Holy Cross AI Philosophy
AI and Our Mission
At the Academy of the Holy Cross, we are committed to developing women of courage, compassion, and scholarship who responsibly embrace the social, spiritual, and intellectual challenges of the world. Our students should lack nothing in their education so that they may flourish in their individual vocations and may be active in supporting a flourishing humanity.
Pope Leo XIV describes education as “a long journey requiring patience,” one that needs time for growth and to engage in reality deeper than appearances (Magnifica Humanitas 140). Education especially cultivates those intellectual powers that make the student most human: her memory, synthetic reasoning, and critical thinking, as well as those virtuous habits that cultivate and sustain excellence: her executive function, her ability to listen, read, and work with patience while resisting distraction and fatigue, and her evaluative judgment to revise or restart her work, if necessary, until it is excellent.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is actively reshaping the world our students currently navigate and the world they will inherit. We believe that education in this new technology is both necessary for our mission and advantageous for our community, just as Pope Leo calls for schools to “engage positively with new technologies, helping students to use them responsibly, critically and creatively, rather than passively succumbing to their influence” (MH 146).
The qualification is salient, as “technology is never neutral” (MH 9), and “every technology shapes those who use it” (MH 140). AI’s speed–itself a virtue–can create a culture of easy, instant results at odds with the time necessary for growth and the effort necessary to seek the truth (MH 139). Good AI education must therefore be discerning: “Educating people about the use of AI, then, involves teaching them to decide when and for what purpose it ought not to be used” (MH 140).
Basil Moreau, the founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross, provides a model in navigating these challenges. He embarked on his mission of education while facing profound social crisis, educational upheaval, and technological advance in the wake of the French Revolution. And he resolved that “we do not want our students to be ignorant of anything they should know…No one needs fear that we shall confine our teaching within narrow and unscientific boundaries. No, we wish to accept science without prejudice and in a manner adapted to the needs of our times” (Circular Letter 36). We therefore adapt his courageous optimism as our own, and commit ourselves to a technological education that “addresses every dimension of the person” (MH 145).