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Parents and their children are being encouraged to stay rooted in the faith during the summer months by taking part in the 30 Days to an Intentional Catholic Summer program from Spirit Juice Kids.

Spirit Juice Kids is best known for its YouTube Channel, Juice Box, where it creates faith-based content for children, specifically targeting 3- to 6-year-olds.

With the mission to "make kids fall in love with Jesus," the team at Spirit Juice was inspired to create a simple program that could be implemented into a family's daily routine and foster intentional time spent with God.

The free version of the summer program includes a daily reflection, a simple prayer, a family activity, and a Juice Box video.

The theme for the program is focused on the domestic life of Jesus — which include topics such as holiness in ordinary days, trusting God in uncertainty, obedience, and hiddenness, and building a domestic church.

If families want to dive deeper, they can sign up for the paid version where they will receive daily reflection videos with Father Tim Anastos, the chaplain at the University of Illinois-Chicago and spiritual director for Spirit Juice Studios, and Julia Jacks, director at Spirit Juice Studios, as well as activity sheets — in addition to the items included in the free version.

"We wanted to create something really simple that could be implemented into every day because the work that parents do at home, the work that we do here in the cleaning and the taking care of kids is holy, sacred work," Jacks told EWTN News in an interview. "And it's not that we have to go out and find Jesus somewhere else or we need to go somewhere to have God with us. He is right here in this moment. We just have to be more intentional about it."

Jacks explained that the theme was chosen because those hidden years can be seen as the time that "forms Jesus' life — he was holy from the beginning but he continued being formed in that domestic holy life, the type of life that we're all leading at home, too."

She added that the activities in the challenge are "little, simple activities that you can do as you're putting the dishes away from breakfast or as you're folding up a basket of laundry, and it's supposed to fit naturally into your day — whether it may be bedtime or bath time."

"So it's not meant to do more. It's not meant to add more to your plate. It's meant to naturally integrate into your everyday life and just find God where you are and in what you're doing," Jacks said.

While the 30-day challenge officially launches June 8, participants can begin anytime. It can also be completed at their own pace.

"We're trying to help parents not necessarily be perfect but strive for consistency and participation," Jacks said.

The mother of three shared that there's great importance behind parents taking part in these faith-based activities with their children.

"Our kids really look to us for their faith formation. It could be hard for them to maybe conceptualize exactly who God is, who Jesus is, and they look to us to guide them," she explained.

"I can tell you my boys, they repeat everything I do and say to a fault sometimes. So what a great opportunity for us to have them mimic our faith habits, our prayers, reading our Scripture, being grateful, things like that, and they'll learn that through mimicking us, through learning from us," Jacks added.

She said she hopes families who participate in the summer challenge will "build small, meaningful rhythms of faith during a season — particularly with the summer faith challenge — that could otherwise be a little bit challenging."

"We're just hoping to inspire parents and families to participate in these daily rhythms that hopefully they could take on into the school year, into the fall and winter and spring months," she said. "So, it's not meant just to be 30 days and done; it's supposed to help put you on a track of thinking and participating in your faith every single day in small meaningful ways."

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Educators are weighing the benefits and drawbacks of artificial intelligence (AI) and exploring how to successfully integrate the technology into the classroom.

As Pope Leo XIV laid out in Magnifica Humanitas, AI must be used in a way that furthers human development, especially in the formational years of education.

Educators are using AI tools to help them grade papers and offer extensive research capabilities, but they are simultaneously noting the need for community and connections that no technology can provide.

Fernanda Psihas, a professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, said the technology tools have not replaced human instructors and human connection is still the key to success in the classroom.

Concerned about the ethical use of AI, Psihas said it is necessary to preserve the "human element" to enhance the future of education.

"We obviously need to prepare the students for a world with AI," she told EWTN News. "That means learning tools, but that also means practicing proper discernment."

The data science and physics professor said it would be "dangerous" for teachers to keep teaching as if nothing had changed.

"If instructors are not AI-literate, then classrooms are going to run the risk of drifting into having students faking competence and avoiding the actual learning," she said.

