The Ordinary Times

How The Ordinary Times uses AI

Every issue of The Ordinary Times is chosen, finished and sent by a person. Artificial intelligence helps him do it, and we will always tell you so.

The Ordinary Times is a local, diocese-wide Catholic newsletter, written and edited by a human editor. It is independent, and it is not an official publication of any diocese or parish.

You deserve to know how this newsletter is made. This page explains the tools we use, the limits we put on them, and who answers for mistakes. If you read it and still have a question, write to us and a person will answer you.

What the AI and technology tools do

They read more than one person can. Every week we go through parish bulletins, Catholic radio, lay ministries and movements, Catholic charities and food banks, schools, religious communities, diocesan offices and local Catholic media, across a whole diocese. Gathering all of that is the work the tools do first.

They copy out the details. Dates, times, addresses, event names, links. When a bulletin item is pulled out, what gets pulled is the bulletin's own wording, copied, not a machine's impression of it.

They sort. Hundreds of items get grouped by parish, by region, and by date, so the editor can see the whole week laid out at once and choose from it.

They help write. Once the editor has chosen what runs, the tools help turn those collected details into the sentences you read. The editor then edits them.

They check. Before an issue can go out, automatic checks look for errors Such as dates that do not match the source, claims nothing supports, links that have gone dead.

What only a person does

Choosing what gets published. Every item in every issue is picked by the editor. The Computer sorts and the human decides.

Judging. Whether an item is fair, whether it belongs in a Catholic newsletter, whether it is right to name someone. No tool answers that.

Finishing and sending. The editor writes the final version and presses publish. No issue has ever gone out untouched by a person, and none will.

Answering you. When you write to us, a person reads it.

What we will not do

We do not use AI to invent anything. Not a time, not an address, not an attendance figure, not a sentence a pastor never wrote. If we cannot point to where an item came from, it does not run.

We do not use AI to imitate a real person's voice or words, and we do not publish AI-generated images of people or places as though they were photographs of something that happened.

We do not hide it when we use these tools, which is the point of this page.

Where you will see us say so

At the bottom of every issue:

This issue was created with the help of AI. Every item that runs is selected and approved by a human editor.

At the bottom of any email we send you:

This email was prepared with the help of AI for The Ordinary Times. Replies come to a human editor.

When we get it wrong

We will get things wrong. Bulletins contain errors, times change after they go to print, and we make our own mistakes on top of that. What we owe you is a fast and plain correction, so we run one in the next issue where the people who read the mistake will see it. We do not quietly edit the page and say nothing.

If you find a mistake, or if you want to know how a particular item was put together, write to your edition's editor. A person reads every one of these.

Why we think this is a good use of these tools

The Church has been specific about artificial intelligence, and we did not have to invent our own rules. We are trying to follow hers.

The Vatican's 2025 note Antiqua et Nova teaches that "AI should be used only as a tool to complement human intelligence rather than replace its richness" (no. 112), and that "the use of AI should always be transparent" and "never misrepresented" (no. 84). It puts the responsibility where it belongs, holding that "ultimate responsibility for decisions made using AI rests with the human decision-makers" (no. 44), and it asks anyone passing along what a machine produced to "exercise diligence in verifying the truth of what they disseminate" (no. 89).

Pope Leo XIV chose his name with this technology in view, telling the cardinals days after his election that the Church offers "the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence" (10 May 2025). In his 2026 encyclical Magnifica Humanitas he asks for "serious journalism and forums for debate, where reasoned argumentation and verification carry greater weight than immediate reaction," because "truth is a common good and not the property of those with power or influence" (no. 137). He then says something we take personally: "Christian communities, too, are called to commit themselves to transparency in communication and to the honest pursuit of facts" (no. 138).

Writing on artificial intelligence for the 2024 World Communications Day, Pope Francis allowed that machines hold and connect far more than we ever could, and then said that "human beings alone are capable of making sense of that data."

That is the arrangement here. The computer tools read then a person makes sense of it, and publishes it.

The Ordinary Times Team

Sources

Last updated 30 August 2026.