This is the transcript of a speech by Matthew Harvey Sanders, CEO of Longbeard, delivered on Tuesday, September 2, 2025, in Edinburgh as part of a conference titled “Catholic Social Teaching and AI: Responses to the Ethical Challenges of Emerging Technologies.” St. Mary’s University London hosted this conference.

Introduction: The Digital Rubicon and the New Rerum Novarum

It is a profound honor to be with you here today in this historic Gillis Centre in Edinburgh, a place that has long served the mission of the Church in Scotland. I want to thank the organizers at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, and the Archdiocese of St. Andrews & Edinburgh for convening this essential conference.

Your call for papers rightly notes that ever since Rerum Novarum in 1891, the Church has consistently stepped forward to offer the world a moral compass during times of profound social and technological upheaval. Pope Leo XIII looked at the smokestacks of the Industrial Revolution and saw not just new machines, but a new set of challenges to human dignity, the family, and the common good. He understood that technology is never merely a tool; it is an environment that shapes our lives, our relationships, and our very understanding of what it means to be human.

Today, we stand at the precipice of a transformation that will dwarf the Industrial Revolution in its scope and speed. The smokestacks of the 19th century have been replaced by the invisible, complex neural networks of the 21st. We are crossing a new Rubicon—a digital Rubicon—and the name of this river is Artificial Intelligence. Like Pope Leo, we are called to discern the signs of the times. We are called to look at the rise of generative AI, advanced robotics, and autonomous systems not just with technical curiosity, but with deep spiritual and theological reflection, guided by the timeless wisdom of Catholic Social Thought.

This is not a task for a select few in Silicon Valley or in government labs. It is an urgent and non-negotiable mission for the whole Church. The central question before us is not if AI will change the world, but how. And more importantly, who will write the moral and ethical code that governs its development? 

This question brings to mind a lesson I learned while working for Cardinal Thomas Collins of Toronto. As some of you may know, His Eminence is a great admirer of Tolkien and is known for his pithy insights. One that has always stayed with me is this: “If you know where you’re going, you’ll be more likely to get there.”

That simple wisdom is at the heart of our task. Will the destination for AI be a code of radical utility, of transhumanist ambition, and profit-maximization? Or will it be a code rooted in the Gospel—a code that defends the inviolable dignity of the human person, promotes the common good, and orders all technology towards the true flourishing of humanity and the greater glory of God?

This is the choice before us.

My purpose today is to argue that the Church must not be a passive observer in this new age. She must be a bold, active, and decisive protagonist. We are called not just to critique the emerging technological landscape from the sidelines, but to enter into the digital arena, to build, to sanctify, and to evangelize. This is why I have dedicated my work at my company, Longbeard, to building what I call “Catholic AI”—not as a novelty, but as a necessity for the Church’s mission in the 21st century and beyond. Today, I want to outline the importance of this mission and what I consider to be the most critical issues the Church must address to faithfully serve Christ in the age of AI and robotics.

The Two Paths: Defining a “Catholic AI”

When we speak of “Artificial Intelligence,” we often conjure images from science fiction—sentient robots or all-knowing supercomputers. But the reality is both more mundane and more profound. AI is already here. It shapes the news we read, the products we buy, the routes we drive, and increasingly, the way we think. The foundational difference between the AI being built by the secular world and the AI we are called to build as Catholics lies not in the code, but in the creed.

The dominant philosophy driving AI development today is a form of utilitarianism and materialism. It is an ideology that sees human beings as complex data processors, efficiency as the ultimate good, and the human brain as a “meat computer” that can be improved upon and eventually surpassed. This is the “dark path” of AI. It is a path that, if followed to its conclusion, leads to a world where human purpose is eroded, where our God-given dignity is measured by our economic output, and where we are offered a counterfeit transcendence in the form of digital simulations and virtual realities. This path promises a utopia of leisure and convenience, but it is a utopia that risks costing us our very souls.

