Homily for Ordinary Time 22
August 29, 2026
Life in the Technological Age
St. Paul
tells us in the second reading, “Do not conform yourself to this age.” But what
age are we living in that we cannot conform ourselves to? I think it’s safe to
say that we live in an unprecedented age: the technological age. Technology has
completely reshaped the way we think, interact, and deal with the world. We
have to live in the twenty-first century, but we are not to be conformed
to this age. So how are we supposed to live in the technological age without
adopting its errors?
Thankfully,
Pope Leo XIV recently put out an encyclical letter about the proper use of
technology, called “Magnifica Humanitas” – Magnificent Humanity. He gives us
some good guidance in applying our Catholic faith to the use of technology.
Let’s dive in to see what points he makes.
The
first point is that technology is a powerful tool, that can be used for good or
evil. Like any powerful tool, we have to be careful about who can access it. We
don’t give chainsaws to toddlers – not because chainsaws are bad, but because
we have to be careful with something so powerful. Likewise, technology is not
some harmless thing – it is an immensely powerful tool, and it requires a truly
Christian cosmology (worldview), along with virtue and self-control, to use it
well, lest we become a slave to it.
Technology
can become a way of seeing the universe. The Scriptures contrast two different
buildings – the Tower of Babel and the City of God. In the Tower of Babel, man
wants to make a name for himself by building a city according to his own
designs. In contrast, at the end of time, the New Jerusalem descends from God
as a gift to mankind. Technology is all about creating the world according to
our own whims and desires, while the traditional Christian understanding is
that we receive the world as a gift from God, even with its faults and
sorrows. The faults are not bugs, but features (to use the tech lingo) because
without sorrows, there is no need for love or compassion. Technology seeks, in
the words of the famous scientist Francis Bacon, “the relief of man’s estate” –
to eliminate all problems with the world and with humanity itself. It’s the
difference between creating the world in our image, and receiving the world as
a gift. We must be careful not to fall into the former.
One of Pope
Leo’s great warnings is that technology can never reduce the human person as a “project
to be optimized.” We are more than an algorithm; our value is more than likes
and clicks. I recently read an article about a man who had a fight with his girlfriend.
She said that they didn’t spend enough time together; he thought that they did.
So his response? He made an Excel spreadsheet to track how many hours they
spent together over the course of a month. Oh buddy, you’re in for one rocky
relationship if that’s how you respond to your girlfriend’s needs! But isn’t
that the reality of how we live our lives? We track our steps, count our
calories, meet our quotas at work, and obsess over our GPA. We even have apps
to track our prayer time. But aren’t we more than accumulated numbers?
Pope
Benedict XVI put it best when he said, “In the Nazi concentration camps,
they cancelled faces and history, transforming man into a number, reducing him
into a cog in an enormous machine. In our modern era, man must be interpreted
by a computer, and this is only possible if translated into numbers. The Beast
is a number (666) and transforms into numbers. God, however, has a name and
calls by name. He is a person and looks for the person.” We must be careful
with technology so that it doesn’t reduce us to a set of data points, but
respects us and others as human persons, with dignity independent of our
production.
We must evaluate
all technology with the question: does it help us become more human? Or does it
replace humanity? This past Holy Thursday, I wanted to lead a few
parishioners in an ancient tradition to visit seven local churches after the
evening Mass. So I turned to AI and asked it, “What route should I take to
visit the most churches between 8:30pm and 11pm?” And it spit out a very good
itinerary. That use of technology helped us have a profoundly spiritual
evening. But many times we use technology to replace real encounters
with persons. Recently one of our teens told me that he had twenty-three hours
of screen time one day. I asked him what kept him online for that long, and he
told me that he was lonely and bored when he was going to bed so he asked a
friend if they could Facetime each other while they slept, so they kept the
cameras on all night so he wouldn’t have to sleep alone! At that point, just
have a sleepover…or what if we used that natural human loneliness and boredom
to turn to God in prayer?
Which
brings us to the next point: silence, boredom, and loneliness are spaces where
God wants to move. Philosopher Blasé Paschal once wrote, “All of humanity's
problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” The
universe is awash in content – I read a statistic that all of the
content (pictures, songs, written words) that was created from the beginning of
the world until 2008 is now produced every single day – but how much of it is
worthwhile? 402 million terabytes of content is produced daily – but is it
worth it? A teen was telling me that they spend 13 hours on TikTok, watching approximately
2,000 videos. I asked them how many of those videos they remembered. The answer
= zero. The Evil One uses technology to distract us from silence, loneliness,
and boredom, which means that God has no space to enter. St. Patrick was converted
through boredom – he was a slave sent to work as a shepherd for six years. In
the cold and lonely mountains of Ireland, he spent his days and nights in prayer,
coming out of that trial as a holy man. Imagine if he had a smartphone to fill
his time – who would he have become?
Of
course, part of his conversion was the natural beauty – and the raw suffering –
of the Irish landscape. And this, too, must be considered as we look at
technology: human beings have a bodily dimension that must interact with
the physical stuff of the world in order to thrive. The world is sacramental –
it is the way through which God reveals Himself. St. Augustine calls it the “Book
of Nature” – if you observe and interact with the physical world, you will encounter
God. But how the digital world draws us away from reality! This past summer I
hiked Mount Katahdin, the highest peak in Maine. It was a stunning view – 360 panorama,
you can see over 200 miles in every direction. And there we were, exhausted but
overjoyed, and I saw some other hikers scrolling on their phones through their Instagram
or email. What a loss!
This alienation
from our bodily-ness takes a darker turn through the transhumanism movement,
which seeks to help people to live forever through technological means. Some
have advocated for downloading one’s consciousness onto a hard drive so that
when the body dies, the “person” stays alive. Others have worked for an
integration between technology and the human person to supersede the
limitations of the flesh. Sounds like science-fiction, but there are entire
companies such as Neuralink which are working on these technologies. But our bodily
dimension is essential to what it means to be human – including bodily
suffering and death, which itself is redeemed by Christ.
There
are many more elements of technology that we could talk about. Tech addiction
is one of them – all things, including technology, must be used in moderation.
St. Carlo Acutis loved playing video games (as a child of the ‘90s) but he
limited himself to one hour per week, knowing how addictive they could be.
Christ came for freedom – so if you find yourself a slave to your device, take
the steps necessary to break the chains! We could talk about technology and
work – work is a gift from God so that we develop our talents, glorify Him, and
serve our brothers and sisters. Technology is good when it helps us work
better, but it should never seek to eliminate work entirely or make the human
person obsolete. There are so many other dimensions of technology that must be
informed by our Catholic Faith, that we cannot get into today.
But to
sum up: Technology is not a good thing, nor is it an evil thing. It is a
neutral but powerful thing that can be used for good or ill. It can only be wielded
properly by those who understand their Catholic Faith deeply, and who have
enough self-control to not become its slave. Jesus reproaches Peter, “You are
thinking, not as God does, but as human beings do.” We must see technology, not
as Zuckerberg or Musk would want us to see it, but as Christ wants us to see
it. To re-quote St. Paul, “Do not conform yourself to this technological age,
but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may know what is the
will of God: what is good, pleasing, and perfect.”
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