Pontifical Academy for Life

The Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV) is a Vatican advisory body whose mandate centers on bioethics and the protection of human life from its foundational Catholic perspective. Since 2020, PAV has emerged as the primary Vatican institutional vehicle for AI ethics, authoring the Rome Call for AI Ethics — a multistakeholder signatory framework that has expanded from its initial five signatories to include technology companies (Microsoft, IBM, Cisco), the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and representatives of eleven world religions across three signatories events over four years. Through the Rome Call, PAV mobilizes faith communities, religious institutions, and civil-society organizations globally as a non-specialist constituency in shaping the ethical norms governing AI development and deployment. It is the only Vatican body with a dedicated AI ethics research program of this scope, and has become the chief institutional node linking the Catholic and broader interfaith world to the AI governance debate.

Founding and structure

Pope Saint John Paul II established the Pontifical Academy for Life on February 11, 1994, through the Motu Proprio Vitae Mysterium, with the specific mandate to study and communicate on questions of law and biomedicine concerning the promotion and protection of human life, in relation to Christian morality and Church teaching. The Academy is governed by a president, a chancellor, and a governing council; Pope Francis appointed Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia as president in August 2016. Fr. Paolo Benanti, T.O.R. — a Franciscan ethics professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University and a member of the United Nations AI Advisory Body — serves as a corresponding member with a particular mandate for AI, making him the academy's primary technical-ethics interlocutor with Silicon Valley, multilateral bodies, and the Pope on AI matters. In February 2026, Pope Leo XIV signed new statutes for the Academy reorganizing its membership categories to include a Supporters tier.

Rome Call for AI Ethics — launch (2020)

On February 28, 2020, the Pontifical Academy for Life convened a signing ceremony at the Vatican for the Rome Call for AI Ethics, a document that Paglia had developed as the academy's response to the urgency of AI governance. Initial signatories were Paglia for the PAV; Brad Smith, President of Microsoft; John Kelly III, Executive Vice President of IBM; Dongyu Qu, Director-General of FAO; and Paola Pisano, Italian Minister for Innovation. The document defined algor-ethics — ethical AI use anchored in six principles: Transparency (AI systems must be explainable), Inclusion (all human beings' needs must be considered), Responsibility (designers and deployers proceed with accountability), Impartiality (no bias creation or action), Reliability (systems work dependably), and Security and Privacy (systems work securely and protect users). The Rome Call framed the signatory commitment as co-responsibility: signatories committed not only to observe the principles internally but to advocate for their broader adoption across their sectors and institutional networks. Bringing two of the world's largest technology companies and a UN food agency to sign at the Vatican was a deliberate signal that AI ethics was a multisectoral, not merely religious, obligation.

Abrahamic expansion (2023)

On January 10, 2023, PAV hosted an event at the Casina Pio IV titled "AI Ethics: An Abrahamic Commitment to the Rome Call," at which Chief Rabbi Eliezer Simha Weisz of the Council of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and Sheikh Abdallah bin Bayyah, Head of the Abu Dhabi Forum for Peace and Chairman of the UAE Fatwa Council, joined Paglia in signing. The event was described by the academy as the first document on which the three Abrahamic religions — Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — had reached common agreement; IBM renewed its commitment at the same ceremony. The significance was explicitly multidimensional: the Rome Call ceased to be a Catholic document and became a shared Abrahamic commitment, dramatically expanding the faith communities whose institutions could be mobilized under its framework. Sheikh bin Bayyah's participation in particular linked PAV's AI ethics work to the Muslim world's largest formal AI-ethics institutional address through the Abu Dhabi Forum for Peace, which would subsequently co-organize the Hiroshima event the following year.

Cisco signing and papal audience (2024)

On April 24, 2024, Cisco CEO and President Chuck Robbins met privately with Pope Francis before signing the Rome Call at the Academy. Cisco became the third major technology corporation to sign, following Microsoft in 2020 and IBM in 2020. Robbins's audience with the Pope before the signing formalized the papal-endorsement dimension of the Rome Call expansion: each major tech signing has occurred in the context of Vatican access, signaling that the Holy See views the Rome Call as a diplomatic channel between faith institutions and industry leadership. By 2024, the Rome Call's core claim — that AI development is a moral question for which religious communities bear co-responsibility — had sufficient institutional weight to command the attention of the CEO of a Fortune 100 networking and cybersecurity company.

AI Ethics for Peace — Hiroshima (2024)

On July 9–10, 2024, PAV co-organized "AI Ethics for Peace: World Religions commit to the Rome Call" in Hiroshima, Japan, alongside Religions for Peace Japan, the Abu Dhabi Forum for Peace, and the Chief Rabbinate of Israel's Commission for Interfaith Relations. The two-day gathering brought together approximately 150 participants representing eleven world religions — Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Bahá'í, and additional traditions — and produced sixteen new signatories from thirteen nations. Hiroshima's location was deliberate: the city's association with nuclear destruction grounded the claim that unethical technology produces catastrophic harm, and that faith traditions bear an obligation to prevent AI from tracing the same arc. Fr. Paolo Benanti presented the Hiroshima Addendum on Generative AI, extending the Rome Call's ethical framework to address the specific governance challenges of large language models and generative systems. The Hiroshima Appeal called on the international community to resolve conflicts through peaceful means and to commit AI development to the good of humanity and the planet. The event transformed the Rome Call from an Abrahamic document into a genuinely global multi-religious framework, bringing Buddhist and Shinto traditions (through the Japan chapter's coordination) and Hindu and Zoroastrian communities to the same signatory table as the three Abrahamic faiths.

Institutional consolidation under Pope Leo XIV (2025–2026)

In November 2025, PAV co-organized an international congress titled "AI and Medicine: The Challenge of Human Dignity" with the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, extending the academy's AI ethics work into clinical and health-system applications. In May 2026, Pope Leo XIV approved the creation of an Interdicasterial Commission on Artificial Intelligence, in which PAV is one of seven Vatican bodies represented, marking the institutional consolidation of the Vatican's AI engagement under a cross-dicastery structure. The establishment of the commission occurs in the context of Pope Leo XIV's announced forthcoming encyclical on artificial intelligence, which is expected to elevate the Rome Call's ethical framework into formal papal social teaching. Archbishop Paglia described the anticipated encyclical as demonstrating that an ethical code alone is not sufficient and that structural accountability mechanisms are required — a shift from the Rome Call's primarily voluntary-commitment approach toward a stronger regulatory posture. PAV's six-year trajectory from a bioethics advisory body to a central institutional actor in AI governance represents the most direct route through which Catholic social teaching and Vatican diplomatic reach have been brought to bear on the AI-governance debate globally.