Vatican and other Catholic libraries turn to AI and robotics to digitize collections

Vatican City, Oct 6, 2025 / 06:00 am (CNA).

Long before cloud servers and computers, medieval Catholic monks preserved the intellectual inheritance of the ancient world by handwriting 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 that patrimony endures.  

The Vatican Apostolic Library, formally founded in the 15th century, is digitizing about 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 graphics.  

“People often think of the Vatican Library as a dusty old place, but actually it has tended to be sort of on the cutting edge,” Timothy Janz, the library’s former vice prefect and now “Scriptor Graecus,” told CNA.

To underscore his point, Janz pointed to one of the many Renaissance frescoes on the walls of the Vatican Library’s Sistine Hall depicting books stored upright on open shelves — a novelty at a time when volumes were usually laid flat. 

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

The Vatican Library’s mission, Janz said, has always been twofold — “to make works available to readers and also to keep them for future readers.” Digitization, then, is “a new way of doing what the founder actually wanted the library to be for, to make these works available.” 

The Vatican’s digitization efforts are focused on their one-of-a-kind historic manuscript collection 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,” which is from the third century A.D., which has already been digitized, as has the fourth-century “Codex Vaticanus,” one of the earliest complete manuscripts of the Bible in Greek. The digitization project began in 2012 and has so far put about 30,000 manuscripts online. 

The vision is “to have a real digital library that is really usable and user-friendly,” Janz said. 

Elsewhere in Rome, other historic Catholic institutions are going even more high tech.  

At the Alexandria Digitization Hub in Rome’s historic center, a robotic scanner turns the fragile pages of centuries-old books from the Pontifical Gregorian University’s library collection at a rate of up to 2,500 pages per hour. Within minutes, the texts — some that had only been accessible to scholars traveling 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 firm called Longbeard, which is using robotics and AI to digitize Catholic collections in some of Rome’s historic pontifical universities and institutes. 

The project began when the rector of the Pontifical Oriental Institute asked whether its 200,000-volume library on Eastern Catholic and Orthodox traditions could be made accessible to scholars in the Middle East, Africa, and India without requiring travel to Rome. The request was simple: digitize the books, make them readable on any device, and allow them to be instantly translated. 

Since then, the Alexandria Digitization Hub’s workload has grown. Longbeard is currently working to digitize the historic collections of the Salesian Pontifical University and the Pontifical Gregorian University and plans 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 of their collections. 

Digitized works can be folded into a growing Catholic dataset, training Longbeard’s AI 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 across collections, generate summaries, or trace an AI-generated answer back to its source. 

The system also enables translation through Vulgate AI. Sanders recounted stumbling upon 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 Vulgate, and suddenly I was able to read it.”

“When you actually go to the hub and see a book being scanned, and an hour later that work is available to anyone in the world to query 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 which is different from other manuscripts — maybe it’s just one letter that changes it from a word into a different word,” Janz explained. “It’s that little difference that makes this book so valuable.” This type of work requires 100% accuracy, he added. Even if automated AI transcription reaches “99.9% accuracy … it’s basically useless.” 

Sanders said he “wholeheartedly” agrees that for “the deep, meticulous work of textual criticism, the original manuscript is the ultimate authority, and a human expert is irreplaceable,” but he 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, queryable database of human knowledge,” he said. “It allows a researcher to ask, ‘Show me all 15th-century manuscripts that discuss trade with the Ottoman Empire,’ and get instantaneous results from collections across the globe. It can identify patterns and conceptual links that were previously undiscoverable. The AI finds the needles in the haystack; the scholar is then free to perform the exacting analysis on the invaluable originals.”

For the Vatican Library, the digitization effort has also been integrated into its conservation efforts of these historic texts. “Every manuscript that goes to the scanners first goes to our conservation workshop and is thoroughly examined to make sure that … it can stand the strain of being digitized,” Janz said. “When the digitization is done, it goes back to the conservation workshop again, and they check to see if anything has changed.”

“We’ve discovered many manuscripts that needed to be fixed, needed conservation work as a result of going through each and every one and looking at it,” he said.

Still, the Vatican Library is not ignoring AI altogether. It is developing a project to catalog illustrations from medieval manuscripts, making images searchable by theme. In partnership with Japanese researchers, it is also training machine learning models to transcribe medieval Greek handwriting. “It will make mistakes and we tell it what the mistakes are … maybe eventually it will get to a point where it 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 of their manuscripts in the historic languages available for scholars.

As for AI, he remains cautious. “I think we’re pretty open to it. I think we shared the same concerns about AI that everyone else has.”

Inside the Vatican Library’s Sistine Hall, 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 in the mission of ensuring that the wisdom from the past is “shared as broadly as possible.”

“If we are going to progress as a civilization, we have to learn from those who came before us,” he said. “Part of this project is making sure their reflections and insights are available today.”