Taking a "values-first approach" to AI, Psihas said she tries to keep herself and her students accountable when it comes to its use.

"Use it to increase efficiency so you can focus on the learning, but if you do any more than that, you're actually destroying the learning process," she said.

Protecting academic integrity

Aware that "cognitive offloading" to AI tools could disrupt the learning process of students, Psihas said certain AI tools can be useful to protect academic integrity.

"I even use AI to AI-proof my own assignments," she said. "I'll run my assignments through AI to see an example of an AI response … if something in my classroom is AI-generated, my students know about it, and I kind of expect the same for my students."

While AI helps Psihas accurately grade multiple-choice tests and produce datasets, she said it cannot replace her ability to engage with students through mentorship.

"Education is a lot more than just skills and information-transfer, but it's actually the formation of the whole person," she said. "There's guidance. You guide and nurture the students' curiosity and their skills."

It "is about turning knowledge into wisdom and turning skills into virtue and character," she said.

Similarly, Notre Dame Law School professor and Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences member Paolo Carozza said we must ensure technology "is orienting us towards the fundamental understanding of reality, including the reality of ourselves and what we're made for or not," Carozza told EWTN News.

Pope Leo makes this clear in Magnifica Humanitas, that at the root it is "an integrated problem of cooperating with one another to rebuild our city that we want to live in, in the future together."

Education "plays a central role in this cooperative enterprise because we're forming the individuals that are then going to be putting the bricks together in the future," he said.

Advantages and disadvantages are 'well mapped'

AI's "advantages and disadvantages are pretty well mapped," Carozza said. AI can "positively enhance the reach of people's research and the knowledge that they can draw."

In contrast, "every educator, at every level, is seeing the really potentially drastic negative consequences of cognitive offloading and de-skilling of students' basic capacities to write and to think critically."

The "deeper challenge" for educators is "providing our students with a fundamental human formation that allows them to really think about what their personal relationship to technology is in their lives and how it affects it."

The positive and negative impacts of AI in education also differ based on age and must be addressed accordingly, said An Chih Cheng, professor at DePaul University's College of Education.

"The pope warned about the danger of early exposure to digital technology," Cheng told EWTN News.

Children spending time watching screens "is not particularly conducive" for their "mental and cognitive development."

A lot of screen time for children "is passive learning" and is "devoid of social aspects that are critical for communal development," he said.

"Communality is a critical part of the pope's idea that we are not by ourselves" and "we are all interconnected as one," he said.

Going "to the screen and being isolated" is "harmful for your own internality, your own individual growth, and also bad for communal development."

There are also risks of "digital harm" for teenagers, especially with social media use, which has "caused harm to individual teenagers in particular, even suicide," Cheng said.

Then in higher education, new technologies are often being used with "little guidance."

"For example, California [State University] signed a $13 million contract with Open AI to allow students and teachers to use ChatGPT," he said. "But … if you just have the chatbot open there, it is absolutely not helpful for meaningful learning."

The universities are "kind of just buying these tools, convinced or led by the tech industry, thinking that they could deliver some kind of learning."

"But learning, as the pope has always said, is an inquiry, a truth-seeking endeavor that requires patience. You cannot just have an immediate answer like the prompt that gives an immediate answer," he said.

"You need to put in all the effort to seek out the truth. That's how we mentally develop — acquiring the truth."

Reimagining education in the age of AI

To help students understand both the risks and benefits of AI, Carozza and Cheng are incorporating AI into their students' studies.

In his seminar on law and technology, Carozza had his students take a new approach when studying their weekly scholarly works.

"In addition to reading it directly and engaging in their own critical analysis of it, I actually required them to upload those papers into an AI tool and use the tool to analyze it," he said.

Then "they had to write … an essay comparing their analysis to the AI analysis, reflecting on what the use of AI was doing to their own cognitive abilities and processes."

This allowed the students "to reflect every week" and ask: "Is this displacing my ability to think? Is it helping it? How can I make it more the latter than the former?"