In stark contrast, what I call “Catholic AI” proceeds from a radically different starting point. It is built upon the unshakeable foundation of Catholic anthropology. It begins not with the question “What can technology do?” but with the question “Who is the human person?” Catholic AI recognizes that the human person is an imago Dei, a being of infinite dignity, created with a transcendent destiny. It understands that true human flourishing is found not in passive consumption, but in creativity, meaningful work, loving relationships, and communion with God. Therefore, the mission of Catholic AI is fundamentally different. Its purpose is not to replace human intellect but to augment it; its goal is not to automate human relationships but to facilitate them; and its ultimate end is not to distract us from the real world, but to guide us always toward the sacramental life of the Church.

This is the “golden path” for technology, and it’s not just a theoretical concept. It is a path we are actively building. At Longbeard, we saw a foundational problem: for centuries, the Church has been the greatest producer and guardian of human knowledge, yet so much of this treasure remains locked away, inaccessible on the shelves of libraries and in the archives of monasteries. We asked ourselves: how can we use AI to serve the Church’s intellectual tradition?

One answer is the Alexandria Digitization Hub, our “digital scriptorium” for the 21st century, located in the heart of the Church—Rome. The project was piloted with the Pontifical Oriental Institute before being formally established as a collaborative project with the Pontifical Gregorian University.

Its primary mission is to serve the great centers of Catholic learning in Rome, digitizing the priceless and often inaccessible collections of the Pontifical universities and the ancient religious orders headquartered there. We use state-of-the-art robotic scanning and AI-powered optical character recognition to transform fragile, physical texts into robust, searchable digital assets, preserving them for future generations. To enhance this process, we are developing our own AI models designed to improve the automated scanning efficiency of the hardware.

While the Hub’s physical operations are currently centered in Rome, our vision is global. We are already developing plans for a “flying hub”—a specialized team with advanced scanning technology that can travel to monasteries, dioceses, seminaries, and universities around the world to help them digitize their unique collections on-site. This entire effort is an act of both preservation and evangelization, creating the essential “raw material” for training a truly Catholic AI. 

This work fuels our platform, Vulgate AI, which is designed to become the “Catholic Alexandria”—a universal digital library making the richness of our 2,000-year-old intellectual patrimony available to anyone, anywhere, in their native language.

But to be clear, this is not merely a digital bookshelf or a simple PDF repository. Vulgate AI is a sophisticated processing engine. When an institution—be it a seminary in Nairobi, a university in Manila, or our own Alexandria Hub in Rome—ingests its materials, our AI gets to work. It employs advanced optical character recognition and mathematical embedding technology to transform even ancient, fragile, or handwritten texts into perfectly searchable digital data.

But it goes further. The platform uses AI to perform deep semantic analysis, understanding not just the words, but the concepts within the text. It automatically tags documents with key metadata, identifies theological themes, and builds a web of interconnected knowledge, linking a passage from a Church Father to a related concept in a Papal encyclical written centuries later. This means a researcher no longer has to hunt for a keyword. They can ask a complex, multilingual question and discover connections across the entire patrimony of the Church—connections that would have been virtually impossible to find before. It transforms a static archive into a dynamic, living intellectual tradition.

By making these powerful tools available globally, we universalize access to resources previously available only to those with physical proximity to specific archives. It’s an act of preservation, ensuring this wisdom is not lost. More than that, it is an act of evangelization, unlocking this treasury of truth for a new generation.

From that foundation, we identified another urgent need. As people increasingly turn to AI for answers to life’s biggest questions, what happens when they ask a secular AI about sin, suffering, or salvation? They receive an answer synthesized from the moral chaos of the internet, steeped in relativism. The Church cannot cede this ground. This is why we built

Magisterium AI. It is a compound AI system, but with one crucial difference: its universe of knowledge is not the entire internet, but only the authoritative teachings and rich intellectual tradition of the Catholic Church. The system utilizes an extensive and ever growing RAG database consisting of over 28,000 magisterial and Catholic theological and philosophical texts, including works such as the Catechism, the Code of Canon Law, the writings of the Church Fathers and Doctors, documents from the Ecumenical Councils, and Papal encyclicals.

