Issue: July 2026
Letter from the District Superior
Technology arrived without warning, and AI is its newest, most dangerous chapter. From surrendering judgment to machines to substituting AI for human companionship, this editorial names the real stakes: a deeper separation from reality itself. What virtue and vigilance does the Catholic need to face this new frontier?
The Artifact and the Soul: A Catholic View of Artificial Intelligence
A twenty-five-year UX design veteran turns Thomistic philosophy on Silicon Valley's own tools. Why does calling AI a "user" get it backwards? This piece exposes how engagement-driven design counterfeits relationship, deskills judgment, and blurs the line between tool and person—and what genuine wisdom demands instead.
Forfeiting the “Good of Intellect” Through Use of Generative AI
Borrowing Tolkien's Ring of Power as a warning, a former Naval Postgraduate researcher turned SSPX educator explains why he told principals across the U.S. district that AI is already undermining teaching and learning. Is this "Ring" a gift for education—or a menace that must be refused entirely?
When Code Substitutes for Courtship and Companionship
Character.AI has 20 million users, and Replika users are "marrying" their chatbots. As AI companion apps surge 700% in three years, this article asks what happens to marriage, courtship, and virtue when convenience replaces the vulnerability real relationships require—and what the Church says about counterfeit intimacy.
The Intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property
Calling AI "a scourge," this article confronts the muted conversation billion-dollar stakeholders don't want held: how AI both replaces and coopts human creativity. Centuries-old intellectual property law is being outpaced by deepfakes, self-learning systems, and coopted authorship—can law alone contain what technology has unleashed?
Human Intellect and Artificial Intelligence: Two Opposite Paths
Everyone debates AI versus human intelligence, but almost no one defines "intelligence" first. Drawing on Aristotle's four causes, this rigorous philosophical study distinguishes true intellect—possessed only by God, angels, and man—from mere mimicry, dismantling transhumanism's messianic hope for a redemptive "singularity" at its philosophical root.
AI: Happiness Only a Click Away?
AI can save lives and speed research—but can it console you when you're sad, or love you? This article defines what AI actually is, why it can never possess emotion or moral sense, and how Catholics can use this powerful tool without becoming enslaved to it.
AI: Apotheosis of the Enlightenment
The AI industry's true danger isn't a robot uprising—it's the Enlightenment ideology baked into its code. This investigative piece examines how tech leaders, including Anthropic's own philosophy behind "Claude," are engineering AI to promote secularist premises about personhood, consciousness, and reality itself.
In Matters of Reason
From his Spiritual Conferences at Mortain: after examining blindness in matters of faith, Archbishop Lefebvre turns to blindness in matters of reason itself. Drawing on St. Paul and St. Thomas, he diagnoses the “dullness of mind” behind modern errors—a timeless conference newly relevant to today's crisis of thought.
My Life in Tradition
From Fr. Coughlin's radio broadcasts in the 1930s to a basement Mass in Chicago and the raising of strong Catholic children, one woman's lifetime spans the entire hidden history of Catholic Tradition in America. A firsthand memoir of faith preserved against the current.
The Three Thrones of Our Lady
A newly translated medieval sermon from a thirteenth-century Franciscan scholar contemplates Our Lady's threefold glory through the ivory, sapphire, and solar thrones of Scripture—symbols of chastity, poverty, and humility—inviting souls to ascend toward the very throne where the Son of God once rested.
An Artificial Endox
What is AI really doing when it answers a theological question correctly? Drawing on a Belgian physicist-philosopher and Aristotle's concept of the “endox,” Fr. Gleize dissects a real AI-generated answer on episcopal consecration to expose exactly what artificial “intelligence” can—and fundamentally cannot—do.
Eucharistic Prayer II
Composed overnight at a Trastevere café and confessed by its own author to be unprayable, Eucharistic Prayer II is exposed here through startling admissions from Fr. Louis Bouyer himself. Is the Church's most-used Canon really an ancient prayer—or a modern improvisation dressed as tradition?
Abraham’s Heirs: Isaac and Jacob
From Isaac's grief-stricken search for a bride to Jacob's stolen blessing and ladder-vision at Bethel, this rich biblical study traces how God shepherded a broken, deceptive, all-too-human family toward the covenant—prefiguring Christ, the Church, and the patient unfolding of grace across generations.
Questions and Answers
Turning to St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa, this Q&A unpacks what the human intellect actually is: a receptive faculty ordered to “universal being” itself. Why can senses only grasp the particular while intellect grasps the universal—and why can no machine ever cross that line?
The Last Word
In a few spare, incisive paragraphs, Fr. le Roux returns to the Greek roots of “intelligence” and “judgment” to make a single uncompromising claim: intelligence cannot be artificial without ceasing to be intelligence. Every AI claim to the contrary, he argues, is civilizational self-deception.
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