A framework for mission-driven institutions
Deploy AI in a way that is worthy of your mission.
This site helps mission-driven institutions, and anyone who wants their AI to be defensible rather than merely deployable, decide about AI and write the language those decisions require. It offers three things: a framework with every claim cited to its primary source, a five-question rubric for the committee table, and a workshop that drafts and stress-tests your initiative's description, guardrails, and user disclosure.
No login, no cost, nothing stored. You do not need to share the tradition to use the method: the principles are Catholic, and the questions are human.
I · The challenge
The tools arrived before the judgment.
AI is arriving in mission-driven institutions faster than the frameworks for judging it. Chatbots answer admissions questions, algorithms score retention risk, and writing assistants sit inside many courses, often adopted on the vendor's terms rather than the mission's.
Generic AI ethics guidelines help, but they stop short of what a Catholic institution professes. Every person is created in the image of God. The common good is the measure of social conditions. Technology must serve human relationship and judgment rather than supplant them. And even Catholic principles, stated alone, do not decide anything. Institutions need a method for choosing.
II · Why “Jesuit,” not simply “Catholic”?
The principles are Catholic. The way of proceeding is Jesuit.
Everything this framework asserts comes from the Church's universal teaching, from the Compendium and the Rome Call to the recent papal magisterium on AI. What the Jesuit tradition adds is not new doctrine but a method for deciding, one the Society of Jesus has practiced for five centuries. St. Ignatius called it discernment. The Society calls it its way of proceeding.
Catholic Social Teaching tells an institution what to honor. Ignatian discernment tells it how to choose when goods compete. That is the usual situation of AI adoption, with real benefits, real harms, incomplete evidence, and a vendor on the phone. The Spiritual Exercises' First Principle and Foundation supplies the test this framework applies to every system. Created things are to be used insofar as they help the end for which we exist, and set aside insofar as they hinder it.
The method carries the standards Jesuit institutions already use. Cura personalis, care of the whole person, is the measure against which any risk score is judged. The magis asks not whether something is permissible but whether it is the greater service. The Society's Universal Apostolic Preferences commit Jesuit works to discernment, to the excluded, to the young, and to our common home, four commitments AI deployment touches directly.
III · What the framework offers
A grounded framework
The four permanent principles of Catholic Social Teaching (Compendium, §160) mapped to the six Rome Call principles and read through the Ignatian lens, with every claim cited to its primary source.
Read the framework →A working rubric
Five questions in the manner of an institutional Examen. Who benefits first, what happens when it fails, what data is collected and why, who maintains it, and does it connect or isolate. A PDF version is available.
Use the rubric →A working workshop
An interview composes your initiative's description, guardrails, and user disclosure from what you actually decided. Assess against eleven criteria, revise in place, examine the consequences you had not considered, and export the pack. What you have not decided appears as an open item, never as a flourish. No login required.
Open the workshop →For a quick one-shot assessment without the drafting loop, the auditor remains available.