Complexified

When Tradition Becomes Trouble

On the side of a mountain in Switzerland, in the shadow of the Alps, a fanciful event attracting a small but ardent group of Catholic traditionalists gathered to celebrate the consecration of 4 new bishops…

Who were then promptly excommunicated from the Catholic Church along with the bishop who appointed them.

The group is called the Society of St. Pius the Tenth, or SSPX. It has spent decades claiming to defend the true Catholic tradition against a church it sees as too modern, too open, too willing to change. But this time, by moving ahead without Rome’s approval, SSPX triggered excommunications and pushed its whole society into schism.

And it's not the first time this group has run up against the disapproval of the Holy See.

Today, Vatican reporter Claire Giangravè joins us to talk about SSPX, Pope Leo, the Latin Mass, and what happens when longing for an older church becomes a rupture with the church itself.
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Philip Reed-Butler, Black AI, and the future of healing

For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about artificial intelligence. We’ve talked Vatican positioning, Silicon Valley philosophers, Catholic ethics, corporate power, doomsday language, all circling the question of who gets to shape the future these machines are confining us in.

But most of those conversations begin from the same assumption: AI is a tool built somewhere else, by someone else, to give us answers.

Productivity. Efficiency. Surveillance. Profit. 

Today’s conversation starts somewhere else.

Philip Reed-Butler is a scholar, theologian and technologist at Iliff School of Theology, where he directs the AI Institute and teaches Theology and Black Posthuman Artificial Intelligence Systems. He is also the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational AI project designed around introspection, healing and mental-health capacities.

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Anthropic, the Vatican, and the Moral Branding of AI

Imagine you're an engineer at one of the most powerful AI companies in the world. You've built a system that can write poetry, pass the bar exam, and hold a conversation that feels startlingly human. And then someone asks you: but does it know how to say it's sorry?

That question — about fault, correction, forgiveness — is not a technical question. It's a theological one. And the fact that engineers at Anthropic were asking it, and that they were asking it of Catholic ethicists and Vatican officials, is the story we're unpacking today.

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A theology of sorts has been building in Silicon Valley, where questions about digital, biological and spiritual life are beginning to converge.

For most of us, AI means chatbots, recipe tips, work tools and strange little images. But in other circles, the conversation is darker and far more existential. Some believe AI could give humanity powers that once belonged to science fiction: curing disease, extending life, even overcoming death. Others look at the same advances and see catastrophe — even the possible end of civilization.

So which is it? Are we watching the future of medicine take shape, or the beginning of something closer to the end times?

Through it all, religious language is never far away. Religion News Service reporter Hayden Royster joins Complexified to explain the belief systems shaping the AI race — from accelerationists and doomers to transhumanism, superintelligence and the strange theological language running through it all.
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In 1891, Pope Leo 13th looked at the Industrial Revolution — factories, machines, workers being displaced and exploited — and decided the Church had a role to play.

The result was an encyclical: Rerum Novarum, translated as “On New Things,” it became one of the foundational documents of modern Catholic social teaching.

135 years later, another Pope Leo sees another technological revolution enveloping humanity: his first encyclical is about artificial intelligence.

The Ethics of AI is not a question for solely for engineers, investors, governments, or Silicon Valley. It is a question for all of us about the human person.

So today we begin there: with the document, the history behind it, and the tension the Vatican is highlighting as we are barreling into the age of artificial intelligence.  

technology is building machines that aspire to transcendence, while religion maintains that the divine is already present in fragile, embodied human life 

Religion News Service Vatican correspondent Claire Giangravé has spent most of her waking hours with this encyclical and has been reporting on what it says, why it matters, and what kind of future Pope Leo is warning us not to sleepwalk into.
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