Should a Saint Speak Through AI? The Fulton Sheen Hologram

By Bobby Macintosh · Updated October 2026

Picture a room in Peoria, Illinois, a few years from now. Twenty or so visitors stand in the dark. A figure appears, with the face millions knew from black-and-white television. Someone asks him why life is worth living, and he answers.

That is the plan for an AI hologram of Blessed Fulton Sheen, and Catholics are arguing about it. Every tradition will soon face its own version: an AI Spurgeon, an AI Augustine, an AI grandmother. Here is what Peoria has said, what each tradition teaches, and where the line might be.

What Peoria is planning

Bishop Louis Tylka of Peoria described the project to Robert Duncan of Catholic News Service in an interview published on 21 October (Apple Podcasts; Vatican Access). Sheen died in 1979 and was beatified in September. I’ve checked the bishop’s words below against the episode audio.

“Our dream is to put everything he ever said, wrote, the entire corpus of Sheen into the computer,” Tylka said, and to answer a visitor’s question “only from the words of what he wrote and thought.” Asked whether there will be “a generative function” for new questions, he replied: “That’s the plan, yes.”

The hologram is meant to be the last room of the Sheen Experience, a museum planned for the Peoria high school Sheen attended, at a cost the bishop put at “about a $30 million investment” to build, and he hopes to raise about $50 million in all, including an endowment. The opening is “probably three years” away. A pop-up prototype can already be visited, but for now it is “based upon scripts”: things Sheen actually said on television, edited into four-minute pieces.

His reasons deserve a fair hearing. “People who encountered Fulton Sheen when he was alive, quite often through him, encountered Jesus Christ,” he said. “And that’s what we want to achieve.” He promised that “we’re going to be very cautious on how we do this”, and said “the Pope is not against AI”: the concern is how it is used, “so that it does not diminish humanity.” His sharpest line was pastoral: “If the church is simply going to maintain its practices of the past, we’ll become a museum that nobody visits.”

He has described his hope, since the work began in 2021, as “to create that type of an experience that is so engaging that I feel he’s there with me.” Hold on to that sentence. It’s where the theology starts.

Why some Catholics are uneasy

The Catholic Herald reported on 23 October that the plan “has prompted questions about the appropriateness of recreating someone who has died in this way” (Catholic Herald). The rest of that report is behind a sign-in, so I won’t put words in the critics’ mouths.

Speaking to OSV News in August 2025 about grief avatars in general, not about Sheen, Brian Patrick Green of Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics called the phrase “a mockery of the word ‘resurrection'” and warned that “we need to not confuse computers with people” (OSV News).

What the Catholic Church teaches about the saints

This is where I’ll be a little firmer, because the doctrine matters more than the technology.

The communion of saints

The Catechism of the Catholic Church begins plainly: “The communion of saints is the Church” (CCC 946). And “the union of the wayfarers with the brethren who sleep in the peace of Christ is in no way interrupted” (CCC 955) (vatican.va, CCC 946–962).

So, for a Catholic, Sheen isn’t absent in the way a hologram assumes. If he is with God, he belongs to the same Church as the visitor.

Intercession and veneration

The saints “do not cease to intercede with the Father for us,” the Catechism says, “through the one mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus” (CCC 956). The saints “share in the living tradition of prayer by the example of their lives, the transmission of their writings, and their prayer today”, and “We can and should ask them to intercede for us and for the whole world” (CCC 2683) (vatican.va). Veneration is not worship: the honour given to sacred images is “a ‘respectful veneration,’ not the adoration due to God alone” (CCC 2132) (vatican.va).

The saints reach us through their example, their writings and their prayer. A hologram that reads Sheen’s actual words aloud fits the second of those. A system that composes new answers in his voice adds something the list doesn’t contain: Sheen, apparently speaking now.

Intercession also runs in one direction: up, to God, with the saint. Asking Blessed Fulton to pray for you is Catholic devotion. Asking a machine to tell you what Blessed Fulton thinks is a different act.

