SPEAKER_02 0:07

Welcome to Catholic in America, a podcast in partnership with OSB News. I'm Jason Atkins. More and more we're having to wrestle with questions of what does it mean to be human, especially in the wake of stories about the creators of artificial intelligence and chatbots speculating and trying to convince presidents and popes and others to recognize the potential consciousness of Claude and other chatbots, other artificial intelligence tools. What does it mean to be human? What defines a human? What makes us a human? Who is a human being? Who is not a human being? What of what does a human being consist? Hope Leo has a response in his important encyclical Magnifica humanitas, especially speaking about what makes humans wonderful and magnificent is precisely in sometimes in our limitations and respecting those limitations, respecting the way in which God has created us and gifted us with a particular type of nature and a particular type of creation ordered toward communion with him, communion with others, is really what makes humanity magnificent. We don't necessarily need to augment our humanity with every possible tool that comes down the pike, including artificial intelligence, as it were. We are in danger, he says, of building a potential Tower of Babylon, or as an Augustinian Pope might say, building the city of man, not the city of God, a city ordered toward love of self, not toward ordered toward the love of God and other creatures. Providentially, one scholar at the Catholic University of America who's written a lot and taught in the area of Christian anthropology has come up with a useful and accessible guide. And it's called a Catholic Guide to Being Human. In that book, Dr. John Grobowski talks about what it means from the first breath of Genesis to our final hope of heaven. What does it really mean to be human? And along that path, every bit in between. How do we approach questions of tools, the right use of them and the wrong use of them? Biotechnology, for example. Is a person any less a person simply because he or she has disability, because we're not independent? What do these questions mean? How do we understand the human person? He even explores the fact that the person itself is a theological term, uh, surprisingly, and wrought with significance for how we understand ourselves. In this book, he has really done an effective job of making some of the most difficult questions about who we are as human beings very accessible. Delighted to have Dr. Grabowski on the show. He is currently a professor of moral theology and ethics at the Catholic University of America, where he has taught for over 30 years. John Grabowski has served three terms as a theological advisor to the USCCB. He and his wife Claire were appointed to the Pontifical Council for the Family by Pope Benedict in the fall of 2009, where they served as a member couple. 2015, he was appointed by Pope Francis to serve as an expert at the Synod of Bishops on the family. He has written or co-authored eight books and many scholarly and popular articles in the areas of moral theology, marriage, sexuality, and bioethics. Besides a Catholic Guide to Being Human, his recent books include A Catechism for Family Life, One Body and Unraveling Gender, and he and his wife, Claire, live in the DC area and have five children and 17 grandchildren. Dr. John Grobowski from Catholic University of America, welcome to Catholic in America, a podcast in partnership with OSV News. Glad to have you on the program.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Thank you for having me, Jason. It's great to be here.

SPEAKER_02 3:40

Now, the title of your very fine new book, A Catholic Guide to Being Human, might sound surprising to some folks. The obvious question might be: don't we know what it means to be human? What confusion or need led you to spend time writing this book?

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Well, uh kind of the practical or approximate thing is our Sunday visitor actually approached me and asked me to write a book on um Christian anthropology for uh people in the pew for ordinary Catholics. Um so that was kind of the spark. Um and we went back and forth on a couple of titles. A few of mine got shot down, I'm sorry to say, but they proposed a Catholic guide to being human, and I thought, yeah, that works. Um, but I think we, as Pope Leo reminded us with his first encyclical, we need to think more about what it is to be human, our dignity, because frankly, there's a lot of evidence to say we don't really know what it is to be human. We don't treat each other in very human ways, our technology alienates our us from one another more and more, um, on all kinds of levels. So, yeah, we we need to we need to lean into um our humanity and rediscover what it really is and why did God make us in the first place? And what does God want for us and our humanity?

SPEAKER_02 5:10

This book came out in a timely way. It coincides with the release of Pope Leo's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, uh, and similar themes. How do your how does your book and the how do your book and the encyclical uh kind of pair up or complement each other? And I think they really do.

SPEAKER_00 5:27

Well, I I I like to think that too, and I'm grateful to the Holy Father for you know tie timing his encyclical just to better coincide. No, he didn't do that. Um, but I mean I think it's it's there it's responding to what we see going on in the world around us. Um 60 years ago at the Second Vatican Council, the the the bishops of the church talked about in the pastoral constitution on the church, Gaudi Metzpez, our our technology is getting more and more powerful. Our science can explain so much of the mysteries of the universe to us, and yet at the same time, we become more and more confused about who we are, what it is to be a human being, what it is to be a person. And so we we really do need to be reminded. And that same document also said if we really want to understand who we are, we have to look to Christ, because it's only in him that we fully understand ourselves and God's plan for us. Apart from him, we can, you know, our reason can tell us true things and good things, but we don't get the full picture.

SPEAKER_02 6:39

Now, some people might say, well, how how can I understand myself through Jesus? I mean, he was God, he worked miracles, he walked on water, he was sinless. So how how do I understand? What does that mean that uh, as you argue, that we can't fully understand ourselves without God's self-revelation in Christ? How how am I similar to or how can I even relate to uh Jesus to understand my own personhood?

