All: this thread is a good case of what the HN guidelines mean when they say: "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
Religious flamewar about Catholicism (or any other religion of course) is a perfect example of a generic flamewar tangent, the thing we most want to avoid here. Such disputes are as tedious and repetitive as they are nasty and community-destroying. It's hard enough to hold this place together without any of that!
I've posted a dozen moderation replies to commenters who I saw doing this in the thread, regardless (of course) of which side they were on. I'm sure I missed some others, but the intention is to be as even handed about this as we can.
In the meantime, everybody, no more religious flamewar on HN please!
> We need to remember that scientific research and technological innovations are not disembodied and “neutral”, but subject to cultural influences. As fully human activities, the directions they take reflect choices conditioned by personal, social and cultural values in any given age. The same must be said of the results they produce: precisely as the fruit of specifically human ways of approaching the world around us, the latter always have an ethical dimension, closely linked to decisions made by those who design their experimentation and direct their production towards particular objectives.
I wish every AI hype guy yelling "luddite" at the top of their lungs whenever they encounter resistance could simply understand this utterly true point. People have become so confused by what is essentially just accumulated marketing, they don't even have a consistent or rational idea of what something like progress actually is, or perhaps at least, what it could be. SV ideology has created a culture existentially committed to what amounts to an empty signifier: "progress" becomes simply whatever the economic winners happened to do, something defined after the fact.
Everyone wants to believe history is simply climbing this one big mountain, and we simply need to keep up and go forward. But perhaps we are just in the ocean, holding on to whatever planks and buoys we can, hoping we can weather the storms we might see on the horizon.
I certainly didn't expect to read a treatise from the Pope about LLM hallucination today. I wonder who at the Vatican is keeping up with the latest AI advances and helping Francis stay on top of it?
This is actually a pretty balanced/nuanced take on the topic. It almost reads like an OpenAI blog post about alignment...
Artificial Intelligence / Artificial Life is a major area of interest to religions, since their business is defining and guiding life. Religion is the home to most modern day philosophical thinking and struggle.
It's been a hot topic in sermons all year.
> I wonder who at the Vatican is keeping up with the latest AI advances and helping Francis stay on top of it?
The Catholic church has many scientists in the ranks, and is responsible for a fair share of scientific discoveries.
The father of genetics was sworn to abstinence as a priest, and the Jesuits (the current pope's former order) have been particularly prolific in astronomy.
> I wonder who at the Vatican is keeping up with the latest AI advances and helping Francis stay on top of it
The Vatican directly charters universities across the globe. I imagine they have several experts on the topic who are working with them, and I imagine they also have clergy and religious knowledgeable in both catholic theology and mathematics, computer science, HPC and AI. Fun fact, the first american woman to earn a phd in computer science was a nun
>I hope that the foregoing reflection will encourage efforts to ensure that progress in developing forms of artificial intelligence will ultimately serve the cause of human fraternity and peace. It is not the responsibility of a few but of the entire human family.
Isn't it the responsibility of the one in christian speak, not even the few.
> To speak in the plural of “forms of intelligence” can help to emphasize above all the unbridgeable gap between such systems, however amazing and powerful, and the human person: in the end, they are merely “fragmentary”, in the sense that they can only imitate or reproduce certain functions of human intelligence. The use of the plural likewise brings out the fact that these devices greatly differ among themselves and that they should always be regarded as “socio-technical systems”.
That's true now and will probably be true for a few years -- but it seems we could soon have systems that are fully general agents, not just narrow tools. Those would raise some thorny theological questions. For example, will the following be still true?
> The unique human capacity for moral judgment and ethical decision-making is more than a complex collection of algorithms, and that capacity cannot be reduced too programming a machine, which as “intelligent” as it may be, remains a machine.
And what about even more advanced AGI, systems that are more intelligent than any human?
> Human intelligence is an expression of the dignity with which we have been endowed by the Creator, who made us in his own image and likeness (cf. Gen 1:26)
... says Francis and cites Genesis, but that leaves open the status of superhuman machine intelligence. If intelligence makes us similar to the Creator, doesn't this mean that superintelligence is even more similar to Him than us? In a word, will it be a sort of angel? (Or, if it doesn't behave ethically, a devil?)
