7 ms·

No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window - even if they were skilled enough to do so, unless the model was locally h

• Meekro 8mo ago
  This priest agrees with you, and has expressed concerns about mediocre homilies that don't speak to the concerns of the particular community: https://youtu.be/pgZXCPCATmc?si=FM4uj2owYBVK_8Mh https://youtu.be/pgZXCPCATmc?si=FM4uj2owYBVK_8Mh
• onion2k 8mo ago
  No priest will feed sufficient context about their community into the context window But they will try, and they'll share a lot of potentially private information in the process.
  • graemep 8mo ago
    Not to write homilies though. The real danger of risking exposing private information would be pastoral work.
• curtisblaine 8mo ago
  Nit: you're confusing the vow of silence with the confessional seal.
  • graemep 8mo ago
    Its more than a nit. It only applies to confession so putting in other private information would not break a vow, but it would still be a very bad thing to do.
• Herodotus38 8mo ago
  There are resources that publish homilies for priests to give. Here is an example for English speakers. https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/liturgy/sunday-resources/ https://associationofcatholicpriests.ie/liturgy/sunday-resou...
• h33t-l4x0r 8mo ago
  Well maybe they just need to start recording confessionals. Just imagine what Gemini 3.1 could do with 1M tokens of that stuff.
  • TheSpiceIsLife 8mo ago
    Forgive me father for I have sinned. It has been three minutes since I shit posted on HN, and my greentext stories are famous on 4chan. Also, after lunch today I send 300 emails to Jeffrey Epstein using my work email and signed with my real name. What a great guy!
  • fainpul 8mo ago
    Gemini 3.1 – I don't remember that verse. Is that from the old testament?
    • rubslopes 8mo ago
      It's from the Orange Catholic Bible, I think. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
    • RobotToaster 8mo ago
      iam tempus pariendi venerat et ecce gemini in utero repperti sunt - Gen 25:24
  • lostlogin 7mo ago
    This is how you get Grok.
  • linkjuice4all 7mo ago
    You're absolutely right! You can repent on your deathbed and skip years of church attendance!
• anal_reactor 8mo ago
  Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday and I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying, including the priest himself, who was simply reading whatever higher-ups had given him. It was perfect slop because literally nobody cared about the content, it was all form - it needed to sound important and complicated enough to be able to be used in religious rituals. This is an excellent use case for LLMs because they excel at exactly that. Imagine a bunch of bushmen trying to perform the spell of rain. It doesn't matter what they sing, as long as it sounds like something that could pass as the spell of rain, because the goal here isn't to make rain happen, it's to strengthen the community through shared rituals. 99% of religious activities are exactly this.
  • gambiting 8mo ago
    >>Bro as a kid I used to go to church every Sunday I mean, not to dismiss your experience, but in my weekly Sunday going to church in Poland the priest would write an actual homily that felt relevant to the community. But then our small town had 3 churches, and each one had a different style - people would talk about preferring one over the other because they had more interesting "content". But yeah, there was the message from the regional Bishop or the Archbishop of Poland or sometimes directly from the Vatican, then the reading from the old testament, then the homily which I'm 99% was written by the priest giving the mass. >> I guarantee that not a single person from my entire village understood what the priest was saying Well, I wouldn't say not a single person did, but yeah, we had those 3 churches, probably 10k seats each, every one was rammed on the sunday, but I'd say 90% of people there were only there to tick it off and snoozed through the whole thing. But it's not because the homily was boring, it's because going to church on sunday was(maybe still is?) a thing you have to do or people will make fun out of you.
    • anal_reactor 8mo ago
      Your village had proper healthy capitalist market. In mine, there was complete religious monopoly.
      • 8mo ago
• adrianN 8mo ago
  You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • soderfoo 8mo ago
    To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism.
    • lo_zamoyski 8mo ago
      I assume this was intended as a joke, even if it is one that doesn’t land? Because it’s not clear what this could mean otherwise.
      • Lapsa 8mo ago
        I find it funny
      • Brendinooo 8mo ago
        No, "faith" is actually an integral component of "the Christian faith". Go read the first part of Acts 4, where a section closes with: "Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were uneducated, common men, they were astonished. And they recognized that they had been with Jesus." So...yes! We do believe in a God that can empower average people to speak in above-average ways.