SPEAKER_00 7:04

Yeah. Um well gee, Jesus is he's a divine person, but the church tells us he's a divine person into nature. So he has a full human nature, he had a human body that was capable of suffering and death. He had human emotions, he had a human intellect and a human will. And so Jesus shows us, in a sense, what God wanted for us from the beginning, God's design that we kind of messed up with uh turning away from God, the fall of our first parents in the garden. So Jesus gives us, uh He simultaneously reveals the Father to us, but he also reveals us to ourselves because we in him and in his mother, we see what human beings, human life was created to be in communion with God, in communion with others.

SPEAKER_02 8:06

Could we say that one way of relating to Christ uh is through his witness of love and sacrifice, that he shows us what it means to become, as John Paul II said, a true gift of self, and that's the very nature of who we are created to be.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

Absolutely. Um, and again, John Paul II often went back. You're referencing another text in that same council document, um, two sections later in Gaudi Met Spez. Um, man, the only creature of the visible world whom God created for his own sake, can only realize or fulfill himself through a sincere gift of self. That's what we see in Christ. He offers himself as a gift for our salvation and out of love for us and for the Father. Um, so yeah, again, he he shows us our vocation as human beings, because that's also how we're fulfilled, perfected, made happy and whole.

SPEAKER_02 9:03

And in some way, being in relation, and we say God is love, and we know that God is love, and what what better way could we imitate our Lord uh in communion with the Father than becoming love ourselves? And counterintuitively, even though that can be built on sacrifice and indeed suffering, that's actually the path to happiness, as Gaudium and Spez and John Paul II were often uh often said.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

I absolutely absolutely. I again, unfortunately, the reason why that path to happiness often entails suffering is because we're fallen beings in a fallen world. And so learning how to love is painful. It involves a lot of death to self on our part. Um, C. S. Lewis brings this point out beautifully in the problem of pain. Um, it's not that God created us to suffer, but once we misused our free will, in being capable of what God created us for, that is love and gift to one another, it now we experience that as painful. Um, but as John Paul tells us, one of the things Christ did in suffering for us is he actually redeemed suffering itself so that our very suffering can be a means to our transformation and fulfillment in love. Um and again, that's that is very counterintuitive, and that's very not what we tend, not the way we tend to think or our culture tends to think, because we flee suffering.

SPEAKER_02 10:33

Um I like to say that who we are defines what we do, and I'm sure I stole that from someone. I can't remember who, but I think I think it's really true. Who we are defines what we do. If we un if we embrace this idea of who we are, this radical vision of who we are, how would it change the way in which Americans generally and American Catholics in particular live their live their daily lives in this modern consumeristic environment?

SPEAKER_00 11:02

Understanding who we are in the sense of we're created by God, we're created to be in a relationship to God and to one another. We're fallen, and therefore we are have all these, we have darkened minds, weakened wills, disordered passions. Uh, it's so it's much harder for us to do that. But nonetheless, in Christ, we're offered the new life of grace that heals, perfects, elevates us so that we become capable, although with with with struggle, with suffering and over time of actually living God's design, God's plan for us, and we're created for for eternity. Every human being has an eternal destiny. Um, and that has huge implications for the way we live, the way we think about our bodies. Um and it causes us as Christians to think about well, my body, you know, I want to, I want to live forever. Transhumanists think about that in one way, Christians think about that in a very different way, right? Because no, no, no, no. It's not I'm going to upload my my memories into a database or have my brain cryo-preserved and transplanted, but no, this body has an eternal destiny. This body is going to be raised, glorified. And so just understanding that big picture of who we are as created, fallen, redeemed, and called to the life of grace and its perfection in heaven, that really changes the game in terms of how we think about ourselves, how we think about other people, because they have the same dignity and the same destiny we do. And so, therefore, we've we're supposed to treat them that way. And we often don't. We often, as John Paul II, and even before he became Pope, Carol Boitiwa said, our problem is we tend to use people rather than love people. Um, and for for Carol Boitiwa, the real enemy of love is not hate, it's use. When we use, we demean the other person. And we demean ourselves because we're denying our own human dignity and treating others that way. So, yeah, it ununderstanding the big picture really is a game changer.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

No, you one is cut to the heart when one thinks about the way in which we instrumentalize and use other people in our society. And you uh point out in the book that we that spills over into how we think about others, particularly those uh with disability. Um, you challenge the idea that a person's worth depends on their abilities, independence, or productivity. Where do you see this type of thinking most clearly in our culture today?

