Photograph: Franco Origlia/Getty Beware of slide into worldliness – Pope
Pope Francis warned against letting our hearts wander unwittingly into “apostasy”, stressing that we lose loyalty to God when “relativising” and negotiating with money, vanity and pride.
The Pontiff cited the story of King Solomon, who turns away from the Lord in his old age, in his homily at Mass in Casa Santa Marta last week.
“His (Solomon) wasn’t an apostasy from one day to the next,” said Pope Francis, “it was a slow apostasy” where Solomon “slid” into sin.
“The women turned his heart and the Lord scolded him: ‘You have turned your heart.’ Such a thing happens in life.”
He added: “None of us is a criminal, none of us is responsible for big sins like David with Uriah’s wife, nobody. Where is the danger?
“You don’t notice it as you let yourself slowly slide because the fall is anesthetised. Yet we slowly slide, relativising things, losing loyalty to God.”
“For us this slippery slide in life is directed toward worldliness. This is the grave sin at the price of losing our faithfulness.”
Vatican to host workshop on ethics in artificial intelligence
The Pontifical Academy for Life is set to host a workshop on ethics in artificial intelligence (AI), which will be open to the public.
The event takes place at the Aula Nuova del Sinodo in the Vatican on February 26-28 and follows on from last year’s related workshop on ethics in robotics.
Anyone hoping to take part in the ‘Workshop 2020 on Artificial Intelligence’, starting at 3pm on February 26, must register themselves online.
Participants will explore AI in terms of ethics, law and health.
The first two days of the session will be spent discussing the question: ‘The ‘good’ algorithm?’
The last day on February 28 is dedicated to the topic ‘RenAIssance: A Human-Centric Artificial Intelligence’.
Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, President of the Pontifical Academy for Life, says “in these last number of years the Academy has shown a specific interest in new technologies, dedicating the two-year period 2019-2020 to robo-ethics and to ethical-anthropological questions connected to the so-called artificial intelligence”.
Pope: Faith lived in community, not isolation
Pope Francis has advised lay men and women to live their Christian calling by sharing the gifts they receive from God with others, while not keeping them for themselves.
In a message at a conference in Madrid on February 14, the Pope said Christians are called “to live the Faith, not individually or in isolation but in community, as a people loved and willed by God”.
“To do this, it is essential to be aware that we are part of a Christian community. We are not just another group, but the family of God gathered around the same Lord,” he said.
The two-day conference, titled ‘The People of God Going Out’, began on the feast day of St Cyril and St Methodius (patron saints of Europe) and was sponsored by the Spanish bishop’s conference. According to its website, the event’s goal was “to energise the laity in Spain starting from the leadership and participation of the laity themselves”.
Pope Francis called on participants to preach the Gospel “with passion and joy through Christian witness” and urged them to “avoid at all costs the temptations” facing many laypeople.