As AI transforms the global landscape, institutions worldwide are racing to define its ethical boundaries. Among them, the Vatican brings a distinct theological voice, framing AI not just as a technical issue but as a moral and spiritual one. Questions about human dignity, agency, and the nature of personhood are central to its engagement—placing the Church at the heart of a growing international effort to ensure AI serves the common good.

Father Paolo Benanti is an Italian Catholic priest, theologian, and member of the Third Order Regular of St. Francis. He teaches at the Pontifical Gregorian University and has served as an advisor to both former Pope Francis and current Pope Leo on matters of artificial intelligence and technology ethics within the Vatican.

Below is a lightly edited and abridged transcript of our discussion. You can listen to this and other episodes of Explain to Shane on AEI.org and subscribe via your preferred listening platform. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review, and tell your friends and colleagues to tune in.

Shane Tews: When did you and the Vatican began to seriously consider the challenges of artificial intelligence?

Father Paolo Benanti: Well, those are two different things because the Vatican and I are two different entities. I come from a technical background—I was an engineer before I joined the order in 1999. During my religious formation, which included philosophy and theology, my superior asked me to study ethics. When I pursued my PhD, I decided to focus on the ethics of technology to merge the two aspects of my life. In 2009, I began my PhD studies on different technologies that were scaffolding human beings, with AI as the core of those studies.

After I finished my PhD and started teaching at the Gregorian University, I began offering classes on these topics. Can you imagine the faces of people in 2012 when they saw “Theology and AI”—what’s that about?

But the process was so interesting, and things were already moving fast at that time. In 2016-2017, we had the first contact between Big Tech companies from the United States and the Vatican. This produced a gradual commitment within the structure to understand what was happening and what the effects could be. There was no anticipation of the AI moment, for example, when ChatGPT was released in 2022.

The Pope became personally involved in this process for the first time in 2019 when he met some tech leaders in a private audience. It’s really interesting because one of them, simply out of protocol, took some papers from his jacket. It was a speech by the Pope about youth and digital technology. He highlighted some passages and said to the Pope, “You know, we read what you say here, and we are scared too. Let’s do something together.”

This commitment, this dialogue—not about what AI is in itself, but about what the social effects of AI could be in society—was the starting point and probably the core approach that the Holy See has taken toward technology.

I understand there was an important convening of stakeholders around three years ago. Could you elaborate on that?

The first major gathering was in 2020 where we released what we call the Rome Call for AI Ethics, which contains a core set of six principles on AI.

This is interesting because we don’t call it the “Vatican Call for AI Ethics” but the “Rome Call,” because the idea from the beginning was to create something non-denominational that could be minimally acceptable to everyone. The first signature was the Catholic Church. We held the ceremony on Via della Conciliazione, in front of the Vatican but technically in Italy, for both logistical and practical reasons—accessing the Pope is easier that way. But Microsoft, IBM, FAO, and the European Parliament president were also present.

In 2023, Muslims and Jews signed the call, making it the first document that the three Abrahamic religions found agreement on. We have had very different positions for centuries. I thought, “Okay, we can stand together.” Isn’t that interesting? When the whole world is scared, religions try to stay together, asking, “What can we do in such times?”

The most recent signing was in July 2024 in Hiroshima, where 21 different global religions signed the Rome Call for AI Ethics. According to the Pew Institute, the majority of living people on Earth are religious, and the religions that signed the Rome Call in July 2024 represent the majority of them. So we can say that this simple core list of six principles can bring together the majority of living beings on Earth.

Now, because it’s a call, it’s like a cultural movement. The real success of the call will be when you no longer need it. It’s very different to make it operational, to make it practical for different parts of the world. But the idea that you can find a common and shared platform that unites people around such challenging technology was so significant that it was unintended. We wanted to produce a cultural effect, but wow, this is big.

As an engineer, did you see this coming based on how people were using technology?

Well, this is where the ethicist side takes precedence over the engineering one, because we discovered in the late 80s that the ethics of technology is a way to look at technology that simply doesn’t judge technology. There are no such things as good or bad technology, but every kind of technology, once it impacts society, works as a form of order and displacement of power.

Think of a classical technology like a subway or metro station. Where you put it determines who can access the metro and who cannot. The idea is to move from thinking about technology in itself to how this technology will be used in a societal context. The challenge with AI is that we’re facing not a special-purpose technology. It’s not something designed to do one thing, but rather a general-purpose technology, something that will probably change the way we do everything, like electricity does.

Today it’s very difficult to find something that works without electricity. AI will probably have the same impact. Everything will be AI-touched in some way. It’s a global perspective where the new key factor is complexity. You cannot discuss such technology—let me give a real Italian example—that you can use in a coffee roastery to identify which coffee beans might have mold to avoid bad flavor in the coffee. But the same technology can be used in an emergency room to choose which people you want to treat and which ones you don’t.

It’s not a matter of the technology itself, but rather the social interface of such technology. This is challenging because it confuses tech people who usually work with standards. When you have an electrical plug, it’s an electrical plug intended for many different uses. Now it’s not just the plug, but the plug in context. That makes things much more complex.

In the Vatican document, you emphasize that AI is just a tool—an elegant one, but it shouldn’t control our thinking or replace human relationships. You mention it “requires careful ethical consideration for human dignity and common good.” How do we identify that human dignity point, and what mechanisms can alert us when we’re straying from it?

I’ll try to give a concise answer, but don’t forget that this is a complex element with many different applications, so you can’t reduce it to one answer. But the first element—one of the core elements of human dignity—is the ability to self-determine our trajectory in life. I think that’s the core element, for example, in the Declaration of Independence. All humans have rights, but you have the right to the pursuit of happiness. This could be the first description of human rights.

In that direction, we could have a problem with this kind of system because one of the first and most relevant elements of AI, from an engineering perspective, is its prediction capabilities.Every time a streaming platform suggests what you can watch next, it’s changing the number of people using the platform or the online selling system. This idea that interaction between human beings and machines can produce behavior is something that could interfere with our quality of life and pursuit of happiness. This is something that needs to be discussed.

Now, the problem is: don’t we have a cognitive right to know if we have a system acting in that way? Let me give you some numbers. When you’re 65, you’re probably taking three different drugs per day. When you reach 68 to 70, you probably have one chronic disease. Chronic diseases depend on how well you stick to therapy. Think about the debate around insulin and diabetes. If you forget to take your medication, your quality of life deteriorates significantly. Imagine using this system to help people stick to their therapy. Is that bad? No, of course not. Or think about using it in the workplace to enhance workplace safety. Is that bad? No, of course not.

But if you apply it to your life choices—your future, where you want to live, your workplace, and things like that—that becomes much more intense. Once again, the tool could become a weapon, or the weapon could become a tool. This is why we have to ask ourselves: do we need something like a cognitive right regarding this? That you are in a relationship with a machine that has the tendency to influence your behavior.

Then you can accept it: “I have diabetes, I need something that helps me stick to insulin. Let’s go.” It’s the same thing that happens with a smartwatch when you have to close the rings. The machine is pushing you to have healthy behavior, and we accept it. Well, right now we have nothing like that framework. Should we think about something in the public space? It’s not a matter of allowing or preventing some kind of technology. It’s a matter of recognizing what it means to be human in an age of such powerful technology—just to give a small example of what you asked me.