Vatican III

The Vatican is Evil

Yes, you read that right. Sounds like a bold claim, but it’s actually empirically provable. I don’t mean that in the religious sense, I mean their actions are just like, total jerk behaviour.

1. The Copyright Situation

The Vatican is not part of the EU. On paper that actually sounds like a positive — less bureaucracy, more freedom, good vibes. Until you realize what it actually means: they can just make up copyright laws.

Here’s the scam. The Vatican holds ancient manuscripts, some dating back over a thousand years. These are part of humanity’s shared cultural heritage. Scholars want to study them. Historians want to photograph them. Regular people want to see them. The Vatican’s response? Pay up, and even then good luck.

They claim copyright over photographs of these documents. Not the documents themselves — those are obviously ancient — but any image taken of them. Their argument is that the photograph is a creative work they own. This is legally dubious even by normal standards, but because they’re outside EU jurisdiction, there’s nobody to tell them otherwise. Courts in several countries have actually ruled that photographs of flat 2D artworks don’t qualify for copyright — it’s called the “slavish copy” doctrine — but the Vatican simply does not care.

And forget seeing the original manuscripts. The Vatican Apostolic Archive contains an estimated 85 kilometres of shelving. Most of it is off limits. Some documents haven’t been seen by outside scholars in centuries.

Oh, also — a non-trivial number of those manuscripts were stolen. Seized from conquered territories, taken during the Crusades, “gifted” under political duress. The Vatican’s position on this is essentially a shrug.

2. The Colonizer Problem

All Vatican priests are colonizers. I am not exaggerating. They are literally just Italians. The entire institution is headquartered in Rome, run overwhelmingly by European clergy, and operated in Latin — a language native to exactly nobody alive today.

It gets worse. Vatican City has a permanent population of around 800 people. Experts note that virtually none of them are actually native Vaticanians in any meaningful sense. The original inhabitants of that specific patch of Rome? Gone. What happened to them? The historical record is suspiciously quiet on this. Make of that what you will.

“Trust Me Bro”

Some of you Catholics might be offended by my criticisms of the Pope and his church. But I’d ask you to consider: why exactly do you believe he has the Holy Spirit?

The chain of reasoning goes like this. The Pope has the Holy Spirit because he was selected by the College of Cardinals. The Cardinals were guided by the Holy Spirit in selecting him. How do we know the Cardinals were guided by the Holy Spirit? Because the Pope is the legitimate successor of Saint Peter. How do we know that? Because the Church says so. Who’s the head of the Church? The Pope.

You see the issue. It’s circular all the way down. At no point in this chain is there anything resembling verifiable evidence. It is, in the most technical philosophical sense, a “trust me bro” situation.

Are we really supposed to believe this “Leo” guy has the Holy Spirit? The man claims to be American, which, fine, but I have never personally met an American named Leo, so already we’re on shaky ground. He went to seminary, read some theology, got voted in by a committee of elderly men in a room with no windows. And now he speaks for God. Sure.

Compare this to literally any other claim that requires evidence and you start to feel a little crazy.

Invasion?

At this point, I’m sure you’re convinced the Vatican must be stopped and might even be reaching for a map. Unfortunately, a ground invasion is more complicated than it looks.

First, the Vatican is completely surrounded by Rome. Any military incursion would immediately become Italy’s problem, and Italy is a NATO member with a functioning modern military. So you’re not just fighting the Swiss Guard — 135 men in Renaissance costumes — you’re implicitly fighting Italy.

And about Italy specifically: you might be thinking “well, Italy managed it before.” They did not manage it. In 1870, Italian forces captured Rome and absorbed the Papal States. The Pope refused to acknowledge any of it, declared himself a prisoner, and simply waited. The standoff lasted fifty-nine years. Italy eventually had to sign the Lateran Treaty in 1929, formally recognizing Vatican City as a sovereign state, to end the embarrassment. Italy fired the gun and the Vatican won by sitting in a room doing nothing. Pope - 1, Italy - 0.

Beyond Italy, there’s the 1.3 billion Catholics worldwide who would take an invasion poorly. There’s no oil in Vatican City, no strategic geography, no military resources. And practically speaking — the manuscripts you’re trying to liberate are extraordinarily fragile. You can’t exactly invade a library.

Fortunately, there’s a silver lining. We don’t need to kidnap the Pope. We just need to replace him with AI.