"It was great because by the end of the semester they really had thought very deeply, in a continuous way, about their relationship to technology, what the appropriate limits were for themselves, and what to be cautious about," he said.

"That sort of reflection on who we are as knowing subjects, as free people — that's exactly what the encyclical is asking us to do," Carozza said.

Cheng is also incorporating the technology into studies in his research method class where "AI can be used to help brainstorm some research questions," he said.

"More importantly," AI "can help make things more accessible, because some of the statistical software is very expensive to purchase," he aid. "I incorporate … statistical analysis that they can do at home. These tools are much [more] affordable than the super-expensive commercial software."

Cheng also utilizes visual AI simulations so students "can see these virtually enriched environments," which is "beneficial for preservice teachers [student teachers] to understand child development."

The pope's call is correct, that it is "not about using AI to replace teachers or professors but rather to incorporate AI in a way that can further human development and in a way that delivers … spiritual attainment," Cheng said.

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The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has reportedly fired several agents in connection with a controversial 2023 memo that detailed the bureau's plans to investigate "radical-traditionalist" Catholics in Virginia.

Multiple media outlets reported on the firings on June 5, citing sources within the federal agency. The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from EWTN News on the reports.

The memo, which leaked in February 2023, detailed the FBI's Virginia-based investigations into alleged extremists among the faithful at "traditional Catholic houses of worship." The bureau indicated that it had planned "trip wire or source development" among Catholic communities as part of its investigation.

The policy, which was withdrawn after it was leaked to the press, drew rebuke from local Catholic leaders and members of Congress. Lawmakers have repeatedly grilled FBI leadership over the memo and the FBI's handling of it both before and after it leaked.

FBI Director Kash Patel said in September 2025 that there had been "terminations" and "resignations" related to the memo. Patel said at the time that the FBI was conducting an investigation into the memo itself.

In February 2024 multiple U.S. senators grilled then-FBI Director Christopher Wray over the alleged deletion of files related to the memo. The lawmakers claimed that the bureau allegedly "deleted the records as soon as the incident became public."

Although the FBI removed the document from its systems and asserted the issue was isolated to one product from one field office, a 2025 report found that multiple field offices were involved in producing the memo and that it was distributed to more than 1,000 FBI employees throughout the country.

In December 2025 Virginia's then Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger tapped Stanley Meador — the special agent who oversaw the Richmond FBI office that drafted the memo — to lead the state's public safety and homeland security department.

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Pope Leo XIV will visit Spain from June 6–12, making stops in Madrid, Barcelona, the Canary Islands, and Tenerife. This is the ninth time a pope has visited the country. John Paul II visited Spain five times and Benedict XVI traveled there on three occasions.

During this trip, Pope Leo will take part in 20 official events, with some of the most anticipated moments being a large vigil with young people, an open-air Mass celebrating Corpus Christi, and a procession through the streets of Madrid.

Here are 10 things to know about the Church in Spain, with a special focus on areas the Holy Father will be visiting.

1. Spain is the country that sends out the most missionaries.

Spain currently leads the world in sending Catholic missionaries to other countries and is also one of the top financial supporters of the Pontifical Mission Societies. According to the 2024 report of the mission group, Spain has nearly 10,000 missionaries, about 5,000 of whom are active; more than half are women and most serve in the Americas.

2. Pope John Paul II called Spain "Tierra de María" ("Mary's land").

St. John Paul II when he was pope repeatedly referred to Spain as "Mary's land," especially during his 1982 and 2003 visits, pointing to the country's dense network of Marian shrines and devotions. Spain is literally dotted with Marian sanctuaries — from major basilicas to tiny hilltop hermitages — so that almost every region has its own beloved Marian title, feast, and pilgrimage.

3. It's a place of Christian witnesses and martyrs.

The Spanish Civil War left one of the largest "footprints of martyrdom," according to Spanish historian Monsignor Vicente Carcel Orti, in modern Church history, and it has profoundly shaped Spain's map of saints and blesseds. During the war and the wider period of persecution, around 6,832 bishops, priests, religious, and nuns were killed for their faith, along with thousands of lay Catholics who risked their lives to protect clergy and religious.

