In a conversation at Santa Sabina, the Dominican archbishop speaks about the Order in Australia, the coming International Eucharistic Congress in Sydney, the spectacular “Revelations” exhibit, and Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical on artificial intelligence.
During a recent visit to Rome, Archbishop Anthony Fisher, OP, sat down at Santa Sabina with fr. Patrick Briscoe, OP, Promoter of Media for the Order of Preachers, for a wide-ranging conversation about Dominican life, evangelization, the Church in Australia, and the human questions raised by artificial intelligence.
Archbishop Fisher was in Rome principally for a meeting of the International Eucharistic Congress Committee, as Sydney prepares to host the Congress in 2028. As he noted, a trip to Rome usually brings with it several other meetings and conversations, including the opportunity “to tell Rome about our Sestina Revelations project in Sydney.”
A Dominican Vocation in Australia
The conversation began with Archbishop Fisher’s own Dominican vocation.
“I did and growing up I thought the Dominican order had died out in the Middle Ages and some people would say it did and it just refuses to be buried,” Archbishop Fisher recalled with a smile. As a young man, he had known Dominican sisters, but of the friars, he said, “I’d only heard of the great saints of yesteryear.”
His vocational discernment began early. “I was considering my vocation from when I was about 15, maybe earlier,” he said. At first, he considered diocesan priesthood and the Jesuits, who had taught him in school. But during a meeting of Catholic university student groups in Adelaide, he met a young man who had decided at the age of seven that he would become a Dominican. Soon afterward, Dominican vocation pamphlets began to arrive in the mail.
“the more I read about the order, the more it seemed to suit me exactly,” Archbishop Fisher said.
A Province Across Four Countries
Speaking about the Australian Province, he described a mission both local and international. “So in Australia, the main works of the order are parishes in each of the state capital cities and university colleges in a number of universities around Australia,” he said. “But our province is actually in four countries. So it’s Australia, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea.”
The missions in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, he added, have long been “another big work of the Australian province.” For Archbishop Fisher himself, the intellectual life of the Order was especially attractive, as were its scholars and university apostolates. Before being called to episcopal ministry, he served in formation and taught at the university level.
Evangelizing Young Adults
A major theme of the conversation was evangelization, especially among young adults. Archbishop Fisher admitted that, as a young friar, he did not imagine youth ministry would become central to his life.
“All I knew about youth groups was that you had to have pizza and not talk too much about God or you’ll frighten them away. And that recipe did not work,” he said. “God loves to laugh at our plans.”
That changed dramatically when he was asked to help organize World Youth Day in Sydney. He later served for more than a decade as the bishops’ delegate for youth.
“Evangelisation, particularly of young adults, has been a passion for me,” he said. “Though I want everyone, littlest children to the oldest, oldies to be close to Christ and in the church too. But young adults has been a big project.”
World Youth Day bore lasting fruit in Australia. “It brought us many priestly vocations, many good marriages, but above all, brought many young adults close to Christ and to the Catholic faith,” Archbishop Fisher said. Looking toward the 2028 International Eucharistic Congress, he added, “But one way or another, we have to be quite intentional about evangelization.”
Sydney Prepares for the International Eucharistic Congress
For those less familiar with Eucharistic Congresses, Archbishop Fisher explained that they are older than World Youth Day. “So in fact, this is a much older practice in the church. It goes back to the 19th century,” he said. Traditionally, such congresses include talks, liturgies, processions, and public celebrations of faith in the Eucharist, culminating in a major Mass celebrated by the pope or his legate.
Because the 2028 Congress will be held in Sydney, Archbishop Fisher said it will reflect the particular gifts of the Church in Australia.
“We are a very multicultural church and multi-ritual church in Australia. So we will be offering masses in many of the different rites of the Catholic Church, not just in the Latin Rite,” he said.
He also emphasized the strength brought by Eastern Catholic communities. “They often have a very strong sense of their identity,” he said. “They’ve had to fight for their very existence and to preserve the faith in the countries they come from. And they bring that to us, that seriousness about their faith and that sticking power, which in a very secular environment has been a gift to us in Australia.”
The Congress will also have a distinctively Sydney setting. Archbishop Fisher recalled that the last time Sydney hosted the Congress, in 1928, one of the highlights was a Eucharistic procession across the harbor. The Blessed Sacrament was carried on a ferry painted gold and white “as a giant monstrance,” before being brought through the city to the newly consecrated cathedral. Looking ahead to 2028, he said, “we’ll see what ideas like that we might be able to do in the 2028 Congress.”
