Profiles in Catholicism

Prayers

A Prayer to Protect People from Artificial Intelligence Scams and Related Crimes

Lord, Creator of humanity, of our ingenuity, intelligence and creativity, we have been given

the grace of innovation to inform our living growth in society, with and for one another and, from slight,

and unlikely beginnings, we begin to understand the mystery of communication which, Lord, you have

made possible throughout the universe, whereby signals of sound and images traverse the spaces

between places, near and far, far and wide entering our own hearts.

Saint Isidore of Seville, even in the sixth century your knowledge and encyclopaedic mind, fitted you

to be a patron of the internet – pray and intercede in the quickness of a grace transmitted to God!

Saint Clare of Assisi, you became a patron of television screens heralding a new age of technology as,

unable to rise from your sickbed, the very walls of your cell were transformed to depict the Mass to

which you could no longer rise and go: so a miracle, foreshadowed the new, helping technology –

pray and pray for us.

Many interconnected, incremental changes have made arise a vast, virtual space,

drawing on the richly beautiful works of all, old and new, and the ugly, empty places, of spreading,

malignant imaginations, giving it a platform as never before and still spreading.

Now, webs of inter-connection, now span the world: an electronic rope bridge between us or a net to

trap and entrap us into open pits?

Information, like rain, pours down upon us, watering so many good projects and places,

making available whole libraries and collections of articles, books, works of art,

communication across cultures, all within reach of a plug and a button, a cable or a signal, all of a sudden,

traversing continents, from village to city and city to homestead.

But, as the storms assemble, so a deluge now gushes across beautiful meadows, hills, and valleys,

but equally seething cesspits, rat-ridden alleyways and flushing the squalor of man-made creation into

the  waters we drink, not discriminating, incapable of judgement, seizing all and sweeping it on,

turning streets into tunnelling tempests of rubbish and entering, unfiltered, into our homes and our hearts.

And so arises a kind of technological charge, indiscriminately accusing, dressing up, distorting,

substituting false faces for gain or worse, to persecute, to pillory, to drive from the public place

all who would protest and seek to do good, to clean the rivers and drain off the sludge and sieve

what is worthwhile from what is destroying us.

So this creature, strident and unrestrained, even unrestrainable, roves overall, whether swamp or lake,

mixing up everything, unable to sortgood from ill, and towering, like an electrical storm,

above our cities and skies, threatening destruction and striking, randomly, with surges of power,

what is nothing more than plus and minus and many inputs.

We need grace, your gift Lord, like bedazzled beads of moisture across the networks,

to shine in the light of a new dawn: we must ask and even beg for the grace to carefully tread

this silky tightrope between worshipping our own work, impressive as it is,

and humanizing what otherwise seems likely to spread into our brains.

Oh Blessed Carlo Acutis, you filtered through to what was good and found mystery upon mystery

which you documented as the Eucharistic miracles which transcend our time and take us to

Christ in the way that He is present, both ancient and new, and made a kind of

Holy presence amidst the charging particles which know, like creation as a whole,

who is the Lord of all and more splendid still.

Blessed Carlo Acutis, we ask for your intercession: help us control the floodwaters coming forth

from every nook and cranny, casting vivid reflections of hallucinated and falsified realities,

under the glamour and shine of the water: Deepfake, fraud and scams, gash and cut, leaving wounds:

“deep scars in the hearts of those who suffer it”.

Mary, you need to ask your son for help, as we have made what is beyond us to control a

nd threatens our daily life with domestic floods.

Co-written and researched by Margaret and Francis Etheredge