Out of this mass persecution, the Church has gradually recognized a very large number of martyrs: In 2007, the October beatification of 498 martyrs under Benedict XVI was the single-largest beatification ceremony ever held. By the late 2000s, nearly 1,000 martyrs of the Spanish Civil War had been beatified or canonized.

4. Madrid's cathedral was consecrated by a pope.

One of Madrid's most important Catholic landmarks is the Cathedral of Our Lady of Almudena, which was consecrated by Pope John Paul II in 1993. Such papal consecrations are relatively rare outside Rome, giving the cathedral special significance in Spanish Catholic life. The building remains a focal point for major religious celebrations in the Spanish capital.

Construction of Almudena Cathedral began in 1883 and was not completed until 1993. The century-long project reflects both the enduring importance of Catholicism in Spain and the architectural evolution of the modern era. Today, the cathedral stands across from the Royal Palace of Madrid, symbolizing the historic relationship between church and crown.

5. Madrid's Marian patroness was "hidden in the walls."

Madrid's patron saint is the Virgin of Almudena, whose image is linked to a centuries-old tradition dating back to Spain's medieval period. According to tradition, as Moorish forces invaded the region in A.D. 712, the citizens of Madrid secretly hid their beloved statue of the Virgin Mary inside the thick stone walls of the city's fortress, leaving two lit candles beside it. In 1085, after King Alfonso VI reconquered Madrid, the Christians searched for the statue. While processing around the city walls, a section of the wall miraculously crumbled, revealing the statue perfectly preserved with the candles still burning after centuries.

That same venerable image will be processed through the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium during the Holy Father's meeting with the diocesan community of Madrid on June 8.

6. Spain's royal family has strong ties to the Church.

Spain's royal family maintains strong ties to the Catholic Church, and one of the most visible examples came in 2004 when then-Prince Felipe married Letizia Ortiz in Madrid's Almudena Cathedral. The ceremony highlighted the continued role of Catholic traditions in important national events.

7. Barcelona's most famous church is a catechesis in stone.

The Basilica of the Sagrada Família is more than just an architectural masterpiece — it was built to be a tool of evangelization. Its founders envisioned a church that would communicate the Christian faith through art, symbolism, and architecture, making it one of the world's most distinctive expressions of the Catholic faith.

Visitors to the Sagrada Família encounter a visual retelling of Christianity's central story. The basilica's major façades depict the Nativity, the Passion, and the glory of Christ — which is dedicated to the glory, ascension, and eternal life of God.

The Sagrada Família has become the tallest church building in the world at 566 feet. Despite its immense scale, the basilica was designed to direct attention toward God rather than human achievement.

The famous basilica was originally designed by Francisco de Paula del Villar in 1882. However, Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí took over the project in 1883 and completely transformed the design into a blend of Gothic and Art Nouveau styles, overseeing its construction until his death in 1926. After his passing, several other architects have continued his work with the goal of fulfilling his original vision.

Gaudí deliberately planned the Sagrada Família so that it would remain slightly shorter than Barcelona's nearby Montjuïc hill, because he believed no human work should surpass God's creation.

8. The architect of Sagrada Família may one day be a saint.

Antoni Gaudí was known for his intense personal faith and devotion to the building of the Sagrada Família. The Vatican announced April 14, 2025, that Pope Francis had formally recognized Gaudí's "heroic virtue," a key step in the canonization process. Two miracles attributed to Gaudí's intercession are now required for his canonization.

9. Tenerife's great Marian shrine is the Canary Islands' most important pilgrimage site.

The Basilica of Our Lady of Candelaria in Tenerife is the most important Catholic pilgrimage site in the Canary Islands. For generations, it has served as the spiritual heart of the archipelago and remains a major destination for pilgrims and visitors, drawing roughly 2 million visitors a year.

The basilica is dedicated to the patron saint of the Canary Islands — the Virgin of Candelaria. Tradition holds that the image of the Virgin of Candelaria was venerated by the Indigenous Guanche people before Spain completed its conquest of Tenerife. The Virgin of Candelaria is often associated with the tradition of Black Madonnas — dark-skinned images of Mary that are venerated in various parts of the world.

