The Asians make up for their suspiciously short episode on priesthood by serving a banquet-sized discussion of AI—or, more precisely, Pope Leo’s first encyclical on artificial intelligence, Magnifica Humanitas.

As papal documents continue to grow longer than a wedding banquet, they resist sampling every dish and instead select the greatest hits. They read the encyclical against the realities of contemporary economic life and the century-old tradition of Catholic Social Teaching, paying particular attention to its distinctly Augustinian flavour and the ancient image of the two cities.

Rather than banging the doomsday gong, the Asians turn to the encyclical’s more basic questions: What is the human person, and what does Christian witness look like in this new digital ecosystem? Central to their discussion is the need to uncouple evangelisation from the mere distribution of content - and to reconnect it with what it has always been about: one person helping another encounter the person of Christ.

In an irony worthy of a fortune cookie that actually contains wisdom, this very new technology may remind us of some very old truths. Beneath the algorithms, platforms and digital smoke lies the enduring Christian claim about the human person - and the thrilling, creative and occasionally perilous relationship between humanity and its tools.

Resources

Aleteia: What Magnifica Humanitas Says, Simply Explained

The Pillar: Magnifica Humanitas - A Reader's Guide

In this episode, Matt and Dan contemplate two of life’s great mysteries: plants and potatoes and, by a winding path that would make perfect sense in a Chinese garden, the joys of priesthood.

The Asians approach priesthood without focusing exclusively on priests. This is partly for the obvious reason that neither of them is one, and partly because fomenting class warfare within the Church seems like a poor use of an afternoon. More importantly, however, it is because Christian priesthood only makes sense when we begin with Christ and his Church.

Matt and Dan explore the persistent temptation to imagine the Church as something done by priests while everybody else watches, occasionally volunteers and brings a plate.

Against this, they recover the biblical vision of the People of God as a priestly people: the continuation and fulfilment of Israel’s vocation as a kingdom of priests, in which every member of Christ’s Body shares, according to their own calling, in his priestly mission.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, this leads the Asians not first to Holy Orders but to matrimony. Marriage offers a particularly concrete example of how the baptised exercise their priestly vocation: receiving the ordinary stuff of human life - love, work, children, suffering, meals, money, ageing parents, burnt rice – and learning to offer it to God. Beneath every vocation, then, lies the same deep root: baptism. Like water finding its way through a rice terrace, baptism draws every Christian into the life of Christ and therefore into his priesthood, his self-offering and his mission.

None of this makes the ordained priesthood less important. Quite the opposite. Matt and Dan consider how the ministerial priesthood serves the priesthood of the whole Church, and how both find their meaning in the great movement at the heart of Christian existence: receiving creation as gift and, through Christ, offering it back to the Father. There may also be potatoes.

Matt and Dan begin by demonstrating that they learnt absolutely nothing from their previous episode, returning almost immediately to their unconscious devotion to the rubrics - and, with the serene confidence of an auntie rearranging your kitchen, innovation at exactly the same time.

This naturally, or perhaps unnaturally, becomes a discussion about complexity and what the Asians detect as a cultural crusade against it: the conviction that everything, including the intellectual and spiritual life, ought to be made simple, preferably before the tea gets cold.

But when did simplicity become a measure of value?

The Asians consider simplicity not merely as a technique, occasionally useful and occasionally not, but as an ideology which, like an overenthusiastic relative with a cleaver, can reduce something complicated into manageable pieces while insisting nothing important has been lost.

This becomes rather more concerning when it wanders into the life of the Church, where the demand for simplicity can quietly become a demand for reduction: of legitimate diversity, mystery, creativity, and the wonderfully inconvenient lifeworld of historical faith. Some things, after all, are more dumpling than chicken nugget: what matters is folded inside, and flattening them rather defeats the point.

The Asians then consider what this drive towards simplicity actually does to theology, liturgy, and ecclesial life—and whether a faith concerned with the inexhaustible mystery of God was ever supposed to fit neatly on a slide, even if the slide has very good branding.