A boundary worth keeping in view

The Catechism also says: “All forms of divination are to be rejected: recourse to Satan or demons, conjuring up the dead or other practices falsely supposed to ‘unveil’ the future.” Such practices, including “recourse to mediums”, “conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings” (CCC 2116) (vatican.va).

A hologram conjures no one, and nobody in Peoria claims it does. Paragraph 2116 isn’t a ruling on holograms, and as far as I could find, there is no Church ruling on AI recreations of saints or of the dead. What 2116 offers is a question about desire: do we want the saints’ prayer, or do we want control over the dead?

Recent Church documents on AI sharpen the point. Antiqua et Nova says AI “must be understood for what it is: a tool, not a person” (§59), and that “misrepresenting AI as a person should always be avoided” (§62) (vatican.va). Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas adds: “When words are simulated, they do not build genuine relationships, but only their appearance” (§100) (vatican.va; see our reader’s guide to Magnifica Humanitas). A hologram that says “I” in a beatified bishop’s voice is exactly what those paragraphs ask us to label clearly.

How Protestant confessions read the same Scriptures

Protestants confess “the communion of saints” in the Apostles’ Creed too. The disagreement is narrower than it’s often painted, and it’s best stated in each tradition’s own words.

Remembering the saints, praying to Christ

The Augsburg Confession gives the Lutheran position with real warmth: “the memory of saints may be set before us, that we may follow their faith and good works.” But “the Scripture teaches not the invocation of saints or to ask help of saints, since it sets before us the one Christ as the Mediator, Propitiation, High Priest, and Intercessor” (Article XXI) (Book of Concord). Its Apology even grants that the saints in heaven “pray for the Church in general”, while denying that they should be invoked (Apology XXI) (Book of Concord). The Westminster Confession says religious worship is to be given “to God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; and to him alone; not to angels, saints, or any other creature” (21.2), and that the souls of the righteous “are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God” (32.1) (OPC). The Heidelberg Catechism names “prayer to saints or to other creatures” among the things the first commandment forbids (Q&A 94) (CRCNA), and the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, call the “invocation of Saints” “a fond thing vainly invented” (Article XXII) (Church of England).

Both sides quote the same verse. Paul writes: “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5, WEB). The Catechism echoes it inside its teaching on intercession (CCC 956); the Reformers read it as the reason not to invoke the saints at all. That’s a real difference. But neither side gives a hologram any role in it.

Scripture on seeking the dead

Isaiah asks the obvious question: “shouldn’t a people consult with their God? Should they consult the dead on behalf of the living?” Then he points them back to what God has already spoken (Isaiah 8:19–20, WEB).

The saddest scene is Saul at Endor. He asks his servants to find “a woman who has a familiar spirit”, and when Samuel speaks, his first words are “Why have you disturbed me, to bring me up?” Saul explains why he came: “God has departed from me, and answers me no more” (1 Samuel 28:7, 15, WEB). Saul went to the dead because he had stopped hearing God.

No one in Peoria is consulting a medium. The texts matter because they name a hunger. A voice from beyond the grave, real or simulated, won’t do what Scripture can’t.

For a Protestant, then, the question is less “is this necromancy?” than “why would we want it?” We have Sheen’s books and broadcasts.

What both traditions share

Hebrews says of Abel that “through it he, being dead, still speaks” (Hebrews 11:4, WEB). He speaks by the witness of his faith, recorded in Scripture, not because someone rebuilt his voice. Both traditions share that instinct: the faithful dead speak through what they actually said and did, handed on honestly.

Simulated presence: where the line might be

I don’t think the line falls between “AI” and “no AI”. Sheen himself used the newest medium of his day. I’d draw it at a narrower point: between presenting a person’s real words and generating new words in his name.

The current pop-up sits on the safer side: scripts of what Sheen actually said are closer to a documentary than a séance. The planned “generative function” is different. Even a system drawing “only” on his corpus composes sentences he never wrote, then speaks them with his face. Every generated sentence would borrow his authority without his review.

