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On February 19th, Pope Leo XIV gathered his priests from the Diocese of Rome behind closed doors and delivered a message that had nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the central crisis of our time. He told them to stop writing sermons with ChatGPT.

“Like all the muscles in the body, if we do not use them, if we do not move them, they die,” the Pope said. “The brain needs to be used, so our intelligence must also be exercised a little so as not to lose this capacity.”

Then he drew a line that should haunt every manufacturing executive in America: “To give a homily is to share faith,” he said, and AI “will never be able to share faith.”

I run a factory. I am not a priest. But I recognized that line immediately—because I’ve been trying to draw the same one on shop floors for thirty-six years.

The Muscle That Atrophies

The Pope’s metaphor is physiological, and it is exactly right. A muscle that isn’t loaded doesn’t just rest. It wastes. Sarcopenia doesn’t require injury. It only requires disuse.

The same thing happens to intelligence on a production line.

When a frontline operator stops being asked to diagnose a problem—because the system now flags it automatically—the diagnostic muscle doesn’t wait patiently for its next rep. It atrophies. When a supervisor stops building the judgment to read a crew’s body language, mood, and readiness—because an algorithm now assigns tasks—that perceptual capacity doesn’t hibernate. It dies.

I have seen this firsthand. At the Mercedes-Benz plant in Rastatt, Germany, an image processing system on the paint line for the A-Class scans every body coming off the Weißelatte, identifies paint defects invisible to the naked eye, and spits out a marker on the exact spot for polishers downstream to fix. It is a magnificent piece of technology. But over months, the polishers who once found the defects themselves—who ran their fingers across a fender and knew by touch that something was wrong—stopped looking. They waited for the screen. They trusted the marker. And when the system missed something it wasn’t trained on—a new defect pattern, an unusual paint batch—there was no one left with the hands or the eyes to catch it.

The Translation Distinction

A homily is not information delivery. If it were, ChatGPT could do it beautifully. But a homily is a relational act. The priest stands before people whose marriages are fracturing, whose children are sick, whose faith is threadbare—and he speaks into that specific, unrepeatable human moment. The words matter less than the fact that a person who knows this congregation, who has sat at their bedsides and blessed their dead, is the one saying them.

In manufacturing, the equivalent is the supervisor who walks a struggling operator through a quality problem—not by pulling up a standard work document, but by reading the frustration in the operator’s hands and knowing that today, the real problem isn’t technique. It’s confidence. It’s the plant manager who overrides a scheduling algorithm because she knows—from years of accumulated, embodied judgment—that this particular crew on this particular night can’t absorb that particular changeover. No algorithm was trained on that. No chatbot carries that knowledge.

On the very same day that Pope Leo told his priests to put down the chatbot, the Vatican announced a new AI-powered translation system that will render liturgical texts into sixty languages in real time. Same institution. Same week. Opposite directions on AI.

Is this hypocrisy? Not even close. It is precision.

Translation is a task. A homily is a relationship. The Vatican is making exactly the distinction that most corporations refuse to make: AI is a magnificent tool for extending human reach, and a catastrophic replacement for human judgment.

Manufacturing needs this distinction tattooed on every boardroom wall. Use AI