        • foobarbecue 8mo ago
          use of "crux" is a little punny here too but yeah faiths are into faith shrug
        • lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
          The conversation was as follows: > You have a lot of faith in the qualities of average priests. >> To be fair, faith is the crux of Catholicism. So, in context (which the downvoters seem to have missed), "faith" is being used equivocally here. There a difference between having faith in Christ and his promises and faith in his claims of divinity on the one hand, and having "faith" in a priest or whatever else on the other. Hence, my question whether this was some kind of a bad attempt at humor or whether something was meant by it. (FWIW, authentic Christian faith is not an arbitrary faith in anything you please. This is blind faith which is irrational. This is why we can speak of preambula fidei. There must be reasons for faith. When a friend tells you something about his inner life that you cannot know directly, you may believe him given an ensemble of evidence and reasons that cannot prove his claim definitively, but are nonetheless very supportive of it. Furthermore, the claim makes sense of what you do know about him.)
• stratocumulus0 8mo ago
  I was raised Catholic and even though the last time I've been to a church could have been in 2019, I don't remember any priest who wouldn't just gloss over the religious content for the day (copied from an online source), itching to share his politics and the most recent ragebait he's got from Facebook at the end.
  • aubanel 8mo ago
    That's a bit harsh! I go to mass every Sunday (in France) and rarely have political stuff. When there, it's most often about abortion or euthanasia (of course in a pro-life (or anti-choice) direction, "you shall not kill") But dull, empty homilies are (alas) very frequent.
    • stratocumulus0 8mo ago
      Catholicism is different in every country, I would imagine that a church in a secular place such as France would contain itself a bit, because there's no societal expectation that anyone should follow its religion, and therefore the priests have to put in effort into making people stay. In Poland, where I grew up, the Church still holds a lot of power and prestige, and priests consider themselves to have authority over people's lives. Leaving the church is seen as more of a childish rebellion, and I would often hear mocking remarks about non-believers in homilies.
      • sigmoid10 8mo ago
        It also varies inside countries. Some priests are simply more demure than others. The church as an institution certainly prefers the more radical conservatives as you go higher up the chain, but many low level employees that still talk to commoners do realize that these views are going to put off more people than they attract in developed countries. So in the long term they will only be left with a bunch of crazy radicalists and a silent majority that wants absolutely nothing to do with them.
        • lo_zamoyski 8mo ago
• refsys 8mo ago
  "We value your privacy! Do you consent to sharing the contents of your confession with our 2137 partners? [ACCEPT ALL] [MAYBE LATER]"
  • Tenemo 8mo ago
    Was the number of partners you picked random or you chose 2137 on purpose? As it's actually somewhat related to the topic...
    • refsys 8mo ago
      Entirely random of course. I would never reference unsavory memes about past Popes or anything like that.
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
• 1718627440 8mo ago
  > the Vatican would have started publishing standard homilies long ago. There actually are, but they are famous homilies from famous Church Fathers rather then explicitly produced to be standard homilies.
  • dharmatech 7mo ago
    Yeah, the Liturgy of the Hours includes many of them. (Four volume prayer set.)
• viraptor 8mo ago
  I'm glad that priests are well known for always obeying rules and never abusing their position. /s
  • lotsofpulp 8mo ago
    I don’t understand why you’re downvoted. “No priest would ever break rules” is such a strong and ridiculous claim that I thought solatic was trolling.
    • rationalist 8mo ago
      It's alluding to something off-topic, with a hint of "edgy-ness"
      • viraptor 8mo ago
        Let me be more clear then. Not only will there be many priests sharing private information about their local congregation, there will also be priests who continue to directly abuse people in their communities. Sharing private information is extremely mild in comparison.
      • lotsofpulp 8mo ago
        How is it off topic? The entire basis of solatic's comment is the assumption that priests would not break the rules. A track record of breaking the rules is reason to not make that assumption.
• andrepd 8mo ago
  We have been further away from OMM 0000 than we are today, that's for sure.
• lo_zamoyski 8mo ago
  > doing so would be a violation of their vows of silence I don’t know what this means. There is no formal “vow of silence”. The closest things I can think of are the discipline of avoiding unnecessary speech in some monastic communities, or perhaps the seal of confession, but this doesn’t apply as priests can speak in generalities or anonymously about the kinds of moral issues people struggle with. > Good homilies are written with the particular community in mind. That’s a bit of a generalization. Many, if not most, readings simply benefit from clear explanation. Tying in local or cultural context can be helpful, but they can also be a distraction, and mostly, homilies should be about the essential meaning of the readings. By having to write the homily, the celebrant benefits from writing the homily as well, a benefit he would lose if he simply drew from a corpus of prewritten homilies.
