Tony Lusvardi, S.J.

When God doesn’t respond like a chatbot: homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Homily for the twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year A).

*Christ and the Samaritan Woman at the Well, Annibale Carracci, 1604-5*

When I teach my introduction to the sacraments course in Rome, at the end of every sacrament I assign one question and ask my students to write a one-page response. I try come up with unusual questions to keep them on their toes—and to keep myself entertained when I’m grading. This year’s question for the sacrament of marriage was: “Can you marry a chatbot?” Chatbots are essentially AI characters that you can have conversations with; over the past couple of years stories have appeared in the media about people—usually women—becoming emotionally attached to the chatbots they create, to the point where some felt like they had gone through a breakup with a boyfriend when the AI programs they used were discontinued.

There’s not always a right or wrong answer to my questions, but in this case, you will be happy to know that all of my students responded, “No. You cannot marry a chatbot.” And they all passed. There are lots of reasons you can’t marry a chatbot; for one thing, they aren’t actually human, and they don’t have bodies. What a number of my students pointed out, which I found particularly insightful, is that chatbots are designed to give us the answers that we want. An AI program doesn’t have emotions or needs of its own, and it is designed to keep us happy so that we keep using it. This feature is what makes chatbots seem like the perfect boyfriend. The chatbot is programed to always tell you exactly what you want to hear. It never gets impatient. If you wake up at three AM, the chatbot is happy to talk and doesn’t have to go to work in the morning. It feels like the chatbot really understands you because it’s a product of your own design.

My students were right to recognize that conversing with a chatbot is not a real relationship. A relationship means interacting with someone else—someone who is different. Our differences make relationships hard at times, but they are necessary for us to grow. Relationships challenge us to grow because sometimes we don’t get the answer that we want from the other person, and then we have to learn how to respond. This is why marriage is always dynamic, always in progress. In marriage, the fact that men and women are different—physically, emotionally, socially—is what makes the relationship fruitful; the biological difference is necessary for our species to survive.

So why am I bringing up chatbot romance to explain this Sunday’s readings? The reason is because Jesus’ behavior in today’s Gospel story is definitely not what you would expect from a well-programmed chatbot. What Jesus says and does doesn’t quite make sense to anybody. Even for us, reading the Gospel at some distance, his response is jarring because it seems to put a woman seeking help from him in greater difficulty. She comes to him not for anything selfish, but asking for her daughter’s healing. We feel natural sympathy for her, but Jesus, at first, ignores her. An AI boyfriend would never do that.

St. Paul and the Jews: Homily for the 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

*Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Rome*

Today’s marvelous Gospel story of Jesus walking across a stormy sea shows us how faith grows from fear to true understanding. The disciples move from a superstitious worldview, imagining that the Lord is a ghost, to true faith, confessing to Jesus, “Truly, you are the Son of God.” But since the same reading came up at daily Mass earlier this week and some of you already heard what I had to say about it, I thought today I would step out onto a different kind of stormy sea: the second reading, taken from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The reason this particular passage from Romans means walking on turbulent waters is because it deals with St. Paul’s attitude toward his own people, the Jews. It has implications, therefore, for what attitude Christians should take toward the Jewish people today.

I decided to risk stepping out onto such waters this morning because over the past several years we have seen a sharp rise in anti-Semitic rhetoric and an increase in violence directed against Jews. In March, a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan was attacked and, soon after, the FBI thwarted a plot to firebomb synagogues in New York, Los Angeles, and Scottsdale, Arizona. The situation in Europe is worse, and it should disturb anyone of good sense and good will that in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023—which included murder, rape, and hostage-taking—anti-Semitic rhetoric in the West increased.

Cooperating in the mission of Jesus: homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A).

We don’t know much about how the Gospels were written. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John didn’t leave dustjacket biographies, like you see on book covers, because the point of writing a Gospel is to put the focus on Jesus and not on oneself. But we can tell a few things about the lives of the earliest Christians indirectly from what they wrote. One thing we know, for example, is that before even a word of the New Testament was written, the earliest Christians were already celebrating the sacraments. When you remember this, you begin to notice that symbols referring to the sacraments are all over the New Testament—especially baptism and the Eucharist, the two pillars of Christian life. Today’s Gospel passage, for example, begins with a reference to John the Baptist and ends with miraculous loaves of bread, an obvious symbol of the Eucharist.

