Builders AI Forum brings listening into Catholic AI development

A forum and its stated aims

Catholic leaders, AI developers and investors gathered at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome on November 5–6 for the Builders AI Forum, according to EWTN’s event reporting. The university's own listing describes an effort to develop an interdisciplinary community supporting AI products for the Church's mission. It identifies the venue as the Collegium Maximum's Aula Magna and marks the event as restricted. Pontifical Gregorian University Source: unigre.it

In reporting published November 6, EWTN's Isabella Reed described Cardinal Michael Czerny's call for learning through dialogue. Bishop Stephen Wang also discussed the need to form seminarians' judgment about technology already present in their lives. These accounts put relationships and discernment alongside the technical work of developing religious AI tools. The comments are reported by EWTN; they are not a new Church-wide policy. EWTN News Source: ewtnnews.com

The forum's website lists four areas of work: evangelization, building and scaling AI, education, and healthcare. Its stated education focus includes teacher preparation and cooperation between schools, dioceses, universities and developers. Its development aims name human oversight and accountability. Those are the organizer's stated aims. The pages reviewed do not establish that particular products have passed an independent assessment. Builders AI Forum Source: baif.ai

A practical question for churches

Our suggested starting point is modest: before choosing a tool, ask the people who will use it to describe one task that needs help and one responsibility they must keep.

Consider a hypothetical parish team evaluating an AI assistant for an adult introductory course. A volunteer might want help finding passages in approved teaching materials. The course leader might insist that explanations remain traceable to those materials and that personal questions reach a person. A participant might want a straightforward way to say an answer was confusing.

The team could test those expectations with invented questions, without entering anyone's private circumstances. Record which source the assistant used, who checked the answer and how a learner could reach the course leader. Ask the provider to explain what happens when the system cannot support an answer. That exercise would produce a small, inspectable record of what the tool does in the parish's intended setting.

A Christian lens

James 1:19 urges believers to be “quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry” (NIV). The surrounding passage connects hearing God's word with acting on it and caring for people in distress. Applied to a church technology decision, it invites patient attention to the people affected and a willingness to change course after hearing them. A listening exercise becomes useful when someone is responsible for responding to what it reveals. James 1:19–27, NIV James 1:19-27 (NIV)