Operations. Communication. Leadership formation. Technology. Built by someone doing it every day inside a real Catholic parish and school in Austin, Texas.
“The question is not merely what AI can do, but who we are becoming through the technologies we build.”
Pope Leo XIV
Message to the Builders AI Forum
Pontifical Gregorian University - November 2025
Pope Leo XIV didn’t pick his name by accident. He chose it because the last Leo faced an industrial revolution and gave the Church a framework for responding - Rerum Novarum. This Leo is saying: we’re in that moment again. The question isn’t whether Catholic institutions will change. It’s whether they’ll lead the change or be left behind by it.
Most work on Catholic modernization happens from the outside - consultants, conferences, think pieces. This work happens from inside a real parish and school, every day. That means encountering the tools that don’t fit, the workflows that were never designed, the staff doing extraordinary work with software built for someone else. It means knowing why giving dropped in October and what actually moves it back up.
This work is broader than technology. It’s operations. Leadership formation. Communication systems. Culture change. The software is one expression of a larger conviction: Catholic institutions can run with the same intentionality and excellence we bring to the liturgy.
Human dignity at the center. Always. But the institutions have to evolve - and they’re going to need people willing to do the work from inside.
Three areas of focus - each grounded in lived experience running a real Catholic institution.
Seminary gives priests deep formation - theology, pastoral care, spiritual direction. It doesn’t give them finance, HR, communications, or change management. And among those who lead Catholic institutions, some lean into innovation and some don’t. Effective modernization has to meet leaders where they are and build from there.
Every parish and school has its own culture - things it will embrace and things it will quietly reject. Staff have to actually adopt new ways of working, not just be told to. And the community itself has to come along. This isn’t tech evangelism. It’s organizational change, which is slower, messier, and more human than any tool rollout.
The goal isn’t to build software. It’s to understand where the real problems are and apply technology intelligently - whether that means building something new, connecting existing tools, or knowing when a spreadsheet is still the right answer. The institutions that modernize well won’t be the ones that adopt the most technology. They’ll be the ones that use it most wisely.
Every Catholic parish and school is sitting on a rich, largely uncaptured web of knowledge - who belongs, who leads, who gives, which families are struggling, which students are thriving, what decisions were made and why, and how the institution actually operates day to day.
Right now, most of that lives in someone’s head. When they leave, it goes with them.
The work here is, collectively, building that context layer - the institutional memory and relationship graph that makes technology genuinely useful inside a Catholic institution. Not a chatbot bolted onto a website. A living knowledge base about how this community operates, built from everything that happens inside it.
Each tool is an entry point. Each one feeds the layer. The layer is what compounds over time.
Our early thoughts about the context layer are shared in more detail at parishbrain.com.
Every EdTech company is selling schools a better tool. This is something different: a school that already knows itself.
For the parish, the opportunity is operational. So much of a staff's week vanishes into manual, repetitive work: signups, bulletins, records, donor follow-up, and the quiet question of which families need a call. The right tools can carry that load, and AI can surface what a busy office would otherwise miss, so pastors and staff get their time and attention back for the people in front of them.
For the school, the opportunity runs through the classroom and the families around it. Teachers lose hours to planning, feedback, and communication that technology can quietly absorb. AI can help students learn with more support and more accountability, give parents a clear picture of what each child needs, and hand administrators visibility they have never had. Done well, it gives teachers back the one thing they never have enough of: time to teach.
The biggest opportunity sits where church and school overlap, because they are really one community sharing one set of families. Today that shared life is scattered across a dozen disconnected systems. Bring it together and the institution can finally see itself whole: who belongs, who gives, who is struggling, who is thriving. That shared foundation, the context layer, is what everything else builds on, and it is where the real compounding happens.
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Most work on Catholic modernization is written from the outside. This is built from the inside - by someone running a real parish and school every day.
I’m the COO of a Catholic parish and school in Austin, Texas. Four years in, I’ve seen what actually breaks, what pastors actually need, and what parents actually ask. Before this: nearly four years at Microsoft, four startups, and 25 years building products across industries. MBA from UT McCombs.
In the summer of 2024, before AI in Catholic institutions was much of a conversation, I started quietly running experiments - using AI tools on back-office projects to understand where they actually helped and where they didn’t. No announcements, no strategy deck. Just hands-on work to find out what was real.
That led to the BAIF.ai conference in Rome in 2025 - a gathering of Catholic technologists, researchers, and builders working on AI and the Church’s mission. I teach an AI ethics elective to middle schoolers.
The institution I work in is my lab. Everything here is tested there first - not in theory, but in practice, with real staff, real parents, and real operational stakes.