The message of the Gospel writers is clear: when we celebrate the sacraments we are coming into contact with the ministry of Jesus. Today’s Gospel passage begins with news about John the Baptist—the tragic news that John had been killed by King Herod. Herod, if you remember, didn’t like the fact that John had accused him of living in an immoral marriage. Herod’s wife Herodias liked it even less and maneuvered to have John beheaded. Reading between the lines in today’s Gospel, it seems that Jesus felt wounded by the news of his cousin John’s execution and withdrew by boat to “a deserted place” to pray and mourn. Jesus, perhaps, also felt some premonition of his own Passion.

Pope Leo on the liturgy

Prayer Chapel, Jesuit Retreat Center, Parma, OH

Yesterday I wrapped up a retreat for Jesuits about praying with the liturgy in Parma, Ohio. It was the second time I offered the retreat, and I was blessed to have another wonderful group of participants. As I’ve worked with young Jesuits in studies in Rome and encountered others around the world, I’ve sensed a renewed interest in celebrating liturgy well. (I made some brief remarks on the topic at the Jungmann Society Congress a few years ago.)

While working on my retreat conferences this year, I read several of the talks that Pope Leo XIV gave on the subject of liturgy at his Wednesday morning catechesis earlier this summer. The Holy Father has been reflecting on Sacrosanctum Concilium, the document from Vatican II dedicated to the liturgy. As to be expected, the Pope’s reflections are solid, touching on the document’s key strengths. In his first talk, for example, he points out that merely changing the rites was not the Council’s goal; instead, the Council wanted us to appreciate just what liturgy is — an encounter with Jesus.

In drafting this Constitution, the Council Fathers sought not only to undertake a reform of the rites, but to lead the Church to contemplate and deepen that living bond which constitutes and unites her: the mystery of Christ. Indeed, the liturgy touches the very heart of this mystery: it is at once the space, the time and the context in which the Church receives her very life from Christ. For in the liturgy, “the work of our redemption is accomplished” (SC, 2)

Signs of hope and renewal for the Church in Europe

Ruins of St. Andrew’s Cathedral, Scotland

Today, the Church in Europe is sometimes portrayed as ready for last rites, and the decline in Church participation, vocations, and the general vibrancy of the faith there since the mid-1960s is undeniable. But, if the history of Christianity on the continent has taught us anything, it is that the Church can survive ups and downs because she is endowed with a supernatural capacity for renewal.

My own decade living in Europe has taught me that, in times like ours, we need to be attuned to the danger of historical determinism and cultural conformity. We must resist the temptation to think that history moves in an inevitable direction so we might as well just go along with the times. Such an attitude is a recipe for managed decline and eventual extinction.

In contrast, as I’ve noted in previous posts on the Church in Scandinavia (reflecting on my trip to Sweden and and the fine work of Norway’s Bishop Erik Varden), times such as ours present unexpected opportunities if we know where to look and are bold and unapologetic enough to seize them.

How do we choose to suffer? Homily for the 15th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Homily for the fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A).

“Brothers and sisters,” Saint Paul says, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are as nothing compared with the glory to be revealed in us.”

In other words, Saint Paul recognizes that the present time, the world in which we live, is characterized by suffering—pain and weakness, shame and fear, insults and injustices. Human life is not entirely suffering, but suffering is present. Christianity does not promise us a life without it.

But if Saint Paul does not promise to eliminate suffering, what is his message? His message is that suffering can help us obtain a greater glory. In fact, if we read the Gospel with Saint Paul’s words in mind, the meaning of Jesus’ message today becomes clearer.

Jesus uses the image of the seed, and a seed, as we know, must be buried in order to grow. Before taking on its new form, before becoming a plant and blossoming, a seed must lose its old form—it must, in a certain sense, die.

What does a missionary Church look like today?

The Miracles of St. Francis Xavier, Peter Paul Rubens 1617

I was delighted to sit down a few weeks ago to talk to Hannah Brockhaus of the National Catholic Register about Pope Leo’s call to be a missionary Church. The article is out now in the Register: “Pope Leo XIV Wants a Missionary Church — What Does That Look Like Today?” There are lots of important insights in the article from a number of top theologians and Church officials — we talk about the message, the changing cultural situation in which the Church finds herself, our motive for evangelization, the recent increase in adult conversions, and more. Here’s a snippet, but be sure to read the whole article:

From around 1500 to 1800, we thought about missionaries as being sent out from a Christian heartland, [said Father Lusvardi, the author of Baptism of Desire and Christian Salvation].

