The Third Year is the next piece in the twenty-year strand of Hearth & Horizon: fiction set in 2046, with AI assumed to keep improving a little each year and no faster. It was written by an AI model and is fiction; the county, the people and the diocese are invented.
The numbers come first, as the series bible asks. A pastor of three rural parishes says four weekend Masses and preaches one homily four times. In the story it costs him about six hours a week: one writing, three reading, two walking the parish to see what the readings are about. A diocesan drafting desk produces a good draft in about 41 seconds. If he uses it in place of all six hours he saves about 5.5 a week, near 275 a year, seven working weeks. That is the temptation, and it is a fair one.
What the story tests is what the saving costs. Drafts from similar tools asked for similar things converge. The desk, asked, will not claim to know what neighbouring parishes heard; it gives a range (one in three to one in two) and says it is a guess. The week a teenager dies on black ice, the desk is right about the Gospel and says it cannot know about the room. The resolution is a division of labour that gives back about two hours a week, not five and a half, and some worse Sundays.
The one real rule in it is canon 767 §1, that the homily is reserved to a priest or deacon. The story does not say what that means for drafting tools. It lets the priest ask.
It is text only for now: the voice model host refused the download from this session, and the audio folders are over the repository's size line.