February Grab Bag
Benedict AI, Bishop Barron on Immigration Again, and Parish Security
While we wait for Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, here are a few odds and ends that probably don’t warrant an entire article but that I wanted to share. The new encyclical will probably be published by the time this article is posted, however, and many of you will be reading through it, but hopefully you have a few minutes to browse through this grab bag.
Pope Benedict AI?
On Friday, an organization called the Pope Benedict XVI Society announced that they had launched a project called Benedict AI, in partnership with the company Perpetuals.com. Benedict AI is a large language model built on the scholarly writings of Joseph Ratzinger and the encyclicals and other documents of Pope Benedict XVI, as well as a few secondary sources on Ratzinger. The model’s sources also include the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Its purpose is to serve as an accessible resource for those with questions about the thought of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI or who are seeking explanations of the Catholic faith in the spirit of Pope Benedict.
You might be asking yourself: Have the designers of this LLM created a chatbot that presents itself as the “voice” of the late Pope Benedict? After all, a number of companies have developed AI-based chatbots based on historical figures both for entertainment and educational purposes, although some have been criticized for misrepresenting historical facts. The company character.ai allows users to create their own chatbots but has received blowback for chatbots based on school shooters, murder victims, and Jeffrey Epstein, among others. The online writing assistant Grammarly recently introduced and quickly withdrew a product called Expert Review that offered writing advice in the voice of well-known academics and writers, living and dead—without their knowledge or consent—based on an LLM model drawing on those authors’ works. And there are now AI-based apps that allow people to talk to a simulacrum of their deceased family members.
Is Benedict AI something along these lines? The name of the company responsible for the model—Perpetuals.com—could suggest such a possibility! After registering for the product and testing it out, however, I can confidently say it is not (although getting writing advice from “Pope Benedict” would be fun). If asked, the Benedict AI chatbot does not claim to be Pope Benedict or to speak in his voice but rather identifies as “the theological assistant of the Benedict XVI Society” and a “research tool.” It only answers questions related to Ratzinger/Benedict’s writings or about Catholic doctrine and clearly refuses to answer questions dealing with topics not covered in its sources. That means that the chatbot cannot be used to ask what “Pope Benedict” would think about more current issues in the Church or world affairs. For example, I asked what Pope Benedict would think about the current war in Iran, and it responded:
The provided sources do not contain information regarding a current war in Iran. The available text is limited to a 2009 address to bishops from Iran during their “Ad-Limina” visit.
In that address, Pope Benedict XVI noted that the churches in Iran are heirs to a noble tradition and a long Christian presence, and that they have contributed to the life and development of the country. He expressed his support for their desire to continue their work in Iran while maintaining their identity and living their faith in freedom.
Instead of attempting to provide an answer, it responded with the only reference to “Iran” in its database, which was completely irrelevant. And that’s probably a good thing.
After all, imagine if the chatbot did claim to speak as Pope Benedict. After the election of Pope Francis, a small handful of Catholics refused to accept the validity of Pope Benedict’s resignation and therefore of Francis’s election. They continued to view Benedict as the true pope and perhaps even as a prisoner in the Vatican. After Benedict’s death and later the death of Francis and the election of Leo XIV, this stance must be difficult to maintain. But if the chair of St. Peter is vacant, what if we could somehow restore the voice of the last valid pope in perpetuity? I’m only kidding, but nothing is off limits for conspiracy theorists these days.
You also may be wondering, what is the Pope Benedict XVI Society? It is not the same as the Ratzinger Foundation, the organization established by a group of Ratzinger’s former students which most famously annual awards the Ratzinger Prize to esteemed theologians, philosophers, or, more recently, artists of various kinds. The Society is a bit mysterious; it doesn’t list its officers or say much about its membership on its web site, although Patrick Gruhn, the CEO of Perpetuals.com, professes to be a member. It’s also relatively new; the Society held its inaugural gathering on April 17 of this year at the Pontifical Academy of the Sciences, an event that involved Cardinal Kurt Koch, the current Prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the former Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Fr. Thomas Joseph White, OP, the Pontifical University of the Angelicum, among others.
Perpetuals.com is a European tech firm that specializes in using blockchain to facilitate financial transactions, not large language models, so it’s not entirely clear why it was involved in the project, apart from Gruhn’s connection with both the company and the Society. As far as I can tell, the Benedict AI project is not advertised on the company’s web site, although the company’s name is clearly attached to all the press materials from the Benedict XVI Society related to the project.
