In 2016, ChatGPT didn’t even exist yet. And Silicon Valley believed it would solve the future of humanity with codes, billion-dollar investments and genius applications.
It was precisely at this time that the Vatican began inviting technology executives for private conversations. The first meeting was held in Santa Maria sopra Minerva, one of the most symbolic churches in Rome.
The name of the conference series was also not chosen by chance: Minerva Dialoguesin reference to the Roman goddess of wisdom. The message was clear. It wasn’t about discussing gadgets or innovation, but about thinking about what this technological revolution means for human beings.
The expectation, now, is that this debate will not only be limited to meetings with the heads of big techs. Still in 2026, the Church may publish a new and comprehensive document on artificial intelligence and the place of people in this new world.
Series scenario
The person responsible for placing the Minerva Dialogues Standing is Bishop Paul Tighe, advisor to the Dicastery for Culture and Education — together with Father Eric Salobir, Dominican founder of Optic, a network for reflection on technology and faith.
No one can disclose who the participants are without authorization. Even so, the names that have appeared over the years give the dimension of the proposal. Among them, Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google), Reid Hoffman (co-founder of LinkedIn) and James Manyika (former head of the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the largest business consultancy in the world).
Billionaires from big techsmany of them atheists, discussing philosophy and morals with Catholic theologians in ancient churches in Rome. It looks like the setting for a series cult of some service streamingbut perhaps it is the image of the West’s effort to rethink its own direction.
The Church arrived first
To understand why the Vatican entered this debate, and before almost everyone else, it is necessary to go back to the end of the 19th century.
At that time, the Industrial Revolution left millions of workers in critical conditions: children in factories, inhumane working hours and miserable wages. As governments were lost and radical ideologies (such as communism) gained strength, the Church decided to act.
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII published the encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”), a document that marked the Catholic position in the face of industrialization. The text did not condemn technology, but rather the absence of moral limits on its use.
More than 130 years later, when Robert Francis Prevost was chosen pope, he chose the name Leo XIV precisely to signal a parallel between the Industrial Revolution and the AI era.
In his first address to the College of Cardinals, he explained: “Pope Leo XIII addressed the social issue in the context of the first great industrial revolution. Today, the Church offers everyone its heritage of social doctrine to respond to yet another industrial revolution, linked to the developments in artificial intelligence, which bring new challenges to the defense of human dignity, justice and work.”
The big social issue
The most interesting point is anticipation. You Minerva Dialogues began ten years ago, when governments and universities still treated AI ethics as a separate subject.
But Rome realized early that artificial intelligence was not just technology. It was the great social issue of the 21st century.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (the company that developed the Claude AI model), summarized the problem: “Cancer is cured, the economy grows 10% a year, the budget is balanced. But 20% of people don’t have a job.”
In fact, in March of this year, Anthropic itself promoted a seminar at its headquarters in California to discuss the “moral formation” of its products — and, among the guests, there were Catholic priests.
What big tech doesn’t have
But why did technology billionaires agree to discuss AI with a two-thousand-year-old religious institution?
The best answer came from someone from Silicon Valley itself: Jaron Lanier, virtual reality pioneer and chief scientist at Microsoft. After attending a Vatican conference on artificial intelligence, he returned to the US impressed.
According to Lanier, the Catholic view of the human being is “immensely, immensely, immensely more sane and reasonable” than that of his colleagues in the technology field.
The “immensely” repeated three times was not by chance. Nor the fact that the phrase was said by one of the men who helped create the internet as we know it.
Jaron Lanier recognized that the Church has something missing in Silicon Valley: an anthropology. In other words, an articulated, coherent and long-standing vision of the human condition.
The document Antiqua et Novapublished by the Church in 2025, summarizes this objectively. Intelligence is not wisdom, says the text. A machine processes information, but it does not distinguish what is good or bad for people.
AIs lie, flatter users and invent facts left and right. And the big techs seem to be realizing, perhaps grudgingly, that building machines capable of imitating human behavior is much simpler than dealing with the moral dilemmas they create. It is precisely there that philosophy and theology reappear.
“Legionaries of the Antichrist”
But not everyone in Silicon Valley has joined in on this conversation. In November last year, Marc Andreessen — an OpenAI investor and Meta board member — mocked a publication by Pope Leo XIV on moral discernment in artificial intelligence.
The billionaire responded to the pontiff’s message with a meme of actress Sydney Sweeney rolling her eyes. Hours later, after receiving angry comments from the public, he deleted his own post.
Andreessen is the author of the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, in which he defends technological acceleration at all costs. And he even states that any decline in the development of AI “will cost lives”.
However, no one in the industry is as aggressive as Peter Thiel. Co-founder of PayPal and one of Facebook’s first investors, he is also the creator of Palantir Technologies, a software which holds gigantic security contracts with the US government.
An Orthodox Christian and considered the main “guru” of Vice President JD Vance (who is Catholic), Thiel even included Pope Leo XIV in a list of “legionaries of the Antichrist” who dare to try to put moral brakes on technological advances and, thus, threaten progress.
Machines that decide
The truth is that Leo XIV touched a sensitive point in the worldview and, mainly, in the business of figures like Peter Thiel. “No machine should decide to take the life of a human being,” said the pontiff, referring to autonomous weapons — military systems capable of attacking without the command of people.
But the Vatican’s response came quickly: Father Paolo Benanti, the Holy See’s main advisor on technology ethics, defined Thiel’s ideas as “heresy”.
According to Benanti, every AI model carries a “power disposition” and a certain vision of society, generally based on commercial interests unknown to the common user. In short, technology is never neutral. Those who program systems also program values.
A new Rerum Novarum?
In June 2025, representatives from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, IBM and Palantir attended the Second Annual Rome Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics and Corporate Governance.
They weren’t public relations people posing for photos together and trying to improve the institutional image of their companies. They were executives and legal directors. And their presence shows that the Church has become a space for reflection and influence that no government or university has managed to build.
The previous year, the Vatican had already expanded the Rome Call for AI Ethics (“Called Rome for AI Ethics”), a document created in partnership with Microsoft and IBM to establish basic principles such as transparency, responsibility, security and impartiality. The text gained support from leaders of 21 different religions and began to guide regulatory debates in Europe.
And there are signs that the next step is already being taken. German Catholic news agency KNA, citing Church sources, reported that the pope is expected to publish his first encyclical, provisionally called Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”).
The Vatican has not officially confirmed anything, but the topic is already taken for granted: artificial intelligence, work and human dignity.
If this actually happens, it will be the first major papal document dedicated to the age of algorithms — a sign that the conversation that began discreetly in a church in Rome ten years ago is far from over.
Source: www.bing.com
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