Probably that is too far away and to speculative for him to comment about. But I would like to know what his advisors have to say on these questions, if anything.
The human capacity for moral judgement and ethical decision-making can't be reduced to programming a machine with a complex collection of algorithms only because it already is exactly that. Human cognition is embodied in a machine which implements the algorithm determined by its structure and the laws of physics.
Musk's statement that with AI we are "summoning the demon" will be ten years old this year so those tasked within the Vatican with studying such things have had ample time for careful consideration.
Most disturbing to me in this Papal message is the paragraph titled "Shall we turn swords into ploughshares?"
Anytime the phrase "grave concern" is used, whether diplomatically, ethically, morally, or otherwise, it generally means the event has happened, the decision was made, the behavior was expressed, or the news was delivered.
For Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems ("LAWS") to be specifically referenced means the Vatican probably has reports of its use in combat, albeit experimentally, and not just drones and remote piloting of UAVs.
This is probably the best thing I’ve read by a world leader on AI.
It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics. Catholicism is an institution implementing and developing a religious philosophy that has a profound love of humanity, creativity, and understanding.
> The inherent dignity of each human being and the fraternity that binds us together as members of the one human family must undergird the development of new technologies and serve as indisputable criteria for evaluating them before they are employed, so that digital progress can occur with due respect for justice and contribute to the cause of peace. Technological developments that do not lead to an improvement in the quality of life of all humanity, but on the contrary aggravate inequalities and conflicts, can never count as true progress. [8]
The entire thing is worth reading, but this particularly summarizes my feelings.
AI is good, but only insofar as it advances and centers the beauty of humanity.
I’m from Belgium, traditionally a catholic country, and from that POV pretty certain that the biggest issue is that the catholic church as an institution has a pretty bad historical rep (still going on today) of abuse of power, and covering up where they see fit. So might help if they clean house, change policies and find ways to amend the victims.
Just to say that I don’t agree that it’s always about misconceptions but more often about mistrust or not feeling accepted.
That said there have been signs of a more open environment and their ceremonial texts can often be an interesting read.
Many people forget (or never knew) that Catholicism / Christianity basically kickstarted modern science. A large misconception is that Christianity and Science can't coexist. When in reality they amplify each other.
One of my favourite stories is of George Lemaître who came up with the Big Bang theory, and predicted the Higgs Boson - while Steven Hawkins bet against it, and was proved wrong.
They didn't do very well by Giordano Bruno though who proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets and got burned at the stake.
I agree that it's good, but I was struck by how much of it could have been written in the 1970s about the coming revolution in databases. It's probably good to have a refresher!
it is amazing how all computers do could be done in paper, but not as fast
which means that computer technology since the 70s is really just "faster paper", faster by more then a single order of magnitue... but ultimately paper-equivalent to this day
maybe LLMs, once their computational characteristics are better understood, will finally move computing beyond paper so fast it can write on itself over 2,000,000,000 times per second
computer technology since the 70s is really just "faster paper"
Huh... "paper" is just storage, the whole point of "computer technology" is to have a tool to do computation not just storage. So no, computers are not just faster paper.
a mechanical mechanism which isn’t and wasn’t particularly universal and where the use of paper is incidental and often limiting. the point is that just making computation faster (what gp was talking about) is not why computers are everywhere.
> This is probably the best thing I’ve read by a world leader on AI.
> It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics. Catholicism is an institution implementing and developing a religious philosophy that has a profound love of humanity, creativity, and understanding.
Just because the Pope released this statement doesn't change how the Catholic church got its reputation, both good and bad. The magnitude of history of the Catholic Church up to the present defines its reputation far more than a single statement about AI.
That said, it's good that they are adding their humanistic perspective to the debate. They are not the only ones saying these things - but their members, from developing country farmers to Supreme Court justices - need to be informed and aware since AI will probably affect everyone. I think it would be negligent if they didn't.
everyone else thats been accused, indicted or convicted of pedophilia and child molestation were multifaceted people that contributed to society and had love and understanding for someone else
its not a misconception to focus on the totally cancellable, ostracizable, things that institution is known for
Your challenge (and everybody else's in this subthread) is showing that it is belief in the Catholic religion as such that brings these evils. I say it's human beings doing what human beings do; the fact that they're Catholic is incidental to the crimes.
