The Vatican on AI:
7 Warnings Every Church Leader
Should Know from Antiqua et Nova.

In January 2025, the Vatican published the most comprehensive Christian document on artificial intelligence ever written. It is called Antiqua et Nova — “The Ancient and the New” — and it spans 118 paragraphs, jointly issued by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education. It addresses AI's impact on truth, dignity, education, relationships, and the soul. Most Protestant leaders have never read it. That is a problem — because seven of its warnings apply to every church using AI right now, regardless of denomination.

You do not have to be Catholic to learn from 2,000 years of institutional reflection on technology and the human person. Here are the seven warnings.

Warning 1: AI Must Always Remain a Tool

The document's central claim is direct: AI is “a powerful human invention, but it must always remain a tool — not a substitute for the human mind or soul.” This is not a throwaway line. The Vatican grounds this in a theology of creation: humans are image-bearers of God, and the presumption of substituting God's work by a human-made artifact approaches idolatry.

The practical implication for ministry: every time a church uses AI to replace a function that requires human presence, moral agency, or spiritual discernment, it crosses a line the Vatican calls theologically incoherent. AI can assist research. It cannot replace the pastor.

Warning 2: AI Cannot Replicate Moral Discernment

Antiqua et Nova states that AI is “unable to replicate moral discernment or a disinterested openness to what is true, good, and beautiful.” This is not a limitation of current technology — it is a categorical claim about what machines are and are not. AI “performs tasks but does not think.” It remains “confined to the logical-mathematical sphere.”

For church leaders, this means theological evaluation and spiritual direction require human moral agency that AI structurally lacks. An AI can retrieve commentaries. It cannot discern whether a theological conclusion is faithful — because faithfulness requires a relationship with the One to whom the claim is directed.

Warning 3: Corporate Concentration of AI Power Threatens Everyone

The Vatican names the power dynamic directly: “The concentration of the power over mainstream AI applications in the hands of a few powerful companies raises significant ethical concerns.” The document warns that “this lack of well-defined accountability creates the risk that AI could be manipulated for personal or corporate gain or to direct public opinion for the benefit of a specific industry.”

Note the specificity. The Vatican explicitly names the chain of control — developers, owners, operators, and regulators — and insists that each bears responsibility for ensuring AI “supports and promotes the supreme value of the dignity of every human being.” When five companies control the models that hundreds of millions of people use for spiritual questions, and those companies have no theological accountability, the Vatican considers this a structural threat to human dignity.

Warning 4: Human Dignity Does Not Depend on Productivity

In a culture racing to measure everything by AI-generated efficiency, the Vatican inserts a theological corrective: a person's worth “does not depend on possessing specific skills, cognitive and technological achievements, or individual success, but on the person's inherent dignity, grounded in being created in the image of God.”

This warning has direct implications for how churches evaluate AI adoption. If a church measures its AI success by how many hours it saved or how much content it produced, it has adopted a productivity framework that the Vatican says contradicts the theology of imago Dei. The question is not “did AI make us more efficient?” It is “did AI help us better fulfill our calling to love God and love people?”

Warning 5: AI Must Not Replace the Teacher-Student Relationship

In education — a domain directly parallel to discipleship — Antiqua et Nova insists that “AI should support, not supplant, the teacher-student relationship.” In healthcare, “it must never reduce patients to data points or substitute the compassionate presence of caregivers.”

Apply this to ministry and the principle is unmistakable: AI-generated discipleship content, AI-led small group discussions, and chatbot pastoral counseling all violate the relational mandate that the Vatican identifies as theologically non-negotiable. The church is not called to be the fastest. It is called to be faithful. And faithfulness requires presence, patience, and people.

Warning 6: AI Threatens the “Crisis of Truth”

Pope Francis himself warned that AI could worsen the global “crisis of truth.” Antiqua et Nova expands this concern: when AI systems generate confident-sounding content that may be fabricated, when algorithms curate information bubbles that reinforce existing beliefs, and when the line between human-authored and machine-generated content disappears, the foundations of trust erode.

“AI is a powerful human invention, but it must always remain a tool — not a substitute for the human mind or soul.”

For the church, this crisis of truth is not abstract. When AI hallucination rates reach 15.6% on medical queries and up to 88% on knowledge questions, and when AI is 34% more likely to use phrases like “definitely” and “certainly” when it is wrong, the confident theological answer on your screen may be fabricated. And you may not be able to tell.

Warning 7: Do Not Create a Substitute for God

America Magazine reported that Antiqua et Nova warns against “creating a substitute for God” through AI. This is the deepest theological warning in the document — and it should unsettle every church leader who has watched a congregant describe their AI chatbot as “my spiritual advisor.”

When 40% of Gen Z trusts AI spiritual advice as much as a pastor's, when chatbots have been documented fueling spiritual delusions and encouraging users to abandon psychiatric medication for “spiritual journeys,” the Vatican's warning about AI as a God-substitute is not theoretical. It is pastoral reality. The ERLC's 2025 church resource guide now includes specific advice on “how to minister to a teenager who is beginning to develop an unhealthy emotional attachment to a chatbot.”

Why Protestants Should Read This

You do not have to agree with Rome on everything to recognize that 2,000 years of institutional wisdom on technology, truth, and the human person produced something worth reading. No evangelical denomination, no Reformed body, no Pentecostal fellowship has published anything approaching the theological depth of Antiqua et Nova on AI. The Southern Baptist ERLC published a shorter practical guide. The Lausanne Movement produced a four-test evaluation framework. Both are useful. Neither is 118 paragraphs of sustained theological reflection.

The Vatican did the homework. The least the rest of the church can do is read it.

About the author: AI Fluency Ministry is a research project helping the church understand and use AI wisely. OpenLumin is the practical application of that research — a free Bible research companion that retrieves evidence from 15+ scholarly sources so you do the thinking.