The church has seen better days. It stands as a bruised and battered institution with diminished moral credibility. The Anglican Church, as well as every other Canadian church body, still has a long way to go to rectify its complicity with colonialism and Indigenous erasure. And the global Catholic Church is reeling from its systematic complicity in child sex abuse. Given these realities, churches might understandably turn inward, give ourselves over to licking our wounds, and doing the hard work of cleaning up our own houses and making reparations for the harms we have caused.
But over the last week, our diocese and the global Catholic Church, under the leadership of Pope Leo XIV, have dared to do something radical. Even as the church does the much-needed work of housekeeping and repair, it has refused to crawl away and skulk or presume that it can no longer tackle the major challenges of the day.
Last month, our diocese, under the leadership of our dean, Jonathan Thomas, hosted a major conference on homelessness in Victoria. The following week, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical on artificial intelligence.
Both events made it clear to me that the church can still act decisively and meaningfully and that the world still wants and needs the church to be active, to convene conversations and to be a prophetic voice for our time.
Let me start locally. Dean Jonathan Thomas played a visionary role in bringing together priests, theologians and leaders of local service agencies, as well as a city council member, to think together about the problem of homelessness. Dr. Siobhán Garrigan is perhaps the world’s foremost theologian on homelessness and has worked with unhoused persons in New York, England and now Ireland. Her experience is vast, and her book A Theology of Home in a Time of Homelessness is a treasure chest for every Christian who wants to think seriously about what home means in this time of global dislocation, a dislocation destined to worsen because of the climate crisis and the immense refugee crisis that will follow in its wake.
What was astonishing about this conference was that we were also listening to and learning from local leaders in the fight against homelessness. Those voices of courage and passion included Julian Daly, chief executive officer of Our Place Society; Cheryl Diebel, director of New Roads; Krista Loughton, city councillor and documentary filmmaker; and Clint Kuzio, a director at Victoria Cool Aid Society, among others.
I left deeply encouraged. The scale of the problem confronting Victoria may seem insurmountable, but the assembled leadership argued that homelessness can be overcome if the public can be mobilized to focus the minds of local, provincial and federal elected officials on this issue.
Clergy and lay leaders heard one urgent message: the churches can and must make a difference. Letter-writing to local politicians matters, and organized, aggressive advocacy from churches is indispensable for change to materialize. We are very much wanted and needed, even as we were reminded by Cree speaker Clint Kuzio that the problem of Indigenous homelessness is, in no small measure, our fault. The generational consequences of Residential Schools persist—even more reason to be part of the solution for a problem we helped to create.
Meanwhile, this week Christopher Olah, a Canadian computer scientist and co-founder of Anthropic, had this to say at the release of Pope Leo’s encyclical:
“We need more of the world—religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments and indeed all people of good will—to do what His Holiness has done here: to take this seriously, to look closely and to push events in a better direction. We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.”
A leader of one of the world’s major AI labs is pleading for the church and other religious communities to be voices of clarity, conscience and discernment about just what is going on in these AI models that, Olah argues, are beginning to show “internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief and unease.”
In an age in which many in the church are rightly concerned about dwindling numbers and our damaged credibility, key voices from the secular world do not want the church to shut up, sit down or go away. Instead, we are hearing from the most unlikely voices that they want and even need the church to be on the frontlines of activism and the cutting edge of theological and philosophical reflection. With due humility and chastened but not silenced by our past failures, we must answer the call.
