Across the country, faithful Catholics, some of them seasoned software engineers and others not, are building digital tools for the Church at a pace that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago: praying apps, missal companions, classroom assistants. What they share, beyond their Catholic mission, is a common accelerant: artificial intelligence. The more interesting question is not what these apps do, but how AI is changing who gets to build them, how fast, and where the human has to remain firmly in command.
Magnifica Humanitas and the Question of Human Flourishing
Magnifica Humanitas is the first major teaching document of Pope Leo XIV’s pontificate. He signed it deliberately on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s foundational social encyclical, signaling that the Church now regards the rise of artificial intelligence as a civilizational inflection point comparable to the Industrial Revolution.
“In the era of artificial intelligence,” the Holy Father writes, “when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.”
The encyclical does not condemn AI. It frames the challenge as a moral choice: humanity may “construct a new Tower of Babel,” placing technology at the center of civilization without God, or it may “build the city in which God and humanity dwell together.” Handled well, the pope argues, such a transformation can serve the common good. Handled badly, it can dehumanize and exclude.
That framing turns out to be a practical question, not just a theological one. For Catholic developers, every decision about what to hand off to a machine and what to keep in human hands is a small enactment of the choice the encyclical describes. The three projects below are useful precisely because they show where that line falls in practice.
Intercede: Letting AI Do the Mechanical, Never the Sacred
Ten years ago, I launched Intercede, an app to help Catholics pray their novenas. What has changed recently is not chiefly what the app does, but how it gets built. I have integrated AI throughout my development workflow, from writing and debugging code to formatting new novenas and publishing them to the website. Work that once consumed hours of tedious, error-prone effort now takes a fraction of the time, which has let me clear a long backlog of requested saints and devotions and ship new features far faster than before.
But the most instructive use of AI in the app is also the most carefully fenced. Intercede lets users publicly submit answered prayers, testimonies of graces received, and that openness invites the same abuse any public submission field does: spam, and occasionally content that runs counter to the Catholic faith. So I have AI read every public submission and flag anything that needs my attention before it can appear. The machine does the first pass at scale; it never has the final word. I review what it flags, and the decision about what belongs in front of a praying community stays human.
That is a division of labor that I am okay with. AI is extraordinary at the mechanical: parsing, formatting, and surfacing the handful of items a person actually needs to look at. It has no business deciding which prayers are theologically sound. Keeping that boundary sharp is important, because AI is not infallible.
Missal Page: One Developer Doing the Work of a Team
Igor Aguiar, the developer behind Missal Page, is an experienced full-stack engineer, and he has built singlehandedly something that has historically required a small team: a complete companion for the traditional Latin Mass that follows both the 1954 and 1962 liturgical calendars.
The traditional calendar is a genuinely hard data problem. It is a dense liturgical structure of hundreds of feasts, variable propers, and intricate rubrical rules governing which prayers are said on a given day. Managing all of that, while also building and maintaining a polished cross-platform app, would once have demanded liturgical researchers and several developers, the better part of a year, and tens of thousands of dollars.
AI collapses that equation. Used for code generation, data organization, and development assistance, it lets one person carry the load that used to require an organization. What it conspicuously does not do is supply the judgment about whether the calendar is right; that comes from a developer who knows the tradition and checks the machine’s work against it. The headline here is the new economics: AI has made it feasible for a single competent person to serve a niche the market would otherwise have ignored.
QuillScan: Lowering the Barrier to Entry
Brian Fink is not a software engineer. He is a Catholic educator who had a concrete problem: the paperwork of a classroom was eating his time, and rather than wait for someone else to solve it, he built QuillScan himself. The app handles the document drudgery of teaching, and it fits Catholic and classical schools especially well, where written work remains central and lean staffs leave teachers managing the paperwork alone.
The fact that Fink built it without an engineering background is incredible (and a bit scary to my job security as a software engineer). A few years ago, the distance between a clear idea and a working application was a technical chasm most people simply could not cross; you either learned to code or you hired someone who had. AI-assisted development has narrowed that chasm dramatically. A motivated person with a real problem and a clear vision can now produce something polished and functional, because the technical bottleneck that used to stand between an idea and its execution has largely been removed. That is a profound expansion of who is allowed to build.
The Pattern: More Mission, Fewer Resources
Read together, the three tell one story. An experienced developer covers two traditional calendars alone. A non-engineer ships a working classroom tool. A novena app uses AI both to build faster and to keep a public submission field free of what shouldn’t be there. In each case, AI is a force multiplier, not a replacement for the human judgment, theological discernment, and pastoral instinct that make these tools genuinely Catholic.
The best Catholic apps are not built by large corporations optimizing for engagement metrics. They are built by faithful Catholics who love the Mass, who pray novenas, who teach in classical schools, and who want better tools for their own communities. AI has widened the circle of people who can turn that kind of love into something usable.
Keeping the Human at the Center
Pope Leo XIV insisted that “true progress always stems from a heart open to others, an intelligence willing to listen and a will that seeks what unites rather than what separates.” The developers behind these apps have internalized that principle in the most concrete way available to them: in the deliberate choices about what they will and will not let a machine decide.
Magnifica Humanitas warns against the temptation to build “a future excluding God.” These developers are building the opposite, using the tools of their age to serve the purposes of eternity and keeping themselves squarely in the seat where the moral decisions get made. That, I think, is exactly what the Holy Father had in mind.
Devin Rose is the developer of Intercede, the Catholic novena app. https://catholicnovenaapp.com