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If there’s one defining aspect to Catholicism, it’s a fondness for the corporeal. They’ve involved themselves, for thousands of years, with the natural world and the role of the human body within it. Every sacrament has matter and form: something in the hand, something said with the voice. Water, to cleanse the body of sin. Ashes, pressed into the forehead. Bread and wine, blood and flesh, placed in the mouth. It’s a preoccupation that makes sense for a faith born from an incident of extreme physical torture, but Catholics know, for all their focus on Jesus’ singular body, that one body alone is of little use. Churches are not built by disparate networks of hermits. Your sins cannot be absolved without the attentive ear of a priest to hear them in the first place. People are important.
As a result, the labour of the Catholic church is largely done offline, by real people in real buildings. Its practitioners should be among the most insulated from fear about new, unwieldy technology. But after being elected as the new Pope in May of last year, Leo XIV used his first cardinal address to sound an alarm not only rooted firmly in the digital present, but which also rings out long into the future.
