Catholic Dads, AI, and the most important virtue for Shepherds.
One of my twin three-year-olds said something to me last week about Jesus that made me reach for Claude before I'd even finished hearing it. I caught myself. Put the phone down. Sat down on the floor next to him. Kids never cease to amaze me.
If you're a Catholic father who has reached for AI for any reason — random exegesis, a Bible verse, an answer to a child's question you weren't ready for — you've probably had the same half-second instinct and not known what to do with it. The risk isn't that AI is dangerous. The risk is quieter: that you've already handed the formation role to a chat window in a dozen small moments you don't remember making, and the horse (and carriage) is heading somewhere you didn't pick. This post is framed from Aquinas for getting back into the drivers' seat.
The question Catholic dads aren't asking about AI
The two stated takes go like this. AI is fine — it's a tool, use it well. Or: AI is dangerous — keep it away from your formation life. Each has a strongest form. The utilitarian take is right that the tool isn't intrinsically evil and that fearing it is its own kind of negligence - very Aquinian... The defensive take is right that some uses corrode the very faculty that prayer needs. There's a quieter reality here, it's that most of us already handed the tool the reins and didn't notice.
Fatherhood as formation isn't a tool problem. It's a virtue problem. Aquinas would not ask should I use this? He'd ask what virtue is at stake — and who's currently exercising it?
The charioteer — what Aquinas calls prudentia
The Catholic tradition calls prudence — prudentia, the practical wisdom to discern what to do here, now, with these particular people — the auriga virtutum, the charioteer of the virtues. Thomas Aquinas builds his treatment of prudence around exactly this directive function: he calls prudence the genetrix virtutum, the mother of the moral virtues, because none of the others know where to go without it (Summa Theologiae II-II, q.47, a.6 ad 3). Every other virtue is a horse. Prudence steers. Without it, fortitude turns to recklessness, generosity to indulgence, devotion to performance. The point Aquinas keeps making across questions 47–56 is that prudence is not a feeling and not a rule. It's a habit of right reason about contingent things — the things that change, the things that come up at 6 PM on a Tuesday when one of your sons asks you what a soul is.
That's the picture from a high seat. It is not the picture from 2026.
The honest 2026 picture is that AI is often the horse and the driver. We've quietly slid into the carriage. Someone else is choosing the route — the prayer we copy-paste, the saint we cite, the answer to our son's question, the route through the moral knot at 9:15 PM. We were not asked. We did not refuse. We simply stopped climbing onto the box.
The work of prudentia, then, is not a pre-emptive defence against something that might happen. It's a recovery from somewhere we already are. It's getting back onto the seat we were given.
What does Aquinas mean by prudentia?
Prudence, for Aquinas, is right reason applied to action — the virtue that perceives the true good in a particular situation and chooses the means to it (ST II-II, q.47, a.2). It's distinct from speculative wisdom (knowing what is true) and from cleverness (knowing how to achieve any goal). It's the leader's virtue: the one anyone responsible for governing a household, a parish, a country must develop.
What your leadership is FOR — pietas
Prudence tells you how to climb back onto the box. Pietas — the virtue of due devotion to family, country, and ultimately to God (ST II-II, q.101) — tells you what for. Aquinas treats pietas as a part of justice. It's the recognition that the people you were given — your wife, your sons, your parents — have a claim on you that no efficiency tool can satisfy on your behalf. Pietas is why you wake up at 2 AM with a sick child even though you can't fix anything. It's the substance under the form of fatherhood. AI changes the means available to you. Pietas decides the direction those means are aimed.
There's a reason the Catholic tradition has always reached for Mary as the icon of pietas perfected. Her fiat — let it be done unto me — is not the surrender of agency. It's agency at its most ordered: a will so completely devoted to God that the means and the end coincide. A household that wants its leadership shaped toward God needs that model visible. Not as decoration. As compass.
Is using AI to help with prayer or family formation okay?
The honest answer is: prudently used, with pietas keeping the direction, yes. Use AI to surface a saint's life you didn't know. To find the catechism paragraph on a question your son just asked. To draft a family blessing for Friday night that you'll then read in your own voice. The disorder isn't reaching for the tool. The disorder is letting the tool take the reins, then forgetting you were ever meant to drive.