Murder is the deliberate killing of an innocent person regardless of circumstances or perceived consequences. The Church has always condemned murder. Same for rape, theft, etc etc. So those arguing that Catholics qua Catholics, rather than human beings who happen to be Catholic, are responsible for these evil acts have a tough case to argue.
Edit: what's more, the atheist regimes of the 20th century shed orders of magnitude more blood than Catholics of the previous 19, and explicitly appealed to their ideology to justify their evil.
>what's more, the atheist regimes of the 20th century shed orders of magnitude more blood than Catholics of the previous 19, and explicitly appealed to their ideology to justify their evil.
That was just people who happened to be atheists, communists, and socialists. It isn't inherit to the ideology like it is with Catholicism /s.
You're going to have serious trouble showing me that the crimes of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot (a disciple of Sartre's existentialism), and other explicitly and deliberately atheist regimes, is incidental to their ideology. Even if I were to grant, for argument's sake, that their atheist beliefs were incidental to their crimes, it's pretty trivial to show that such beliefs present no obstacle to said crimes.
You will also have serious trouble showing me that the crimes of Catholics are not incidental to their ideology. On the contrary: Catholicism explicitly condemns murder, pillage, rape and all the rest of it, under any and all circumstances and for any and all motives.
Fair enough. I assume sarcasm is easier than presenting a coherent argument.
I've heard thousands of people attack the Church for rape, murder, theft, etc; but the moment you ask them to demonstrate that Catholicism as such is the cause of such crimes, rather than people who happen to be Catholics, they have nothing to say. Which isn't surprising, because their position is hopeless.
> It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics.
What are these misconceptions? Catholicism uses shame to induce conformity, has had numerous priests abuse children (and protecting the offenders), has a long history of violence against non-adherents, historically deeply homophobic, and so on. All of that is factual.
Edit: Oh! And now I remember, they killed and buried hundreds of children in Canada at their "schools" for indigenous people. Graves unmarked, families never knew what happened to the kids. But it's OK! Pope here said sorry, sort of, after being pressured, for decades. Also they found graves. Canadian govt. couldn't give a rats ass because the church is as powerful as governments.
No religious flamewar on HN please. I realize the parent more or less started it but it's quite against the HN guidelines to take the bait this vigorously.
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
A modest proposal: perhaps if you were to teach your userbase why their thinking is objectively incorrect the frequency of these spectacles would decrease over time.
I don't see why. Consider the enlightenment, the rise of science subordinating religion, the fact that humans who have attended school are smarter on average than those who have not, the theory that you scolding people for violating the rules improves behavior, etc.
It certainly isn't physically impossible, but I acknowledge that it may be metaphysically impossible.
Just because some people do bad things does not mean you get to paint the whole group with those crimes. Imagine if you had said, "Black people are criminals, because a black person robbed the liquor store down the street last week." We all (hopefully) recognize the deep racism in this statement!
Unfortunately, there are parts of the country where this type of racism is acceptable and even common. There as similar attitudes towards Catholics, due to America's history as a predominately protestant country. The formula is the same both way - pick a heinous crime from a few members, blame it on the group as a whole, and feel smug about yourself.
The rate of child sexual abuse among Catholic priests is lower than that of Protestant pastors, which in turn is even lower than that of public schoolteachers.
The issue is that the catholic church covered up the abuse, and in some cases even moved offending priests to other parishes where they continued to abuse children.
Yes; school districts and teachers unions do this as well sometimes. It's an institutional problem, and a difficult institutional problem to solve. Just about every institution that works with children has dealt with the same problem--this famously bankrupted the Boy Scouts of America, for instance. And statistically, the Catholic Church has done a better job than most institutions.
Is this globally? Is this just in your own experience?
In the case of Australia which had a five year long Royal Commission into Institutional Sexual Abuse of children that took in tens of thousands of interviews across schools and all religuous institutions the final report included:
Many children have been sexually abused in religious institutions in Australia.
Based on the information before us, the greatest number of alleged perpetrators and abused children were in Catholic institutions.
In many religious institutions, the power afforded to people in religious ministry and the misplaced trust of parents combined with aspects of the institutional culture, practices and attitudes to create risks for children.