SPEAKER_00 13:59

Oh boy, uh I think it really shows up in the way we treat and think about the unborn, right? Because the unborn can get dismissed simply as an inconvenience, a nuisance, an unwanted mouth to feed whatever, whatever it is, right? Because they're not living independently and being productive. It shows up in the way we think about the elderly and the handicapped and the comatose, right? Because while they're not productive members of society, therefore, what value do they have? So we we've adopted a functional view of what it is to be a human person. And it's that's a completely faulty view, and yet that's that's what we are, and we can define function in different ways. Um, intellectual output, economic output, um, whatever you know uh benchmark we want to use. We functionalize uh humanity, human dignity. And therefore, once again, we get ourselves really wrong when we do that. And we and it leads to, you know, a lot of the horrors we see in the culture around us in terms of abortion on demand and euthanasia and um neglect of people who are handicapped, elderly, or comatose.

SPEAKER_02 15:24

You spend uh a lot of time in the book making the distinction between who we are and what we are, that we're also not just who's, but we're also what's. We have a nature. What as we've already discussed, what we are not is cogs in an economic wheel. What we are not is to be instrumentalized or used by other people. What we are not is to be judged by our limitations. Well, what are we? What's the what is the distinction between who we are and what we are?

SPEAKER_00 15:52

So again, um, that's a distinction that applies specifically to uh persons, right? And the world of persons. So, but that's not just the interesting thing, of course, is that's not just us. Um, it uh we we have a nature as human humans, a common human nature, but each of us possesses that human nature as a unique, unrepeatable, irreducibly different self-aware subject, what we call a person. But angels are also what's and who's. They have a nature, an angelic nature. They don't have bodies or they're not material the way we are, they have intellects like we do, but so they're spiritual beings, and so they too are persons. And then God is the ultimate um uh one to whom those terms really apply in the fullest and most real sense. God is three persons in one nature. Um, as my I had my teaching assistant in class the other day give a guest lecture, he's a Dominican, and he leaning into this distinction said, God is one what in three whos, right? Because there is there is a common nature, and each of the divine persons is completely fully God, equal in majesty, equal in omnipotence and power, and yet it irreducible to one another because of these mutual relations of love and origin that enable us to distinguish them. So again, this is something that makes us that being persons and not just things is what makes us kind of like angels and more remotely kind of like God and differentiates us from the rest of creatures, because other creatures are just what's, they're not who's. Um, they have value, they're good. God made them, right? And we we we are called to use them wisely and what and treat them wisely and well and in a human manner, um, you know, with our own humanity and the uh uh coloring the way we treat them, but they don't they're they don't rise to the level of being persons. So this is why some of the fathers of the church, John Paul II, said man is a microcosm. Because we kind of we're kind of like the the the the fulcrum, the the meeting point of these different realities in the universe. We are both material like the rest of creation, and we're spiritual like angels in God. So again, that's part of our unique dignity.

SPEAKER_02 18:41

I think one interesting aspect of that, of course, uh, between human beings and the lower creatures, if you will, is that we we've lost a bit of the distinction between the two. We talk about um, you know, fur parents and cat parents and dog parents and dog grandchildren and all these things. And sometimes we think that secularization means that people just don't go to church anymore, but it really means we've lost a sense of the distinction, the rightful distinctions between creatures and creator and the creation, uh losing a sense of the creator altogether. And you dwell a lot on this idea of person and relate a fascinating story from the creation of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights when the Soviet delegation objected to the use of person as a theological term. And so share, share more about the way in which sometimes terms we take for granted or don't even think are theological in nature, like person, really have significant import to how we understand ourselves and operate in our culture.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Yeah. Um, I think it was at the meeting that took place in Washington, D. D.C. at Dumbarton Oaks, but there were there were early drafts of what became the charter for the United Nations and the Declaration. Um, and some of those early drafts contained the word person. And as you say, the Soviet delegation said, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's a theological term. We we don't subscribe to that term. And the representatives of the Western, allegedly Christian nations all scratched their heads and said, What do you mean it's theological? This is an everyday term. We all use this term person. What are you talking about? But it turns out the Marxists are the ones who knew the history and they knew what that where that word came from and where it meant, because in the ancient world, there was not a concept of person. Even the Old Testament doesn't contain a word or a concept that's equivalent to what we know as person. Now, there are indicators of what we would call personal uniqueness, like a name, a face, um, different things of that nature, but nothing that would correspond to this. Um, and likewise, secular Greek philosophy, Roman philosophy, um, the words they would use, prosapam persona, those typically, the typical meaning of that was a mask that an actor would wear in a stage production, right? Or maybe the actor's role in the play, um, or maybe the per uh that could get extrapolated to a role in life, but not this idea of a unique someone who exists in relation to others, that started to take root when some of the fathers of the church began to read the Old Testament and say, well, when is it in this in these texts of the Old Testament, when is God the Father the speaker? When is God the Son the Speaker? And when is God the Holy Spirit the speaker? And so they started to, and they when they use this, they weren't just like talking about grammatical person. No, these are re realities. So earlier. Early Christian theologians started to use person as denoting that which was three in God, and nature as denoting that which was one. And the thing that distinguished the divine persons one from the other were their relations of origin. The Father begets and isn't begotten. The Son is begotten by the Father from all eternity in an act of love. The Holy Spirit, I'm going to speak like a Latin Christian here, is breathed forth by the Father and the Son, right, as the bond, the gift of their mutual love. So that's how we can know these divine persons as distinct. But that's where the term came from. And then it was also simultaneously applied to the person of Jesus Christ, because he is a divine person, the person of God the Son, who becomes incarnate and takes on a human nature. So the Marxists were reading the history right, because that's where the concept of person entered into not just Western thought, but the thought of human culture around the globe. It's a Christian contribution to uh our intellectual history, this idea of being a person, a unique someone who exists in relation to others.