10. The Canary Islands were an early Catholic outpost.

The Canary Islands are divided into two Catholic dioceses: one centered in Las Palmas and the other in San Cristóbal de La Laguna on Tenerife. These were established in the early 15th century, decades before the evangelization of much of the Americas. This made the islands an important frontier of Catholic expansion during a pivotal period in world history.

Because of their strategic location in the Atlantic, the Canary Islands became a key stopping point for explorers, missionaries, and settlers traveling between Europe and the Americas. As a result, the islands played a notable role in the spread of Catholicism across the New World.

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More than 75,000 people participated in the "Totus Tuus" ("Completely Yours") Marian event held on Saturday, May 30, at the Serra Dourada Stadium in the city of Goiânia, Brazil. According to the organizers, this marked the largest attendance recorded to date. Additionally, more than 18,000 people followed the event via screens set up outside the stadium.

This year, the event featured the pilgrim image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of Latin America, brought from Mexico, accompanied by a reproduction of St. Juan Diego's tilma, upon which the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe miraculously appeared in 1531.

During the event, there were moments of prayer, praise, preaching, artistic performances by Catholic singers, and Mass, celebrated by Archbishop João Justino de Medeiros Silva of Goiânia.

According to its organizers, Totus Tuus is the largest free Marian event in Brazil's central-west region. Held annually since 2015, it is organized by Our Lady of the Assumption Parish with the support of the Archdiocese of Goiânia. It always takes place on the last Saturday of May at the Serra Dourada Stadium.

The reproduction of the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which was prominently displayed during the celebration, suddenly fell from a height of more than 16 feet in front of the faithful.

The image is an authorized and certified copy of the tilma housed at the Marian shrine in Mexico City. According to the event organizers, it was created to the same standards of fidelity to the original image and is used for international pilgrimages.

The image of the Virgin, encased in a wooden frame, was mounted on an acrylic stand set up for the celebration when it came loose and fell. Despite the horror at seeing the image fall, it remained intact and suffered no damage.

According to the organizers, the incident "had a strong emotional impact on the participants." Videos of the scene went viral on social media, garnering thousands of views and accompanied by stories of faith, testimonies, and messages of devotion.

Father Marcos Rogério de Oliveira, founder of Totus Tuus and pastor of Our Lady of the Assumption, said that at the moment the image of the tilma fell, they were "praying the rosary and were on the fourth mystery" when he felt "that something was about to happen."

"I spoke with Sister Zélia, who was beside me, and she told me the enemy was furious. That was when it all happened. But in that moment, we were left with a much deeper message: How many times do we fall in life? How many times does our heart ache? And the Virgin seems to tell us: 'Here I am. Rise up.' The tilma fell, yet it remained intact. The same happens to us when we trust in Mary's intercession. We fall, but she helps us stay on our feet. It was a grace that deeply moved the hearts of everyone present," the priest said.

Instagram post

Oliveira said the incident resounded with the faithful as an invitation to trust, persevere, and have certainty in the maternal protection of the Virgin Mary.

"In that moment, we felt in a tangible way that the Mother [of God] was leaving a message for each of us. In every fall in life, ask for her intercession. When your heart aches, cry out to her. The message was given: She crushes the head of the serpent and destroys all enemies. Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us," Oliveira noted.

This story was first published by ACI Prensa, the Spanish-language sister service of EWTN News. It has been translated and adapted by EWTN News English.

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The U.S. bishops are urging Congress to reject a bill that would make noncitizens labeled as gang members deportable based on a "reason to believe" standard.

The House Judiciary Committee approved the bill, H.R. 175, on June 3, which sponsor Rep. Tom McClintock, R-California, named the Deport Alien Gang Members Act. House consideration is the next step.

In a letter to Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, Bishop Brendan J. Cahill of Victoria, Texas, said: "This bill is unjustifiably broad and risks implicating the victims of criminal gangs, as well as Catholics and other people of faith serving immigrants in accordance with our sincerely held religious beliefs."

