In this open letter, Matthew Harvey Sanders, CEO of Longbeard, responds to a January 12, 2026 blog post titled, “Delete Magisterium AI.” Marc Barnes, the author of the piece, published it via New Polity in response to Sanders’ December 2025 speech titled, “The Church’s Mission in the Age of AI.”

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Hello Marc,

I have read your essay, “Delete Magisterium AI,” with great interest. 

As I’ve said before, we are standing at a crossroads—a “yellow wood” where two paths diverge. One is a dark path where technology eclipses our humanity, and the other is a “golden path” where it serves to elevate it. 

I believe your critique is a vital part of the discernment required to ensure we choose the latter.

You and I share a fundamental starting point: a deep wariness of the “technocratic paradigm” and a conviction that the Faith is received from persons, ultimately the Person of Christ, not generated by machines. 

However, I believe your conclusion—that we must delete this technology to preserve our humanity—confuses the medium with the mission.

Here is my critique of your main points, offered in the spirit of a shared desire for the flourishing of the Church.

1. The Confusion of “Communion” with “Consultation”

You argue that conversation is teleologically ordered toward communion with another intelligence, and therefore, speaking with a chatbot is an inherently disordered act—a kind of superstition where we treat a thing as a person.

My Response: This argument confuses the mechanics of language with the intimacy of conversation. When a student queries Magisterium AI, they are not seeking “communion” with the software any more than a scholar seeks “communion” with the card catalog or the index of the Summa Theologiae. They are seeking access to the patrimony of the Church.

We built Magisterium AI not to be a digital friend or a robotic priest, but as a highly specialized instrument for exploration. It is a “synthesizer” of the Church’s collective memory. To claim that using natural language to query a database is a moral lie is to misunderstand the tool’s nature. It is not a fake person; it is a dynamic interface. If we can use a static index to find Augustine’s thoughts on grace, why is it disordered to use a dynamic one that can synthesize those thoughts in seconds? The “communion” happens when the user takes that truth and brings it into their prayer or their parish community—which is explicitly what we design the tool to encourage.

2. The Medium is the Message (The Habit of Simulation)

You argue that even if we know the AI isn’t a person, the mere act of conversing with it forms a habit of simulation. You suggest that by feigning a dialogue with a machine, we train our souls to be satisfied with “non-mutuality,” effectively malforming us to accept cheap imitations of love and truth.

My Response: I reject the premise that querying in natural language is the same as conversing.

When a user types, “What does the Church teach on usury?” into our system, they are not engaging in a fake conversation. They are using the most natural interface humans possess—language—to perform a complex search function. The “chat” interface is simply a technological evolution of the index or the search bar.

To argue that this interface inherently malforms us is to argue that efficiency is the enemy of sanctity. Was the monk who used a searchable concordance of the Bible less holy than the one who had to memorize every verse? I do not believe so. The danger lies not in the tool, but in the anthropomorphism of the tool.

This is why we stripped Magisterium AI of personality. It does not have a name like “Father Justin”; it does not say “I feel” or “I believe.” It says, “The document ‘Lumen Gentium’ states…” We are focused on deliberately breaking the illusion of personhood to protect the user from the very habit you fear. We are building a telescope, not a mirror.

3. The Fear of Impersonal Authority

You raise a valid concern that AI might flatten the living tradition of the Church into mere data, detaching the teaching from the teacher. You worry that we are replacing the living voice of the Magisterium with an algorithmic approximation.

My Response: This is exactly why we built Magisterium AI the way we did—to be “faithful, deep, and verifiable.” Unlike secular models like ChatGPT, which hallucinate and operate as black boxes, our system is anchored entirely in the official documents of the Church.

We are not replacing the authority; we are amplifying access to it. For centuries, the vast majority of the Church’s wisdom was locked away in physical archives or untranslated Latin texts, accessible only to a tiny academic elite in places like Rome. Is that the “personal” transmission of faith we want to protect? Or is there a greater charity in unlocking that treasury for the faithful in 165 countries? The AI doesn’t generate the truth; it retrieves it and points you back to the source. It is a window, not the view itself.

