“When ChatGPT was abandoned, I saw an answer to a problem I had been trying to solve my whole life,” said Matthew Harvey Sanders.
The Torontonian – a serious-mannered 43-year-old dressed in clerical black – stands in the modern library of the Vatican’s Pontifical Oriental Institute. Balconies lined with shelves rise three stories and house one of the the largest collections of books on Eastern Catholic traditions in the world.
It is a fraction of Catholics The church written trace: councils and synods, papal encyclicals, official documents and statistical directories tracing baptisms, marriages and ordinations. Sanders is transforming this corpus into Magisterium AI, a Catholic-focused artificial intelligence platform that he founded and leads as CEO.
Around the corner, in a small office near Rome’s Termini station, a young women staff supplying thick theological volumes refrigerator-sized scanners while robotic arms lift and turn pages.
“Right now we are trying to complete the collective works of all the doctors and fathers of the Church,” Sanders said.
This isn’t the most obvious origin of the world’s most widely used Catholic AI chatbot.
A Toronto converted in the Vatican
Sanders was baptized Anglican, raised evangelical and converted to Catholicism after a Catholic Church history course at the University of Toronto, while serving part-time as an infantry officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. Later, while helping promote a Catholic youth event for the Archdiocese of Toronto, he noticed the gap between the Church’s intellectual tradition and the tools available to access it.
This led him to Rome — first as a technology consultant, then in the construction of the Magisterium, supported mainly by private Catholic donors.
Magisterium is a large language model, but its training data is tightly constrained. General-purpose systems such as ChatGPT are trained on Internet data, where Catholic doctrine is only a small part, making errors and hallucinations more likely.
The Magisterium, Sanders said, is formed from primary Catholic sources, much of which is material that would otherwise be found in archives. specialized libraries or church basements. Responses include quotes directly from these sources.
“We always say: Nnever trust an AI on faith alone,” he said.
The Vatican has not officially approved the platform — and probably never will, Sanders said. Individual books may receive a imprimatur (“can be printed”) or a nothing stands in the way (“no objection on moral grounds”) because the text is fixed and immutable. But a linguistic model continually changes and cannot be approved equally by Catholic leaders.
Yet Sanders keeps on the office wall a letter signed by Pope Leo XIV encouraging Catholic AI developers and suggesting that “technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation.”
The Vatican enters the digital age
Leo has made artificial intelligence a primary focus of his pontificate, warning last spring in his first public address that it could reshape not only economies and workplaces, but also the way people understand what it means to be human.
After a few years online, Sanders said Magisterium was active in 185 countries. Most users are professionals: priests preparing Sunday homilies, bishops, seminary professors and chancery staff. But the platform is increasingly used by lay Catholics, particularly in the West, many of whom have personal moral questions — what Sanders calls “scrupulousness.”
From a small office near Rome’s Termini station, Matthew Sanders and his team scan Vatican texts to train Magisterium AI, a Catholic language model designed to answer questions based on official documents and theological sources.
“A lot of people have a burdened conscience,” he said. “They are trying to understand how serious the sin is. Should they confess or not? Is it [sin] subordinate or mortal?
Common themes include pornography addiction, questions around sexuality, sexual shame, anger, and behaviors that people feel unable to control.
“People are trying to find their way after their will is broken,” Sanders said, asking, “What does that mean? How do they go about fixing the situation?”
Among to set down Catholic, he says, the user base is predominantly male and Gen Z – one of the loneliest cohorts in the West And the one who seems to rediscover Catholicism.
Some arrive in a confrontational mood — “yelling in CAPS,” Sanders said — before moving on to questions.
“There’s a lot of anger,” he said. “And a lot of confusion about sexuality.”
Sanders said traffic patterns suggest some cultural influences: Query volumes increase after online conferences or alumni podcasts. University of Toronto professor turned conservative culture warrior Jordan Peterson.
“People come in upset that the Catholic Church can say that sex outside of marriage is harmful,” he said. “They present it as a argument … thinking they are opposing an AI, but what they are actually encountering is Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Paul II.
Sanders is careful to present the Magisterium as a reference tool and not as a substitute for clergy, confession or spiritual direction. He bristles at the idea that this sounds like a priest.
“I prefer to think that the voice is that of a librarian” he said, then added: “one with a denominational seal and no long-term memory.”
The balance between utility and human connection is essential. If the interaction is too cold, he says, users might back at ChatGPT. Too warm, and Sanders fears it will become a substitute for relationships.
On the border between tool and teaching
This border That’s important, said Michael Baggot, a theologian and bioethicist at Regina Apostolorum University in Rome who serves on the Magisterium’s advisory board.
“It’s a positive opportunity for people to explore issues that they might not be comfortable discussing with other people,” he said. “But it should always be a first step that leads them to a real person, to a living community.”
The risk, Baggot said, is substitution, replacing human support with a system that seems safer because it never reacts.
Virginia Dignum, an AI ethicist, agrees that a faith-specific system can reduce factual errors, but says that doesn’t change the technology’s limitations.
“This may be relevant and encouraging, but it can never be understood as a guarantee in terms of accuracy,” she said. “This is generative language, not a guarantee of truth.”
The delicate balance – between access and authority, empathy and structure – is a tension that runs through Sanders’ own biography. He describes his childhood in a multicultural Toronto, where he was exposed to different ideas and cultures, as a “privilege” but also as an obstacle, he says, to the distinction of right and wrong.
“If you try to find out where the truth lies,” Sanders said, “there are so many signals that you give up.”
Bridging the knowledge gap
His conversion to Catholicism was intellectual, Sanders said, and later led him to enter a seminary in Washington, D.C. He left after two years, realize he was more suited to marriage than to the priesthood. This period coincided with the height of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, teaching him, he says, to separate the claims of the faith from the failures of those charged with them.
After working in the Archdiocese of Toronto’s Office of Spiritual Affairs, which handled abuse cases, Sanders became convinced that many of the Catholic Church’s crises stem from isolation.
“It is unacceptable,” he said, “that the clergy benefit from five years of training and that everyone else is left to their own devices. »
The Magisterium, he asserts, is an attempt to remedy this imbalance, by giving clergy and ordinary Catholics easier access to the intellectual tradition of the Church. — and, according to him, stronger participation and accountability.
A long-term goal is to digitize the Catholic CHurch statistical directories, making data on baptisms, marriages and ordinations searchable by diocese.
“If your diocese is in decline,” Sanders said, “you should be able to ask why.”
