Pattern machines…..not AI
Edited article by Nathan Beacom
Chatbots are computer programmes designed to simulate human
conversations. We ask chatbots for help in making decisions, for
advice, for counsel. Companies are making a great deal of money by
replacing therapeutic relationships with ‘therapy chatbots” and are
proposing to offer AI companions to the elderly, so that their faraway
children need not visit so often! Are you lonely? Talk to a machine.
Corporations are happy to endow these programs with human names, like Abbi,
Claude, and Alexa.
This is a disaster. In uncritically letting these machines shape our lives, we become
prey to all kinds of manipulation, we lose sight of reality, and we are induced, in an
important way, to take a reductive view of actual people. Chatbots offer us a form
of relationship without friction, without burden and responsibility. This illusory
kind of relationship hampers our ability to engage in the difficult challenge of real
bonds, which are the only things that can give value to human life. The more we
personify AI, the more we slouch toward lives of isolation and deception.

The need for creeds—reimagining Nicaea
From ‘Flashes of Insight’
September 2, 2025 Thomas OLoughlin (UK priest and theologian)
·
The Council of Nicaea was convened in 325 by the Emperor
Constantine. It remains most famous for producing much of
the creed used in the liturgy, but the need for new statements
of the creed is ever present. If we do not reformulate
expressions of faith, the formulae become empty—if solemn
sounding—words.
One such reformulation was produced by Pope Francis just a
few months after he was elected Bishop of Rome in 2013. It is short and to the
point, and deserves to be better known as a memorial to him.
To believe in the Father who loves all men and women with an infinite love means
realizing that “he thereby confers upon them an infinite dignity.” To believe that
the Son of God assumed our human flesh means that each human person has been
taken up into the very heart of God. To believe that Jesus shed his blood for us
removes any doubt about the boundless love which ennobles each human being.

Nurturing the relationships we have: PFGM in 2025
There are people in Terrey Hills parish, Sydney
who have lived Passionist Family Group life for 50
years. Some of those members were young
parents at the beginning, and many are now in
their 80’s. Life has changed so much in that time,
and so have PFG’s. Back thirty or forty years ago,
nearly every group included our ideal ‘grandparent
to baby’ dynamic. That is no longer the case.
Let’s go back a little further. 74,000 years ago the Mt Toba eruption in Indonesia,
resulted in as few as 3,000-10,000 humans surviving across the entire planet. The
human family had to slowly re-establish and some estimates are that 40,000 years
ago there were between one and six million humans. We know too that 42,000
years ago, there was a reversal and weakening of Earth’s magnetic poles.
5

Author: Anonymous
(Happiness Tips from the Viber app)
“When we think of happiness, we often think of it as a single mental state. This
perspective is confusing because happiness is a term we use to combine entirely
different chemical processes in our bodies. Each process has a different role and
purpose.
To increase long-term happiness, we have to understand the difference between
short-term, medium-term, and long-term happiness chemicals. It’s ok to look for a
short-term happiness boost like ice cream, but we need to consciously realize that
it'll go away quickly and that those dopamine activities
(e.g., social media, junk food, TV shows) are usually
taking up too much time and starve out medium and
long-term happiness chemicals. A medium-term
happiness chemical is serotonin, which we get after
accomplishing a task or being creative. The long-term
happiness chemical is oxytocin which comes from safe
relationships. We should spend most of our time making
sure we have the right skills to be in a safe relationship
and building those relationships”
.

Using our gifts: Pope Leo 14th…….10th August, 2025 (Zenit news)
In Luke’s Gospel Jesus invites us to consider how we will invest the treasure that is
our life (cf. Lk 12:32-48). He says: “Sell your possessions and give alms” (v. 33). He
exhorts us not to keep to ourselves the gifts that God has given us, but use them
generously for the good of others, especially those most in need of our help.
It is not simply a matter of sharing the material goods
we have, but putting our skills, time, love, presence and
compassion at the service of others. In short, everything
in God’s plan that makes each of us a priceless and
unrepeatable good, a living and breathing asset, must be
cultivated and invested in order to grow. Otherwise,
these gifts dry up and diminish in value, or they end up being taken away by those,
who like thieves, snatch them up as something simply to be consumed.

