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“When ChatGPT went down, I saw the answer to a problem I’ve been trying to solve all my life,” said Matthew Harvey Sanders.
The Torontonian – a serious-mannered 43-year-old in clerical black – stands in the modern library of the Vatican’s Pontifical Oriental Institute. Balconies lined with shelves rise three stories above them, where one of them is located the largest collection of books on Eastern Catholic traditions in the world.
It is a piece of Catholicism Church written records: councils and synods, papal encyclicals, official documents and statistical yearbooks that follow baptisms, weddings and ordinations. Sanders is turning that body into Magisterium AI, a Catholic-focused artificial intelligence platform that he founded and runs as CEO.
Around the corner, in a small office near Rome’s Termini station, a staff of young women feed thick theological volumes into scanners the size of refrigerators while robotic arms pick up and turn the pages.
“Right now we’re trying to complete the collective work of all the doctors and fathers of the church,” Sanders said.
It’s not the most obvious origin story of the world’s most widely used Catholic AI chatbot.
AND Converter to Toronto in the Vatican
Sanders was baptized An Anglican, raised evangelical and converted to Catholicism after taking a course on the history of the Catholic Church at the University of Toronto while serving part-time as an infantry officer in the Canadian Armed Forces. Later, while helping to promote Catholic youth events for the Archdiocese of Toronto, he noticed a gap between the Church’s intellectual tradition and the tools available for access.
This led him to Rome — first as a technological consultant, then in the construction of the Magisterium, which is primarily supported by private Catholic donors.
Magisterium is a great language model, but its training data is tightly constrained. General purpose systems like ChatGPT are trained on data from the Internet, of which Catholic doctrine is a small part – increasing the likelihood of errors and hallucinations.
The Magisterium, Sanders said, is taught on primary Catholic sources, much of it on material that would otherwise sit in the specialized libraries or church basements. Answers include citations that link directly to those sources.
“We always say: Nalways trust AI on faith alone,” he said.
The Vatican has not officially approved the platform — and probably never will, Sanders said. Individual books can be obtained imprimatur (“printable”) or a nothing stands in the way (“no objection for moral reasons”) because the text is fixed and unchanging. But the language model is constantly changing and the Catholic leadership cannot approve it in the same way.
Still, Sanders keeps a signed letter from Pope Leo XIV on his office wall. in which a Catholic artificial intelligence developer is encouraged and suggests that “technological innovation can be a form of participation in the divine act of creation.”
The Vatican is entering the digital age
Leo made artificial intelligence an early focus of his papacy, warning in his first public address last spring that it could reshape not just economies and jobs, but the way people understand what it means to be human.
After several years online, Sanders said Magisterium is active in 185 countries. Most users are professionals — priests who prepare Sunday homilies, bishops, seminary professors and office workers. But the platform is increasingly used by lay Catholics, especially in the West, many with personal moral questions — what Sanders calls “conscience.”
From a small office near Rome’s Termini station, Matthew Sanders and his team scan Vatican texts to train Magisterium AI, a Catholic language model built to answer questions based on official documents and theological sources.
“Many people struggle with a burdened conscience,” he said. “They are trying to understand how serious the sin is. Should they go to confession or not? Is it (the sin) venial or mortal?”
Common topics include pornography addiction, questions about sexuality, sexual shame, anger, and behavior that people cannot control.
“People are trying to get by after their will is broken,” Sanders said, asking, “What does that mean? How are they going to fix the situation?”
Among lay Catholics, says user base skews male and Generation Z – one of the loneliest cohorts in the West and one that seems to rediscover Catholicism.
Some arrive in a confrontational mood — “yelling in all caps,” Sanders said — before moving on to questions.
“There’s a lot of anger,” he said. “And a lot of confusion about sexuality.”
Sanders said traffic patterns point to certain cultural influences: Inquiries spike after online lectures or podcasts by alumni In of T professor turned conservative culture warrior Jordan Peterson.
“People come in upset that the Catholic Church might say that sex outside of marriage is harmful,” he said. “They frame it as argument… thinking they are confronting artificial intelligence, but what they are actually encountering are Augustine, Aquinas, John Paul II.”
Sanders is careful to present the Magisterium as a reference tool, not a substitute for priesthood, confession, or spiritual direction. He cringes at the idea that it should sound like a priest.
“I rather think it’s the librarian’s voice,” he said and then added, “the one with the confessional stamp and no long-term memory.”
The balance between utility and human connection is key. If the interaction is too cold, he said, users might return on ChatGPT. Too warm, and Sanders worries it could become a substitute for bonds.
On the border between tools and teaching
That border questions, said Michael Baggot, a theologian and bioethicist at Rome’s Regina Apostolorum University who sits on the advisory board of the Magisterium.
“It’s a positive opportunity for people to explore issues that they might not be comfortable dealing with with other people,” he said. “But it should always be the first step that leads them to the right person, to a living community.”
The risk, Baggot said, is substitution, replacing human escort with a system that feels safer because it never reacts.
AI ethicist Virginia Dignum agrees that a faith-specific system can reduce factual errors, but says it doesn’t change the technology’s limitations.
“It can be relevant and supportive, but it can never be taken as guaranteed in terms of correctness,” she said. “It is a generative language, not a guarantee of truth.”
A fine balance—between access and authority, empathy and structure—is a tension that runs through Sanders’ biography. Growing up in multicultural Toronto, where he was exposed to different ideas and cultures, he describes as a “privilege” but also confusing – an obstacle, he says, in distinguishing right from wrong.
“If you’re trying to figure out where the truth is,” Sanders said, “there are so many signals that you just give up.”
Closing the knowledge gap
His conversion to Catholicism he was an intellectual, Sanders said, which later led him to enter seminary at Washington, DC He left after two years, understanding he was more suitable for marriage than for a priest. That period coincided with the height of the Catholic sexual abuse crisis, which taught him, he said, to separate the claims of the faith from the failures of those entrusted with it.
After working in the Toronto Archdiocese’s Office of Spiritual Affairs, which dealt with abuse cases, Sanders became convinced that many of the Catholic Church’s crises stemmed from isolation.
“It is unacceptable,” he said, “that priests receive five years of formation, and everyone else is alone.”
The Magisterium, he claims, is one of the attempts to solve this imbalance, giving clergy and regular Catholics easier access to the Church’s intellectual tradition. — and, in his opinion, stronger participation and responsibility.
One long-term goal is to digitize Catholic Cchurch statistical yearbooks, with which data on baptisms, marriages and ordinations can be searched by diocese.
“If your diocese is failing,” Sanders said, “you should be able to ask yourself why.”
