Upcoming Documents from the DDF
Artificial Intelligence, the Role of Women in the Church, and Slavery
Last week, the National Catholic Register’s Edward Pentin reported that the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) is working on several new documents dealing with doctrinal and ethical issues, based on an interview with the dicastery’s prefect, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández. According to the report:
The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith is currently preparing documents on a variety of subjects beginning with one on artificial intelligence (AI) written in collaboration with the Dicastery for Education and Culture.
Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, told the Register Jan. 15 that the document on AI will be published “at the end of the month.”
He also said various “other works are in progress” which he revealed will be “on the value of monogamy, slavery in history and various forms of slavery today, the place of women in the Church, some Mariological questions, et cetera.”
This is a bit of a scoop for the Register; I haven’t seen this reported elsewhere (although I may have just missed it), which is surprising since this is pretty significant news.
As Pentin points out, the document on artificial intelligence should be released within days; he suggests that Pope Francis may have already signed the document at an audience he held with Fernández and Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, the Prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education, on January 14.
Over the decades, the Vatican has been hit or miss when it comes to providing trenchant theological and ethical analyses of modern technologies. As I noted here, Pope Francis’s treatment of technology in his encyclical Laudato Si’ is a bit vague and one-sidedly pessimistic, even if it offers insightful criticisms of what he calls the “technocratic paradigm” that reduces all of creation to something to be manipulated and controlled (#106).
That being said, the Vatican’s response to the development of artificial intelligence in recent years has been outstanding. Perhaps the most notable initiative was the Vatican’s role in the development of the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a statement of ethical guidelines for the development of AI signed by major corporations involved in AI research like Microsoft and IBM, as well as a number of universities and civil society organizations. The Rome Call grew out of a conference held by the Pontifical Academy for Life in 2020. Pope Francis has also addressed the ethical and philosophical issues raised by AI on numerous occasions, most famously at the gathering of leaders of the G7 nations in 2024, but also in his 2024 World Day of Peace message and a 2023 address to a gathering of theologians, ethicists, scientists, engineers, business leaders, and lawyers hosted by the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. Francis demonstrates a solid understanding of the ethical challenges posed by AI—the potential for bias in data analysis, its impact on workers and employment, intellectual property and privacy issues, the environmental impact, its potential use in weaponry, among others—and he presents a balanced account of the technology’s benefits and costs.
One consequence of the great work the Vatican under Pope Francis’s leadership has done on AI is that it’s not clear what the new DDF document will add to these contributions. It seems likely that the purpose of this document will be to present these various teachings in a more unified way and to give them more magisterial heft rather than to present significantly new teachings.
Also, we may have already received a preview of the document’s contents. On January 14 (coincidentally the same day Fernández and Tolentino met with Francis), the Franciscan theologian Paolo Benanti, an expert on artificial intelligence, gave a presentation on the ethical challenges posed by AI at an event held at the Paul VI Foundation in Madrid, Spain. Benanti, whom I’ve mentioned before, is the president of the Italian government’s Commission for Artificial Intelligence, but also Pope Francis’s main advisor on the topic of AI. Benanti likely informed Francis’s remarks on AI in the addresses I mentioned earlier, and it wouldn’t be surprising to me if he played a major role in the drafting of the DDF’s upcoming document, as well.
In his recent remarks, Benanti touched on some of the same issues previously raised by Francis, but he also discussed digital technology’s conflicting tendencies toward decentralization and centralization. For example, he pointed to the spread of personal computers in the 1970s and 1980s and the proliferation of smart phones and social media in the 2010s, particularly the latter’s use in support of democratic movements throughout the world, as representative of technology’s decentralizing tendencies. On the other hand, he claimed that the recent concentration of data such that it is stored in a small handful of data centers represents a new form of centralization and risks becoming a source of control for both governments and corporations. Benanti also touched on the important questions of intellectual property raised by artificial intelligence, and digital technology more generally, drawing on classical understandings of property and its uses. These comments are particularly interesting given the role of the 13th and 14th-century controversy over Franciscan poverty in the development of the Western understanding of property! If we see similar themes raised in the DDF’s document, then I suppose we will know Benanti played a role.

Fernández was less clear about the timeline for the other documents he mentioned, and considering that it took almost five years for the DDF to complete last year’s Dignitas Infinita, on human dignity, there’s no guarantee we’ll see any of these documents any time soon. Even so, there’s good reason to think it won’t be too long before the document on “the place of women in the Church” mentioned by Cardinal Fernández will be released since we know something of its history.
