Comment by rgblambda
6 hours ago
Not defending the use of AI, but plenty of people who grew up going to Mass on Sunday know that priests often recycle old homilies, deliver lazily written homilies or homilies that were clearly pulled from the internet, or just skip them if they couldn't think of anything that week or are running late for something.
Absolute worst was when an intelligent priest put in incredible effort, only for it to go over the heads of the yokels in their parish who want a simpler homily.
> only for it to go over the heads
If it actually went over their heads, then the effort was wasted. I've heard the goal of preaching described thus: "Address the mind to move the heart to change the will." If you haven't addressed the minds of the people you're speaking to, your preaching was a failure.
NB if the people in the parish don't want to change their will, and so close up their minds, that's a different issue.
> If it actually went over their heads, then the effort was wasted. I've heard the goal of preaching described thus: "Address the mind to move the heart to change the will." If you haven't addressed the minds of the people you're speaking to, your preaching was a failure.
Reminds me of Pauls retort about speaking in tongues with no translator. ;)
The idea being, that if it serves nobody but the person themselves, they should keep it to themselves, if you're going to "share" with the whole congregation, then it should edify the congregation.
1 Corinthians 14:27-28 (KJV)
"27 If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course; and let one interpret.
28 But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak to himself, and to God."
Indeed. As one priest in graduate school said to me (and with which I agree), one should generally keep homilies short, simple, clear, and to the point. In most cases, it isn’t the proper place for an extended theological meditation.
Of course, people ought to realize that the purpose of the mass is not the homily, but the sacrifice of the eucharist, which is the “source and summit of the Christian life”.
Yeah I think that happened to me yesterday. We had a new priest (actually retired and visiting) and the homily was 10x more engaging than the normal ones. I fear that the rest of the congregation didn't like that he wasn't using cheap techniques like constant repetition and that the content was more elevated about what was really meant by the authors of part of Genesis.
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How are bad human-written homilies worse than AI written ones?
But if you like the idea: you don't need a priest for that at all! A QR code with a prompt will do just fine in this case.
There is no person in the world that is capable of weekly delivery of meaningful insight into your life. Or any topic, to be honest. AI won't solve that, it just "recycles old homilies".
Again, not defending the use of AI. My comment was more as a general response to people who maybe don't have a real life experience of listening to Catholic homilies and have unrealistic ideas of how much effort priests would normally put into them pre-ChatGPT.
In retrospect, I probably should have replied to a specific comment.
Yokels! lol