A visionary proposal emerged during the April 24, 2025 talk at the Blanquerna Observatory in Barcelona: the establishment of a “Specola Artes Technicaeque Digitales” — a Vatican Observatory for digital arts and technology. This institutional framework, emerging from the complementary reflections of Bo Bonner and Luigi Russi, aims to help the Church engage hopefully with digital transformation and the existential questions it raises.
The concept draws inspiration from the Vatican Observatory (Specola Vaticana), which has long allowed the Church to institutionalize its engagement with astronomical discoveries. Just as that institution enables ongoing interpretation of cosmic phenomena, a digital counterpart would foster sustained conversation about how digital technologies shape human experience and spiritual formation.
A Critical Appraisal of How the Digital In-Forms Us
Bonner’s exploration centered on the concept of “in-formation,” contrasting the common understanding of information as transmitted data with Thomas Aquinas’ deeper interpretation: in-formation as the formation of the soul. Through this lens, the Gospel becomes not merely a message to be received but a medium that actively shapes the soul. This perspective invites us to consider how digital technologies similarly “form” us, often unconsciously.
Algorithms, Bonner argued, function as a type of discipline that we submit to, frequently without awareness. To illustrate this, he evoked Dante’s portrayal of the devil—ceaselessly flapping his wings yet remaining stationary, creating a freezing wind. Similarly, algorithms generate “fruitless movement” that keeps users engaged but “going nowhere.” He examined how dating apps fragment human qualities into discrete data points before recombining them into compatibility metrics, ultimately imposing a fragmentary, repetitive form on our souls. As an alternative, Bonner suggested that faith might offer different formative disciplines, highlighting silence as particularly valuable for creating space for intention and attention that allows content to truly shape personhood.
Gazing Into Depths That Stare Back At Us
Russi built upon these insights by examining the metaphors that unconsciously direct our thinking about the digital realm and mission. Citing the synthesis report from the Sixteenth Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, he noted the prevalence of spatial metaphors when discussing digital spaces—places one “goes to” and “exits from.” These metaphors, he argued, mislead us into conceptualizing mission as physically “going somewhere” to “talk about” something.
To reframe this understanding, Russi called up the concept of the “Uncanny Valley,” first proposed by Japanese designer Masahiro Mori in the 1970s. Drawing on Ciano Aydin’s “Extimate Technology” (2021), he suggested that the uncanniness actually originates within the human observer. Digital technology creates experiences that destabilize our settled self-understanding and reopen existential questions in “disturbingly familiar” ways. The digital thus becomes not an external territory but a “periphery within”.
Both speakers found value in historical parallels, particularly the Church’s relationship with astronomy. Galileo Galilei’s findings through the use of what was, at the time, an innovative technology for astronomical research—the telescope, unsettled certain ways of thinking that, importantly, were not part of the Church’s Magisterium but had nevertheless become accepted as given and served as important conceptual scaffolding for biblical theology. These discoveries, coupled with the tense climate of the Thirty Years’ War, led the Church to attempt to do away with the matter by outlawing heliocentrism.
However, approximately 200 years later, in 1891, Pope Leo XIII reinaugurated astronomical observation within the Church through a permanent institution. This evolution from premature regulation to institutional exploration demonstrates an effective strategy through which the Church could elevate the myriad isolated experiments currently underway into a sustained conversation on the nature of the “periphery within” that new technologies invariably stir up.
Bonner and Russi jointly emphasized that while individual efforts at critical engagement with technology are valuable, they do not serve the same purpose than an institutional decision to approach digital formation as an area of ongoing inquiry. What an institutional anchor does is infuse digital exploration with hope—a space where the “digital uncanny” might be gradually befriended through ongoing interpretation in a community of inquiry. The speakers suggested that the time might be ripe for the Church to establish a “Specola Artes Technicaeque Digitales” to follow in the example of Leo XIII, who re-established the Specola Vaticana so that “everyone might see clearly that the Church and her Pastors are not opposed to true and solid science, whether human or divine, but that they embrace it, encourage it, and promote it with the fullest possible dedication.” In a similar way, a Specola dedicated to the exploration of the digital realm could provide the center of gravity to enshrine a hopeful gaze into the digital uncanny, allowing for critical engagement with how technology shapes spiritual formation, while drawing upon the Church’s rich heritage of intentional disciplines.
