Pope Leo, come to Silicon Valley

(RNS) — I wish I could better recall every person I met at Our Lady of Peace Church and Shrine this past June 6. It’s a vibrant and growing parish (packed Sunday Masses, every two hours, from 6:30 a.m. through 8 p.m.) in the heart of Silicon Valley, and Bishop Oscar Cantu of San Jose decided it would be an ideal place to have an event on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” just days after its release.

I met people from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Meta, PayPal and Microsoft, among other places. Well over 300 folks showed up for two public panels on a papal encyclical at 9 a.m. on a Saturday. Several who identified as religious felt deep apprehension about what was happening within their companies. Others were secular but expressed gratitude that the pope was stepping up at this key moment in our history. Both the numbers of the people who came, and the kinds of stories they told, demonstrated the profound need for the leadership of Pope Leo and an interest in “Magnifica Humanitas.”

I’m a Catholic moral theologian, but prominent secular outlets like NPR, The New York Times, the BBC, The Atlantic and The Washington Post all reached out to me to help cover the…