One last thought: Almost three years ago, I wrote about Magisterium AI, the much more ambitious project to build an LLM based on all of the Church’s magisterial documents as well as the works of major historical theologians. I noted at the time that one problem with models like this (and Benedict AI) is that, because they are simply based on texts, they don’t really understand context. For example, I discovered that Magisterium AI cannot explain the historical development of Church teaching. Similarly, one cannot really understand or explain Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI’s thought without understanding his interlocutors, both historical figures like St. Augustine and St. Bonaventure, for example, but also contemporaries like Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Johann Baptiz Metz, Pope John Paul II, and so on. The idea that you can understand an author simply by analyzing their texts is a misleading one.
Bishop Barron on Immigration, Again
Fourth months ago, amidst the chaotic immigration enforcement efforts and protests in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, Bishop Robert Barron of Winona/Rochester, Minnesota issued a statement calling for an easing of tensions between law enforcement and protestors while calling on protestors and politicians to refrain from “stirring up resentment” against law enforcement officers. In response, I explained at length that in that statement Bishop Barron completely ignored the systematic, well-documented civil liberties violations and abuses committed by immigration enforcement agents (which I recounted in detail), accused critics of those policies of fomenting violence, and distorted what the Catholic Church has taught about immigration policy.
In an interview with Fox News this past Friday, Bishop Barron offered similar remarks. He criticizes members of what he describes as the “Catholic Left” and, seemingly, his fellow United States Catholic bishops, for engaging in the “demonization” of the Trump administration over its immigration policy. Barron claims that those on the Catholic Left love to call for dialogue until it comes to dialogue with conservatives: “when it comes to conservatives, just tell them what they should be doing and saying." Instead, he says, “"If there are points of disagreement, whether it's immigration or it's the [Iran] war or whatever, let's talk about it, let's talk."
But for months, Barron’s fellow bishops, members of the Catholic media, and Catholic activists, to say nothing of non-Catholics, have pointed to real, widespread abuses carried out by the Trump administration and raised substantive criticisms of its policies. Bishop Barron simply refuses to acknowledge them, waving it all away as the “demonization” of the Trump administration or of law enforcement. If Barron wants to discuss any of these criticisms, then I’m sure there are many Catholics, including myself, who would be willing to discuss them. To all appearances, however, it is Barron who is uninterested in dialogue about the Trump administration’s policies, and indeed who seems unable to acknowledge nearly any criticism of the Trump administration in good faith. After all, it was Barron who—mere days after President Donald Trump had pardoned all of the January 6 rioters who violently broke into the US Capitol and disrupted Congress’s proceedings to overturn the 2020 election results—could not fathom why the Democrats would protest the president’s address to a joint session of Congress held in the very chambers desecrated by the rioters. And, as readers know, only last month Barron argued that the Church should not criticize the president’s judgments regarding war.
In just the past week:
Federal prosecutors in Illinois were forced to drop charges against protestors at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s Broadview detention center in Chicago because of prosecutorial misconduct during grand jury proceedings. The prosecutors admitted to engaging in “vouching,” that is, telling the grand jurors that, because they were US attorneys, the jurors could trust them that there was evidence the defendants had committed crimes, without, however, presenting the jurors with that evidence. At least one prosecutor discussed the case with grand jurors outside the grand jury room. After presenting the evidence, the jurors voted not to indict, and so the prosecutors then dismissed those who had voted against the indictment and recalled the others to vote again. And to top it off, the prosecutors hid all of this misconduct from the judge by redacting it in the grand jury transcript.
A federal judge in Tennessee dismissed human trafficking charges against Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia, stating that they were the result of a vindictive prosecution by the Department of Justice. Abrego was wrongly deported to El Salvador in March 2025, where he was detained indefinitely and tortured in that country’s CECOT prison; after a court order requiring the administration to facilitate his return, the administration finally brought him back to the US in June. Upon his return, the DOJ indicted him for human trafficking charges based on a previously closed case arising from a traffic stop in 2022. At the time of the indictment, the head of the criminal division of the US Attorney’s Office in Nashville resigned because he recognized the indictment as politically motivated.
An ICE officer was charged with assault and falsely reporting a crime after shooting a Venezuelan immigrant during the widespread immigration enforcement efforts in Minneapolis-St. Paul earlier this year and then lying about the circumstances of the shooting. The man, who is in the US legally, along with a second man, were originally charged with assaulting the officer, but the charges were dropped after evidence exonerating them emerged.
A hunger strike broke out at the Delaney Hall immigration detention center in Newark, New Jersey in response to inhumane conditions in the center. According to family members who have been in contact with detainees, the latter are served food that is rotten or infested with worms, denied necessary medical care, refused adequate access to their attorneys, and rushed through legal proceedings without due process.
The Trump administration announced a new policy in which immigrants present in the US on valid visas will need to return to their home countries before applying for a green card that allows them to permanently live and work in the US. Applying for a green card can take months or even years, and the policy would mean that immigrants would have to leave behind their families and jobs in the US. The administration claims the policy is intended to prevent those who are denied green cards from illegally remaining in the US, but the policy places an unfair burden on those who are attempting to follow the rules.