How old are you?
This question is not easily answered by our Vietnamese
brothers. Traditionally, Vietnamese babies were
considered one year old at birth and their age increased
each year at TET (Lunar New Year). Only in June this
year, did Vietnam scrap it’s ‘two child’ per family policy,
first established in North Vietnam 1963.It is generally
accepted that the policy was more strictly enforced for government officials. After
the reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1975, the policy was extended
throughout the country and after 1983, families were requited to limit their
children to two children. Financial penalties were imposed but it was not strictly
enforced. A significant cost of the one and two child policy is that the abortion rate
in Vietnam is among the highest in the world at 2.5 per woman!

What are people actually seeking from religion?
A response to American sociologist Christian Smith’s book reflecting on the demise of
traditional religion in America. (Kaya Oakes June 2nd 2025)
Religion is fading away, but faith and belief, somehow, are not. The
problem is that how people define faith and belief is just as
individualistic as the culture we live in. And the root cause of this
drift remains debatable.
Christian Smith brings a sociologist’s expertise to the topic. Key to his
thesis is the notion in the book’s subtitle—what’s dying out are
“traditional” ideas about religion, not necessarily the idea that God or a higher
power exists. In exploring the idea of “religious obsolescence” and pinning its
beginnings to the post-Boomer generations—
with a particular focus on Millennials—Smith
finds that not only are people drifting away
from religion, but that religion has given them
plenty of reasons to do so: “Something
becomes obsolete when most people feel it is
no longer useful or needed because something
else has superseded it in function, efficiency,
value, or interest.” Religion’s obsolescence wasn’t planned, but is instead the
inevitable result of social and cultural structures that have changed over time.

Changing worldviews
Part 5 finished at the point where we noted that Thomas Berry, an American
Passionist o-wrote ‘The Universe Story’ with Brian Swimme in 1992. He referred to
the reinvention of the human as ‘the Great Work’ of our times. He suggested that
“our greatest challenge is to discover the meaning of being human”.
Hominoids are a sub-group of primates (Great Apes) and include humans,
chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons. They various species lived
have been living on earth for 7
million years having branched off to form the primate family. Humans have lived
here for at least 2 million years and evolved and died out, intermingling and sometimes
interbreeding along the way. As time went on, their bodies
changed, as did their brains and their ability to think. It is
suggested a species like the one in the photograph
appeared 500,000 years ago, about two hundred thousand
years before Homo Sapiens.

Pope appeals for end to Gaza ‘barbarity’
By Joseph Tulloch
Speaking after the Sunday Angelus, Pope Leo mourns
the three Gazans killed in an attack on the Holy Family
Catholic parish in Gaza city, which he says is “just one”
of the “continuous” attacks on Gaza’s people and holy
sites. Pope Leo XIV has expressed his “deep sorrow”
over the recent Israeli attack on the Catholic parish in
Gaza, and called for “an immediate halt to the barbarity” in the Strip. After the
Holy Family church was struck on Thursday morning, three of the approximately
600 Gazans sheltering there were killed, and several others, including the parish
priest Fr Gabriel Romanelli, were injured.

Thomas Thanh
It was a shock to us to learn that our brother Thomas died
suddenly in Vietnam last Sunday. He was just 46. He was
introduced to the Passionists twenty years ago in June 2005
and was professed fourteen years and ordained for nine years.
He and Peter Truc were the senior Vietnamese Passionists.
Thanh had been working hard to establish and build a new
residence in Xuân Lộc, Đồng Nai. On Sunday he celebrated
Mass with some religious sisters and then met with some of
his family (both of his parents are deceased but he has nine
siblings including a brother who is a priest). Soon after he arrived he complained of
a severe headache. He was taken to hospital immediately, but died soon
afterwards. Thanh was buried in his home parish on Wednesday morning He is the
first Vietnamese Passionists to leave here for heaven.