The Public Infrastructure of Truth

Written after reading Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical

There have been numerous discussions about how far it is acceptable for the Church to meddle in worldly matters. Now, I’m not talking about the Church as the communion of local communities of the faithful, since each of us meddles to some extent simply by existing somewhere — where we work, live, raise our kids, and try to change things for the better. Nor do I mean pronouncements from the Vatican — whether weighty magisterial documents or everyday political stances against some atrocity or worrying social trend. I’m talking about something in between. A church school, say, or a church hospital. These are joint undertakings of many believers, lay and ordained alike, and they touch individual lives far more concretely than any public exhortation could.

These days, in the wealthy parts of the world, it can be harder than ever to justify why such institutions should exist at all. Many Catholic schools, for instance, are Catholic in name only, barely distinguishable from any secular counterpart and neither more affordable nor better. The same goes for the hospitals. When there are public and private options already, surely there should be a better reason for keeping such a complex thing going than just soothing ourselves with the hope that a kid or a patient might, by accident, bump into a chaplain — and that once in a while, that could turn a life around.

I’m not saying it doesn’t happen — it did for my own wife. But in the past these institutions contributed far more widely to the salvation of souls, to bringing people into a right relationship with God. Once, remember, the poor and uneducated often fell into pagan superstition and were routinely ensnared in practices too graphic to describe here. The same was true of families in which a mother or father fell ill and might have died without medical help. A lack of resources used to push people into desperate survival strategies that left them open to terrible exploitation. Even today, in many parts of the world, people and whole societies resort to terrible things when they are kept uneducated and without medical care — and it was once like that in your own country too, wherever you live. This is where church schools and hospitals have truly served the salvation of multitudes.

I’m not saying all this to invoke a dead past or to dwell on trivialities. I want to show that the salvation of souls has always been at the center of such endeavors — because I can see that today, too, people and whole societies resort to terrible things wherever entering into relationship with God is made difficult by systematic evil. Some of these new situations are worth naming — and we may even find ourselves imagining new church institutions, not yet established, that could serve our societies as deeply as hospitals and schools did two hundred years ago.

Let’s start with something we still face everywhere, even in wealthy, clean countries: serious problems with sanitation. We drown in informational slop. It is so thick that it’s hard to reach the cornerstone of truth buried beneath it. For years there has been no clear way to find curated material on a matter of importance — material that meets some baseline standards of quality and truthfulness, basic Catholic requirements. And it isn’t only those hungry for truth who are stuck. Even more stuck are the would-be creators of such material: the ones who would gladly contribute to the common good if it weren’t all but certain they’d end up broadcasting into a wall.

The root cause is how today’s big-tech infrastructure is built. As an author, you must please the algorithm first; God comes second at best, and there is no way around it. It’s like a city whose water pipes are made of plastic bottles, delivering water that is free but muddy, thick with viruses and bacteria — because for the corporation, delivering water is only a sideline, and its true business is selling medicine. Forgive the harsh words, but I believe they reflect reality accurately.

The fact is that we, the people, did not build this, and the common good did not guide its design. Facebook, to take just one example, was built so that well-off students could rate each other’s looks online — and yet this is now where most institutions reach people and share what matters. With Google, you can never be sure which of the indexed pages will actually surface for a given query; there is no way to dig deep for serious research. It has grown so useless that people hailed the arrival of large language models as the glorified search engine we’d always wanted — and yet these tools work only for content well represented in their training data, and they are inherently unpredictable.

Years ago I sat in front of an ancient computer in a library, trying to find good material on a subject. It was frustrating, but satisfying too. With the language processing technology we have today, we could build tools for precise search that would push that experience to a level that once felt like science fiction. We could explore the whole of human heritage in a rigorous, scholarly way — and make it available to anyone, as public infrastructure — if only enhancing human skill were valued more than shedding it to cut costs.

Attempting this is well within the means of the Catholic Church. If it has its own observatory, why can’t we at least try what apparently no one else is interested in doing? There is no public infrastructure for looking up resources designed with the common good at its heart, because in this climate of relativistic confusion no public institution has shown the courage to back such an endeavor. We don’t need the world’s top talent to start, or to show the way — only the will to stop being mere commentators on what is crumbling.

Wikipedia proves this kind of thing is achievable without wealth: its founder had neither billions nor big-tech money behind him. At first he was ridiculed. Linux is another such example, on an even larger scale — and it did real, lasting good for humanity, the kind AI has yet to match. It is no accident that one of its most popular distributions, Ubuntu, takes its name from the very concept Léocadie Lushombo spoke of at the presentation of Magnifica Humanitas: that a person becomes fully human through relationships with others.

Yet if we leave the courageous few who fight for projects like Wikipedia and Linux to fend for themselves — or worse, let LLMs drain the work that multitudes poured into these projects, exploiting it the way they already exploit copyrighted material without permission — we will sink, as a society, to a place where people of intellect can no longer find room to breathe. There must be a better way than to wish good luck to those willing to start over and build proper channels for information.

But if the Catholic Church could become the driving force behind such an infrastructure, that would still be only the first step. The ability to discover information accurately does not capture the most important dimension of information: its quality — its veracity, sincerity, and faithfulness. These criteria may strike a modern reader as too subjective, yet they are in fact far more objective than they appear. As we grow increasingly capable of processing language automatically, we can now build an index constructed and maintained by humans, with algorithms doing the heavy lifting. I am not calling for another Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the old list of forbidden books; I am calling instead for a carefully curated index of recommended resources, one in which each contributor’s work is judged on its merits — quality, beauty, and truthfulness — not on the author’s identity or wealth. Inclusion would be free; no one could buy their way in. The Church was once in this business, and its return to the field may help save many souls — perhaps as many as were once ensnared in pagan superstition.

Third, and most fundamentally: by ensuring that humans moderate one another’s contributions to public infrastructure, we may restore some measure of denied dignity. Today, human beings increasingly face automated systems that deal with them coldly and without mercy, in ways incompatible with our humanity. It may soon become impossible to be heard at all — as is already the case when dealing with today’s big-tech “free infrastructure” providers. Lately, even reaching a real person is no guarantee: the one who reads and responds may turn out to be a form of automation. This steadily builds walls between people, their representatives, and the institutions meant to serve them. Ensuring that people can meet one another in virtual space would keep them from growing accustomed to a world that treats them with the consideration owed to animals rather than the dignity owed to human beings. It goes without saying how hard it is for someone living in such conditions to develop a healthy relationship with God.

Out of 1.3 billion Catholics, only a tiny fraction would be needed to change a great deal. Perhaps, in the process, another kind of public infrastructure would emerge — one that would finally let people across the planet meet those they ought to know. That was another unfulfilled promise of social networking.

The world has many extremely wealthy people willing to feed the hungry, provide sanitation and medical care, or teach a sustainable way of living. These philanthropists understand well enough what it means to be ill, to go hungry, to live in discomfort when basic needs go unmet. They are rarely faithful Catholics, or Christians at all, and they may have little sense of what a life of purpose looks like. But perhaps now is the time to let them build the schools and the hospitals, while the Church provides what money cannot buy: the public infrastructure of truth.

So, dear Holy Father, perhaps the task does not belong to somebody else — some international body, a group of politicians, or a brave and talented individual. Perhaps we should be the ones to show the way.

Because the Truth is our core business.