The Puglia Federation of Don Bosco Past Pupils could not have chosen a more important and timely topic than Artificial Intelligence to discuss during the annual conference held in the San Giuseppe Hall of the “Redentore” Institute in Bari on the morning of Saturday, May 16. A topic of global importance required a speaker whose culture, experience, and analytical skills could describe the situation from a variety of perspectives. For this reason, the organizers had to wait several months to have the Rector Major Emeritus of the Salesians, Fr. Pascual Chávez Villanueva, as their speaker .
The relationship between artificial intelligence and human intelligence (Antiqua et nova) was the theme addressed from the opening prayer of the conference, continuing through the welcoming speeches by Nicola D’Urso, President of the Apulian Federation, Fr. Gino Cella, National Delegate of the Past Pupils, and Fr. Tobia Carotenuto, Inspectorial Delegate for the Salesian Family. The organizers also received praise for the conference’s theme in a message from Inspector Fr. Gianpaolo Roma, who unfortunately was unable to attend due to other commitments.
” The topic of AI is often associated with terms such as threat, defense, challenge, fear ,” began journalist Paolo Romano, before handing the floor to Father Chávez. ” It’s significant that this conference doesn’t end in defense, but opens up to understanding how to live with this reality today, how to inhabit today’s world.”
The one to explain the rules of this coexistence could only be Don Chávez, called to succeed Don Bosco in the decade 2002-2011, a period that had to deal with the birth of the first social networks (2004), the iPhone (2007), Amazon in Italy (2010), new inventions and lifestyles that he necessarily had to take into account when preparing the guidelines for Salesians around the world, in that decade, not sitting behind a desk but experiencing and analyzing the various realities around the globe.
In the first part of his speech, Don Chávez, after joking about the evidence that the event’s poster had been clearly created using Artificial Intelligence ( “Just compare it to my real face”), focused on the Church’s position on the issue of AI, a topic addressed particularly in the last year of Pope Francis’s pontificate and then left as a legacy to his successor.
” In their words ,” he stated, referring to Pope Francis and Leo XIV, ” there is no nostalgia for a lost world nor a demonization of progress. Rather, there is an attempt to think critically about the scenario unfolding before us. To look inside the machine and ask who is truly at the center of its movement.”
Pope Francis—as stated in the document that Father Chávez left to participants, which you can find in the link at the end of this article along with other conference materials—has brought to the heart of the global public debate a reflection on AI that is neither merely technical nor purely moralistic. From the beginning, he recognized the positive potential of artificial intelligence: for him, it was not simply a threat, but also an opportunity. The possibility, for example, of reducing the burden of human labor, of providing significant assistance in healthcare management, of democratizing access to knowledge, of fostering encounters between peoples and cultures through machine translation, data analysis, and neural networks capable of processing billions of data points per second.
Regarding Pope Leo’s thought, a fitting occasion was to draw inspiration from his message for the 60th World Communications Day, celebrated the following day (May 17, 2026). He specified that the true mission entrusted to communicators is to protect human voices and faces from the risks of AI, “voices and faces given to us by God, who created us in his image and likeness . ” It is therefore not a question of stopping digital innovation, but of guiding it, educating it to respect human dignity.
It is therefore an arduous task that falls to us and awaits us; we must constantly keep in mind a fundamental principle: that AI must serve humanity, not replace it , that AI is not neutral, and that the risk of manipulation is high. Pope Francis has renamed this risk “cognitive pollution,” the effect of digital communication increasingly governed by optimization and calculation: fake news, deepfakes, and the manipulation of public opinion are not accidents, but symptoms of a crisis of truth.
“ The risk of AI ,” Don Chávez emphasized several times during his speech, “ is therefore that of forming a technologically augmented but not humanly improved man” – then addressing the Past Pupils specifically – “ Do not be nostalgic for the past, but learn from the past world without demonizing progress and remember, AI will probably be able to replace a teacher, but never an educator”.
AI: there are therefore many opportunities but also many risks, but let us not forget, as Pope Francis reported in his latest encyclical, Dilexit nos, “In the era of artificial intelligence, poetry and love are necessary to save humanity” .
At the end of the meeting, Tobia, thanking the journalist-writer Paolo Romano, a Past Pupil of Salerno, and dear Don Chávez, highlighted how the Past Pupils of Don Bosco, inhabiting the IA in a Salesian way, not only place themselves in this time but, precisely by using it, feel the need to grow in ” Salesian humanism “, to communicate ” in truth” and serve the young people and many people, who need Don Bosco , a communicator with a “cordial intelligence “.