Alleged perpetrators often continued to have access to children even when religious leaders knew they posed a danger.
We heard that alleged perpetrators were often transferred to other locations but they were rarely reported to police.
The Catholic Institutions in Australia with the worst behaviour were the Christian Brothers who operate globally and there was no evidence seen that as an international group dealing with the education of minors, most often orphaned minors, their behaviour in Australia was somehow better or worse than their behaviour elsewhere - they rotated bad priests in and out, dodged responsibility, and hands down "won" the prize for most children abused.
So what??? If my neighbour murdered children would that be mitigated by a serial killer in the next town over?
Do people really have this much cognitive dissonance that they lose the ability to think? Like how much delusion do you have to be under to even say the above and think it makes it better for Catholics.
Even one priest raping a child under the protection of the church is entirely unacceptable.
Nobody is saying it is acceptable. The problem is every time the Church is brought up somebody has to talk about the abuse/cover up regardless of the topic. It is completely irrelevant to this thread.
Nobody does this with public schools. If people always brought up the abuse and cover ups by teachers and unions regardless of the topic they would be down voted and told it is not relevant to the topic.
If people actually cared about making abuse and coverups known they would bring it up every thread schools are brought up. Instead they only do it with the Church. It is almost as if they just want to attack the Church and ignore it in their own preferred abusive institutions.
>I still don't get what the problem is. What does the asymmetric treatment between schools and church abuse have to do with the facts?
Nothing.
>So you are saying I don't actually care about the abuse coverups? You think I have another agenda? You have a sick mind
I don't know what you believe. I think if somebody is willing to randomly (completely unrelated to to the topic) bring up abuse by the Church in every thread, but is not willing to do the same thing for schools it shows they have a bias.
I have no issue accepting that abuse has happened in the Church and it is despicable. My issue is nobody seems to care about the much larger abuse problem in schools.
>It's not that, at all. Shame on you for trying to reframe it as such.
Please explain the asymmetric treatment if it is not because people on HN in general don't like the Church, while they do like public schools.
You should read the comments. The top comment I am replying to specifically opens the door on this stuff. They challenged that people have "misconceptions", I am showing how those concepts that are held about the church are actually very real and substantiated.
> Please explain the asymmetric treatment if it is not because people on HN in general don't like the Church, while they do like public schools.
When you find a post on HN that talks about public schools maybe this topic will open up there too, and you can have your day there.
> people on HN in general don't like the Church
I don't like psychopaths either, and for good reason. I don't like the Church because of what it has enabled, the lies, the hypocrisy, and so on. You are trying to frame it as HN folks have a hard on for going after the church for no good reason. Well, lots of reasons have been listed once the OP basically said "there is no good reason to object to the church, it's all misconceptions. Lol.
> My issue is nobody seems to care about the much larger abuse problem in schools.
This isn't true. You just happened to come to a comment section that is talking specifically about the church and you are mad because it's not talking about what you want to talk about. Why not go post a tech story about schools, and then find someone challenging misconceptions about schools.
These comments aren't trying to nefariously undermine the problem in schools, that's just you being frustrated, or whatever is motivating you to get mad.
Please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar, regardless of which religious group you have a problem with. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
> So what if it's not unique to Catholicism? I was asking specifically what the misconceptions are. You've redirected.
As someone who left Catholicism for Wicca and then eventually gave up on religion in general, I think it's valid to point out that these flaws are not unique to Catholicism.
I would say that in pointing at all those things it has done wrong, you are implicitly saying that that these traits are unusual — but we're all a bunch of monkeys, it's really hard to get us to be nice to each other, and it's really easy for Machiavellian sadists to rise to power in every institution.
> I think it's valid to point out that these flaws are not unique to Catholicism.
In what way? Does pointing it out change the facts? Why can't we have a discussion about how Catholicism is objectively hypocritical and not have to discuss all of the other things that are wrong in the world?
In the specific way I wrote in the very next sentence.
You're welcome to point out the flaws and hypocrisies all you like, though I know from my experience as an angry bisexual Wiccan teenager that had to go to a Catholic school and study the bible as part of my education, that it does little good unless you have the goal of looking pompous — especially when the very line you were quoting was
> It makes me immensely sad that people have so many misconceptions about Catholics.
rather than
> It makes me immensely sad that people don't realise Catholics are uniquely perfect.
