ROME — Robots may achieve many things, but the one thing they will never be capable of is tenderness, Pope Francis proposed in his weekly General Audience Wednesday.

The pontiff recounted that he had been speaking with some scientists about artificial intelligence and robots, who have been programmed to do astounding things.

“And I said to them: ‘But what is the one thing that robots will never be able to do?’ They thought, they made proposals, but in the end they agreed on one thing: tenderness. This is what robots will never be capable of.”

The pope was contrasting the tenderness of God revealed at Christmas in the Nativity scene and the limits of artificial intelligence.

As one of the best ways to prepare to welcome Jesus at Christmas he proposed spending some time in silence in front of the manger scene to contemplate the Holy Family of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.

“The manger is a catechesis” of the miracle of Christmas, he said. In the school of St. Francis of Assisi, the first one to create a manger scene, “we can return to our childhood by remaining to contemplate the scene of the Nativity, and let amazement be reborn in us at the ‘wonderful’ way in which God wanted to come into the world.”

“Let us ask for the grace of astonishment: in the face of this mystery, this reality so tender, so beautiful, so close to our hearts, may the Lord give us the grace of amazement, to meet him, to draw close to him, to draw close to all of us,” the pope said. “This will make tenderness be reborn in us.”

This picture taken at nightfall on December 18, 2020 shows figures of the Vatican’s crib, a near monumental nativity scene made up of larger than life ceramic statues made in the village of Castelli in the Abruzzo region of Italy, at St. Peters Square in the Vatican. (Photo by Vincenzo PINTO / AFP) (Photo by VINCENZO PINTO/AFP via Getty Images)

Curiously, the figures in the Vatican’s Nativity scene in St. Peter’s Square have been compared to robots, aliens, and astronauts, in a spectacle that conveys anything but “tenderness.”

The Vatican’s manger scene, populated with totemic, ceramic figures made by high school students and their teachers in the 1960s and 1970s, has been universally panned as one of the most uninspiring religious displays in recent memory.