We live in a world Thomas Merton never saw—but somehow anticipated. Merton died in 1968, before personal computers, before smartphones, before algorithms decided what we read and AI began writing our emails. Yet his warnings feel more urgent now than ever: about technology becoming autonomous, about systems that run on their own logic regardless of human need.

 

Here’s the thing about Merton: he didn’t read Catholic Social Teaching the way most of us were taught to in high school religion class—as a tidy list of principles to memorize for the test. For him, the great social encyclicals weren’t position papers. They were invitations to conversion. They were the Church trying to answer one massive question: What do the Beatitudes actually mean when you’re living in a world of factories, nuclear weapons, economic systems that chew people up, and technologies that seem to have minds of their own?

When Merton read Rerum Novarum (1891) or Quadragesimo Anno (1931), he saw the Church wrestling with the “new things” of industrial capitalism—not theorizing from a distance, but naming concrete realities: the dignity of workers being crushed by machinery, the right to a decent living, the insistence that moral order comes before profit.

 

With Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris (1963), Merton sensed a turning point. Here was the Church saying clearly: peace isn’t just the absence of war. It’s built on human rights, on conscience, on recognizing moral limits to state power. It included a searing critique of modern warfare and weapons of mass destruction. For Merton, this wasn’t political calculation—it was the Gospel of the peacemakers breaking through.

 

And then came Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes (1965), calling the Church to read the “signs of the times,” to leave its defensive crouch and enter history in solidarity with everyone who suffers. Merton heard this as a summons: Be faithful to Christ right here, right now, amid these particular social structures, these ideologies, these technologies.

 

These documents were pastoral in the most profound sense—the Church learning how to follow Jesus in a world that kept inventing new ways to organize power and production.

What did Merton pull from Catholic Social Teaching that speaks to our moment?

Human dignity and conscience. Every person carries an inviolable dignity. Conscience is where God’s law is “written in the heart”—not as a set of external rules but as an inner sanctuary. Merton connected this to contemplative prayer, where we discover our true self as loved by God. In our age of surveillance capitalism and data extraction, this matters enormously. You are not your click-through rate. You are not an engagement metric. You bear the image of God.

 

Common good and solidarity. The social encyclicals moved the Church beyond individualism toward a vision of the human family seeking peace and justice together. Merton called this “hidden wholeness”—the mystical reality that we’re all bound together. When technology platforms maximize profit by maximizing division and outrage, Catholic Social Teaching and Merton both insist: there is another way.

 

Structures of sin. The older documents focused on labor and capital. Later teaching named systemic injustice—racism, the arms race, and economic exploitation. Merton understood how such structures deform everyone involved, perpetrators and victims alike. Interior conversion and social change can’t be separated. Today, we might ask: What are the structures of sin embedded in our technologies? The algorithms that amplify hate? The systems that automate inequality? Was the AI trained on stolen work?

Merton helps us see that Catholic Social Teaching is the Church’s ongoing attempt to ask: What do the Beatitudes, the Good Samaritan, and Matthew 25—”I was hungry and you gave me food”—mean in this specific historical moment?

 

For us, that means asking: What do they mean in a world where algorithms curate reality? Where do autonomous weapons systems make kill decisions? Where gig economy apps treat human beings as interchangeable units? Where AI companies promise to solve everything while concentrating unprecedented power?

 

The Gospel of peace (Pacem in Terris) becomes a question about autonomous weapons, about cyber warfare, about the violence embedded in systems that surveil and control.

 

The Gospel of the poor (Rerum Novarum and its descendants) becomes a question of who profits from automation and who gets left behind, of just wages in the platform economy, and of workers’ rights when the “boss” is an algorithm.

 

The Gospel of communion (Gaudium et Spes) becomes a question of which technologies build authentic community and which exploit our loneliness for profit.

If we take Merton’s approach to Catholic Social Teaching seriously in our tech-saturated world, what changes would result?

We start with contemplative discernment, not reactive outrage. We actually see what’s happening (the See-Judge-Act method the Church has always taught). We honestly look at our relationship with technology, at how these systems actually work, and at who benefits and who suffers.

 

We judge in light of Scripture and CST. Does this technology serve human dignity or diminish it? Does it build the common good or fragment it? Does it concentrate power or distribute it justly?

We act from a place of prayer and humility, not moral superiority. Maybe that means deleting an app that’s making us cruel. It may mean organizing other parents around smartphone-free childhoods. It may mean advocating for AI regulation that prioritizes human dignity. It may mean supporting workers fighting algorithmic management.

 

Merton would tell us that resisting autonomous technology—technology that runs on its own inhuman logic—is a form of nonviolence. It’s truth-telling. It’s refusing to let efficiency and profit become our only gods.

Imagine a parish that studied Pacem in Terris alongside the Sermon on the Mount, but asked: What does peacemaking mean in our digital age?

 

They might discern that it can’t stop at pious statements. It might mean: digital literacy programs that help people recognize manipulation. Support for tech workers blowing the whistle on harmful products. Advocacy for laws that protect children online. Community practices that create space outside the attention economy. Works of mercy for those harmed by online hate or AI discrimination. All of it grounded in Eucharistic prayer—coming to the table where we remember we’re one body.

Merton’s reading of Catholic Social Teaching becomes a bridge for us. It carries these powerful documents back to their source in the Gospel. And then it carries the Gospel forward into the concrete practices we need for Christian life in the 2020s.

 

The encyclicals aren’t museum pieces. They’re a living tradition, helping the Church discern how to be faithful in each new age. And this age—with its autonomous algorithms, its extractive platforms, its AI reshaping work and creativity and truth itself—desperately needs the wisdom they contain.

 

Merton died by accidental electrocution, touching a faulty fan in Bangkok. There’s a terrible irony there—the technology critic killed by a machine. But his writings live on, calling us to something he knew the world needed: contemplatives who engage the world, not escape it—people rooted in prayer who can see clearly and resist the inhumanity of autonomous systems.

 

Christians who know that the Beatitudes aren’t abstractions, but a different way of being human together—even and especially when the machines tell us otherwise.

 

That’s the gift of reading Catholic Social Teaching through Merton’s eyes. It makes the ancient Gospel urgently relevant and the Church’s social wisdom personally transformative.

 

In a world of autonomous technology, we need both more than ever.