The Vatican has decided to intervene -and not in a minor way- in one of the most profound debates of the moment: the role of technology in the future of humanity.
He has done it through its official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which published on March 17 an article signed by the Italian philosopher Eugenio Mazzarella in which he launches a direct criticism of the thought of the American entrepreneur Peter Thiel.
It is not common for the Vatican newspaper to use expressions like “false prophets”. But this time it has done so.
And not as a rhetorical metaphor, but as a conceptual accusation: for the Italian philosopher, Silicon Valley's technological promise is not a solution to the human problem, but an illusion of salvation.
The secret seminars of Thiel in Rome
Clash between the Vatican and Silicon Valley: the papal newspaper accuses Peter Thiel of “false prophet". The Vatican has decided to intervene -and not in a minor way- in one of the deepest debates of the moment: the role of technology in the future of humanity.
It has done so through its official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, which published on March 17 an article signed by the Italian philosopher Eugenio Mazzarella in which he launches a direct criticism of the thought of the American businessman Peter Thiel.
It is not common for the Vatican newspaper to use expressions like “false prophets”. But this time it has done so.
And not as a rhetorical metaphor, but as a conceptual accusation: for the Italian philosopher, Silicon Valley's technological promise is not a solution to the human problem, but an illusion of salvation.
The secret seminars of Thiel in Rome
The Vatican's reaction is not understood without the immediate context. Between March 15 and 18, Peter Thiel -co-founder of PayPal and Palantir- organized in Rome a series of private seminars under the title The Biblical Antichrist. According to various reports published in international media, the event gathered more than a hundred selected guests from around the world. The conditions were strict: mandatory surrender of mobile phones, confidentiality agreements, and application of the Chatham House rule
The objective: to discuss the figure of the Antichrist from a mix of technology, political philosophy, and theology, with strong influence from René Girard's thought.
The chosen place was no coincidence either. Rome is not only a European capital. It is the symbolic center of one of the largest structures of cultural power on the planet: the Catholic Church.
The answer: philosophy instead of confrontation
The Vatican opted not to respond with an institutional statement. It chose something more sophisticated: a philosophical reply.
The person in charge was Eugenio Mazzarella, professor of theoretical philosophy at the Federico II University of Naples and one of the main Italian interpreters of Heidegger. The official Vatican newspaper does not usually use the expression "false prophets" lightly-
The professor of theoretical philosophy at the Federico II University of Naples, former deputy for the Italian Democratic Party and one of the main Italian interpreters of Heidegge signs an article in L'Osservatore Romano, titled "For the heart of man, the only possible leap from zero to one is Christ", is at the same time a piece of political philosophy and a direct reply to the Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
Eugenio Mazzarella is neither a curia theologian nor an occasional polemicist. He is one of the most rigorous Italian philosophers of his generation: born in Naples in 1951, professor of theoretical philosophy at Federico II since 1993, former dean of the Faculty of Letters, deputy between 2008 and 2013. His academic work is built upon Heidegger and the question of technology, which makes him an especially appropriate interlocutor to respond to Silicon Valley's technological ideology from within the European philosophical tradition.
That L'Osservatore Romano commissioned him the article -and not a theologian or a canonist- is in itself a significant editorial decision. The Vatican did not want to respond to Thiel from dogma but from philosophy. Mazzarella accepts the ground that Thiel proposes and defeats him on it.
Mazzarella's argument: the quantum leap that Silicon Valley cannot make
Mazzarella's article starts from the central concept of Thiel's book, Zero to One: the idea that true innovation does not consist of improving what already exists but of creating something radically new, a leap from zero to one instead of linear growth from one to n. Thiel applies this scheme to the technological field, where startups must invent, not copy. For Mazzarella, the scheme is correct. The problem is the application.
The Neapolitan philosopher distinguishes between two types of leaps. The first is the technological one: the one Thiel preaches and executes, the one that leads from current algorithms to new forms of artificial intelligence, from existing platforms to more powerful monopolies. This leap, Mazzarella argues, is perfectly real in its domain. Thiel is right that disruptive innovation exists and transforms the world. Where he is wrong is in believing that this technological leap brings with it an anthropological leap, a change in the human being that makes him better or freer.
The second leap, the one that matters to Mazzarella, is the one Saint Paul describes in his letters: the passage from the old man to the new man, from the man of flesh -dominated by envy, rivalry, what Girard would call mimetic desire- to the man of the spirit. This leap, says the philosopher, is the only one that counts for the real history of humanity. And it is the only one that technology cannot make, however advanced it may be.
The accusation of "false prophets" is technical in the biblical sense: the false prophet is not necessarily the one who lies, but the one who promises a salvation that he cannot deliver. Jesus' miracles -healing, resurrection- transformed man from within. Thiel's -AI, algorithms, Palantir's surveillance systems- are instrumental prodigies that do not touch the heart. They leave Hobbes's homo homini lupus, the human being capable of the worst, intact, and give him more powerful tools to execute it.
The critique of Girard: when the anthropologist is used in reverse
One of the most interesting aspects of Mazzarella's article is his treatment of René Girard, the French philosopher whose theory of mimetic desire and the scapegoat is the most invoked intellectual reference by Thiel. The irony is that Mazzarella uses Girard against Thiel.
For Thiel, Girard serves to diagnose the problem: human beings are fundamentally rivals, we copy each other's desires, we generate mimetic violence that only stops with the sacrifice of the scapegoat.
AI and surveillance technology would serve, in this scheme, to manage that violence, to build order in a naturally chaotic and conflictive world. The vision is that of Hobbes: man is wolf to man, and the technological Leviathan can tame him.
Mazzarella points out that this reading of Girard is partial.
Girard himself did not conclude that mimetic violence was irreducible: he concluded that Christ revealed and overcame it. The movement that Christ executes -becoming the voluntary scapegoat and resurrecting, breaking the cycle- is precisely the quantum leap that matters. Thiel's eschatology takes the Girardian diagnosis of violence but rejects its Christian resolution, and replaces it with the technical management of conflict. For Mazzarella, that is exactly what a false prophet does: diagnose well and cure poorly.
The man of the stone and the sling: Quasimodo against Thiel
The most devastating moment of the article is the quote from Salvatore Quasimodo. The Italian Nobel laureate in literature wrote in 1947, two years after the end of World War II, the poem Uomo del mio tempo, in which he stated that modern man, despite his planes and bombs, was fundamentally "still that of stone and the sling". The poem is a lament: all the technology of the 20th century had not made man better. It had made him more lethal.
Mazzarella recovers that verse to apply it to Thiel. The man that the Silicon Valley entrepreneur builds with his AI, his algorithms and his vision of the world is the same man of the stone and the sling: more efficient, more watched, more connected, but just as violent, just as selfish, just as incapable of putting his neighbor above himself. Technology can make the old man more efficient. It cannot create the new man.
The article ends with an assertion that is also a frontier: that heart of darkness that Christian tradition describes -Cain's heart, Romulus's heart -only Christ can change it, "aided by those who follow him". No algorithm, no language model, no planetary surveillance system can do what the Gospel promises. For the Vatican, Thiel is not the enemy to destroy. He is the false path to point out.