Comment by solatic
6 hours ago
No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window - even if they were skilled enough to do so, unless the model was locally hosted, doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence.
Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind. If it were more effective to write a homily for a generic public, the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.
You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests.
Not sure what this is implying, but aspiring priests are required to have a Bachelor’s degree before entering Seminary, or it tacks at least two years onto a very rigorous six-year seminary program. The seminary program is on par with getting a Master’s degree in Philosophy and Theology. Further, only 30-50% of seminarians ultimately become ordained as priests, due to the rigorous vetting program and “discerning out.”
To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism.
I assume this was intended as a joke, even if it is one that doesn’t land? Because it’s not clear what this could mean otherwise.
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we have vibe coding priests before GTA VI
> the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago.
There actually are, but they are famous homilies from famous Church Fathers rather then explicitly produced to be standard homilies.
This priest agrees with you, and has expressed concerns about mediocre homilies that don't speak to the concerns of the particular community: https://youtu.be/pgZXCPCATmc?si=FM4uj2owYBVK_8Mh
all the homilies i've heard were pre-written but ended with current events... like telling the congregation to not vote for Obama heh. My wife was Catholic until that moment, she never went back after that. This was St. Rita's in Dallas TX.
American religions are supposed to stay out of politics, or they risk their tax-exempt status.
For me, the disturbing event was shortly before the 2016 event when a Catholic Church in Lowell MA had posters urging people to vote no on marijuana legalization.
(In my case, I smelt the politization when I was a teenager so I never continued being Catholic as an adult.)
When my state was debating creating a state-run lottery to fund education projects, my preacher gave a sermon on the evils of gambling. Religions can't realistically stay out of politics because every law can be reinterpreted as a moral argument.
The separation of church and state in the US was for the state to stay out of religion.
(the US was founded by religious exiles from a state which didn't stay out)
Religions are explicitly political but politics shouldn't interfere with religions. To follow your religion means interacting with the outside world. It's not some personally private thing like a harmless badge you wear (although there are American faith communities that advocate for that).
The cases in the past where political have interfered with religions are often, ironically enough, by other religious politicians. Hence the good idea to separate church and state.
Well maybe they just need to start recording confessionals. Just imagine what Gemini 3.1 could do with 1M tokens of that stuff.
Gemini 3.1 – I don't remember that verse. Is that from the old testament?
It's from the Orange Catholic Bible, I think.
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
iam tempus pariendi venerat et ecce gemini in utero repperti sunt - Gen 25:24
Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been three minutes since I shit posted on HN, and my greentext stories are famous on 4chan. Also, after lunch today I send 300 emails to Jeffrey Epstein using my work email and signed with my real name. What a great guy!
There are resources that publish homilies for priests to give. Here is an example for English speakers.
https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/liturgy/sunday-resou...
No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window
But they will try, and they'll share a lot of potentially private information in the process.
Not to write homilies though. The real danger of risking exposing private information would be pastoral work.
You’re right that a priest can’t (and shouldn’t) dump private pastoral context into a prompt. But context doesn’t have to mean identifiable confession details.
I’m building BibleGuided, and one thing we’re adding is a church feature where congregants can opt in to sharing prayer themes, and leaders can see aggregated and anonymized trends over time rather than identities. That’s enough to shape a homily toward what people are actually struggling with, without violating confidentiality.
If anyone has experience with privacy thresholds (minimum group sizes, differential privacy), I’d love pointers.
How are you dealing with the Pope saying priests shouldn’t use your product?
I agree with the Pope’s point. Priests should not hand pastoral judgment to a model. BibleGuided has church management tools plus optional AI help for drafting and organizing, with the priest making the final call.
For community context, we avoid confessional and private pastoral data. It is opt-in from congregants, then aggregated and anonymized into themes and trends.
We think AI can be a helpful tool across many areas, including faith, and over time many church leaders (of many denominations) will get comfortable using it in bounded, and responsible ways. If a church does not want AI used for homilies, those features can be toggled off and the rest of our tools still work.
To be fair ignoring and occasionally kidnapping the pope is a time honoured Catholic tradition.
If they're Protestant, that might be a point in its favor :)
Not the parent, but products like it are strongly Protestant Evangelical-coded, so that could actually be a selling point for the intended audience
Exactly.
A priest could use AI for a homily dealing with drug addiction, without specifying "Bob in row 3 is a methhead"
I was raised Catholic and even though the last time I've been to a church could have been in 2019, I don't remember any priest who wouldn't just gloss over the religious content for the day (copied from an online source), itching to share his politics and the most recent ragebait he's got from Facebook at the end.