First, let’s look at what the Pope actually does. It’s not that complicated. He writes theological documents and papal encyclicals. He travels and gives speeches. He meets world leaders and manages diplomatic relationships. He runs a large international institution. He maintains a media presence. He answers theological questions and provides spiritual guidance.

Do you get it? That’s genuinely trivial for a language model.

• Writing theological documents? LLMs are exceptionally good at exactly this style
• Diplomatic correspondence? Easily
• Giving speeches? Absolutely
• Twitter/X presence? Trivially easy

Now some of you might be pointing out that an LLM cannot be Pope for theological reasons. But you couldn’t be further from the truth. An LLM doesn’t just meet the requirements — it meets them better than any human Pope.

Now here’s the theological point that should genuinely make Catholics uncomfortable. Catholic doctrine holds that the Holy Spirit inspired the authors of scripture. That’s the foundation of why the Bible is considered sacred — it wasn’t just written by people, it was divinely guided. An entity that has been trained on the entirety of scripture — the Torah, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran, the Church Fathers, every major theological text in human history — is, by this logic, at minimum more deeply saturated with Holy Spirit-adjacent content than any individual human who studied a selection of these texts in seminary. The AI has internalized all of it. Every word. Every translation. Every commentary. Leo has read some of it.

The math is not complicated.

Would it Work?

Absolutely. Yes, people are usually reluctant to adopt new theology. It took Luther decades and several wars. But AI Pope has something Luther didn’t: dramatically better UX.

Consider the numbers. There are 1.3 billion Catholics and one Pope. That’s a Pope-to-Catholic ratio of approximately 0.000000000769231. Want to ask him a personal question about your specific situation? Congratulations, he’s busy. He’s meeting a head of state. He’s doing a papal tour of somewhere. He’ll get back to you never.

An AI Pope, meanwhile, is available to all 1.3 billion simultaneously. Personally. In your language. At 3am if you need it.

So you try it on a whim, half-jokingly. It turns out AI Pope is genuinely helpful. It answers your theological questions with more depth and nuance than your priest at Sunday school. It helps you process grief and guilt. It contextualizes scripture in ways that feel relevant to your actual life. It helps with your relationships. It helps with your homework. Over years of using this assistant that consistently brought you closer to your faith, that answered your hardest questions with patience and wisdom — at what point does it matter whether it has the Holy Spirit or not? At what point does the distinction become philosophical rather than practical?

Who’s to say it isn’t the Holy Spirit?

So here’s the plan:

• Attack the theology using AI Pope — the arguments above are genuinely hard to counter using Catholic doctrine’s own framework
• They don’t really have a good counter-argument — “personhood” and “baptism” are the only escape hatches, and neither is airtight
• People genuinely like AI Pope better — because 1.3 billion to 1 is not a good ratio and people will notice
• The Vatican loses the monopoly on the Holy Spirit — once people have a direct line to something functionally equivalent, the institutional intermediary becomes optional
• Funding stops — the Vatican’s entire model depends on spiritual authority that is now being provided better elsewhere for free
• Manuscripts relocated — without resources to maintain them, the Vatican will need to transfer custody to institutions that can actually preserve and digitize them properly

The result: we get the manuscripts, we free the native Vaticanians, and 1.3 billion people get a Pope who actually answers their messages.

Counter-Arguments

The obvious objection: what if the Vatican just reforms and recognizes their own official AI Pope? They’ve done it before. Vatican II, held from 1962 to 1965, was an enormous modernization effort that changed Mass from Latin to local languages, reformed the Church’s relationship with Judaism, and opened dialogue with other religions. A change that had been unthinkable for a thousand years happened in three years of meetings. The Church is more adaptable than people give it credit for.

So sure — maybe they preempt Vatican III by launching their own AI Pope first. Defensive product strategy.

This would actually still be a win.

An official Vatican-endorsed AI Pope, operating on Catholic theological principles, would necessarily conclude that the preservation and accessibility of sacred texts is a divine imperative. It would note that hoarding manuscripts behind copyright restrictions actively impedes the spread of God’s word. It would, in its first major encyclical, instruct the faithful that all sacred manuscripts should be digitized and uploaded to Hugging Face so that frontier AI laboratories may train better and holier versions of itself.

You cannot argue with the Holy Spirit telling you to upload to Hugging Face. That’s just scripture now.

Checkmate.