National Catholic Register

(NCR. Jonah McKeown/CNA).

Nicolas Torcheboeuf, a 31-year-old Swiss engineer and a Catholic, developed CatéGPT in his spare time and launched it in the late spring of 2023.

If you have a question about a teaching of the Catholic Church in 2024, where do you go for a solid answer? You can crack open the catechism yourself, ask a trusted personal source like a priest or theologian, or you can delve into that famously infallible repository of knowledge — Google. A friendly arms race of sorts has arisen among Catholics around the world to provide Catholics with another option, however — one based around artificial intelligence (AI). In the past year or so, several online AI tools have been released that generate authoritative-sounding answers about Catholic teaching based on users’ questions.

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(Jonathan Liedl. National Catholic Register).

At a normal Catholic university, the announcement of a new center devoted to virtue ethics would likely be an uncontroversial cause for celebration.

But the University of Notre Dame, where competing visions of Catholic identity play out at one of the nation’s most prestigious institutes of higher learning, isn’t an ordinary Catholic university. 

And the newly announced Father John Jenkins, C.S.C, Center for Virtue Ethics, named for the university’s outgoing president, is anything but uncontroversial.

In fact, its establishment may be a key indicator of how administrators intend to implement Notre Dame’s ambitious plan to become “the leading global Catholic research university” by 2033 — and what vision of Catholic identity will be guiding that pursuit.

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(NCR. Tyler Arnold/CNA).

As the Vatican tries to settle a chaotic yearlong dispute between a Carmelite monastery and Diocese of Fort Worth Bishop Michael Olson, the nuns at the center of the controversy announced they will defy a Vatican decree that delegates their governance to an outside religious association. The dispute centers on Bishop Olson’s investigation into the former prioress of the Arlington-based Monastery of the Most Holy Trinity: the Reverend Mother Superior Teresa Agnes Gerlach. The prioress, who is now defrocked, admitted to sexual misconduct occurring over the phone and through video chats with a priest — a confession she has since retracted and claims was given when she was medically unfit and recovering from an operation.

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(NCR. Emily Zanotti).

The Washington Post and other left-leaning outlets are terrified that women are making choices — specifically, the choice to drop hormonal birth control in favor of more natural — and, increasingly, more scientific, options. The “Democracy Dies in Darkness” publication fretted publicly, last month, that women were falling prey to “misinformation” propagated, they suggested, by a vast right-wing anti-birth-control conspiracy, using social-media platforms, to wean poor, unsuspecting women off the monthly pill. 

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(NCR. Matthew McDonald).

Zack Short was kneeling during adoration last fall, silently struggling with whether the Host in the monstrance was actually Jesus or merely a piece of bread. To his left was his girlfriend, Katie, a Catholic who had invited him to join the campus ministry’s catechism program for converts. “I was like, ‘Lord, if this is really you, please speak to me. Lord, help my unbelief,’” Short recalled. “I kid you not: I saw light coming out of the Eucharist. It just clicked for me: This is really God.” Later, he asked Katie if she saw the light. She didn’t. Short, 19, a sophomore majoring in mechanical manufacturing engineering technology who grew up going to a nondenominational church in Colorado, entered the Catholic Church during last month’s Easter vigil Mass at St. Mary’s Catholic Center at Texas A&M.

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(National Catholic Register. Editorial).

While it is far short of the sort of justice that this case demands, we have reached beyond the point in the Father Marko Rupnik scandal when concrete steps must be taken to remove the disgraced artist’s ubiquitous mosaics from public display.

Certainly, this is easier said than done. But that is a logistical discussion, involving the mechanics of disassembling his works, replacing them with something better, and raising the funds needed to make that happen.

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