The Cloud of Shalimar
This week I read Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical letter, Magnifica Humanitas, On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence. It sent me back to Sunday mornings with my grandmother Martha.
We walked to Mass together in a cloud of her Shalimar. I can still find that smell faster than anything, powder and spice, the sleeve of her good coat. We sat in a wooden pew, close enough to feel her shift to kneel, stand, and greet the people around us by name. There was incense, and beautifully embroidered banners. When I was old enough, I shared in communion. Mass was not a set of beliefs for me. It was connection with Martha, made out of sound and scent and warmth and movement.
Prayer connected me to everyone else. Every week, every day during Holy Week, my elementary school crammed into a stuffy hallway to pray the rosary. One hundred and twenty of us, shoulders touching, sharing one breath, our voices overlapping in a hypnotic drone I can still feel in my chest. The prayers simple, their cadence rising and falling. All of us together, our little sweaty bodies in the same small space, over and over until it became part of us.
Those repeated experiences created a space for connection I always seek to fill. The encyclical names it plainly. The quality of a civilization, Leo XIV writes, is measured “not by the power of its means, but by the care it is able to offer”: the ability to see another person as a face and not a function. Care, he insists, is not an idea you adopt. It is “learned and mastered through lived experience.” You learn it by sitting with someone, keeping company with the old and the young. I learned it in a pew, pressed against a woman who smelled of Shalimar.
We sit in a different seat now. We are using artificial intelligence to build a supportive framework, choosing how it creates room for the connection the Church created for me. The encyclical has a word for people like us. Developers, Leo XIV writes, “bear a particular ethical and spiritual responsibility, for every design choice reflects a vision of humanity.” That responsibility feels weighty. Our own vision, formed by years of loving and caring for vulnerable people, is built on connection, not efficiency. The tool will carry whatever we put into it. Build it to save steps, and it may teach people to need one another less. Build it to send a caregiver toward a colleague on a hard day, and it teaches the opposite.
So we keep the pew in mind. We are not crafting tools to stand in for presence, but to support the people doing the work, enabling two kinds of connection: more presence with those we care for, and more peer support among caregivers who rarely meet yet share this holy work. It means caregivers more fully and authentically present for the part no machine can do: the hand on the shoulder, the shared meal, the face recognized. It means holding one another accountable.
I want to build tools worthy of that cloud of Shalimar, measured by the connection they make possible, not the labor they replace.
A note on making this column: I listened to Magnifica Humanitas on Audible, then printed it from the Vatican website and underlined what felt most relevant. I asked an AI assistant to check what I’d missed; it surfaced passages I’d overlooked, though I wrote about what caught me first. It is dense but well worth the effort, with or without an AI helper.
This column ran in the Santa Fe New Mexican on July 28, 2026, under Business Different.