The former does not imply perfection, nor even an absence of hypocrisy.
Correct. Organizations besides the Catholic church also get criticized for that kind of behaviour. (To various degrees, due to public awareness, religious or media or political or national or personal bias, or the fact that nobody outside the West Nowhere Parish in Nowhere cares about a regional, 800-member church scandal.)
The Catholic church is a big organization. As in any big organization, there are aspects of it that are good, aspects of it that are OK, and aspects of it that are utterly, irredeemably rotten. And it's up to the church to figure out how to navigate that complexity.
Given how hard it's been fighting accountability in this space, even very recently, I can't say they are doing a great job of navigating it, but that's just my opinion.
That may be a bit strong. What can be said is that a lot of the initial media outrage regarding the residential schools in the last few years were based on possible gravesites, discovered using ground-penetrating radar. However, multiple excavations have so far been unable to confirm those gravesites at the scales predicted, some of them even turned out to contain no human remains at all [0]. That does not excuse anything, but I find it troubling how many fairly strong claims are made in this thread with zero citations/evidence to back them up.
Over 3k children buried with little to no documentation, families not informed, kids never returned to their loved one.
I don't think what I have said is strong at all. The reports are eyeopening, the level of care afforded to these kids is abysmal. The Church stood in the way of providing documentation for families to find their kids. Basically buried them and forgot where.
The fact we can't find these children is the "strong" complaint I have. You are suggesting that because we can't find over 3000 children.
The discoveries of unmarked graves began to make international headlines in May 2021, starting with the detection of 215 potential graves at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. This was followed by several other significant findings, including over 600 potential graves at the Marieval Indian Residential School site in Saskatchewan and 182 at the former St. Eugene's Mission School in British Columbia, among others.
All of that sounds like a very strong motivation to feel the way I do. I should not have to explain how this mistreatment is all racially motivated, too.
Lots of evidence of abhorrent mistreatment, over 3k lost children in hundreds of potential burial sites and you have the bravado to say "no one has been found" as if that means nothing is to be found.
People downplaying this stuff makes me want to vomit.
The article linked does not support the thrust of your comment.
"In total there are presently 4,126 children within the national student memorial register.[15] Research efforts by the NCTR are ongoing, and this number will increase over time."
There are clearly more gravesites than we currently know about. The scale of this atrocity is beyond what was predicted.
I was referring specifically to the media coverage in 2021 and later that presented fairly large numbers (in the hundreds) of possible graves. However, per the article, none of them have been confirmed yet and a number of them even debunked.
I am not denying that there are large gravesites or that terrible things happened at those schools.
Is this[0] something you are questioning as being real news? Those are actual found bodies, 600 graves is significant amount of bodies that families never got to find out about. You know, people are alive today that have direct connection to those kids. It's not something that happened so long ago that it's just a tragedy of the past. People should be held accountable.
Oh so you were referring specifically to one of dozens of these schools "Kamloops" . Because there are undoubtedly several hundred of these graves with well over a hundred already confirmed.
Take a look a little further down the page and you can see a list with the numbers of suspected and confirmed graves per school clearly laid out. The first three examples already put the number at over a hundred.
I dont know where you imagine all those 4,126 children went when they died if not into unmarked graves?
You're sort of singling out Catholicism though. Islam does all those things much much worse than Catholicism ever has - in the present day too! I'm not Catholic and I don't care to defend them. Still, I don't want them singled out when Islam is demonstrably worse in every way.
But the Bible is clearer on this than all Christian orgs.
Life starts at first breath according to Genesis 2:7.
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being.”
And numbers 5 that has a recipe for a potion that will allegedly identify an adulterous woman and cause her to abort.
“27And when he hath made her to drink the water, then it shall come to pass, that, if she be defiled, and have done trespass against her husband, that the water that causeth the curse shall enter into her, and become bitter, and her belly shall swell, and her thigh shall rot: and the woman shall be a curse among her people. 28And if the woman be not defiled, but be clean; then she shall be free, and shall conceive seed.“
Sed contra ruah (breath) meaning that people are not of concern to God before they take their first breath - "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you" (Jeremiah 1:5). So even if people were not people before they were born, God cares about them before they are people. But then we have "Who am I that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" (Luke 1:43), said to a pregnant Mary by St. Elizabeth. If Christ is fully man and Mary is already "the mother of God" when she holds Christ in her womb then people are people before they are born. So we must be misunderstanding something about what Genesis 2:7 means.
