New Delhi, Oct. 29 -- "WE HOPE POPE LEO will see us as his soldiers," says Matthew Harvey Sanders, the boss of Longbeard, a Catholic startup. In a room near the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, the firm's robots scan ancient books, manuscripts and codices. Scholars have long struggled to make accessible much of the "great wisdom sitting on shelves" of Catholic institutions, he says, but advances in AI mean "we can now understand the insights" of even the most worn, ancient texts. His firm then feeds this corpus into a more modern form of religious communication: Magisterium AI, a chatbot that draws on a curated library of Catholic doctrine and scholarship. According to Mr Sanders, it has millions of users across 190 countries, who...