“When ChatGPT went down, I saw the answer to a problem I had been trying to solve all my life,” said Matthew Harvey Sanders.
The Torontonian — a 43-year-old with a strict demeanor and a black pastor — stands in the modern library of the Vatican’s Pontifical Oriental Institute. Balconies fitted with high shelves are three stories high, with one house the largest collection of books on Eastern Catholic culture in the world.
It is part of the Catholic Church For the church written text: councils and synods, papal letters, official documents and statistical yearbooks following baptisms, marriages and ordinations. Sanders is turning that organization into Magisterium AI, the Catholic-focused artificial intelligence platform he founded and serves as chief executive.
On the corner, in a small office near the Roman station Termini, a young female workers enter thick theological volumes scanners the size of a refrigerator while robot arms lift and turn pages.
“Right now we are trying to finish the jobs of all the doctors and fathers of the church,” said Sanders.
It’s not the most obvious story of the origin of the most widely used Catholic AI chat in the world.
A Toronto convert in the Vatican
Sanders was like that be baptized An Anglican, he was raised Evangelical and converted to Catholicism after a University of Toronto course in the history of the Catholic Church while serving part-time as an infantry officer in the Canadian Army. Later, helping to promote a Catholic youth event for the Diocese of Toronto, he saw a gap between the church’s intellectual culture and the tools available to reach it.
That led him to Rome – first as a technical advisor, then to build a Magisterium, supported mainly by private Catholic donors.
The Magisterium is a large language model, but its training data is tightly bound. General purpose systems like ChatGPT are trained on extensive Internet data, of which Catholic teaching is a small piece – making mistakes and seeing things too close.
The Magisterium, Sanders said, was trained in the main Catholic sources, much of which would remain special libraries or church basements. Answers include citations that link directly to those sources.
“We always say: Nalways trust AI only on faith,” he said.
The Vatican has not officially approved the platform – and probably won’t, Sanders said. Individual books can receive i incomplete (“can be printed”) or a not an obstat (“no objection on moral grounds”) because the text is fixed and unchanging. But the language model is constantly changing and cannot be approved by the Catholic leadership in the same way.
Still, Sanders keeps a signed letter on the office wall from 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 is entering the digital age
Leo has made artificial intelligence a major focus of his papacy, warning last spring in his first public address that it will not only reshape the economy and workplaces, but the way people understand what it means to be human.
After a few years online, Sanders said the Magisterium is active in 185 countries. Most users are professionals – priests preparing Sunday homes, bishops, seminary professors and chancellor staff. But the platform is increasingly being used by mainstream Catholics, especially in the West, many of whom have personal questions about morality — what Sanders calls “intellectualism.”
From a small office near Rome’s Termini station, Matthew Sanders and his team scour Vatican documents to train Magisterium AI, a Catholic language model built to answer questions by drawing on official texts and religious sources.
He said: “Many people are suffering from a heavy conscience. “They are trying to see how bad the sin is, should they confess or not? [sin] low or mortal?”
Common themes include pornography addiction, questions about sex, shame about sex, anger and behaviors that people feel they can’t control.
“People are trying to move around after their will is violated,” Sanders said, asking, “What does this mean? How do they continue to fix the situation?”
In the middle sleep Catholics, says user base criticizes male and Gen Z – one of the loneliest groups in the West again one that seems to rediscover Catholicism.
Others got into a confrontational mood — “shouting in CAPS,” Sanders said — before answering questions.
“There is a lot of anger,” he said. “And there’s a lot of confusion about gender.”
Sanders said the traffic patterns suggest some cultural influences: inquiries increase after online lectures or previous podcasts. U of T professor turned cultural hero Jordan Peterson.
“People came upset that the Catholic Church might say that sex outside of marriage is dangerous,” he said. “They are a frame like contradiction… thinking they were pushing back against AI, but what they actually encountered was Augustine, Aquinas, John Paul II.”
Sanders is careful to present the Magisterium as a reference tool, not a place for clergy, confession or spiritual direction. He is surprised when he thinks it must sound like a teacher.
“I prefer to think it’s a librarian’s voice,” he said, then added, “with a confessional seal and no long-term memory.”
A balance between aid and human interaction is important. If interactions are too cold, he said, users might come back on ChatGPT. It’s too warm, and Sanders worries it could be harmful instead of relational.
On the border between tool and teaching
That border news, says Michael Baggot, a theologian and bioethicist at Rome’s Regina Apostolorum University who sits on the Magisterium’s advisory board.
“It’s a great opportunity for people to explore things that they might not talk about freely with other people,” she said. “But it should always be the first step that leads them to a real person, a living community.”
The risk, says Baggot, is to switch, instead of going along with someone with a system that feels safe because it doesn’t work.
AI theorist Virginia Dignum admits that a religiously-specific system might reduce the error of fact, but says it doesn’t change the technology’s limitations.
“It can be appropriate and supportive, but it can never be understood as guaranteed in terms of accuracy,” he said. “It’s about the language that produces it, it doesn’t confirm the truth.”
A fine balance — between access and authority, empathy and structure — is the contention found in Sanders’ history. He describes growing up in multicultural Toronto, where he was exposed to different ideas and cultures, as a “privilege,” but also as confusing—an obstacle, he says, to distinguishing right from wrong.
“When you’re trying to figure out where the truth lies,” Sanders said, “there are a lot of signs that you should just give up.”
Bridging the knowledge gap
His conversion to Catholicism He was smart, Sanders said, and later led him to a seminary Washington, DC He left after two years, realizing he was more suitable for marriage than for the priesthood. This period coincided with the height of the crisis of sexual abuse of Catholics, teaching him, he said, to separate what the religion says and the failure of those entrusted to it.
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 problems stemmed from segregation.
“It is not acceptable,” he said, “that the pastors get a five-year suspension and all the others sit on their own.”
He says the Magisterium is one of the efforts to address that inequality, to give priests and lay Catholics easy access to the intellectual tradition of the church. – and, in his opinion, strong participation and accountability.
One long-term goal is to digitize it Catholic CHurch’s statistical yearbooks, which make data on baptisms, marriages and ordinations searchable by diocese.
“If your diocese is going down,” Sanders said, “you should be able to ask why.”
