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

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

Long before the servers in the cloud and computers, the medieval Catholic monks preserved the intellectual heritage of the ancient world 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 lasts.
The Vatican Apostolic Library, formally founded in the fifteenth century, is digitizing around 80,000 manuscript manuscripts, part of a collection that also includes 2 million books, 100,000 file documents and hundreds of thousands of currencies, medals and graphics.
“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 Graceus.”
To underline his point, Janz pointed out one of the many Renaissance frescoes on the walls of the Sistine Room of the Vatican Library that represents books stored vertically on open shelves, a novelty at a time when the volumes were usually placed in horizontal position.

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

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

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

In other parts of Rome, other historical Catholic institutions are acquiring even more technology.

In the Digitalization Center of Alexandria, in the Historic Center of Rome, a robotic scanner passes the fragile pages of centenary books of the Library collection of the Pontifical Gregorian University at a speed of up to 2,500 pages per hour. In a matter of minutes, the texts (some of which had only been accessible to scholars who traveled to Rome) can be sought, translated and even entering an artificial intelligence model trained to reflect Catholic teaching.
The initiative is directed by Matthew Sanders, executive director of a Catholic technology company called Longbeard, which is using robotics and artificial intelligence 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 on Eastern Catholic and Orthodox traditions could be made accessible to Middle East academics, Africa and India without traveling to Rome. The petition was simple: digitize books, make them readable on any device and allow their instant translation.
Since then, Alexandria Digitization Hub has increased. Longbeard is currently working to digitize the historical collections of the Salesian Pontifical University and the Gregorian Pontifical University and plan to work with the Pontifical University of Santo Tomás de Aquino and the Venerable English College, as well as with several religious orders, to digitize some or all its collections.

(History continues below)

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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 specific Catholic language model, Ephrem. Institutions can choose to make their texts public or keep them private. Academics can search in collections, generate summaries or track an answer generated by AI until its source.

The system also allows translation through Vulgate AI. Sanders said he had stumbled with a papal document not translated on Santo Tomás Moro: “I never knew that this existed. I was in Latin. It had not been translated. We ingratiated it through the Vulgata and suddenly I could read it.”
“When you go to the center and see that a book scan, and an hour later that work is available for 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 to 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; it may be just a letter that changes it from one word to a different one,” Janz explained. “It is that little difference that makes this book so valuable.” This type of work requires 100% precision, he added. Even if automated transcription of AI reaches “99.9% precision … is basically useless.”
Sanders said he is “with all my heart” according to “for” the deep and meticulous work of textual criticism, the original manuscript is the highest 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 investigator to ask: ‘show me all the 15th -century manuscripts that deal with trade with the Ottoman Empire’ and obtain instant results of collections around the world. You can identify conceptual patterns and links that could not be discovered before. The AI ​​finds the needles in the bird; then, the scholar is free to perform the exact analysis of the original invaluables.”

For the Vatican Library, the digitalization effort has also been integrated into its conservation efforts of these historical texts. “Each manuscript that passes through the scanners goes first to our conservation workshop and is thoroughly examined to ensure that … can support the tension of being digitized,” said Janz. “When the digitalization ends, it returns to the conservation workshop again and verify if something has changed.”
“We have discovered many manuscripts that needed to be repaired, they needed conservation work as a result of reviewing each and every one of them,” he said.
Even so, the Vatican Library does not completely ignore the AI. It is developing a project to catalog illustrations of medieval manuscripts, causing the images to be sought by topic. In association with Japanese researchers, it is also training automatic learning models to transcribe medieval Greek writing. “It will make mistakes and we will tell you what they are … maybe eventually reaches a point where you can do things reliably,” Janz said.
In the future, Janz said he would love to see that technology would allow transcripts of all his manuscripts in the historical languages ​​available for academics.
As for AI, it remains cautious. “I think we are quite open to it. I think we share the same concerns about the AI ​​that everyone else has.”
Within the Sistine Room of the Vatican Library, an ornate series of frescoes travels through the long history of libraries and learning: Moses receiving the law, the library of Alexandria, the apostles registering the gospels. Sanders considers that his AI project continues with the mission of ensuring that the wisdom of the past is “shared as widely as possible.”
“If we want to progress as civilization, we have to learn from those who preceded us,” he said. “Part of this project is to ensure that your reflections and knowledge are available today.”