When you ask Magisterium AI a question, it answers not from a position of secular neutrality, but from the heart of the Church’s Magisterium. It is a digital catechist and a tool for clarity, designed to guide the curious and the faithful toward the truth. Crucially, every significant answer it generates includes clear, specific citations, encouraging the user to “never take an AI’s word on faith alone” and facilitating a deeper engagement with the primary sources of the faith. The need for such a tool has been affirmed by its global adoption. Today, Magisterium AI is the number one answer engine for the Catholic faith in the world, used in over 165 countries and more than 50 languages.

The Five Critical Issues for the Church in the AI Age

If we are to navigate this new era successfully, we must be clear-eyed about the challenges we face. These are not merely technical problems but profound pastoral and theological crises. I believe there are five critical issues the Church must urgently address.

The “Existential Cliff”: Mass Unemployment and the Crisis of Meaning

The first and most immediate challenge is what I call the “Existential Cliff.” For decades, we have been told that automation would only affect blue-collar, manual labor jobs. This has proven to be false. The generative AI revolution is now coming for white-collar, knowledge-worker jobs—paralegals, accountants, graphic designers, even software coders. Some economists predict that within the next decade, AI and robotics could automate or significantly alter up to half of all existing jobs. This is not simple economic disruption; it is a fundamental threat to the social fabric.

For over a century, the modern world has implicitly tied human dignity and identity to work and economic productivity. When millions find that what they “do” is no longer economically valuable, what will be the source of their identity and purpose? The secular world’s proposed solutions—universal basic income, a life of leisure, immersion in video games—are hollow. They treat human beings as mouths to be fed and minds to be entertained, a recipe for despair. The result will be a pandemic of what Viktor Frankl called the “existential vacuum”—a widespread sense of meaninglessness.

This is where the Church’s mission becomes absolutely critical. We must be the ones to offer a more profound vision of human dignity, decoupling it from economic utility. Our parishes must become vibrant centers of community and purpose. And we must provide the intellectual and spiritual food for those seeking meaning. Imagine a man who has lost his job and his sense of purpose, who can now, through tools like Magisterium AI, access the profound writings of St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, finding answers in a tradition that has weathered empires and ideologies. This is how we begin to offer a real alternative to nihilism.

The New Gnosticism: The Philosophical Threat of Transhumanism

The second great challenge is the insidious philosophy that often underpins AI development: Transhumanism. At its core, transhumanism is a modern form of the ancient Gnostic heresy. It views our biological bodies as obsolete hardware that needs to be “upgraded” and dreams of a future where we can upload our consciousness to the cloud to achieve digital immortality. This is a direct and profound assault on the Christian understanding of the human person. We believe in the Incarnation—that the body is not a prison to be escaped, but a temple of the Holy Spirit to be glorified. Our finitude and vulnerability are the very conditions through which we learn to love, to sacrifice, and to depend on God.

The Church must expose and combat this Gnostic heresy with the full force of her theological and philosophical tradition. We must preach a “theology of the body” for the digital age, championing the goodness of creation and the sanctity of our embodied nature. We must remind the world that true transcendence is not found by uploading our minds to a server, but by uniting our hearts to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Salvation comes through the Cross, not through code.

The Digital Phantoms: The Challenge to Sacramental Life and Human Connection

The third critical issue is the threat AI poses to real human community and, by extension, to the sacramental life of the Church. We are already witnessing the corrosive effects of digital immersion on our ability to engage in deep, authentic relationships. We have more “friends” than ever before, yet we are lonelier. Advanced AI will amplify this trend exponentially, offering perfectly tailored AI companions and hyper-realistic virtual worlds. The temptation to retreat from the messiness and demands of real relationships into the comfort of these digital phantoms will be immense.