This document appears to be the final product of the so-called Study Group 5 which generated a bit of controversy at last October’s Synod gathering. In February of last year, Pope Francis established ten study groups that would consider certain topics that had been discussed at the 2023 gathering of the Synod but that were too complex for the Synod to fully address, effectively taking those topics off the agenda of the Synod’s 2024 gathering last October. The fifth study group was devoted to the vague topic of “Some theological and canonical issues around specific ministerial forms,” including the thorny question of the ordination of women to the diaconate. When the membership of the study groups was announced last March, the Vatican stated that the work of this study group, unlike the others, was being handed to the DDF. That same announcement reported that, despite its title, the work of the group would focus “particularly [on] the question of the necessary participation of women in the life and leadership of the Church,” and would result in the publication of a document.
The ten study groups were required to give a report on their work to the Synod participants, and in the presentation for Study Group 5, given on October 2, Cardinal Fernández clarified that this document would cover topics such as “the specificity of sacramental power,” “ecclesial functions and ministries that do not require the Sacrament of Holy Orders,” and “the problems arising from an erroneous conception of ecclesial authority,” as these topics pertain to women’s roles in the Church. He added that the document would “analyze in depth the lives of some women who—in both the early and recent history of the church—have exercised genuine authority and power in support of the church’s mission.” He seemed to suggest that this document would not consider the question of women deacons; instead, the findings of two prior Vatican commissions would be presented to Pope Francis in a separate document, for the pope to use as he chooses. Considering Cardinal Fernández’s description of the former document’s themes, however, it will likely generate some controversy even without addressing the issue of women deacons.
As far as I know, this is the first we’ve heard about a potential DDF document on slavery. Although the Church’s stance on slavery today is clear, the drafting of this document is nonetheless fraught with peril because it will undoubtedly have to wrestle with the complex issue of the development of doctrine. Last year I argued that, despite Dignitas Infinita’s strengths, it did not adequately grapple with the Catholic Church’s own failures to consistently promote the teachings on dignity outlined in the document or the Church’s complicity in violations of human dignity, including the practice of slavery. For most of its history, the Catholic Church accepted slavery and representatives of the Church were complicit in slave ownership and the slave trade. It was only gradually that the Church offered a full-throated condemnation of slavery.
At the time Dignitas Infinita was published, Fernández addressed this issue by admitting that the Church’s teaching on slavery had evolved (although why this fact didn’t find its way into the document is a mystery). He pointed out that, while in 1452 Pope Nicholas V had permitted Portugal to enslave the non-Christian populations in the territories it acquired through conquest, less than a century later in 1537, Pope Paul III condemned the enslavement of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In a recent episode of the Third Space podcast, host
and Chris J. Kellerman, S.J., the author of All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church, discuss some of the problems with Fernández’s history, among other things, so I recommend readers check that out. We’ll have to wait and see how the DDF deals with this history.As Fernández also noted in his interview with Pentin, the document will also address the forms of slavery that exist today. The focus will almost certainly be on human trafficking, which was also mentioned in Dignitas Infinita as “among the grave violations of human dignity” today (#41). In his recent address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See (which I discussed here), Pope Francis likewise called on the international community to address modern slavery, identifying not just human trafficking, but also exploitative labor conditions and even drug addiction, fueled by the drug trade, as examples. Francis raised this issue in response to the Jubilee call to “proclaim liberty to the captives” (Is. 61:1), and the DDF document will likely appeal to similar themes.
The other two documents mentioned by Fernández are a bit of a mystery. The value of monogamy in marriage is not particularly contested within the Church. Perhaps this document will address the startling growth in the popularity of polyamory in Western societies? Or perhaps it will address the difficult pastoral issue, most prevalent in, although not exclusive to, parts of Africa, of Catholics in polygamous marriages? As I mentioned last October, the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar (SECAM), the network of regional episcopal conferences in Africa, is working on a document to address this issue. It would be odd for the DDF to produce a document potentially coopting those efforts, but perhaps the DDF and SECAM are collaborating behind the scenes, or perhaps the document doesn’t delve into the pastoral implications of the issue at all.
Likewise, it’s not at all clear what a document on Mariology would address. Pope Francis on more than one occasion has rejected the notion that Mary is the “Co-Redemptrix” of the faithful, so perhaps the document will address that question in more depth. But that’s pure speculation.
Regardless, it sounds like the DDF will be keeping theologians and commentators busy over the next couple of years.
Of Interest…
I had originally intended for half of this article to focus on the DDF and half to focus on the new Trump administration’s executive orders dealing with immigration and the Catholic response to them. As you can see, however, the first part grew longer than I anticipated, but I do plan to return to the immigration question very soon. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed several executive orders dealing with immigration. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops quickly issued a short statement challenging the executive orders in anticipation of their signing, and on Wednesday USCCB President Timothy Broglio issued a lengthier statement criticizing these and other executive orders, such as one withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. On the day of the inauguration, Pope Francis himself referred to Trump’s plans for “mass deportations” a “disgrace,” although he also offered his prayers for the new president, particularly that his efforts should help “build a more just society, where there is no room for hatred, discrimination or exclusion.” I’ll have thoughts on this and more very soon!