Massimo Faggioli

And it has been interesting to see how different Catholic cultures have reacted to this.

Some can be more convincible than others.

Absolutely, yes.

Because they are scared by the Antichrist, which still has identified the Green Movement, Greta Thunberg, the progressive left, and so on.

So they have a common enemy.

What's happening, I believe, now and from now on is a yawning gap between this techno-right and the expectations of the traditional Catholic or conservative religious right to be reassured

about the real historical enemies of them, which are abortion, which is gender, and so on, against which Thiel and that kind of technocrats, they're not very interested in that.

But certainly Peter Thiel, he represents exhibit A of a certain connection between business and technology and politics and religion, which is

very far from our European sensibility where we have kept religion aside in the private mostly and certainly not connected with technology and expectations from the

I have seen personally the email that some important professors of theology in pontifical universities in Rome have received to attend that lecture.

So they had a mailing list of people who can be potentially interested.

And from what we know, the vast majority of them, of those Catholics who work for pontificate institutions, they showed they were not interested.

So they realized how toxic that was, what was the intention behind that, exactly at a time when Pope Leo is writing his first encyclical, we'll cover AI, by the way,

But some of them showed up.

I mean, some members of the American Catholic circles in Rome, because they have been interviewed at the doorstep of that event.

But Vatican institutions and especially the Catholic media sector in Rome and the Vatican in those days published very critical articles on Peter Thiel and that idea of God and of religion.

It has been an attempt, a ballon d'essai, to see what happens.

It was not the first time because we saw something similar in terms of political goals coming from Steve Bannon between 2018 and 2019 to create a base in Rome.

It didn't work back then.

We'll see if it works now, but for a certain kind of