Cahill's letter expressed concern that the bill's low evidentiary threshold would expand deportation authorities in ways that could sweep too broadly.

"In effect, foreign-born religious workers, such as priests and religious sisters, while being compelled as a primary purpose of their vocations to assist with others' basic needs, could be subjected to the designation under section 2(a) of the bill and its corresponding consequences for individuals," said Cahill, chair of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Migration.

U.S. bishops said while governments have a legitimate responsibility to protect the public from criminal activity, immigration policies must also safeguard human dignity, family unity, and fundamental humanitarian protections.

The bishops' opposition to H.R. 175 is consistent with their long-standing approach to immigration policy. While affirming the government's responsibility to protect public safety and secure the nation's borders, the USCCB has repeatedly objected to policies it believes threaten due process or family unity.

U.S. bishops issued a special message in November 2025 warning against "indiscriminate mass deportation," saying such broad actions would harm families, violate human dignity, and ignore the Church's call to protect the vulnerable.

McClintock's legislation would make noncitizens who are believed to be members of a criminal gang deportable and ineligible for certain forms of immigration relief. Supporters of the bill argue that it would strengthen public safety by giving federal authorities additional tools to remove dangerous individuals associated with transnational criminal organizations.

McClintock said: "The bill fills that glaring gap in our nation's defenses. It creates clear grounds of inadmissibility and deportability for aliens who are members of criminal gangs or who have promoted, aided, conspired with, or participated in gang activities."

Raskin, meanwhile, said the administration already has ample authority under existing immigration laws to deny entry to or remove criminal gang members. Current law contains provisions ensuring that convicted criminal gang members are deportable and inadmissible. The Immigration and Nationality Act allows the administration to exclude anyone who seeks to enter the U.S. and intends to engage in any unlawful activity, and it renders deportable any noncitizen who is engaged in criminal activity endangering public safety.

Would this administration use the powers granted to them by the bill to declare Pope Leo as the leader of a criminal gang? Donald Trump has already called the pope weak on crime. Is this the next step?"

Jamie Raskin

Ranking member, House Judiciary Committee

"The Catholic Church has come out forcefully against this government's abuse and mistreatment of migrants," Raskin said at the markup. "Would this administration use the powers granted to them by the bill to declare Pope Leo as the leader of a criminal gang? Donald Trump has already called the pope weak on crime. Is this the next step?"

While U.S. Catholic bishops have repeatedly affirmed the government's responsibility to protect communities from crime and maintain secure borders, they said H.R. 175 lacks sufficient safeguards to ensure that immigration enforcement is carried out justly.

The bishops warned that gang affiliation can be difficult to establish accurately and that individuals may be labeled as gang members based on limited or unreliable evidence. They argued that the legislation could expose immigrants to severe penalties without providing adequate opportunities to challenge accusations made against them.

The conference also raised concerns that the bill would contribute to an enforcement-focused approach to immigration policy rather than advancing comprehensive reforms.

"Given these significant defects, we ask you to reject this bill and to instead work toward meaningful and bipartisan reforms of our immigration system that uphold protections for the vulnerable and ensure religious and humanitarian services can be provided in good faith to all in need," Cahill wrote.

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The Food and Drug Administration's safety investigation of the chemical abortion pill mifepristone, used in most abortions, is progressing, according to a senior FDA official.

The official claimed that a study has been ongoing for months, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

"The FDA has been actively working on a science-based safety review of the mifepristone REMS [Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy] for months, as the agency has stated publicly and in court filings," an FDA official said, according to a Department of Health and Human Services statement shared with EWTN News.

"Any reporting suggesting otherwise, including that a study is just being started, is either false or based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how complex scientific safety studies work," the official said.

The study is expected to take a total of six months, according to the Wall Street Journal report. It could be released in July, according to a CBS report.

Throughout Donald Trump's presidency, pro-life advocates have been calling for regulation of the abortion pill mifepristone and for a reinstation of in-person dispensation amid abortion pill poisonings and safety concerns for women.