  • harimau777 8mo ago
    Catholic priests are forbidden from revealing anything they learn in confession under ANY circumstances. If someone comes in and confesses to a crime or that they are planning a crime, the priest can advise them to go to the police, they can counsel them that they may be in danger of hellfire if they do not, but they absolutely cannot tell anyone. The Catholic Church takes this very seriously. It is fully expected that a priest would die rather than break the confidentiality of confessions.
    • 1718627440 8mo ago
      > It is fully expected that a priest would die rather than break the confidentiality of confessions. And that is not just a theoretical thing. This what e.g. Nepomuk is a saint for and what other priests went for to a concentration camp.
    • frumper 8mo ago
      The Catholic Church is made up of people and people do all kinds of things and make all kinds of choices in life. As others have pointed out, it's very possible to talk about the struggles of your community without calling out Bob in the third row.
• bibleguided 8mo ago
  You’re right that a priest can’t (and shouldn’t) dump private pastoral context into a prompt. But context doesn’t have to mean identifiable confession details. I’m building BibleGuided, and one thing we’re adding is a church feature where congregants can opt in to sharing prayer themes, and leaders can see aggregated and anonymized trends over time rather than identities. That’s enough to shape a homily toward what people are actually struggling with, without violating confidentiality. If anyone has experience with privacy thresholds (minimum group sizes, differential privacy), I’d love pointers.
  • superb_dev 8mo ago
    How are you dealing with the Pope saying priests shouldn’t use your product?
    • RobotToaster 8mo ago
      To be fair ignoring and occasionally kidnapping the pope is a time honoured Catholic tradition.
    • i80and 8mo ago
      Not the parent, but products like it are strongly Protestant Evangelical-coded, so that could actually be a selling point for the intended audience
    • crazygringo 8mo ago
      If they're Protestant, that might be a point in its favor :)
    • bibleguided 8mo ago
      I agree with the Pope’s point. Priests should not hand pastoral judgment to a model. BibleGuided has church management tools plus optional AI help for drafting and organizing, with the priest making the final call. For community context, we avoid confessional and private pastoral data. It is opt-in from congregants, then aggregated and anonymized into themes and trends. We think AI can be a helpful tool across many areas, including faith, and over time many church leaders (of many denominations) will get comfortable using it in bounded, and responsible ways. If a church does not want AI used for homilies, those features can be toggled off and the rest of our tools still work.
• FrustratedMonky 8mo ago
  Pretty sure there are books of homilies.
• chasd00 8mo ago
  all the homilies i've heard were pre-written but ended with current events... like telling the congregation to not vote for Obama heh. My wife was Catholic until that moment, she never went back after that. This was St. Rita's in Dallas TX.
  • gwbas1c 8mo ago
    American religions are supposed to stay out of politics, or they risk their tax-exempt status. For me, the disturbing event was shortly before the 2016 event when a Catholic Church in Lowell MA had posters urging people to vote no on marijuana legalization. (In my case, I smelt the politization when I was a teenager so I never continued being Catholic as an adult.)
    • thinkingemote 8mo ago
      The separation of church and state in the US was for the state to stay out of religion. (the US was founded by religious exiles from a state which didn't stay out) Religions are explicitly political but politics shouldn't interfere with religions. To follow your religion means interacting with the outside world. It's not some personally private thing like a harmless badge you wear (although there are American faith communities that advocate for that). The cases in the past where political have interfered with religions are often, ironically enough, by other religious politicians. Hence the good idea to separate church and state.
      • gwbas1c 7mo ago
        From the horse's mouth: https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/charities-churches-and-politics https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/charities-churches-and-politics > In 1954, Congress approved an amendment by Sen. Lyndon Johnson to prohibit 501(c)(3) organizations, which includes charities and churches, from engaging in any political campaign activity. To the extent Congress has revisited the ban over the years, it has in fact strengthened the ban. The most recent change came in 1987 when Congress amended the language to clarify that the prohibition also applies to statements opposing candidates. > Currently, the law prohibits political campaign activity by charities and churches by defining a 501(c)(3) organization as one "which does not participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for public office."
• jacquesm 8mo ago
  Not to mention a massive violation of privacy, which they are subject to as much or more as every other entity that processes privacy sensitive data.