As for drinking dirty water from the floor of the temple (literally, sweep up some dust and put it in a cup with water - not an abortifacient) - the trial is asking God to reveal the truth or falsity of the woman's claim that she is virtuous (much in the same way as asking someone to take an oath in court - the bad outcome in both cases is falling under the judgement of God and receiving in some measure justice for the offense of blaspheming by asking God to witness to your lie before men).
We have to ban accounts that keep doing these things despite our requests to stop. I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Please don't respond to bad comments by breaking the site guidelines yourself—it only makes everything worse—and please don't take HN threads further into religious flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Is Catholicism still relevant once we create a new AI god to rule over us and it kills the old god? Could Catholics utilize their expertise in worshipping omnipotent deities to appease Roko's Basilisk?
A few things that aren't in the common blog post about AI:
On account of revealed truth, he knows that the machine cannot be anything more than a machine:
> Our world is too vast, varied and complex ever to be fully known and categorized. The human mind can never exhaust its richness, even with the aid of the most advanced algorithms. Such algorithms do not offer guaranteed predictions of the future, but only statistical approximations. Not everything can be predicted, not everything can be calculated; in the end, “realities are greater than ideas”. [9] No matter how prodigious our calculating power may be, there will always be an inaccessible residue that evades any attempt at quantification.
What the machine does is bound by the same rules of morality as human beings, but it can't act in a moral fashion so it's up to us to ensure that we do:
> “Intelligent” machines may perform the tasks assigned to them with ever greater efficiency, but the purpose and the meaning of their operations will continue to be determined or enabled by human beings possessed of their own universe of values. There is a risk that the criteria behind certain decisions will become less clear, responsibility for those decisions concealed, and producers enabled to evade their obligation to act for the benefit of the community.
> ...
> At times too, forms of artificial intelligence seem capable of influencing individuals’ decisions by operating through pre-determined options associated with stimuli and dissuasions, or by operating through a system of regulating people’s choices based on information design. These forms of manipulation or social control require careful attention and oversight, and imply a clear legal responsibility on the part of their producers, their deployers, and government authorities. [emphasis mine]
And the kicker - intelligence is not free will (even if the two are severable the machine will never have the latter):
> The unique human capacity for moral judgment and ethical decision-making is more than a complex collection of algorithms, and that capacity cannot be reduced to programming a machine, which as “intelligent” as it may be, remains a machine.
----
[9] Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (24 November 2013), 233.
I'd expect them to have used AI in the broadest sense of the word, one that includes spell checkers and autocomplete. But, for the same reason AI assists but has not fully replaced us software developers, I think it's not likely to have done more than that — LLMs are one example of AI that's great when you're lacking some skill, it "raises the waterline" so to say, but when you're the best in the business you see all of the flaws in its output.
Because that's how political messaging is usually curated. I see no reason to expect the Pope to be different. The idea of him finding time to sit down at his desk, doing all that research, finding citations, have time to understand all the technical neauance, etc. etc. sounds totally unreasonable for a person whose time is split in so many directions.
I'm not sure I'm convinced. Why do you think (of all places) the Vatican's press office has taken up using LLMs so quickly? And why wouldn't they mention it (in an official message from the Pope, no less)?
I wouldn't be surprised because an LLM is a viable shortcut to get shit done. Why would the Pope's press office not use one? You think they are too honest, too benevolent to do that? Why?
Religious flamewar about Catholicism (or any other religion of course) is a perfect example of a generic flamewar tangent, the thing we most want to avoid here. Such disputes are as tedious and repetitive as they are nasty and community-destroying. It's hard enough to hold this place together without any of that!
I've posted a dozen moderation replies to commenters who I saw doing this in the thread, regardless (of course) of which side they were on. I'm sure I missed some others, but the intention is to be as even handed about this as we can.
In the meantime, everybody, no more religious flamewar on HN please!