My son says he was with Jesus
A few days after we came back from a wedding, one of my twin three-year-olds looked up from the floor and said, I didn't go to your wedding Dadda, I was with Jesus. The way he said it stopped the room. He wasn't reporting an absence. He was reporting a location.
My first instinct was shock and surreal curiosity if it was his insight or someone had told him that. I sat down on the floor. I said, That's right, mate. He knew you before you were born. He went back to his cars. He didn't need me to verify what he already knew.
The AI I almost reached for would have given me a paragraph on Origen and the immediate creation of the soul at conception. It would not have given my son a father who could just receive what he'd said. Pietas in our house — the rosary on the wall, the prayers before meals, the way both boys watch what I look at — got there before either of us did. AI didn't put that sentence in his mouth. The household did. The tool would only have got between me and what was already happening.
One Tuesday move — climbing back onto the box
Pick one. This week, when you reach for AI for something that touches your family's formation — an answer to a child's question, a prayer, an interpretation of a difficult passage, a parenting decision at 9 PM — pause for a count of three before you type. In those three seconds, ask yourself: am I the one who should be answering this? If yes, answer it yourself, badly if you have to. If genuinely no, use the tool — but read the source it surfaces with your own eyes before reading the AI's summary.
The pause is the prudentia. The choice is yours. The point isn't never using the tool. The point is being the one who chose to use it — not the one who slid into the back of the carriage and let the tool drive while you watched the scenery go by.
I haven't figured all of this out. We're still working out what AI in our house should look like. Some weeks it's a help. Some weeks I notice I've been driven somewhere I didn't choose. We hold the line on one thing — the answers I give my sons about God come out of my mouth first, and only then do I check whether I got them right.
Full of Grace — Mary canvas. Mary's fiat is pietas in its perfected form. A household that wants its leadership shaped toward God needs the model visible above the place the household actually gathers. View the Full of Grace canvas →
What the Magisterium and Aquinas have said about technology in the family
Pope Francis's Antiqua et Nova (2025) — the Vatican's first major doctrinal note on AI — names parents in §5 as among those "entrusted with transmitting the faith" who are called to engage this question seriously. It treats the limits of AI at §30, and at §110 it states the principle directly: families are one of the levels where the use of AI must be evaluated "to ensure that AI is used for the good of all." The Catechism is just as clear: parents are the primary educators of their children in the faith (CCC §§2221–2229), and that responsibility is not something a tool can take over. Aquinas's whole treatment of prudence and pietas assumes a household where the head exercises both — and where the means available, whatever they are, are subordinated to the formation the children are owed.
The Catholic dad sitting on the couch at 9:15 PM with the kids finally down and the phone in his hand has a small choice to make. Not whether to use the tool. Whether to climb back onto the box. Prudence is the charioteer. Pietas is the road. AI is a horse — useful, fast, sometimes the right one to ride. But you were given the reins. And the carriage is going somewhere whether you drive or not.
— Harvey 🐑
Wear the cause
The same Mary who reframed Friday night in our house — Behold the Handmaid — on a sweatshirt made after bedtime by a solo Catholic dad. Every dollar of profit goes to Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery and St. Joseph's Seminary, Xuan Loc Diocese, where Dominicans and seminarians are being formed for the work the rest of us can't do. Shop Behold the Handmaid →
Sources & further reading
- Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, qq.47–56 — on prudence (New Advent)
- Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q.101 — on pietas (New Advent)
- Pope Francis, Antiqua et Nova (2025), §§13, 24, 30, 110 — on technology and human formation (Vatican.va)
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§2221–2229 — parents as primary educators (Vatican.va)
- Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics (1995) — a Thomistic reading of the virtues in modern life
- Edward Feser, Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (2009) — accessible entry to the virtue framework
Made after bedtime by a solo Catholic dad. 99 Sheep Co. designs are reverent modern apparel and canvas art, with every dollar of profit going to Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery and St. Joseph's Seminary, Xuan Loc Diocese, Vietnam. Want a free saints colouring pack for Sunday afternoons? Join our newsletter