It acts less like an author and more like a paralegal. It locates the precedent, summarizes the specific text, and places the document in front of you. If it cannot find the teaching in the official documents, it should remain silent.

By anchoring every output in a verifiable reference, we remove the “dice roll” and return the user to the sure footing of the text.

4. The Name: Usurping the Teacher?

A critique I have heard often, and which seems to undergird your hesitation, is the name itself: “Magisterium AI.” It might appear that by applying this title to a machine, we are claiming the machine possesses the teaching authority of the Church, effectively creating a “Robotic Pope.”

My Response: I want to be clear: The AI is not the Magisterium. It has no authority, no charism of infallibility, and no soul. We chose the name to describe the scope of the library, not the nature of the agent.

Just as a “Law Library” is not a Judge, but a place where the law is kept, Magisterium AI is not the Teacher, but the place where the Teaching is organized. 

We named it to signal to the faithful that this tool is not referencing the open internet, Reddit threads, or secular commentary. It is grounded strictly in the Magisterium—the official teaching documents of the Church—as well as the wider treasury of Catholic theological and philosophical works, such as the Doctors and Fathers of the Church. The name is a label for the authoritative weight of the content, not a claim to the authority the AI wields. It is a signpost, not the destination.

5. The Charge of Gnosticism (Separating Truth from Body)

You argue that by turning the faith into a dataset, we risk a new form of Gnosticism—treating Catholicism as a collection of secret knowledge or information that can be extracted from the living Body of Christ and dispensed by a machine. You fear this disincarnates the faith, suggesting that “having the answers” is the same as “having the faith.”

My Response: This is perhaps your most profound warning. If Magisterium AI were a replacement for the lived tradition, you would be right. However, we must distinguish between Formation and Information.

The Church has always used “disincarnate” tools to store and retrieve information. When St. Thomas Aquinas wrote the Summa, he was encoding wisdom into a static medium (ink and parchment) so it could be retrieved by people he would never meet. A book is not a person. A library is not a bishop. Yet we do not call a library Gnostic because it stores the data of the faith outside a human brain.

Magisterium AI is essentially a dynamic library. It does not offer sacramental grace; it offers intellectual clarity. It helps a user find what the Council of Trent said about Justification so that—and this is key—they can go and live it. The danger you identify is real, but the solution is not to destroy the library; it is to ensure the library has a door that leads back into the parish.

6. The “Golden Path” vs. The Retreat

Your solution is withdrawal: “Delete Magisterium AI.” You seem to suggest that because this technology can be used for the “dark path” of isolation and simulation, it must be rejected entirely.

My Response: This is a failure of imagination and, I would argue, a failure of stewardship. The AI revolution is not coming; it is here. If the Church vacates this space, we cede the formation of millions of minds to secular algorithms trained on values antithetical to the Gospel.

In my speech, “The Church’s Mission in the Age of AI,” I argued that the Church, which has studied the human condition longer than any other institution, is uniquely poised to lead this revolution. We have the moral framework to direct these technologies toward human flourishing. If we “delete” our presence in this sphere, we don’t stop the sphere from existing; we simply ensure it remains godless.

We must have the courage to baptize the tool, not bury it. We can use these systems to handle the “knowledge work” of the Church—organizing, translating, and synthesizing information—so that our priests and lay leaders are freed up for the work that only humans can do: sacraments, pastoral care, and true communion.

Ultimately, Marc, the City of God has need of both the watchman on the wall and the mason in the quarry; I welcome your warnings as the necessary friction that sharpens our work, provided we agree that the goal is not to abandon the tools of our age, but to rightly order them.

Sincerely,

Matthew Harvey Sanders 

CEO, Longbeard

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Addendum: Correction of Misattributed Quotes

Since the original publication of this blog post, we have identified instances where quotes were inaccurately attributed in the text. These errors were not caught during the initial preparation of the post. The misattributions have now been corrected in the post above to accurately reflect the intended context and sources.

Matthew Harvey Sanders offers a personal apology to Marc Barnes for these errors and regrets any confusion or misrepresentation they may have caused.