The Vatican and other Catholic libraries resort to AI and robotics to digitize collections

Vatican City, October 6, 2025/06:00 am

Long before the cloud and computers servers, medieval Catholic monks retained the intellectual inheritance of the ancient world when writing Greek and Latin manuscripts. Centuries later, the Vatican Library and other Catholic institutions in Rome are resorting to new technologies, including digitalization, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI), to ensure that the heritage endures.
The Vatican Apostolic Library, formally founded in the fifteenth century, is digitizing around 80,000 handwritten manuscripts, part of a collection that also includes 2 million books, 100,000 archiving documents and hundreds of thousands of currencies, medals and graphics.
“People often think of the Vatican Library as an ancient and dusty place, but in reality they have tended to be at the forefront,” said Timothy Janz, the old Vice Prefect of the Library and now “Scriptor Graecus,” he told CNA.
To underline its point, Janz pointed out one of the many Renaissance frescoes on the walls of the Sixtine room of the Vatican Library that represents books stored vertically on open shelves, a novelty at a time when the volumes generally placed plans were placed.

“Being a public library was something unusual in the sixteenth century,” he said, adding that Pope Nicholas V first described his desire for a library “for the common convenience of scholars.”

The mission of the Vatican Library, said Janz, has always been double: “Make the jobs available for readers and also to keep them for future readers.” Digitization, then, is “a new way of doing what the founder really wanted the library to be, so that these works are available.”
Vatican digitalization efforts focus on their collection of unique historical manuscripts, as well as some of their oldest books, the printed incunabula books during the first period of typography before 1500.

One of the oldest manuscripts in the Vatican’s collection is the “Hanna Papyrus”, which is from the third century DC, which has already been digitized, as well as the “Codex Vaticanus” of the fourth century, one of the first complete manuscripts of the Bible in Greek. The digitalization project began in 2012 and so far has put around 30,000 online manuscripts.
The vision is “to have a real digital library that is really usable and easy to use,” said Janz.

In another part of Rome, other historical Catholic institutions are going even more high technology.

In the Alexandria Digitalization Center in the Historic Center of Rome, a robotic scanner converts the fragile pages of centenary books from the Library collection of the Pontifical University of Gregorian at a speed of up to 2,500 pages per hour. In a matter of minutes, the texts, some that had only been accessible to academics traveling to Rome, can be registered, translated and even fed in an artificial intelligence model trained to reflect Catholic teaching.
The initiative is directed by Matthew Sanders, CEO of a Catholic technology firm called Longbeard, which is using robotics and AI to digitize Catholic collections in some of the historical pontifical universities and institutes of Rome.
The project began when the rector of the Pontifical Eastern Institute asked if his library of 200,000 volumes in Eastern Catholic and Orthodox traditions could be accessible to academics in the Middle East, Africa and India without requiring trips to Rome. The application was simple: digitize the books, make them legible on any device and allow them to translate instantly.
Since then, the workload of the Alexandria Digitalization Center has grown. Longbeard is currently working to digitize the historical collections of the Salesian Pontifical University and the Pontifical Gregorian University and plan to work with the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas and the venerable English College, as well as several religious orders, to digitize some or all its collections.

(History continues below)

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Digitized works can be folded in a growing set of Catholic data, training Longbeard’s systems, such as Masterium AI and an upcoming specific Catholic language model, Ephrem. Institutions can choose to make their texts public or keep them private. Academics can search the collections, generate summaries or track an answer generated by the source.

The system also allows translation through Vulgate AI. Sanders recounted stumbling with a papal document not translated on St. Thomas More: “I never knew that this existed. I was in Latin. He had not translated. We ingest it through Vulgate and suddenly I could read it.”
“When you really go to Hub and you see a scanned book, and an hour later that work is available to anyone in the world to consult in any language, it is when you realize what this really means,” he said.
For now, the Vatican Library is adopting a more cautious approach for artificial intelligence and robotics. Janz explained why he believes that manuscripts in particular require a human touch instead of automation.
For scholars, he said: “The reason why this manuscript is interesting is because in this specific place, it has a word that is different from other manuscripts, perhaps it is only a letter that changes it from a word to a different word,” Janz explained. “It is that little difference that makes this book so valuable.” This type of work requires a 100%accuracy, he added. Even if automated transcription of AI reaches the “precision of 99.9% … is basically useless.”
Sanders said that “with all my heart” agrees that for “the deep and meticulous work of textual criticism, the original manuscript is the final authority, and a human expert is irreplaceable,” but added that “limiting the role of AI to mere transcription is losing its revolutionary potential.”
“The AI, even with a 99.9%precision rate, transforms these silent collections into a dynamic and consultable database of human knowledge,” he said. “Allows an researcher to ask:” Show me all the 15th -century manuscripts that discuss trade with the Ottoman Empire “and obtain instantaneous results from collections worldwide. You can identify conceptual patterns and links that were previously indecidental. The AI ​​finds the needles in the hay; the scholar is free to perform the exact analysis in the originals.”

For the Vatican Library, the digitalization effort has also been integrated into its conservation efforts of these historical texts. “Each manuscript that goes to the scanners first goes to our conservation workshop and is thoroughly examined to make sure … can support the tension of being digitized,” said Janz. “When the digitalization is performed, it returns to the conservation workshop again, and verify if something has changed.”
“We have discovered many manuscripts that should be fixed, they needed conservation work as a result of going through everyone and looking at it,” he said.
Even so, the Vatican Library is not ignoring the AI ​​completely. It is developing a project to cataloged illustrations of medieval manuscripts, causing the images to be searched by topic. In association with Japanese researchers, he is also training automatic learning models to transcribe medieval Greek writing. “It will make mistakes and tell you what the mistakes are … maybe it will eventually reach a point where you can do things reliably,” said Janz.
In the future, Janz said he would love to see that technology makes it possible to have transcripts of all his manuscripts in the historical languages ​​available to academics.
As for AI, it is still cautious. “I think we are quite open. I think we share the same concerns about the AI ​​that everyone else has.”
Within the Sixtine room of the Vatican Library, a series adorned with frescoes traces the long history of libraries and learning: Moses receives the law, the library of Alexandria, the apostles who record the gospels. Sanders sees that his AI project continues in the mission of ensuring that the wisdom of the past is “shared in the widest possible way.”
“If we are going to progress as a civilization, we have to learn from those who preceded us,” he said. “Part of this project is to make sure your reflections and ideas are available today.”