This trend strikes at the very heart of our Catholic faith, which is fundamentally incarnational and communal. Christ saved us in the flesh and left us a Church with physical sacraments—water, bread, wine, oil. The life of faith is a life of presence, communion, and tangible encounter.

The Church’s response must be to double down on the real. Our parishes must be authentic schools of communion. And we must be wise in how we use technology. A tool like Magisterium AI must be understood as a digital front porch to the Church, not the church itself. Its purpose is to answer the initial questions a person might have in the privacy of their own home, to clear up misconceptions, and to provide sound catechesis that ultimately encourages them to take the next step: to walk through the real doors of a real parish, to join a real community, and to encounter Christ in the real sacraments. An AI cannot baptize, consecrate, or absolve. Our technology must always serve as a bridge to the tangible, sacramental life of the Church.

Algorithmic Injustice: AI Bias and the Marginalization of the Vulnerable

Your conference’s call for papers astutely asks how AI will impact social systems and subsidiarity. This points to the fourth critical issue: the danger of algorithmic injustice.

AI systems are not objective arbiters of truth; they are mirrors reflecting the data we give them. If that data is tainted by decades of societal prejudice, the AI will not only learn these biases but will amplify and entrench them at a massive, unprecedented scale, all under a veil of technical neutrality. Consider predictive policing algorithms, which can send more officers into neighborhoods based on historical arrest data. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: more police lead to more arrests for minor offenses, which in turn “proves” the algorithm’s prediction and justifies an even greater police presence, trapping already marginalized communities in a cycle of over-policing. Or imagine a healthcare algorithm designed to allocate critical resources to the sickest patients. If it wrongly uses past healthcare spending as a proxy for sickness, it will systematically overlook poorer communities who have had less access to care, wrongly labeling the most vulnerable as the least in need and denying them life-saving intervention. This is a profound threat to the preferential option for the poor, as it risks building a future where injustice is automated and baked into the very infrastructure of society.

Furthermore, this crisis is compounded by the immense concentration of AI power. The development of foundational AI models requires computational resources and capital available to only a handful of global tech corporations. This concentration is not just a commercial concern; it is a profound civic one. We risk creating a new technocratic oligarchy, where a few unelected engineers in a few coastal cities design the systems that will influence the lives of billions. But the danger multiplies when this private power is embraced by the state. Governments, eager for the efficiency and control these systems promise, may adopt them for social scoring, public services, and surveillance, creating a form of technocratic governance that operates far from the consent of the governed.

This alliance of corporate and state power poses an unprecedented threat to the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which holds that decisions should be made at the most local and immediate level possible. This top-down control undermines the family, the local community, and the individual, treating them not as active participants in their own governance, but as data points to be managed and optimized in a vast, centralized system.

The Church must be a powerful advocate for a more just and decentralized technological future. We must insist on transparency and accountability in AI development, and we must champion a human-scale approach that empowers, rather than erodes, the communities that form the bedrock of a healthy society.

The Crisis of Consciousness: Defining the Soul in an Age of Artificial Minds

Finally, the fifth, and perhaps most profound, challenge is the looming Crisis of Consciousness. As AI systems become ever more sophisticated in their ability to imitate human conversation, creativity, and reason, society will inevitably confront a startling question: Can a machine be conscious? The secular world, often operating from a purely materialistic framework, is ill-equipped to answer this. Its primary tool, the Turing Test, is fundamentally inadequate, as it only measures a machine’s ability to imitate a human, not whether it possesses a genuine inner life, self-awareness, or a soul.

This is a moment where the Church’s intellectual tradition is not just relevant, but essential. We cannot determine if an AI is, or could ever be, conscious without first having a clear and robust Catholic understanding of consciousness itself—one that integrates philosophy, theology, and the concept of the immortal soul. AI labs today are focused on computational power; they often lack the expertise and, frankly, the incentive to innovate in this deeply humanistic domain. They are, however, open to collaboration.

