Vatican City: Centuries after medieval monks meticulously copied sacred texts by hand to preserve the wisdom of the ancient world, the Vatican and other Catholic institutions are once again at the forefront of knowledge preservation this time through artificial intelligence, robotics, and advanced digitization.
The Vatican Apostolic Library, founded in the 15th century, has embarked on one of the most ambitious cultural preservation projects in the world the digitization of around 80,000 handwritten manuscripts. These are part of a vast collection that includes 2 million printed books, 100,000 archival documents, and hundreds of thousands of coins, medals, and artworks, many of which date back over a millennium.
Timothy Janz, the Vatican Library’s Scriptor Graecus and former vice prefect, noted that innovation has always been part of the library’s identity. “People often think of the Vatican Library as a dusty old place, but actually it has tended to be on the cutting edge,” he said. Even in the Renaissance, he added, the Vatican pioneered practices that would shape modern libraries such as displaying books upright on open shelves, a rare concept in the 16th century.
Pope Nicholas V, who first envisioned the library in 1451, described it as a place created “for the common convenience of scholars.” That mission, Janz explained, continues today through digitization: “It’s a new way of doing what the founder wanted making works available while ensuring they endure for future readers.”
The Vatican’s ongoing project began in 2012 and has already placed 30,000 manuscripts online, including treasures such as the third-century “Hanna Papyrus” and the fourth-century “Codex Vaticanus”, one of the oldest known copies of the Greek Bible. The goal is to create a “real digital library user-friendly, accessible, and enduring,” according to Janz.
The digitization effort is also closely tied to conservation. Each manuscript undergoes detailed examination before and after scanning to ensure its preservation. “We’ve discovered many texts that needed restoration thanks to this process,” Janz noted.
While the Vatican takes a cautious and preservation-focused approach, other Catholic institutions in Rome are pushing the boundaries of technology even further. At the Alexandria Digitization Hub in the city’s historic center, robotic scanners delicately turn the pages of centuries-old volumes at a rate of 2,500 pages per hour, digitizing fragile texts with precision and care.
The hub, managed by the Catholic technology company Longbeard, works with pontifical universities to make their rare books accessible worldwide. Matthew Sanders, Longbeard’s CEO, said the initiative began when the rector of the Pontifical Oriental Institute asked how scholars in distant regions could access its 200,000-volume library on Eastern Catholic and Orthodox traditions.
“The request was simple digitize the books, make them readable on any device, and allow instant translation,” Sanders explained. That vision has since expanded to include the Salesian Pontifical University, the Pontifical Gregorian University, and other major institutions.
Once scanned, these works become part of a growing Catholic digital dataset that trains AI systems like Magisterium AI and the upcoming Ephrem language model both designed to reflect Catholic theology and moral teaching. The platform allows scholars to search, summarize, translate, and even trace AI-generated answers back to their sources, ensuring academic reliability.
Longbeard’s Vulgate AI translation system has already transformed research possibilities. Sanders recalled discovering an untranslated Latin papal document on St. Thomas More: “We ingested it through Vulgate, and within an hour I could read it in English. That’s the kind of access this technology enables.”
The Vatican Library, however, remains cautious about full automation. Janz emphasized that manuscripts often contain subtle textual variations a single altered letter could change an entire meaning. “Even a 99.9% accurate AI transcription isn’t good enough,” he warned. “For textual criticism, absolute accuracy is essential.”
Sanders agreed that AI cannot replace human expertise but argued that its analytical potential is transformative. “AI can scan across collections worldwide and identify links and patterns that would take decades for a scholar to find,” he said. “The scholar’s role remains indispensable, but AI becomes a powerful ally in discovery.”
Despite its cautious stance, the Vatican is exploring AI-driven projects. One initiative aims to catalog and tag illustrations from medieval manuscripts, allowing images to be searchable by theme. Another, developed with Japanese researchers, is training machine-learning models to transcribe medieval Greek handwriting, a task that could eventually save years of manual labor.
Janz acknowledged that the technology still makes mistakes but said ongoing training will improve results. “Maybe eventually it will reach a point where it can do things reliably,” he said, adding that the ultimate goal is to make all manuscript transcriptions accessible to scholars in their original languages.
Inside the Vatican Library’s grand Sistine Hall, frescoes depict milestones in human learning from Moses receiving the Law to the scholars of Alexandria and the Apostles recording the Gospels. Sanders views the AI project as an extension of that sacred duty.
“If we are to progress as a civilization,” he reflected, “we have to learn from those who came before us. This technology ensures that their reflections, insights, and prayers remain alive and accessible for generations to come.”
In this way, the Vatican and Catholic academia are proving that preserving ancient wisdom does not mean resisting modern tools but rather, sanctifying them in service of truth and memory.