SPEAKER_02 23:22

Say a little bit about the application, that next step from person as a theological term to describe the relations in the Trinity to mere mortals being described as persons. How tell us a little bit about the genealogy of that development?

SPEAKER_00 23:36

Sure, sure. Well, I again once once this theology emerged and was kind of enshrined in some of the early councils, Nicaea, uh, Constantinople, Chalcedon in the early church, then philosophers began to take it up. So you have philosophers like Boethius. What is a person? He defines it as an individual substance of a rational nature. So we are an existent being, but who has this spiritual power of rationality. So focusing more on our kind of intellectual cognitive powers, but the idea of relation is still there in Boethius, it's there in Aquinas, it's there in St. Augustine, right? So it's that that's that's kind of a thread. Um, and we I 20th century scholars, uh Joseph Ratzinger, for example, who uh we you know we also know as Pope Benedict XVI pointed out some at times during the history, we kind of focused more on the sub the rational substance and lost sight of human beings as existing in relation. But uh this is where where we started in this conversation, kind of comes this comes back around full circle, because if we're created for and fulfilled for the sincere gift of self, then what fulfills us as human beings is to take the relations that are constitutive of who we are as a creature of God and actualize that in a relationship of love and entering into the life of grace and relating to God as a son to a father or a daughter to a father, right? And likewise on the human level. Our relations to our parents and our siblings and others are givens, right? I'm I'm always the son of this particular man and this particular woman, and that affects me historically, socially, genetically, on all these different levels. But my task is to take those relations and turn them into relationships of love and self-gift, right? Because you can have, and sadly it does happen in our world, you have people who have no relationship to their parents. They haven't spoken in 20 years. Are they still in relation to their parents? Is are they still the son or daughter of that man and woman? Of course they are, right? So that as human beings, relationality is written, it's in our very existence as persons, but then it's what we're ordered to for our fulfillment, to take those relations and make them the basis of entering into communion with others, entering into relationships of love.

SPEAKER_02 26:28

What's so fascinating, of course, is that we Americans, and this podcast is called Catholic in America for a reason, uh, because we're trying to cultivate discipleship in this corner of the vineyard in our age today. But we we tend to think of ourselves, it's our mental architecture, it's the ambient culture as radical individualism. We celebrate radical individual individualism in our culture and our movies and our art. And it it seems that we've lost the sense of what we owe to each other. We talk about rights, and rights are not perceived as responsibilities. We have the right because we have the duty. Um they're perceived as immunities, uh, lacking responsibility, lacking munarar, moonis, uh to use the Catholic social teaching uh term. So you see that, and you you talked about the the concept of children cutting themselves off from their parents, for example. We see people uh who propose uh assisted suicide in euthanasia without recognizing they have duties and responsibilities to other people, even if they're in a chronic state of illness. Um mothers uh cutting off their relationship with their unborn children in the context of abortion, and but then just more generally social atomization. And then you think to yourself, well, the evil one is the great divider. What is how does he win? Is when he divides us from one another and creates a state of really division and conflict between peoples. And so you start scratching your head and thinking, oh my goodness, we have a lot of work to do as a culture and in society when you think of it in that context.

SPEAKER_00 28:05

To be sure, to be sure. And I I mean, I think one of the particular challenges of our day is um the some of the uh some of the new deceptions that are out there in the culture that the evil one is able to exploit and use, right? Our communication technology, our phones, our screens, which have the promise and offer the you know, offer the the the promise of being able to connect us to each other and and deepen human connection and communication, when in fact they often have the opposite effect. Because when you relate to people through a screen, you lose something of the human-to-human connection, right? This is something we all discovered during the pandemic, right? We were we might have been able to still teach or work or do certain things through screens, but it was not the same as being able to uh actually interact with real flesh and blood people. And certainly, you know, to be able to, it's not the same to watch mass on a screen as it is to be able to go and enter into the liturgy and take part. Um it's it's a poor substitute. But so, so we we have these devices that seem like, oh, this is this is a great thing because it's going to enable us to build communion and communication. But in fact, they often drive us apart and people get lost in virtual worlds and virtual reality and then start to think, well, hey, you know, maybe if I just like I can change my avatar on a screen, if I don't like the display I'm showing through my body, well, I can change my display. I can change, you know, I can change my appearance because my body is just a screen anyway for this deeper identity. And so it feeds into people seeking um, you know, to remake themselves through gender transitioning procedures, for example.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

You uh offer us a vision of our whatness as embodied souls called the communion. How do you think this vision is an antidote to the uh deterministic biological or purely individualistic worldviews that are offered as alternatives today?

