Author name: amdg

The National Catholic Register reports that Father Brendan McGuire, a former Silicon Valley executive and current pastor in Los Altos, California, claims that the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas issued by the antipope Leo XIV has “opened the doors for deeper conversations between the Church and the tech industry regarding how AI is going to affect humanity.” McGuire, who holds degrees in engineering and computer science from Trinity College Dublin and previously worked for the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (PCMCIA), boasts of having “helped shape Claude’s Constitution,” the 23,000-word document governing how the AI system Claude reasons through complex moral questions. He also co-founded the Institute for Technology, Ethics, and Culture — a formal partnership between Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics and the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. “More intensely over this last year, we’ve been more deliberately, and more intentionally, engaged in deeper conversations monthly … mostly with Anthropic, and we believe this document now will be able to deepen these relationships even more,” he said. The priest praised the antipope’s “reframing” of the issue: “How do we have all of humanity … flourish inside of AI? Instead of the other way around.” He further claimed that those in the tech industry “are men and women of goodwill” who “are looking for wisdom” and that “every religious tradition needs to lean into this moment.”