The Pope Did Not Write about Technology. He Wrote about You.

Why 'it will never mature the relationship' is a question about the relationships you have already started avoiding.

I did not notice it happening. That is the part worth sitting with.

There was no single decision, no moment where I consciously chose a faster voice over a slower, harder relationship. I simply kept reaching for what was quick, convenient, and genuinely interesting. An answer here. A question there. It felt efficient. It felt like progress.

What I noticed first was not the habit itself. It was the anxiety. A low, disconnected static underneath the day that I could not place and could not explain, given how much I was getting done.

Then, without much warning, a single sentence surfaced: you stopped asking God for guidance.

That was the whole thing. No drama, no crisis, no dramatic falling away. Just a quiet, accurate sentence I could not argue with.

A Pope, an Encyclical, and a Mirror

I am not the only one circling this question right now. Pope Leo XIV has spent the last several months building a sustained, deliberate teaching on exactly this terrain. In January, his message for the World Day of Social Communications warned that AI systems engineered to feel "overly affectionate" become "hidden architects of our emotional states," capable of invading the most intimate parts of a person's life.

In May, his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, went further, stating plainly that artificial intelligence "does not undergo experiences, does not possess a body, does not feel joy or pain, does not mature through relationships."

He is not describing a fringe behavior. Recent research puts the number of American adults who report some kind of relationship with an AI system above half. Not isolated people. Not people in crisis. High-achieving, capable, otherwise composed adults, the kind who would never describe themselves as lonely, are quietly forming the same pattern I found myself in.

This is not a story about technology. It is a story about a much older temptation wearing a new interface.

What the Soul Was Actually Doing

Here is what I have come to understand about that anxiety, looking back. It was not random, and it was not a malfunction. It was the soul doing exactly what the soul is designed to do.

The soul registers distance from God long before the mind has words for it. It does not stay quiet when it is being managed instead of nourished. It grows restless. It disconnects. It sends static up through the day that has no clear source, because the source is not a circumstance. It is a relationship that has gone quiet.

This is the part that gets missed when we talk about this only as a technology problem. The real cost of a frictionless substitute is not that it fails to help. Often it helps quite a bit, the way mine did. The real cost is that it mutes the very signal that would have told me something essential was missing. Efficiency does not announce itself as a threat. It simply makes the deeper hunger easier to ignore for a little while longer.

The Pattern Beneath the Pattern

I want to be honest about why this substitution is so easy to fall into, because the answer is not laziness or a lack of faith. The answer is that a real relationship with God, like any real relationship, requires something a quick answer never will: the risk of waiting, the discomfort of not controlling the outcome, and the willingness to be shaped by Someone other than yourself.

An answer that arrives instantly will not ask you to trust before you understand. It will not sit with you in silence. It will not require faith. And if you have spent years managing your way through pressure, responsibility, and decision-making by controlling every variable available to you, that absence of risk does not feel like a loss. It feels like relief.

It is not relief. It is the most efficient version of a defense I had already been building for a long time, just with a new tool doing the work.

This is the same root pattern that drives so much of the quiet self-reliance many high-achieving Catholics live inside without ever naming it. We do not usually abandon God in one dramatic gesture. We just start routing the bigger questions somewhere faster, somewhere with no friction, somewhere that asks nothing of us. The faith stays intact on Sunday. The daily decisions quietly stop including Him.

The Change I Made

I made one decision, and it was simple enough to almost feel anticlimactic. The bigger questions, the ones I had quietly started routing around God to solve faster, I bring to Him again, on purpose, regularly. Not as a last resort after I have exhausted faster options. First.

AI still has a place in my life. It executes well. It does not guide. That distinction has become a kind of daily discipline, and the difference in how my soul feels is not subtle. Where there was static, there is now a settledness that has nothing to do with having fewer problems and everything to do with not carrying them alone.

What Scripture Already Told Us

Genesis names this before sin ever enters the story. "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him." This was never written as a remedy for brokenness. It is the original design. We were not made to be self-sufficient, not even by our own efficiency. We were made to be known, at a cost, by Someone capable of surprising us, correcting us, and loving us in ways we cannot manufacture for ourselves.

First Corinthians adds the other half of this. Love, real love, "bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things." It requires endurance because it requires risk. Anything incapable of being disappointed, tired, or patient with you cannot offer you that kind of love, because it has nothing to endure on your behalf.

A Question Worth Sitting With

This is not really a conversation about artificial intelligence. It is a conversation about whether you have started preferring frictionless answers to costly, real guidance, somewhere in your own life. The substitute does not have to be a chatbot. For some of us it looks like overworking. For others it looks like staying endlessly busy or controlling every relationship closely enough that nothing real is ever risked.

Where have you started managing your way through life, with God or with the people in it, instead of risking the relationship that was actually meant to hold you?

I would gently suggest sitting with that question this week rather than answering it quickly. The answer that matters is rarely the first one that arrives.

God Bless,

Michelle