Magnifica Humanitas names the deeper danger. The risk “is not so much that a person may believe they are communicating with another person, but rather that they may gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections” (§100). The bishop’s hope that visitors will feel “he’s there with me” is sincere. It’s also precisely the feeling a simulation can produce without anyone being there.

A better use of the same corpus

None of this means Peoria’s work is wasted. The same archive could build something every Christian could welcome:

1. A searchable Sheen library that answers questions by quoting him verbatim, with the book, page or broadcast for every line, and never says “I”.
2. Clear labels on anything generated. If the hologram ever answers a new question, the screen and the voice should say so, in the moment, every time (Antiqua et Nova §62).
3. A handover to the living. End the experience with a priest, a chapel or an invitation to Mass, which is where Sheen always pointed people.

These are my suggestions; nothing is built yet. For a model of reading the dead well, see our guide to reading Scripture with the saints.

A word to the grieving

Some readers are thinking not of Sheen but of a mother or a husband, and an app that offers to bring their voice back. If that’s you, be gentle with yourself. Wanting to hear them again is love. But Patrick Metts, a licensed counsellor who developed a Catholic bereavement ministry course, told OSV News that such an avatar can “create more loneliness”, “because ultimately, that avatar is going to fall infinitely short of the person they lost” (OSV News).

Paul doesn’t tell the Thessalonians not to grieve. He tells them not to “grieve like the rest, who have no hope”, because “God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep in Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 4:13–14, WEB). Christian hope doesn’t rebuild the dead from data. It waits for the resurrection. Keep the voicemails if they help, and take the grief to people who can hold it with you.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is an AI hologram of a saint the same as necromancy?
Not in the Bible’s sense: no one claims it summons Sheen. I found no Church ruling on AI recreations of saints, but CCC 2116’s warning about “conjuring up the dead” is worth keeping in view.

What does the Catholic Church teach about the communion of saints?
That the living, those being purified and the saints in heaven are one Church, “in no way interrupted” (CCC 955), and that the saints intercede for us through Christ (CCC 956).

Why don’t Protestants pray to saints?
Confessions such as Augsburg (Article XXI) and Westminster (21.2) honour the saints’ example but direct all prayer to God through Christ alone, citing passages such as 1 Timothy 2:5.

Will the Fulton Sheen hologram answer new questions?
That’s the stated plan. Today’s prototype uses scripts of things he actually said.

Being dead, still speaks

Fulton Sheen spent his life pointing past himself. Like Abel, he still speaks, in every book and broadcast he left. Read him. Pray as your tradition teaches you. And when someone offers you a machine that sounds like a saint, ask Isaiah’s question, then go back to what God has already spoken.

Sources and Further Reading

• Robert Duncan, “Bringing Fulton Sheen Back to Life — As an AI Hologram“, Vatican Access (Catholic News Service interview with Bishop Louis Tylka), 21 October 2026; episode page “Bringing Fulton Sheen Back to Life — With AI“.
• Christine Rousselle, “Fulton Sheen AI hologram plan sparks backlash among Catholics“, Catholic Herald (23 October 2026).
• Gina Christian, “AI ‘resurrections’ raise ethical issues, prolong grief, say Catholic experts“, OSV News (21 August 2025).
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§946–962, 2116, 2132, 2683 (vatican.va).
• Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and Dicastery for Culture and Education, Antiqua et Nova (28 January 2025), §§59, 62.
• Leo XIV, Magnifica Humanitas (15 May 2026), §100.
• The Augsburg Confession, Article XXI, and the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Article XXI (Book of Concord).
• The Westminster Confession of Faith, 21.2 and 32.1 (Orthodox Presbyterian Church).
• The Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 94 (Christian Reformed Church in North America translation).
• The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Article XXII (Church of England).

Scripture quotations are from the World English Bible (WEB), which is in the public domain.

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