• sigbottle 8mo ago
  Side note, but I've definitely gotten annoyed with "context". There's context in the strict technical sense - the AI is stateless, you need to get the right tokens to it in the right way, allow it to use tooling calls, etc. I get that. That, is cool. I use agentic coding a lot. Then there's the sense of what you're saying - you have to feed the AI "enough context". In your case it's critical, but I've seen way too many pro-AI people just dismiss everything and say "context context you didn't give it proper context, have you tried this prompt etc." as a justification for the "lack" of intelligence. At some point you have to wonder when it becomes unfalsifiable.
  • thewebguyd 8mo ago
    At some point, at least if businesses want to have AI “Agents” act as employees, then it needs to cease being stateless. There’s a lot of hidden context in day to day work that a human often times wouldn’t even know to explain to the AI or even think that they’d have to include it, things that are just “known” by default of working somewhere for a long time. With coding, there’s at least the entire codebase as context. With more creative tasks, it becomes murky. Even something as “simple” as sending a price increase notification to customers. There’s a lot of nuance in that, and customer relationship history you’d have to feed to the AI as context to get it right, yet a good CSR would just factor that context into their writing without a second thought. There is a point, and it is reached very early, where it’s more costly and less productive to feed the AI as much context as you can try to imagine you’d need to give it vs. just doing it yourself. If I’m at the point of writing an entire document of history and context, into what’s effectively a full page prompt, then why bother with AI at that point.
• unsupp0rted 7mo ago
  Best to skip the priest and feed context directly
• snowhale 7mo ago
  [dead]
• jquinby 7mo ago
  When I was in formation a couple of years ago, I showed our homiletics instructor a ChatGPT-generated homily for our assigned text. He read through it and put his head on the desk. Then he handed it back to me and said it was as good as good as anything you'd hear from the ambo that Sunday. By this, he meant that it was ok-but-not-great, and there's a lot of weak preaching out there. And your point is dead on: the text and the assembly are the primary considerations. I preach on the same readings to 4 different masses, but the 4:30 Saturday Vigil folks are a different group than the 11:30 Sunday Morning crowd, so the message is tuned accordingly. Different emphases, different touchstones, differing exhortations, etc.
• hluska 7mo ago
  Very few priests take vows of silence. The standard vows are chastity, obedience and poverty. Even highly contemplative orders like Trappists don’t make a vow of silence - they practice something called monastic silence but it’s not a vow. The closest thing is that a priest cannot share anything told during the sacrament of reconciliation. But that’s not so much a vow as just the other side of what Catholics believe is a direct connection to god.
  • wahern 7mo ago
    Confession was originally often made in public. Confessional secrecy is more about making it easier for people to freely confess their sins, free of the fear of retribution or shame, very much like why we have doctor-patient confidentiality enshrined in law today. I would imagine confessional secrecy arose very quickly, even if the norm wasn't private confession. The first reference I could find for confessional secrecy was from a 4th century book written by the 3rd/4th century Persian bishop, Aphraates. In Demonstration VII, On Penance, he councils priests to keep a penitent's confessions secret, "lest he be exposed by his enemies and those who know him. .... If they reveal them to anyone, the whole army will suffer an adverse reputation." Source: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Sy0vAAAAMAAJ/page/n251/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Sy0vAAAAMAAJ/page/n251/mo... That's a Syriac to Latin translation. I used Google Translate for Latin to English. There's at least one partial English translation of that book online, but I found their translation more confusing.
• grogers 7mo ago
  Take a homily written by someone 2000 miles away and it will likely feel just as relevant to me. Most humans deal with similar issues.
• b3ing 7mo ago
  Homilies are not the core of Catholic mass, the Eucharist is. Protestant churches put more emphasis on the sermon, not sure if it’s all Protestant churches or just “Evangelical” ones
• michaelsbradley 7mo ago
  Sermon manuals were popular among Catholic priests from the time the printing press started to spread in Europe, and remained so into the middle of the 20th Century. A parish priest might not deliver a “canned sermon” verbatim, but still rely on one/more sermon manuals heavily when preparing his words for Sunday. The Roman Catechism (Catechism of the Council of Trent), published by the Vatican and ordered for use in seminaries for core formation of candidates for the priesthood, included a list of specific topics to address for each Sunday of the year. While not a sermon manual as such, those “bullet points” informed Catholic sermons around the world for 300+ years.