Bishop Conley calls AI revolution ‘massive opportunity’ to reclaim medicine’s vocation

Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, told Catholic health care professionals that the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) presents “a massive opportunity” for Catholic medicine to reintroduce the art of caring for another person, in a homily Sept. 10 at the opening Mass of the Catholic Medical Association’s 95th annual education conference in Phoenix. 

“We must be absolutely clear: the vocation of one called to health care is totally at odds with the idea that doctors are vendors, providing a service to the twin idols of algorithmic efficiency and profit margins,” Conley said in remarks recently published by the Lincoln diocese. “He or she is practicing an ancient profession and art, directed toward objective natural and supernatural ends.” 

Therein lies “the massive opportunity for Catholic health care hidden inside the AI revolution,” Conley said, urging the medical providers present to bring their love for Christ to their patients. He exhorted the physicians, “this is our time,” a time for dethroning an efficiency-at-all-costs mentality and placing “the radical love of Christ, the Divine Physician, at the center of our profession.”

Conley encouraged the attendees to recognize that Catholic medicine can make a sizable impact because it has advantages, including one in six hospital beds in the U.S. being is in a Catholic facility, the bishops’ recently approving updated Ethical and Religious Directives for health care facilities, and the substantial Catholic medical education system already in place, with new faithful medical and nursing schools being launched. 

In a critique of the current medical system, Conley, who serves as the association’s national episcopal advisor, said a “technocratic paradigm” has made metrics, algorithms, efficiency, and profit margins into idols that risk driving out “the focus on another person.” The Lincoln bishop gave the example of a physician who sees 70 patients a day, eight minutes at a time, as the outcome of the current model, which he labeled a “structure of sin” that AI-automation will not improve. 

He cited Dr. Kristin Collier of the University of Michigan Medical School, whom he said told a Benedictine College audience that decades of change in health care have amounted to the “justification of a retreat from the patient as a person, every step of the way.” According to Conley, the Michigan medical professor sees the trend of depersonalization showing up in a medical professional’s career: as a trainee they are someone who “cares for people with diabetes,” a fellow “sees diabetics,” and an attending physician says, “I manage diabetes.”

The bishop tied the current moment in the medical field to Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which warns against technology that puts efficiency and automation ahead of the human person. Conley pointed to the Pope’s warning against a “false realism” that dictates that people must keep building a Tower of Babel because everyone else is. Instead, he urged the assembled medical professionals to help Pope Leo in restoring Catholic health care’s focus on Christ and the person in need.