ROME, ITALY — From November 6th to 7th, experts in artificial intelligence, technology companies, and investors gathered at the Pontifical Gregorian University for the Builders AI Forum — a landmark event dedicated to exploring how artificial intelligence can serve the mission of the Catholic Church in education, health care, media, and evangelization.
The gathering brought together voices from both the Church and the tech world in a shared effort to ensure that technology remains a tool for good. EWTN’s Andreas Thonhauser reflected on the significance of this collaboration: “you also have a lot of speakers or participants here from the tech world, Microsoft, HP, other companies who send people or where people are interested in engaging also with the Church. Why is that?”
Matthew Sanders, CEO of Longbeard, responded why major technology companies are eager to engage in dialogue with faith communities. “I think there’s a number of reasons. I think the companies see an opportunity to serve an important market. I mean, there’s a lot of Catholics in the world and they feel their tech platforms could be helpful in servicing that mission. But I think beyond that, I think a lot of the companies, especially the AI labs, are aware that as these AIs become more and more intelligent, they become more and more powerful, the more we have them acting agentically in the world, they need to have some kind of understanding philosophically. They need to have some kind of moral code which guides them.”
Throughout the forum, participants took part in a series of workshops that explored ethical boundaries, practical applications, and the need to safeguard human dignity while designing tools that respond to real human needs. Among the participants was Sean Graber, President of EWTN Digital, who shared his insights on how artificial intelligence is already transforming today’s world.
“Well, it plays a huge role… AI is just taking the world by storm and it’s enabling us to do a lot of things that we couldn’t do before. So, we’re experimenting with how to use AI in some light ways and content creation and sort of brainstorming the way that we evangelize and tell stories and then even in more prosaic ways, how we develop softwares, how we build apps, how we market it and how we tell the stories of our own products and bring them to the world.”
As the conversation unfolded in Rome, Pope Leo XIV sent a message to participants, thanking them for their efforts to “ensure that emerging technologies remain oriented toward the dignity of the human person and the common good.”
Fr. Stephen Wang, Rector of the Venerable English College, underscored the need for Catholics to play an active role in shaping the future of technology: “Catholics need to be in the mix, they need to be involved and taking risks,… Otherwise, we’ll just get left behind and we’ll be playing catch up.”
Andreas Thonhauser posed a timely question: “Would you say that it’s necessary to have also gatherings like this, let’s say, inside the church to learn more about those new technologies?” Fr. Micheal Kong, an Australian priest and influencer, responded with “we try to use all these things, available for us for the right reasons and the right purposes as well.”
Adapted by Jacob Stein