Revelations: Encountering the Sistine Chapel in Sydney
The conversation then turned to Revelations, a new immersive experience in Sydney introducing visitors to the Sistine Chapel and the biblical story it presents. Built in front of St Mary’s Cathedral, the exhibit includes a half-size replica of the Sistine Chapel.
“So it’s half, half the size of the Sistine Chapel. Exactly half as high and wide and long,” Archbishop Fisher explained. “But when you’re in there, because of the high-tech images that we have and the way they’re presented, you feel like you’re in the Sistine Chapel. You don’t realise it’s smaller. It’s very clever, the way it makes you feel like you’re there.”
The exhibit is designed for people who may know little about Christianity, the Renaissance, Michelangelo, or even the conclave. Introductory rooms help visitors enter the world of the art before entering the chapel itself.
“For the first time ever, the Vatican gave permission for such an immersion experience with the images of Sistine Chapel and gave us all their highest resolution images, which are not normally available to people,” Archbishop Fisher said.
Unlike a typical visit to the Sistine Chapel, the exhibit is not hurried. “No one’s pushing you through,” he said. “The show itself goes for 25 minutes, so you’re expected to stay there for at least half an hour, possibly longer, not be pushed through in two minutes, like happens with the Sistine Chapel now.”
A Universal Story for Everyone
The purpose, however, is not only artistic or technological. It is evangelical and catechetical.
“The Sibyls who are there on the ceiling tell the story of the ceiling,” he explained. “You might say, well, why the Sibyls rather than the prophets? It’s to make the point that this is a universal story. It’s for everybody to learn and to live.”
Visitors are led through creation, the fall, the deluge, the promise of salvation, the Moses cycle, the Christ cycle, and finally the Last Judgment.
“What will I have become by the end of my life? What will the judgment of God and history be on me?” Archbishop Fisher asked. “And I think that’s done very cleverly so that every person that comes out of that is going to be asking that question about themselves.”
“So I think the evangelical and catechetical purposes have been absolutely at the forefront and it’s going to be very effective in those ways,” he said.
AI, Angels, and the Human Person
Finally, the interview turned to Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, and its reflections on artificial intelligence. Archbishop Fisher offered a distinctly Dominican reading, beginning not with machines, but with St Thomas Aquinas and the angels.
“I have always taken an interest in why does Thomas Aquinas talk so much about angels and be known as the angelic doctor,” he said. “My thought is that his interest in angels is actually about humanity.”
The study of angels, he explained, helps human beings understand both what they share with purely spiritual beings and what distinguishes them. In a similar way, reflection on AI can deepen our understanding of human nature.
“And I think what the pope is doing with his encyclical on AI is something similar to that, that by reflecting on AI, we again learn more about ourselves,” Archbishop Fisher said. “In what ways are we like AI? What things do we have in common with AI? We are data collectors, we are analysts of data, we do delight in manipulating data so as to imagine, create, but in what ways are we not like AI?”
The answer, he said, begins with the embodied and spiritual nature of the human person.
“Because we’re bodies and souls, we’re sacramental and incarnational in a way that no AI can be,” he said. “We are social and feeling beings. That means we can have empathy. It means we’re made for friendship. And again, those things are not true of computers and even the most brilliant algorithms.”
There are moral and spiritual differences as well. “no AI can sin or be saved,” he said.
A Technological Revolution and a Christian Response
For Archbishop Fisher, the encyclical presses urgent questions at a decisive moment. “We need to reflect on what is special about human beings,” he said, and also on “what things about human beings do we want to protect in the face of this technological revolution that’s around us.”
The Church, he said, should not be afraid of technology, but neither should she be naïve about it. The question is how to use AI in a way that protects education, human reflection, communication, community, and human dignity.
“And so in pressing the anthropological question and the ethical questions that come from that, what is it to be a virtuous and principled user of AI, those questions that are pressed in the encyclical I think are very important,” he said.
He compared the possible significance of the AI revolution to the Industrial Revolution, which occasioned Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum. This new moment, he suggested, may require an equally profound reflection on “being a human being, for human flourishing, for being a human community, and for communion between persons, and for our relationship with God.”
Hope for the Order
The interview closed with Archbishop Fisher’s gratitude for the wider Order. He described his own province as “a little province, huge in area, nearly a quarter of the world if you include all the oceans that are part of our province, but very small in numbers.” Seeing the work of other provinces, he said, gives him “enormous hope and confidence for the order.”
As Sydney prepares to welcome the Church for the 2028 International Eucharistic Congress, Archbishop Fisher’s words point to a deeply Dominican task: to preach Christ in a secular age, to draw the curious toward the truth, to use new technologies without losing sight of the human person, and to invite all people into communion with the living God.