A 2025 study found that 1 in 10 women experience serious adverse events after taking the abortion pill mifepristone. Studies often have difficulty estimating the exact number of adverse effects due to loose reporting requirements and chemical abortions supplied by companies outside the U.S. healthcare system.

"In 2016, the FDA, under the Obama administration, told abortion providers, hospitals, and emergency rooms that, even if there are complications, they no longer needed to report these 'adverse' events to the FDA, only deaths," Carol Tobias, president of National Right to Life, told EWTN News. "That action allows abortion proponents to make the outrageous claim that 'mifepristone is safe because no complications have been reported.'"

Tobias celebrated the current move by the FDA.

"We are happy that the FDA is looking into the so-called safety of abortion pills," Tobias said.

But another pro-life group urged the current administration to do more to protect women and children.

When asked about the development, Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America urged the administration to settle a case related to the abortion pill, Louisiana v. FDA, "to end mail-order abortion drugs."

"The FDA admits abortion drugs are more dangerous to women than many of them know," the group said in a statement shared with EWTN News. "As many as 1 in 11 women experience serious side effects such as hemorrhage, infection, and sepsis."

"Every month the DOJ waits to settle in Louisiana v. FDA, 15,000 more unborn children die in states with pro-life laws, women experience life-threatening side effects from mifepristone, and abusers obtain abortion drugs to poison women," the statement continued.

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Less than two weeks after Pope Leo XIV published an encyclical warning artificial intelligence (AI) companies against constructing "a new Tower of Babel," the multibillion-dollar AI company Anthropic is calling for a global pause or slowdown in development.

Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark and Anthropic Institute head Marina Favaro published a blog on June 4 warning about a risk of "humans losing control over AI systems" as its own system Claude is reaching the potential to autonomously design its own successor without any human contributions.

"This is called recursive self-improvement," they wrote. "We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable. But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for."

The blog post did not mention the encyclical, but a separate Anthropic co-founder, Chris Olah, met with Leo and sat alongside the pope when the encyclical Magnifica Humanitas was revealed on May 25. Anthropic has engaged in outreach to the Vatican and other religious leaders to help address ethical questions related to AI development.

In the blog post, Anthropic leaders explained that its AI system is taking over a large portion of writing code that designs AI — with its workload growing eightfold every quarter. AI will "become much more capable in coming years," they wrote, and "these trends have huge implications."

"If systems are capable of fully building their own successors, the ways we secure them, monitor them, and shape their behavior all grow much more important," they wrote.

Although Clark and Favaro acknowledged AI has not reached this level yet and they cannot say for certain it will, they wrote: "We do not have good intuitions for what this world would look like" if this occurs, and AI capabilities "eclipse those of humans."

Anthropic's leaders wrote that AI companies should come together to either pause or slow down development "to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications." However, this would require global international cooperation among countries and AI companies because "if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe," they wrote.

"We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology," they added.

Anthropic intends to engage with policymakers, researchers, and other members of the public to discuss these concerns. The company will publish a document based on what comes out of the conversations.

'Disarming' AI

Charles Camosy, a moral theologian at The Catholic University of America who has worked with Anthropic on ethical questions, told EWTN News that Anthropic's statements appear in line with Leo's desire to "disarm" AI, which the pontiff explained as not halting innovation but "preventing it from dominating humanity."

He said Anthropic recognizes the speed of development as "such a problem we all need to slow down here." Such a pause would allow society to "think about what AI should or should not do in the culture," he said.

Camosy pointed to concerns about "outsourcing" teaching, tutoring, parenting, care for the sick, and other human interactions to AI, possibly "undermining the things that … make our humanity magnificent."

He recognized that fierce AI competition among nations and companies "creates a significant roadblock" to global cooperation for slowing everything down, but said: "I've been astonished by how many different kinds of people are interested in this encyclical."

"Many people were kind of waiting for someone to fill the moral space," Camosy said and suggested the Church help lead a global movement that demands ethical AI, and he encouraged the Holy Father to consider a trip to Silicon Valley.

"To many people that sounds hopefully naive," he said. "But I don't see another choice here."

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