The Vatican and AI: Is It God or Big Tech?
February 26, 2026
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I read an interesting item in Futurism. The article “Pope Implores Priests to Stop Writing Sermons Using ChatGPT.” I think it was okay to recycle homilies and other outputs from approved texts. I think that some priests (not very many) use sermon services that deliver content to provide some booster jets to the content creation process. I also think that some folks involved in the church rely on digital Bibles. In my one-year stint at Duquesne University in the 1960s I relied on microfilm.
Thanks, Venice.ai. I think there were windows in most of the scriptoria I have visited.
But ChatGPT is different.
The write up reports:
In a closed-door meeting with clergy from the Diocese of Rome late last week, Pope Leo XIV clobbered his priests with a distinctly 21st-century request: to resist the “temptation to prepare homilies with artificial intelligence…
At Duquesne I was not studying to be a priest, I was a person who had some minor work indexing Latin sermons. I had a grant or fellowship to continue that work. What I recall about the documents I reviewed and added to the digital index was that there was a lot of repetition. The same Biblical passages, the same conclusions about conduct, and the same tone was evident in the medieval material I began working on in 1962 for a fellow named Dr. Gillis, I believe.
I was surprised when I spotted this passage in the write up:
“Like all the muscles in the body, if we do not use them, if we do not move them, they die,” the Pope reportedly said. “The brain needs to be used, so our intelligence must also be exercised a little so as not to lose this capacity.”
I wonder why the Catholic church actively encouraged reuse and recycling of its information. I am not going to disagree with any major religious figure, but the intentional and seemingly required reuse of certain information seems tailor made for a AI system trained on these authorized texts. (No, I won’t mention unauthorized texts which had some interesting ideas in them. A few crept into those medieval sermons too.)
My thought is that the Vatican should snag an open source LLM, input content (selected content from the Vatican Library because some of the content in that repository is, one might say, controversial), and make that resource available to those who wish to interact with the authorized information. However, the Catholic Church became agitated with the concept of infinity. Maybe AI is the same type of conceptual problem? A chat with the Iron Maiden might convince the schismatist.
Stephen E Arnold, February x, 2026
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