World Children’s Day : A culture of safeguarding and ‘chatbots’

Jun 07, 2024

By Sr Nuala Kenny, OC, MD
Pope Francis’ first World Children’s Day in Rome May 25-26 hopes to deepen the Church’s commitment to protect the young from harm and promote their human flourishing with its theme, Behold, I make all things new (Rev 21:5). He encourages 6-12 year-olds to be “united to Jesus” as just and compassionate disciples and reminds us that in their trust, wonder, and inquiry, children teach all Christians what it is to be open to God. As links in a chain from past to future, he calls children to listen to the stories of parents and grandparents and to remember all children who suffer illness, hunger, homelessness, violence, and crime.

We are all called to listen deeply to the unique experience of these children who have normalised the experience of the pandemic. In December 2021, the Pontifical Academy for Life recognised the pandemic explosion of physical and sexual abuse and mental health issues for young people. It exacerbated the lack of accessible, affordable health care, protective services, and preventive care. It revealed systemic issues of poverty, racism, sexism, exploitation, and social marginalisation, with higher illness and death rates among the most socially disadvantaged. Public health advisories to “shelter in place” at home assumed one had a home and that it was safe. The stark reality is that 100 million homeless families are displaced by war, poverty, persecution, and natural disasters.

Future of the Church
Infants, toddlers, and preschool children were required to wear masks and received no reassurance from smiles as they interacted with other masked faces. Quarantine increased the time young people, including many North American children before the age of two, spent on addictive screen technology.

As a Religious and paediatrician, I am deeply concerned about the physical, emotional, and spiritual consequences of the pandemic, as well as the trauma, secularisation, economic instability, and global violence for these young children who are the future of the Church. An explosion of research in developmental traumatology on the profound, life-long psychiatric and psychobiological effects of overwhelming stress during the crucial periods of growth and development from infancy to early adulthood confirms my fears.

Quarantine and social distancing also disrupted family, sacred, and cultural rituals, which are essential for children’s sense of identity, security, and moral development. The virtual Mass lost the incarnational encounter, with no link to a real worshiping community. School closures meant the loss of educational achievements and support, including food programmes, nursing, and counselling services.

Valuing of children and childhood
In response, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors proposed universal guidelines to develop a new culture of safeguarding youth: formal Church structures, leadership commitment and accountability, care, and outreach to victims and their families, education into the harms of abuse, and effective prevention. A culture’s valuing of children and childhood is essential. Many cultures and families have provided children with love, care, and protection. However, a “dark side” is revealed in ongoing experiences of neglect, sexual abuse and exploitation, human trafficking, military recruitment, and child labour. These stand in sharp contrast to the Pope’s claim that children are a “source of joy…for our human family and the Church.”

Over 50 years ago, Karl Rahner identified the unsurpassable value of childhood, which touches on God’s absolute divinity specially, and called for a theology of childhood. We need this now, more than ever, to fulfil our promises to these little children.

The Synod recognised that our first formation in faith takes place in the family. Parents pass down beliefs and educate their children as moral agents; they are the “first responders” to trauma.

At every Mass, Catholics hear “the greatest story ever told,” which reveals the depth of God’s love for us in the Paschal Mystery and salvation history. Today, these are among many competing, contradictory, dazzling interactive stories offered to screen-addicted youth, creating unprecedented challenges and opportunities for catechesis.

We need to live our belief in the perfection of charity; the essential dignity of all persons made in the image and likeness of God; accept vulnerability as essential to humanity; and salvific suffering.

All new technology brings new moral issues. The Church reflected specifically on artificial intelligence (AI) in the then Pontifical Council for Culture’s symposium The Challenge of Artificial Intelligence for Human Society and the Idea of a Person in October 2021. We need to understand its power and perils, especially for our technology-dependent young.

Chatbots
AI has produced a staggeringly rapid erosion of the boundary between carbon-evolved and silicon-designed life, raising questions of meaning. For proponents, it is not about enhancing human function but replacing humans with perfect machines. We need to live our belief in the perfection of charity, the essential dignity of all persons made in the image and likeness of God, accept vulnerability as essential to humanity, and salvific suffering.

AI can be used for pastoral reasons. “Chatbots” can rapidly respond to queries about Church teaching or theological and moral questions from many sources, adapting to our time and place. This can open us up to new or confirmed biases and prejudices.

Jesus demands we “let the little children come to me…” (Mk 10:13) We need to teach them, who are so loved by Christ, to be brave in this new world; promote an incarnational personal encounter in a welcoming community of friends; and discernment through the power of the Holy Spirit of its power for truth and goodness or deceit and harm. -- LCI (https:// international.la-croix.com/)

Nuala Kenny, a Sister of Charity based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is also a paediatrician. An officer of the Order of Canada since 1999, she has authored several books, with her latest publication being “A Post-Pandemic Church: Prophetic Possibilities” (Novalis and Twenty-Third Publications, 2021).