SPEAKER_00 30:29

I mean we we uh we have yeah, we we have a nature as human beings um that uh we we should pay attention to because if we act contrary to our nature and contrary to the way God created us and designed us to pursue fulfillment, we wound and frustrate ourselves on a deep level. Um and so and part of our nature is as you say, we are composites of body and soul, we are not identities trapped within a body, we are not thinking uh uh thinking uh entities trapped in matter, and but neither are we just coterminous with our bodies, such that if something happens to our body or when our body dies, we cease, we cease to exist, or our energy is reabsorbed into the universe. That the biblical vision of what it is to be human is much it is much richer than that, right? We're we're made in Genesis 2, we're made out of the clay of the ground, and yet God breathes into us his own breath, his the Nishma Haim, the breath of life. And so we don't just share life, which we do with other animals, right? Because in the Old Testament, other animals are said to be living souls, but they do not have this divine breath, the breath of life breathed into them. So again, we're back to we are microcosms because we are material and spiritual. We we're we have an earthly origin and an eternal destiny in the presence of God. And so we have to hold all of that together. And when we hold that together, we can more easily see through the cultural counterfeits that are all around us with some of those ideologies.

SPEAKER_02 32:35

Let's talk about the reality of embodiment. And I think sometimes even Catholics, we overlook that as something like we we possess a body, we are not a body. Um, what's the distinction there and and how does it shape how we might treat our bodies? I mean, I think just in terms of being stewards of our bodies, uh decorating our bodies, even tattoos are more prevalent uh among Catholics than they used to be. Jews still in large by and large don't uh have tattoos, but Catholics by and large are Catholics are more and more embracing it, for example. So, how do we think about our bodies as as integral to our personhood and not simply something we possess or something that is like a meatlocker uh for our souls?

SPEAKER_00 33:20

Yeah. I I mean, again, to say that we are hylomorphic unity of body and soul is to say that we are embodied persons, right? We are not souls wearing bodies for a period and then we throw them away and discard them. Our bodies are an integral part of who we are. The catechism actually says our bodies participate in the image of God. It's not just our souls. We tend to think about, oh, the soul's the image of God, the body is, you know, that's that's that's material or animal or something else. That's not the that's not the church's vision. Our bodies, our our soul in animating our bodies, um, the whole of our body participates in our personal reality, value, dignity, which is why, I mean, that that has all kinds of implications, right? Because this is why the church says, well, you shouldn't mutilate. I mean, tattoos are another thing, but you shouldn't mutilate your body, especially healthy body, in order to change your appearance so you look like the other sex. That's actually mutilation. You're doing harm to your body, which is a gift from God, and it's an integral part of who you are, right? So sometimes we do need to undergo medical procedures that cut us or um, you know, even remove part of our body, and we can do that for the for the good of our overall health and well-being, but not in order so that we're changing the display setting on our bodies, because Saint Paul is emphatic in 1 Corinthians 6, telling the Corinthians, your bodies have an eternal destiny. So what you do with your body matters. You can't just take your body and say, Well, I can I can go and visit a temple prostitute at the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth. And apparently in Paul's day, there were like 3,000 temple prostitutes at that temple. Um, I can't do this and then say, Well, it doesn't matter, it's just my body, you know. At St. Paul's, no, no, no. Your body is how you were washed and joined to Christ in baptism. Your body, when you become give yourself sexually to another person, you become one flesh with them, right? That's Genesis 2.24 that um our Lord quotes in repeatedly in the Gospels, right? Um, a man leaves his father and mother and is joined to his wife, and they become one flesh. So, yeah, we can't trivialize our bodies in terms of how we treat them or what we do with them in terms of how we relate to others, how we give ourselves sexually, because when we do that, we're not just um, we're not just using our bodies for a um a recreational purpose, uh, to pursue a momentary pleasure. We are wounding our bodies and souls, which have this eternal destiny and which have this incredible dignity um in God's eyes.

SPEAKER_02 36:32

Well, we not only commune spiritually with our Lord, but we also commune physically with him in actual communion, like bodily communion. He gives us his body in the Eucharist. Um, you mentioned marriage as uh the you the one flesh union of man and a woman, um, as sealing a covenant, the covenant of marriage, but also uh you you spend a lot of time in your book, rightfully so, talking about um our role in terms of our relation to creation. So, how do we relate bodily to the rest of creation, uh, especially as in that vision is laid out in the book of Genesis?

SPEAKER_00 37:09

Yeah, yeah. So uh Genesis in describing um uh let's go to the first account of creation. So Genesis one and the first couple of verses of chapter two, which, as we all know, is structured according to seven days, right? And so there's this kind of progressive ordering of creation from God separating light and darkness, land and sea, earth and sky, and then God decorating his creation, putting stars and lights in the sky, creating vegetation on the earth, fish, birds, animals, and then as kind of the apex of the physical create, the visible creation, human beings. Um and it's interesting the way Genesis describes this, right? We're created on the sixth day with the beasts, with the other animals, right? But we're created on the sixth day to for two the uh the things Genesis highlights in terms of describing the image of God in us are two fundamental realities. One, we share in God's royal authority, have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, all the creatures of the earth, right? So image the fact that we image God doesn't mean we resemble him or look like him. It means God entrusts us as stewards with some of his authority to govern creation, to use it well for his purposes. Um, but at the same time, we are priests, right? So we're we're created last in creation so that all of creation can return to its creator in grateful praise through us, because only we can give voice to the praise that all creation would be shouting at the top of its lungs if it had lungs and if it could shout, right? Um, and you know, the psalms talk about this. The heavens declare the glory of God. Um, Jesus says in the in the gospels to the Pharisees, you know, these stones would shout if I tell this crowd to stop yelling Hosanna. So, right, so we are priests, we have the unique privilege of giving God the praise which He's due as creator, not because He needs it, because again, that gift of self in loving worship is what fulfills us. That's how the image of God is perfected in us. But conversely, when we fail to do that, we revert to our origin, we become like the beasts with whom we're made. There's a fascinating story in Daniel 4 about King Nebuchadnezzar, the great Babylonian king who conquered Jerusalem, burned the temple, carried off most of the population to exile. Nebuchadnezzar's out looking at his kingdom, and he's like, Oh, I'm a really amazing, powerful guy. Look at all this wealth and all these armies, and I did all of this.

SPEAKER_02 40:11

I've got a burning fiery furnace, too.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

Exactly. And he gets a little tap on the shoulder, and uh God says to him, Oh no, you're not, buddy. Um, and so you can learn this, you're gonna lose your mind for seven years. Notice that number seven, seven, the day of the Sabbath, the day dedicated to the worship of God. And Nebuchadnezzar has a psychotic break, the most powerful man on the earth goes off and he lives with the beasts out in the field. And he becomes bestial in his appearance. His hair grows like the mane of a lion, and his uh nails grow like the talons of a bird. He becomes bestial. And at the end of those seven years, God returns to him, restores his senses, and Nebuchadnezzar blesses and acknowledges God and says, Everything I have has come from God. He learned, right? But that's that's the teaching of the book of Genesis, right? When we image God fully, when we are responsible stewards of the creation he's made for us, and when we lead creation in its song of praise, its song of worship to its creator.

SPEAKER_02 41:20

So that has tremendous implications for how we interact with those of the opposite sex, obviously, in marriage, but also our work, um, ordering our work uh as stewardship and properly uh relating to the material reality of creation, not just the animals, but to how we use creation effectively too. This is a deep reaching vision.

SPEAKER_00 41:43

Absolutely. And just to comment on the two things that you've pointed to there, um Genesis itself kind of ties together um you know our our being in relation as male and female with our our the call we're given to have dominion, because Genesis 1.28, God blesses the man and the woman and says, be fertile, multiply, fill the earth, subdue it, right? So one of the ways we exercise dominion rightly in creation is by receiving the gift of new life made in God's image and likeness and welcoming that into creation and forming that as parents to children. So that's a great blessing and a great responsibility that God's entrusted to us. Um, but then work, as you say, um, John Paul II points out that work, work is not just about doing things for someone else so someone else can make money and oh yes, they can pay me something. Work is actually part of our vocation as human beings because in Genesis 2, God places the man in the garden to what? To till and to keep it. Work predates the fall, right? Everyone goes to Genesis 3, uh, you know, the ground is going to yield uh thorns and thistles to your efforts to work it and get food from it. But that's the disorder that we've unleashed into creation and to work by sin. But work is something that's necessary for our dignity, and work is not just the objective reality of doing X in exchange for Y. Work, John Paul II, has a subjective value. It perfects us as persons, right? Because we develop our learning how to work, learning the value of work as adults, and then adults passing this on to children is that again, this is part of how we are fulfilled and perfected as human beings, is because we don't just earn a living through our work, we form ourselves through our work. So it's important. Important that the work that we do is good work, that it has value, that it contributes to the common good, and not simply personal enrichment.

SPEAKER_02 44:12

I think two of Pope Francis's encyclical la datos see. First of all, you know, praise for the creation and worship as a fundamental act of who we are, um, even in relation to that which has been created by the creator, but given to us and not just the beauty of the material world, but also our bodies, as Pope Francis talks about in that encyclical, and any of you mentioned, and being stewards of creation, respecting them as gifts, respecting the limitations of those things and rightly ordering them in line with who we are and how we're supposed to responsibly use those gifts. So that's really a beautiful meditation about who we are that really impacts what we do in the context of our work and family life, et cetera. I I want to dwell a little bit more on this idea of creation. Um Christian civil we we live in the um, one might say the embers of Christian civilization on some level, sadly. Um but uh other worldviews, other political systems, other cultures, cultural societies, other societies have built their vision of government, of the human person around other states of nature. And certainly we can talk about the Garden of Eden as a state of nature. But we then we we read about Thomas Hobbes and the the state of nature and John Locke. Uh where we're either at war, we're all at war, and we construct societies to create peace uh among people, the absence of conflict, or we're all transactional human beings trying to protect our property, as John Locke said, or um society where the we're the state of nature, the noble savage, but then society comes and ruins our freedom, as Ruizau said, or we're maximizing utility, uh, to quote Jeremy Bentham, or we're all pursuing our rational self-interest. So we have all these state of nature origin stories that have shaped especially American society. I mean, no one disputes that we have a Lockean stream in our founding and in our our ambient political culture. But what what is what's the what difference does this make about how we build our vision of the human person, who the human person is, and then our relation or lack of relation to one another?

SPEAKER_00 46:25

Oh, it it makes a huge amount of difference because I mean again, if we accept something, we'll start something like a Hobbesian state of nature, right? Well, for Hobbes, in that state of nature, we have unlimited rights, including the right to each other's bodies, right, to use as we see fit, to to destroy as we see fit. But that's intolerable. We can't live like that. So we sacrifice our freedom and give it to this uh Leviathan, this totalitarian state, there, therefore, we have no rights. We have no real claim against the state. We are we are part of this collectivist whole and modern totalitarianisms of various kinds, you know, owe a lot to Hobbes and are, you know, their own, they have their own take on a Hobbesian state of nature. But then we have Locke's, you know, more attenuated individualism, but it's as you say, individualism nonetheless. Um and that too, it's it's fundamentally at odds with the church's vision, because again, the church's vision of a healthy, flourishing society is built on its vision of who we are as human persons. We are not created to be little isolated monads who negotiate with each other, Locke, um, use one another, Bentham, right? Um, we are we're we're created to enter into relationships with one another that foster the common good, the good of all, not right, but the common good can never be pursued at the expense of the dignity, value, purpose of the individual. The yeah, I'll use the modern term because the church has used it cautiously over the last century or so, but the the rights of the individual can never be trampled in the name of a collectivist good, um, which is why the church has remained critical in different ways of both collectivist socialism in its various manifestations, Marxist and otherwise, but unfettered, unrestrained capitalism, right? Which says the individual is just a cog within the four the forces of market economics, and you know, some people profit and some are kind of trampled underfoot, and that's the way it goes. Um instead, the church, no, no, no, we are all members of a society, and we are all tasked to try to build and pursue the common good. We are in uh we we have this responsibility um we to to um practice solidarity in promoting the common good, and that's a duty each one of us has. Um, but at the same time, the church insists on subsidiarity, right? So that if if in fact, as we know is the case, families can better raise children, well, then the state shouldn't usurp that and take over child raising because um subsidiarity says the smallest, most local entity that can effectively do something is where that thing ought to be done. So raising children is the business of families, not the state. Um so the church's vision, I think, cuts across these modern states of nature, these modern ideologies, and reminds us of what we're getting wrong in the way in our political life and institutions can also point us toward maybe what we're getting right and could do but could do more of.

SPEAKER_02 50:21

Yeah, indeed, along those lines, one one thinks of the COVID lockdowns as being a perfectly natural outcome of a society built on individuals without a conception of relational goods and government designed to protect either our property, and in this case, property and our bodies, as Locke would say, or protect us from harming one another and to embrace a more Hobbesian viewpoint of things. In that sense, the COVID lockdowns were perfectly natural, but what they sacrificed was uh a sense of the relational goods and uh civic life, social association, and all sorts of other things, too. Now it's a lot more complex, one can argue, that these are these lockdowns were built around solidarity and the common good and those sorts of things. But I think it's interesting that these political ideas that seem abstract really have very, very practical consequences. Absolutely. In terms of how we relate to one another and the very basics of life.

SPEAKER_00 51:16

And if you look at the data in terms of what did the lockdowns do in terms of the impact on children who were deprived a couple of years of education and are set back by that, the impact on marriage and the spike in divorces and addictions to alcohol and pornography that took root during the lockdown. There's no way you cannot look at the data and say, oh, yeah, that was a good thing to do. Let's do more of that. Because it was it was a social experiment, the results of which seem to be abject failure. Um, but it's a failure because we don't understand who we are. And we don't, as you say, don't understand the relational goods that are intrinsic to who we are as human beings.

SPEAKER_02 52:04

I want to spend our limited remaining time to talk to return to Magnifica Humanitas and the timeliness, the providential timeliness of the encyclical in your book coming out at the same time. Tell us about, you know, what in one view you could say that AI is uh artificial intelligence is a superpowered Google. It's obviously a lot more than that. Um Pope Fran or Pope Leo goes as far as to say we're in danger of creating a Tower of Babel. How do human beings use tools properly? Um, what's where do we draw lines of distinction? What's the what's the proper line between augmenting um our human faculties to make things more efficient and then giving ourselves over to a tool in a way that undermines who we are as human beings uh or our relationships with one another?

SPEAKER_00 52:52

Yeah, no, that's a that is a great question. Um, and it's really kind of one of the questions of the hour. Um so sure, AI, as Pope Leo has said um in the encyclical and prior to it, AI can be a useful tool. It can be useful to compile large amounts of data that would take a human being or a group of human beings far, far longer to compile and sort through that could get us to faster potential medical cures for certain conditions and disease. That's a great use of a tool like that. But AI to um automate what um processes and functions that are done by human beings and human workers with lives and with families that depend on those jobs, and to replace those human workers because AI is cheaper and you don't have to pay it a salary and retirement benefits, that's a bad use of a tool because now you are using this tool to supplant, to replace human beings. Likewise, uming AI-powered uh weapon systems with no human operator or agency involved, right? We're just gonna have autonomous weapon systems that go off under certain conditions. That's a terrible use of this kind of tool, right? So when AI replaces the human, it's problematic. When AI augments human endeavors to know, to understand, to uh pursue genuine goods, curing disease, acquiring knowledge, uh scientific experiments of certain kinds, that that can be useful. So, I mean, that's one side of it. But then the problem is because we're so deeply confused about what it is to be human, which is why the Holy Fathers encyclical, as you say, was absolutely providential. We have because we are we're we're losing our sense of our own humanity and our own relationality, then people say, well, you know, it's easier to talk to an AI chatbot than a human being. So I'm not gonna date, I'm just gonna have a chat bot as my emotional and romantic to meet my emotional and romantic needs, or worse still, my sexual needs. I'll have this bot, right? So that's that's where you really see kind of this badly going off the rails, because the the very fact that people are asking, can AI be a person? Right? The very fact that we have that question means that we are very, very deeply confused about who we are.

SPEAKER_02 55:52

What's the if you wanted listeners to take one thing away from your book, one theme, or to stick with them and to change to change how they operate in the world, what would that be?

SPEAKER_00 56:06

And so I think um that's a great question. I I don't know, I haven't prioritized, but I think one one thing that comes to mind immediately would be to find ways to lean into real human connection and relationships, right? To lean into and not rely on apps and screens and technology, but person to person, real human connection with friends, with coworkers, with family, with spouse, right? Let's we need to in this age when our humanity is under threat and we are in danger of forgetting, we need to embrace, right? And this also refers to, I think, and I say this, they say confession is good for the soul. So I will, I mean, I do use online apps in my own prayer life. I use the iBravery. It's a great way to pray the office and parts of it. We use it as a family as well. So, I mean, you again, useful tool, but the eye brevery cannot be the whole of my prayer life, right? I need, I need to be going to mass with other people and worshiping God alongside of them. I need to be having a prayer time, uh, praying on my own and relating to God and speaking to God. Those are the things that keep us anchored in who we are as human beings and who God calls us to be.

SPEAKER_02 57:38

Well, what a beautiful way to end our conversation. This is a really important book that I'd commend to our listeners. Dr. Grobowski, thank you for joining us on Catholic in America, helping us to rediscover anew our true humanity, our true identity in Christ. I'm grateful for your work and all you do for the church and at Catholic University. Thank you so much for joining us on Catholic in America.

SPEAKER_00 58:01

Thank you, Jason.

SPEAKER_02 58:04

Who we are defines what we do. I think sometimes we overlook the importance that the stories that we tell about ourselves, particularly in the realm of politics and who the human person is, shape our societies. One need only think about the implications of a philosophy, a certain philosophy of the state of nature, those proposed by secular theories and theorists such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the way in which those shape our imagination, they shape our understandings of ourselves, and they therefore have an impact on shaping society. But what if we went to the actual true origin story, the real state of nature and the Garden of Eden? How would that change how we look? One thing we didn't get into with Dr. Grabowski is the reality of that second garden in scripture, the garden of Gethsemane, and the tomb in the garden, all these garden imageries and the way in which our resurrected bodies and the hope of the resurrection also should change our outlook and shape who we are and what we do. But starting with the right principles and a right understanding of what it means to be human has so many downstream consequences of who we are, how we behave, how we understand our politics, how we relate to one another on so many important questions, including how we relate to new tools and uh proposed forms of consciousness, such as artificial intelligence. We know that's not can't be real consciousness, just simulated consciousness. But these are questions that folks without a faith horizon often struggle with. So as Catholics, we can be good messengers of the reality of what it means to be human in all its glory. And indeed, Dr. Grabowski in this fine book presents us with the glory of our humanity created as a gift to be received and stewarded and not to be manipulated as well. I'm really grateful to him for this conversation and for the time he took to unpack this for us. And certainly we only scratched the surface on the topic, which is why you should go out and grab the book published by our partners at our Sunday Visitor. Thank you for joining us on this episode of Catholic in America. I hope you found this conversation edifying and engaging. We look forward to another great episode coming up, and I'll look forward to joining you then. Until then, know of my prayers for you and your families, and God bless you. This is Jason Atkins.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:26

This OSV podcast production is in partnership with OSV News. Visit OSVnews dot com to learn more.