Our approach
Parishes deal in trust, memory, and human judgment. Software can help, but it needs boundaries. These rules decide when it works, when a person takes over, and what we will not build.
How we build
They govern what we automate, what we verify, and when a person takes over.
Every product should move someone toward a parish, another person, or God: a church found, a call returned, a reading shared. We do not build products whose final destination is a conversation with a machine.
St. Isidore's angels drove the plow while he was at Mass. That is the pattern: automate the plow, not the kneeling. We can handle data entry, phone triage, and bulletin transcription. Pastoral care, presence, and the sacraments remain human.
Scripture, doctrine, and parish facts come from their sources. Models may retrieve, route, and format them. They do not decide what the Church teaches.
We do not build AI confession, spiritual direction, or companions designed to simulate care. When a request crosses that line, the product stops or hands off to a person.
Before an answer is published or acted on, it must be traceable to a source or checked against one. When exact words matter, we compare the export with the approved text.
AI may draft, read, and route. Front Desk hands off calls beyond its scope, and staff can review the record. Parish data is not used for model training and can be exported at any time.
Where this comes from
Developers bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity.
Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas, 2026
Church teaching gives us a design boundary. AI may assist. It may not impersonate a person, claim spiritual authority, or make the final decision.
Selected incident reviews
Records from Catholic Index and Monica development. Each one ended in a new control.
raw agent findings were false positives by round seven
Observed after eight sequential review roundsFailure pattern / correction drift
After the clear errors were fixed, later review rounds kept looking. Agents disputed a valid papal reference, rewrote a quotation past its meaning, and “corrected” an already accurate number.
Every correction now needs an official source, reproducible arithmetic, or a cited Church document.
Similar parish names and plausible geography produced confident mismatches. In one targeted audit, 243 of 1,444 LLM-assisted matches were reverted.
St. Joseph’s stored URL in Gowanda redirected to Chinese adult manga. Other compromised sites carried multilingual gambling spam. A successful HTTP response was not proof of a valid parish source.
Tests preserve legitimate parish uses, including casino bus trips and charity poker nights.
Generated lettering appeared in sacred imagery and passed at a glance.
An audio assembly pass reworded an approved lyric without sounding obviously wrong.
Operational evidence
As parish use grows, we will publish handoff, review, and source-coverage rates—including inconvenient results.
Calls the system routes to parish staff
PendingOutputs flagged before anyone sees them
PendingAnswers traceable to parish-published data
PendingReview the approach
If you work in a parish, tell us where these rules are incomplete or impractical.
Talk with us