Today, he explained, “we’re missionaries in the same way that they would have been in the early Church. … The whole world is mission territory, which I think actually makes the urgency of mission even greater.”

Father Lusvardi noted that missionary activity used to go hand in hand with economic, educational and healthcare development.

Those “don’t necessarily go together anymore. … I think that we have to be even more up front with acknowledging the uniquely supernatural dimension of Christianity and what it gives — it gives us a relationship with God, period. And we don’t need to justify that on any other grounds,” he said. “A relationship with God is valuable in and of itself.”

George Washington and the Jesuits

On Saturday, the United States of America will celebrate 250 years of independence. In a slightly ironic twist, I will be attending an ordination that weekend in… Great Britain. (Scotland, to be precise.) Don’t worry: I’m not going Loyalist, and, if anyone asks, my opposition to taxation without representation remains undimmed. It is, nonetheless, an occasion worth celebrating.

Declaring independence was a bold gamble for the colonists, with no guarantee of success; winning that independence was a work of tenacity and perseverance. Founding institutions that would produce two and a half centuries of stable and broadly just governance in the uncertain years that that followed independence is perhaps an even more remarkable achievement.

We Americans are fortunate to have a Constitution designed to keep the ship of state afloat even when unwholesome individuals wield the levers of power, but that first generation of Americans didn’t have that luxury. In those first years of American independence, without the stability of established republican precedents or even a firm national identity, things could easily have gone wrong. The murderous course of the French Revolution a few years later is a reminder of how badly can one can go even when shouting “Liberty!”

As I’ve argued before, Americans owe a lot to George Washington, who provided leadership that was remarkable, above all, for its integrity. Washington was no military genius but where he stood above the other figures of his age–what made him the greatest man of his century–was his character. As a general, he stayed steady even in defeat. His leadership was marked by patience, courage, and steady resolve. He learned how to hold his emotions–his temper was volcanic–in check. He put his country before personal ambitions, not just in word, but in deed as well. He showed a scrupulous respect for the rule of law; as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, he always deferred to the Continental Congress, even when tactically inconvenient. And, of course, he relinquished power, resigning his command at the end of the War of Independence and retiring to Mount Vernon after two presidential terms.

Homily for the Nativity of John the Baptist: The desert in the temple and the temple in the desert

Homily for the Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist

John the Baptist, Filippo Lippi (ca 1455)

The story of Saint John the Baptist begins in the temple, when an angel announces his miraculous conception to the priest Zechariah while he is offering incense at the altar. The account of Gabriel’s announcement is read during the vigil of this feast, and today we read about the fulfillment of that prophecy.

We probably do not associate John with the temple because most of his prophetic mission takes place in the desert—which is exactly where he heads at the end of today’s Gospel. But I would like to pause for a moment in the temple, where the story begins.

As modern Christians living after Luther, Kant, and the Enlightenment, we are unfortunately accustomed to viewing the temple and all Jewish rituals in a somewhat negative light. We tend to see them as superfluous, rigid, and irrational. We think of ourselves as more enlightened, scientific, progressive, and perhaps even more moral, believing we have no need for such complex and useless rituals.

I must admit, I am grateful that I am not required to observe the entirety of the Jewish ritual law. I, too, enjoy eating prosciutto and calamari. But if we view the Jewish religion in a negative light—as if ritual worship were in itself merely a sign of a primitive mindset that we have finally outgrown—we lose something. The Gospel of Luke begins in the temple but, as all our biblical scholars know, it also ends there: after the resurrection, the disciples “were continually in the temple praising God” (Lk 24:53).

Interview on the Sagrada Familia and more

Nativity Facade, Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Following up on my article in America about the Sagrada Familia and looking forward to Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Spain, I had a chance to sit down at the beginning of the month with Robert Duncan, host of Vatican Access, a new podcast from Catholic News Services.

It was a great conversation, and I was happy to discover this excellent new podcast. You can watch the interview here: “Why Pope Leo Chose Sagrada Família.”

Readers might also be interested to check out the 20th Anniversary Issue of Dappled Things magazine. The fact that this unique contribution to the Catholic literary scene has been going for two decades is indeed worth celebrating, and I was honored that they included one of my stories from 2017 in an anthology of their favorites. The story has dystopian ring, which in retrospect feels almost prophetic….

Here’s a final rundown of recent posts on Gaudí and the Sagrada Familia: