Over the past few weeks, I've seen a number of images circulating on social media. A baby dolphin, a 1901 photograph of a family with 18 children, two little boys of different races enjoying friendship: nothing controversial.

The response to these images is almost universally positive. That's because the images are created to be universally appealing.

The problem is that these images aren't real. They are created by AI.

Flawless vs. real

What's the big deal? More and more people are becoming unable to tell the difference between what is real and what isn't.

Even worse, we seem to be developing a preference for flawless and beautiful images over messy and imperfect reality.

I'm grateful that God does not.

At the end of June, the church commemorates her two most influential (and flawed) leaders: Sts. Peter and Paul.

The irony of a shared feast day shouldn't be lost on us. Despite the similarity of how their lives ended, both Peter and Paul had their issues.

Simon walked on water, but then sank. He proclaimed that Jesus was the Son of God, then cautioned him against going to Jerusalem.

Swearing he would remain loyal even if no one else did, within hours, Peter denied Jesus not once, but three times.

He was anything but the "rock" Jesus had called him to be — not exactly a firm foundation on which to build the church.

In his zeal for Jewish law, Saul orchestrated the stoning of Stephen.

He was ambitious and intent on rooting out members of this dangerous new Messianic cult.

He was a man with a mission, en route to Damascus to arrest wayward Jews and bring them back to Jerusalem in chains.

That was interrupted when Jesus appeared to him.

Poor Ananias must have been terrified when God sent him to minister to Saul. It's no wonder Paul was not readily trusted by those who were following the way.

These two men could not have been more different from each other.

Simon was not well educated, and Saul was a scholar who had studied under one of the most esteemed rabbis in Jerusalem.

Simon was brash and impetuous, often jumping into things mouth first.

Saul was calculating and deliberative, carefully planning his next move.

Simon lived in Galilee, a crossroad of cultural and religious diversity. Saul grew up in Tarsus, exposed to the full force of Greek learning and achievement and its effect on Jewish thought.

Simon and Saul also came to faith in Christ in entirely different ways.

Simon's discipleship grew organically and over time. He became "Peter" slowly.

In contrast, Saul was struck blind by an unexpected mystical encounter (see image). When he regained his sight, he was "Paul," suddenly part of a community he had considered heretical. Read more

• Jaymie Stuart Wolfe is an author, singer-songwriter, and lay evangelist. A 1983 convert to the Catholic faith, Jaymie is a wife and mother of eight.

The demand for being perfect, based on Matthew 5:14, "Be ye therefore perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect," became the deranged and deranging discipline that was brought to an end by Vatican II's healthier attitude toward spiritual growth.

One of the great, largely unseen and surely unsung tragedies of the old church to which Pope Benedict XVI's "Reform of the Reform" triumphantly proposes to return us was that of good-hearted and willing young men and women sacrificing their spontaneity and zest for life on the altar, more pagan than Christian, of trying to follow the Rule of Life that their superiors insisted was the perfect expression of God's will for them.

No wonder docility was the virtue dearest to the hearts of superiors in those days.

"Keep the Rule," they would say in one of their most addled dicta, "and the Rule will keep you."

Good-hearted young men and women thought these superiors, like the restored professional referees, knew what they were doing when they told them that spiritual perfection lay in following the rules — most of them more like traffic regulations than spiritual insights — that covered almost every waking moment in the lives of seminarians and aspirants to religious orders.

The seminary I attended instructed students with a solemnity unrelieved by irony, "Never appear at the window without your cincture on."

Those who broke any of the rules, mostly by doing something healthy, such as talking to another human being during imposed periods of strict silence, had to report themselves to their superiors. In its most baroque form, this took place at a Chapter of Faults, a public event, in which candidates could accuse themselves, and sometimes others, of rule infractions.

Being a seminarian or a novice in these circumstances was the closest thing to being an innocent bystander at the collision of inhuman but supposedly "perfect" spiritual nonsense with human and reassuringly imperfect common sense.

The so-called "Reform of the Reform" would love to bring back this idea that religion imposes some quest for perfection on us.

That is an illusion akin to the notion that the professional football referees will call every play perfectly.

Instant replay was only introduced when fans, owners and sportswriters complained that the professional referees made too many mistakes in their calls on the field.

The quest for perfection, which has no real application in the spiritual life, calls for a reach that is always beyond our grasp. Even instant replay, through which plays are examined from all angles in slow motion and in freeze-frame, does not always get it right. Continue reading