Habemus AI: The Vatican’s Approach to New Technologies

The Catholic Church, with its 2000 years of history, predates the formation of all European states, making it one of the oldest institutions in the world. It has a clearly defined structure, with the Holy See in the Vatican City and the figure of the Pope at its core. This institutionalisation and the overseeing of the Bible’s latest translations are designed to protect the foundations of Christianity. Interpretations of faith, however, are not immune to technological and scientific advancements: Gutenberg's printing press made the Bible universally accessible, while Galilei and Darwin revolutionised Christianity’s scientific assumptions. Despite setbacks in scientific research, technological progress has always been an unstoppable force, as the XVI century philosopher Paracelsus prophesied:"[w]e shall be like gods. We shall duplicate God's greatest miracle – the creation of man”. Today, the Vatican has to guide Christians through humanity’s latest milestone: the mainstreaming of artificial intelligence.

What is AI?

Interestingly, the history of AI starts during the 1950s, when early computers could only perform basic calculations. In what felt like science fiction at the time, AI was established as a recognised field of study at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, in 1956. During what has been defined as the Constitutional Convention of AI, experts discussed the possibility to build machines that could interact through human language, create abstract concepts, solve problems, and improve themselves. The first breakthrough was made with the Perceptron, a software that could recognize patterns and organise them in two categories. However, its limitations with complex data led scholars and the US government to focus on problem solving and machine learning, leading to an AI boom throughout the 1960s. The two most important milestones of the time are the General Problem Solver, which could reach a solution between a given set of options, and ELIZA, a language processing program simulating a psychotherapist. Despite stagnation towards the end of the century, AI restarted making breakthroughs in the early 2000s with the advent of big data. Thanks to a bigger pool of information, machines transitioned from machine learning, which helped computers to improve their predictions, to deep learning, where models simulated multi-layered decision-making. Finally, in 2022, OpenAi released ChatGPT, a generative model able to create original content. The software, accessible via website and an app, quickly rose to fame due to widespread plagiarism at all stages of education, and as a tool to generate misinformation campaigns. Today, as other rivals such as Copilot, Gemini, and DeepSeek emerge, AI users are estimated at 380 million. As concerns raise over machines’ self awareness, how does the Church react to attempts of recreating human consciousness?

AI and Christianity

A first approach to the question was made by the clergyman, theologian, and academic Paolo Benanti, who has attempted in 2018 to build an ethical framework for the use of AI, which he considers a potential step towards algorithmic governance, or algocracy. In 2020, he assisted Microsoft, IBM, the FAO, and the Italian government to write and sign the Rome Call for AI ethics, encouraging a responsible development of new models. Since 2020, he has published several editorials on Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s prominent newspapers. In his pieces, he dwells on the interplay of AI with life, society, and economics, sketching a hybrid reality, between utopia and dystopia, called paraferno. He is the only Italian at the UN High Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, has collaborated with Pope Francis, and will likely assist Pope Leo XIV.

The late Pope Bergoglio introduced the issue at the papal level, centering the 2024 International Peace Day around the ethical development of AI. In a message released in December 2023, the Pope praised technological advancements for improving mankind, but raises the questions over the environmental costs of such progress. Moreover, man-made discoveries are seen as subjected to cultural biases, and thus having significant ethical implications. He rejects, therefore, taking the rise of AI as a granted improvement for humanity, as its profit and political driven development do not ensure societal stability, global peace, and environmental sustainability. In an attempt at preserving individual human dignity, the pontifex suggested machines should serve people in reaching their maximum potential rather than compete for human achievements. From a Christian standpoint, AI will never be able to replace humans in decision making tasks due to its missing ethical values which, together with its developers’ influences, deprive machines of the possibility of independent life. At a G7 meeting in June, the pope rejected labelling machines as ‘intelligent’, and warned about the potential rise of a technocracy that would inevitably increase global inequality. In a note called ‘New and Ancient’, the Vatican explains that, while AI-related progress may help people’s collaboration with God, the Holy See also calls for the prohibition of automated weapons, a dignified approach to automation’s application in the labour sector, and a careful oversight on its use in human relations.

Conclusion

Despite a promising start in Church-AI relations, Pope Francis’ papacy came to a sudden end in April when he passed away on Monday 21. After a quick conclave, the cardinals have chosen Robert Prevost as the first US-Peruvian pope, taking the name of Leo XIV (you can read more about Leo’s election and papacy in an excellent piece written by our colleague Patrycja). But how will he approach the matter of the AI, as Francis witnessed its early stages and Leo will supervise its maturity? We can get a first hint from the confirmation of Benanti as a papal advisor, tracing a possible continuity with Bergoglio. A second piece of evidence is in the choice of Leo as a new name: Leo XIII's major work was Rerum Novarum, or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, which advocated for the rights of workers during the first industrial revolution. Therefore, we can expect an emphasis on workers’ dignity, as Francis had encouraged a support in their productivity rather than their automated surveillance and reduction to repetitive tasks. As automation brings drastic changes to workplaces, and threatens mass layoffs across all sectors, we can expect a showdown between the Vatican and the biggest companies over workers’ rights in the age of AI.