New Delhi: A week after Pope Leo XIV confronted the risks of artificial intelligence in his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, Magisterium AI founder Matthew Harvey Sanders has announced a new AI platform for Catholics.
Set to launch in 2027, Ephrem AI will respond to users’ moral and spiritual questions and offer prayers, readings, and saints. It’s like “putting a saint in your pocket”, Sanders told Forbes.
It’s not the first time Sanders has developed an AI tool for Catholics. Launched in 2023, his tool Magisterium AI has been trained on more than 32,000 Catholic doctrines and teachings spanning nearly 2,000 years. The platform acts as a “ChatGPT for Catholics”, helping users get instant answers on theology, scripture, and moral questions. It is also used by priests, students, and educators for homilies, lesson planning, and faith-based research.
While Magisterium is primarily a research and teaching tool for Catholic doctrine, Ephrem is designed as a personalised spiritual companion that guides individuals in their moral and devotional life.
An appeal to bishops
In a speech delivered to the Council of Bishops’ Conferences of Europe (CCEE) in Rome, Italy, Sanders argued that the entities that shape AI would shape “the anthropology of the next generation”.
“The secular framing of AI is being written this year, in newsrooms across Europe. Two frames dominate, both inadequate: the utopian (AI solves everything) and the technophobic (retreat, resist). Neither has an adequate anthropology,” he said.
Sanders added that the Catholic frame, which evaluates every technology through the lens of “dignity, freedom, and destiny of the human person”, is absent from the conversation around AI.
“You are the people who can put it there,” he appealed to the bishops present. “The window is open right now. It will not stay open. Once the framing sets, it takes a generation to shift it.”
Sanders is a Canadian entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Longbeard, a digital tech company that develops AI tools.
“Matthew became curious about Catholicism thanks to a high school crush and in college decided to convert,” read the Forbes article.
Sanders has often raised concerns about ‘digital serfdom’. During his December 2025 lecture, ‘The Church’s Mission in the Age of AI’, he warned that “concentration of AI power in a few corporations could create a new form of digital feudalism.”
Bhavya Priya is a TPSJ alum currently interning with ThePrint.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)
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