It is not “demonizing” to point out that these recent examples illustrate a systematic, and in some cases criminal, attempt to abuse law enforcement, the court system, and detention centers to dehumanize immigrants.
Barron raises the valid point that administration critics should be willing to discuss difficult questions they would prefer to avoid like what sorts of border security measures would be needed in a well-functioning immigration system, but even here he runs into problems. He cites an anecdote from a phone call involving participants on the White House Commission on Religious Liberty, of which Barron is a part, and members of the Trump administration:
So, one of the people on the call was Tom Homan, who’s in charge of Border Patrol and so on, and he spoke with great passion . . . He’s a Catholic . . . and he said he’s come out of retirement twice to engage this issue. Now why? He said that because he’s seen the terrible destruction caused by an open border. And he was talking about, especially human trafficking, the human trafficking of children, the disappearance of children, children we’ve lost track of completely in this process.
And he was saying, we can’t simply fall for the simplistic view that open borders is humanitarian, that open borders is kind to the stranger, and so on. Okay, but an open border also causes enormous moral problems.
And I found that very moving, actually. You could tell that it was affecting him very deeply and very personally.
The problem is that the “enormous moral problem” being discussed here, at least as Homan described it, is a fabrication promoted by right-wing media and the Trump administration based on the misrepresentation of a Department of Homeland Security report from 2024, as numerous immigration experts and factcheckers have pointed out.
When unaccompanied migrant children arrive in the US, they are first taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security and then transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services, which attempts to place them with family members or other sponsors living in the US. Homeland Security then schedules a date for the children to appear in court for hearings to determine their future status. The Homeland Security report states that, between 2019 and 2023, about 448,000 such children went through this placement process. It adds, however, that by the time of the report, ICE had not yet sent notices to about 291,000 of them regarding their court hearing, and about 32,000 who were sent notices failed to appear at their hearings. The report states that, therefore, “ICE was not able to account for the location” of those children. The report’s point is that ICE has not done an adequate job of contacting the children’s sponsors, not that the children have in fact “disappeared.”
The report does state that “Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs [i.e., unaccompanied migrant children], ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor,” but that is not at all the same as reporting that thousands of children have, in fact, “disappeared,” let alone that they are victims of child trafficking. That would be highly improbable considering that the sponsors are thoroughly vetted by Health and Human Services. The claim that thousands of children have gone missing and are the victims of child trafficking is simply made up, no matter how deeply affected Tom Homan seemed to be about it.
Barron also ignores that the Trump administration has diverted thousands of law enforcement officers whose focus is on combatting human trafficking and other serious crimes to detaining and deporting immigrants with jobs and families, the very immigrants Barron admitted in his earlier immigration statement should not be a priority for law enforcement.
In February, I noted that in his earlier statement on immigration, Barron likewise repeated the false claim that the independent right-wing journalist Nick Shirley had “broke the case” of fraud committed by Somali immigrants in Minnesota in December of last year, suggesting that the Biden administration and the Democratic government in Minnesota had either ignored the problem or covered it up, a media narrative that contributed to the massive immigration enforcement action in Minnesota beginning the following month. In reality, however, federal investigations into the fraud scheme had begun as early as 2022. For example, Aimee Bock, the ringleader of the largest fraud scheme, was recently sentenced on federal charges originally brought in September 2022. Meanwhile, the allegations made against Somali-owned daycare centers in Shirley’s video have been shown to be unsubstantiated.
The point is, Bishop Barron not only refuses to acknowledge substantive criticisms of Trump administration immigration policy (or other policies, for that matter), he also now has a pattern of uncritically accepting what turn out to be false or misleading anti-immigrant narratives promoted by the administration. I’m not sure what ought to be done about this situation, but the bishop is increasingly a source of scandal in the Church.
Keeping Churches Secure
Last autumn, I wrote some reflections on the school shooting at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis. Among other things, I noted that Catholic parishes need to balance the need for security with the purposes of worship, nothing that some security practices like the presence of guns at Mass or replacing stained-glass windows might unduly detract from proper worship. Last month Daniel Quinan wrote a thoughtful and detailed analysis of what reasonable security measures in a parish might look like. What makes the piece especially interesting is his application of what canon law has to say on the matter. It’s worth a read!
How about the part in the interview where Barron criticized the synod, doubling down on his rhetoric of socialism being the only economy that kills. He’s in naked dissent from the magisterium on this front, and something indeed needs to be done about it.
I really can't understand what happened to Bishop Barron. I have the Word on Fire Bible and thoroughly enjoy his commentary. I guess it's just hard to think that the man who wrote those things is now saying such nonsense.