pope Francis’ pastoral style, which has brought him in close proximity to the faithful during his audiences in Rome and his travels abroad.  

“Pope Francis is like every pope,” Cinotti remarked. “He has his own style, and we must adapt to the pope.” 

“If he wants to go to contact the people of God, we must guarantee that, of course, everything is fine, but we cannot prevent it. He does what he wants, he is the pope,” he added. 

While this can raise some logistical problems, Cinotti reassured that the guards have been trained to respond to possible threats. He said they have developed a symbiotic, and always professional, relationship with Francis. 

“He transmits a certain serenity and a certain awareness that we are there next to him, we are there, like the gendarmerie, which allows us to operate in complete tranquility on the ground without being disturbed,” he said. 

“He likes to change plans and will change plans throughout the day,” Cinotti added, “but it suits us very well because we adapt to him and we do this service and for us, it is still important to guarantee his safety.” 

ACI Prensa Staff, May 5, 2024 / 14:00 pm (CNA).

Bishop Brendan Cahill of Victoria, Texas, is inviting Catholics throughout the United States to join the May 22 “National Day of Prayer and Remembrance for Sailors and People of the Sea,” which this year will include a special prayer in memory of those affected by the catastrophic March 26 Baltimore bridge collapse. 

“Each year, we pray for those who work on the high seas and the ports. In a special way this year, we remember those who have been impacted by the collapse of the Key Bridge, particularly the six construction workers who perished in the bridge collapse, and for their families as they mourn the loss of their loved ones,” Cahill said.

On March 26, the container ship Dali suffered a power failure and collided with one of the bridge pillars, causing the collapse of most of the bridge while a group of eight construction workers were doing maintenance work on the structure. The six fatalities were immigrants to the United States from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.

Immediately following the tragedy, the Stella Maris network of port chaplains and volunteers mobilized to provide pastoral care and support to crew members of the Dali and for crew members of other vessels in the Port of Baltimore.

Cahill, who is also the bishop promoter of the Apostleship of the Sea “Stella Maris,” solicited prayers “for the captain and crew of the cargo ship and for the countless people who have been working in the aftermath of the tragedy.” He also remembered the longshoremen and those who depend on the Port of Baltimore to make a living.

Around the world, Cahill noted, “there are countless men and women who labor on the high seas for their livelihood. Let us seek the intercession of Our Lady, Stella Maris, that she protect and guide us,” he emphasized.

As part of this commemoration, a Mass will be celebrated on May 18 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C., at 12:10 p.m. local time.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, CNA’s Spanish-language news partner. It has been translated and adapted by CNA.