The Vatican and other Catholic libraries turn to artificial intelligence and robotics to digitize their collections

Vatican City, 06/10/2025 / 06:00 am

Long before cloud servers and computers, medieval Catholic monks preserved the intellectual heritage of the ancient world by writing Greek and Latin manuscripts. Centuries later, the Vatican Library and other Catholic institutions in Rome are turning to new technologies, including digitization, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), to ensure heritage endures.
The Vatican Apostolic Library, formally founded in the 15th century, is digitizing around 80,000 handwritten manuscripts, part of a collection that also includes 2 million books, 100,000 archival documents and hundreds of thousands of coins, medals and charts.
“People often think that the Vatican Library is an old and dusty place, but in reality it tends to be up to date,” Timothy Janz, former vice prefect of the library and now “Scriptor Graecus,” told ACI Prensa.
To underscore his point, Janz pointed to one of the many Renaissance frescoes on the walls of the Sistine Hall of the Vatican Library that depict books stored upright on open shelves, a novelty in an era when volumes were generally placed horizontally.

“Being a public library was unusual in the 16th century,” he said, adding that Pope Nicholas V first described in a 1451 letter his desire to have a library “for the common convenience of scholars.”

The mission of the Vatican Library, Janz said, has always been twofold: “to make works available to readers and also to preserve them for future readers.” Digitization, then, is “a new way of doing what the founder really wanted the library to be about: making these works available.”
The Vatican’s digitization efforts focus on its unique collection of historical manuscripts, as well as some of its oldest books, incunabula books printed during the earliest period of typography before 1500.

One of the oldest manuscripts in the Vatican collection is the “Hanna Papyrus”, dating from the 3rd century AD, which has already been digitized, as has the 4th century “Codex Vaticanus”, one of the oldest complete manuscripts of the Bible in Greek. The digitization project began in 2012 and has so far brought about 30,000 manuscripts online.
The vision is “to have a real digital library that is really usable and easy to use,” Janz said.

Elsewhere in Rome, other historic Catholic institutions are getting even more technological.

At the Alexandria Digitization Center in the historic center of Rome, a robotic scanner turns the fragile pages of centuries-old books in the library collection of the Pontifical Gregorian University at a speed of up to 2,500 pages per hour. In a matter of minutes, texts (some of which had only been accessible to scholars who traveled to Rome) can be searched, translated and even fed into an artificial intelligence model trained to reflect Catholic teaching.
The initiative is led by Matthew Sanders, CEO of a Catholic technology company called Longbeard, which is using robotics and artificial intelligence to digitize Catholic collections at some of Rome’s historic pontifical universities and institutes.
The project began when the rector of the Pontifical Oriental Institute asked if its 200,000-volume library of Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions could be made accessible to scholars from the Middle East, Africa and India without needing to travel to Rome. The request was simple: digitize the books, make them readable on any device and allow instant translation.
Since then, the Alexandria Digitalization Hub’s workload has increased. Longbeard is currently working to digitize the historical collections of the Salesian Pontifical University and the Pontifical Gregorian University and plans to work with the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Venerable English College, as well as several religious orders, to digitize some or all of their collections.

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Digitized works can be incorporated into a growing Catholic data set, training Longbeard’s artificial intelligence systems such as Magisterium AI and an upcoming Catholic-specific language model, Ephrem. Institutions can choose to make their texts public or keep them private. Scholars can search collections, generate summaries, or trace an AI-generated response to its source.

The system also allows translation through Vulgate AI. Sanders recounted stumbling across an untranslated papal document on St. Thomas More: “I never knew this existed. It was in Latin. It hadn’t been translated. We ingested it through the Vulgate and suddenly I could read it.”
“When you go downtown and see a book being scanned, and an hour later that work is available for anyone in the world to read in any language, that’s when you realize what this really means,” he said.
For now, the Vatican Library is taking a more cautious approach to artificial intelligence and robotics. Janz explained why he believes manuscripts in particular require a human touch rather than automation.
For scholars, he said, “the reason this manuscript is interesting is because in this specific place it has a word that is different from other manuscripts; maybe it’s just a letter that changes it from one word to a different one,” Janz explained. “It’s that small difference that makes this book so valuable.” This type of work requires 100% precision, he added. Even if automated AI transcription reaches “99.9% accuracy… it is basically useless.”
Sanders said he “wholeheartedly” agrees that for “the deep and meticulous work of textual criticism, the original manuscript is the ultimate authority, and a human expert is irreplaceable,” but added that “to limit the role of AI to mere transcription is to miss its revolutionary potential.”
“AI, even with a 99.9% accuracy rate, transforms these silent collections into a dynamic, searchable database of human knowledge,” he said. “It allows a researcher to ask, ‘Show me all the 15th-century manuscripts dealing with trade with the Ottoman Empire,’ and get instant results from collections around the world. It can identify previously undiscoverable patterns and conceptual links. The AI ​​finds the needles in the haystack; the scholar is then free to perform the exact analysis of the priceless originals.”

For the Vatican Library, the digitization effort has also been integrated into its conservation efforts for these historical texts. “Each manuscript that passes through the scanners first goes to our conservation workshop and is carefully examined to ensure that… it can withstand the stress of being digitized,” Janz said. “When the digitization is finished, they return to the conservation workshop again and check if anything has changed.”
“We have discovered many manuscripts that needed to be repaired, needed conservation work as a result of going through each and every one of them,” he said.
Still, the Vatican Library is not completely ignoring AI. He is developing a project to catalog medieval manuscript illustrations, making the images searchable by subject. In partnership with Japanese researchers, it is also training machine learning models to transcribe medieval Greek handwriting. “You’ll make mistakes and we’ll tell you what they are…maybe eventually you’ll get to a point where you can do things reliably,” Janz said.
In the future, Janz said he would love to see technology make it possible to have transcriptions of all his manuscripts in historical languages ​​available to scholars.
As for AI, he remains cautious. “I think we’re pretty open to it. I think we share the same concerns about AI that everyone else has.”
Inside the Sistine Hall of the Vatican Library, an ornate series of frescoes traces the long history of libraries and learning: Moses receiving the Law, the library of Alexandria, the apostles recording the Gospels. Sanders sees his AI project as continuing his mission to ensure that the wisdom of the past is “shared as widely as possible.”
“If we want to progress as a civilization, we have to learn from those who came before us,” he said. “Part of this project is ensuring that their reflections and insights are available today.”