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Quarr Abbey:

A Heart of Peace for the Island Community?

Abbot Xavier’s Address to the Annual Quarr Abbey Charity Dinner
26th June 2026

These days, if you wish to look intelligent in conversation, you just have to mention AI. It is the topic of the day. Everybody is speaking of it. When you begin, you generally find someone telling you, ‘It is, true, AI will transform things in the future’. This is the moment you were waiting for. You take a deep breath, adopt a very stern face, you look at the person right in the eyes and you declare solemnly, ‘It is already everywhere around us.”

This is absolutely true. AI is everywhere. Even the Pope speaks of AI. (By the way, he has reminded priests that they should not use AI for their sermons.) He himself has just written his first Encyclical – the very first of his pontificate which in Catholic understanding is a sort of programmatic document – precisely on this matter. When he began writing, Pope Leo turned to an AI platform and asked: ‘What should the pope say on AI?’ The answer came immediately: ‘Pope Francis would say…’ He was not impressed. So, he took his pen and paper and began to write a marvellous text, which is very much about AI but even more about a much more marvellous reality: the beauty and dignity of our humanity, and the gratitude we, human beings, can feel precisely at being human beings – not artificially boosted inhuman superbeings.

As those among you are the habit of reading papal Encyclicals have probably already read this one (and those who aren’t will not make an exception for it), I thought I would rather share with you the deep impression another text recently made on me – a text some of you have read or may consider reading. I am speaking of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun. Ishiguro, born in Japan, raised and living in England, was awarded the Nobel Prize of Literature in 2017. He is famous for many novels and films. You may have seen The remains of the day, the moving and subtle love story between an English butler and one of the maids.

Klara and the Sun is set in a not-too-distant future when robots have become companions of daily life and take the place of senior members of staff who are reduced to surviving on the margins of communities. Children whose parents can afford it are selected to receive brain implants which enhance their capacities and prepare them for high responsibility roles.

Klara is a highly intelligent and sensitive robot. She has been bought by a family to serve as companion and helper (her official title is AF – for Artificial Friend) to a teenage girl, Josie, who is studying at home and preparing for university. Klara is remarkably perceptive, which enables her to act as a quasi-person for most of the time. She is also totally selfless. She does all that she can for Josie without expecting any reward in return.

Human beings have a mixed relationship with her: at times, they treat her as a friend whom they love, whom they hug, and with whom they share their most intimate thoughts; at other times, she is considered just as a machine that will eventually be discarded.

One of the questions at the centre of the book is the question of love. Can a robot love just as a human being does? Can a robot observe and imitate a human being so well that it, too, ends acting as if having a heart? Or is there something in human persons that cannot be translated into algorithms and therefore cannot be reproduced by a machine?

The answer is multilayered. In many ways, Klara proves able to act with great love. She is even able to sacrifice herself secretly for the girl she feels responsible for. However, at the end of the book she herself declares that this is not enough. She is unable to love as the human beings she has been interacting with: the mother, the father, the housekeeper and a young neighbour. These loved Josie in a different way. Their love was in many ways less perfect than Klara’s. But at the end of the day, human beings require a love that no selfless androids can give but that comes from another human heart. Our heart needs other human hearts. AI can imitate the heart; it cannot have a heart. Our heart feeds on other human hearts. We need personal love. Our self needs the interest and the care of another self.

Such is our beauty. Each of us is a heart, able to love and to suffer and to share in someone else’s love and suffering, not only by identifying with these feelings, but also by owning them from the perspective of someone else; not as mirror which leaves you alone with yourself, but as a person who affirm you as another person. Human interaction at its most basic and at its best is a contact from heart to heart.

I do not think Nigel will deny this. What makes Mountbatten so precious, is that precisely at the difficult and unknow hour of death, human hearts, whilst remaining in their essential solitude, continue to exist to the end in dialogue with other human hearts. The body can be exhausted, the brain can be very weak, the heart remains alive and responds to another heart. Knowing that a heart is watching by my heart till the end is what makes the beauty, the nobility, the humble greatness of what it is to be a human being. Humanity consists of personal hearts in constant dialogue, not individuals bathed in some sort of anonymous love. 

Where does this lead us to this evening? I would like to mention only two areas.

The first, obvious one, is to the whole debate in our Western societies around the end-of-life care and the just definition of this care. Nobody will be surprised with my stand on this question. I firmly believe that a country which invests in supporting palliative care and hospices builds itself up as a community of persons – a communion of hearts. Acting otherwise, to my mind, it destroys itself.

Let me express the second one in the form of a question. If our Island is, can be, and wants to be a community of human persons working at building a communion – that is to say something more than a juxtaposition of individual interests – does it also have a heart – or many hearts? Could Quarr be one of these hearts for our Island community? Could Quarr be a heart of peace for the Island community? I mean, a place where one feels, almost physically, that it is good and beautiful to be a human being, and that hope is possible even with the AI revolution looming large.