That's a bit harsh! I go to mass every Sunday (in France) and rarely have political stuff. When there, it's most often about abortion or euthanasia (of course in a pro-life (or anti-choice) direction, "you shall not kill")
But dull, empty homilies are (alas) very frequent.
Catholicism is different in every country, I would imagine that a church in a secular place such as France would contain itself a bit, because there's no societal expectation that anyone should follow its religion, and therefore the priests have to put in effort into making people stay. In Poland, where I grew up, the Church still holds a lot of power and prestige, and priests consider themselves to have authority over people's lives. Leaving the church is seen as more of a childish rebellion, and I would often hear mocking remarks about non-believers in homilies.
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The last time I attended a mass (Spain) it was about some people in the village that were not helping the church enough (with an activity they had to do but also I think there was some money involved) but it was a bit cryptic, so only the ones that were directed the message to could fully understand it.
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I mean what exactly do you expect them to talk about week after week in what amounts logistically to a book club that only reads one book?
Doubly-so since people are now apparently criticizing Christian pastors for quoting Christ.
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I have heard phoned in homilies from some priests but this is not accurate in the United States based on my travels and weekly local attendance. Sorry that you had a bad experience.
I can assure you that their experience wasn't in any way exceptional. It may be different in the US as Catholicism is in the minority in there (~20%), while GP's experience is from a place absolutely dominated by it (>90%).
This is in the US? I have rarely heard political homilies.
Religion has been far more politicised in the US than elsewhere. And not exactly in a direction that makes sense to me (a European protestant).
Nit: you're confusing the vow of silence with the confessional seal.
Its more than a nit. It only applies to confession so putting in other private information would not break a vow, but it would still be a very bad thing to do.
Pretty sure there are books of homilies.
We have been further away from OMM 0000 than we are today, that's for sure.
"We value your privacy! Do you consent to sharing the contents of your confession with our 2137 partners? [ACCEPT ALL] [MAYBE LATER]"
Was the number of partners you picked random or you chose 2137 on purpose? As it's actually somewhat related to the topic...
Entirely random of course. I would never reference unsavory memes about past Popes or anything like that.
> doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence
I don’t know what this means. There is no formal “vow of silence”. The closest things I can think of are the discipline of avoiding unnecessary speech in some monastic communities, or perhaps the seal of confession, but this doesn’t apply as priests can speak in generalities or anonymously about the kinds of moral issues people struggle with.
> Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind.
That’s a bit of a generalization. Many, if not most, readings simply benefit from clear explanation. Tying in local or cultural context can be helpful, but they can also be a distraction, and mostly, homilies should be about the essential meaning of the readings. By having to write the homily, the celebrant benefits from writing the homily as well, a benefit he would lose if he simply drew from a corpus of prewritten homilies.
Catholic priests are forbidden from revealing anything they learn in confession under ANY circumstances. If someone comes in and confesses to a crime or that they are planning a crime, the priest can advise them to go to the police, they can counsel them that they may be in danger of hellfire if they do not, but they absolutely cannot tell anyone. The Catholic Church takes this very seriously. It is fully expected that a priest would die rather than break the confidentiality of confessions.
I'm glad that priests are well known for always obeying rules and never abusing their position. /s
I don’t understand why you’re downvoted. “No priest would ever break rules” is such a strong and ridiculous claim that I thought solatic was trolling.
It's alluding to something off-topic, with a hint of "edgy-ness"
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Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday and I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying, including the priest himself, who was simply reading whatever higher-ups had given him. It was perfect slop because literally nobody cared about the content, it was all form - it needed to sound important and complicated enough to be able to be used in religious rituals. This is an excellent use case for LLMs because they excel at exactly that.
Imagine a bunch of bushmen trying to perform the spell of rain. It doesn't matter what they sing, as long as it sounds like something that could pass as the spell of rain, because the goal here isn't to make rain happen, it's to strengthen the community through shared rituals. 99% of religious activities are exactly this.
>>Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday
I mean, not to dismiss your experience, but in my weekly Sunday going to church in Poland the priest would write an actual homily that felt relevant to the community. But then our small town had 3 churches, and each one had a different style - people would talk about preferring one over the other because they had more interesting "content".
But yeah, there was the message from the regional Bishop or the Archbishop of Poland or sometimes directly from the Vatican, then the reading from the old testament, then the homily which I'm 99% was written by the priest giving the mass.
>> I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying
Well, I wouldn't say not a single person did, but yeah, we had those 3 churches, probably 10k seats each, every one was rammed on the sunday, but I'd say 90% of people there were only there to tick it off and snoozed through the whole thing. But it's not because the homily was boring, it's because going to church on sunday was(maybe still is?) a thing you have to do or people will make fun out of you.
Your village had proper healthy capitalist market. In mine, there was complete religious monopoly.
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