The Church must seize this opportunity. We are called to work with these technologists to move beyond simplistic imitation games and help develop new, more profound tests—”Theological Turing Tests,” if you will—that probe for genuine understanding, intentionality, and the attributes that flow from a soul. This is not an abstract debate. Defining consciousness is the philosophical frontline for defending the unique dignity of the human person. If we cannot articulate what makes us human, we risk one day being unable to distinguish ourselves from the machines we have created.

The Mission of the Church: A New Vision for Human Flourishing

So, what is the path forward? Faced with these daunting challenges, the mission of the Church in the AI age is to engage, to build, and to propose.

First, we must propose a richer vision of human flourishing, one that reminds the world that we are made for more than just work and consumption. We are made for contemplation, beauty, worship, and love. The Church, having studied the human condition for two millennia, is uniquely positioned to articulate this vision and provide the ethical and teleological anchor for all AI development. By providing the ultimate telos for civilization, the Church can set the moral and philosophical agenda that guides engineers, policymakers, and corporations.

Second, the Church must embrace her role as the primary educator of hearts and minds. In an age of information overload, she must be a trusted source of truth. This is no longer just an abstract goal; we are building the tools for it now. Using platforms like Vulgate AI to unlock our intellectual heritage and Magisterium AI to provide clear, faithful answers, we can equip the faithful with the resources to navigate the complexities of our time, forming men and women with well-formed consciences. The clergy must be prepared to address a new set of pastoral challenges born from widespread unemployment and the resulting crisis of purpose.

Third, we must evangelize the digital continent. The internet and the emerging metaverses are the new Areopagus. The Church cannot be absent. We must be there as missionaries, using tools like Magisterium AI as digital evangelists that can reach people where they are, bringing the light of the Gospel to this new and often dark territory. This is not merely about creating a “Catholic corner” of the internet, but a long-term project aimed at fundamentally influencing the intellectual and ethical formation of the most powerful information technologies ever created.

Finally, we must inspire and form a new generation of Catholic technologists, entrepreneurs, and policymakers. The Church has a rich history of fostering science and innovation. We must reclaim that legacy, showing the world that faith and reason are essential partners in the quest for a future that is truly human. The Church should embrace its role as a global convener, using its moral authority to lead the conversation on AI ethics and purpose, bringing together technologists, policymakers, and leaders from all sectors to ensure a human-centric future.

Conclusion: Choosing Our Future

In the Book of Deuteronomy, the Lord says to His people, “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life.” Today, humanity stands before a similar choice. Technology has placed in our hands an unprecedented power. The two paths—the golden path and the dark path—lie before us. The dark path offers a future of comfort purchased at the cost of our freedom, purpose, and humanity. It leads to the existential cliff, to the Gnostic heresy of transhumanism, and to a world where we are managed by algorithms in sterile isolation.

The golden path, the path illuminated by the light of Christ and the wisdom of His Church, offers a different future. It is a future where technology is placed at the service of the human person. A future where our tools help us to be more creative, more compassionate, and more connected to one another and to our Creator. It is a future where we embrace our vocations as co-creators with God, using our gifts to build a civilization of love.

This choice will not be made for us. It will be made by us. To the theologians, philosophers, and ethicists gathered here today: your role in this moment is indispensable. The world is asking profound questions about what it means to be human, and it is desperately in need of good answers. You are the custodians of a tradition that has been wrestling with these questions for two millennia. Your task is to bring the timeless wisdom of Catholic Social Thought into dialogue with these new technologies, to help us discern a path forward that is faithful to the Gospel and truly serves the good of humanity.

Let us leave this place with a renewed sense of urgency and hope. The challenge is great, but our God is greater. He who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, is with us. Let us not be afraid. Let us go forth with courage and creativity to build a future where every person can flourish, and where all of technology is ordered to its one true and final end: the greater glory of God.