The people behind it
Faith, met with reason
magisAI exists to make the richness of the Catholic faith clear, accessible, and trustworthy — for anyone with a question and an open mind.
Our mission
The name magis — Latin for “more” — comes from the Ignatian call to seek the greater good and the deeper truth. magisAI is built on the conviction that faith and reason are not rivals but partners: that the questions of science, philosophy, and Scripture illuminate one another.
Every answer is grounded in Science, Reason & Faith, drawing on the Catechism, Sacred Scripture, and the wisdom of the Church Fathers — written to meet you wherever you are.
Grounded in the Church
Answers trace back to the Catechism, Scripture, and the Fathers — not opinion. Sources are cited so you can read further.
Reason & science welcomed
Hard questions about science, suffering, and history are met head-on, in the conviction that truth is one.
Meets you at your level
From a curious child to a graduate student, answers adapt in depth and language without losing the truth.
Private by design
Anonymous-first: ask freely with no account and no wall. What you share stays private and is never sold.
In partnership with the Magis Center
magisAI draws on the formation work of the Magis Center and connects to its courses and resources. Explore the Magis Center
Our promise
magisAI is a guide, not a replacement for the Church’s teaching authority or the counsel of your pastor. It points you toward the sources, encourages you to read them, and always invites the next question. Where it isn’t certain, it says so.
Why we created MagisAI
We created MagisAI as a free, specifically Catholic AI that will give the Church’s teaching in relation to most secular disciplines, to respond to secular criticisms, and to give evidence for God, Jesus, life after death, the Church, the Eucharist, and Mary from the vantage point of philosophy, science, and history. Other Catholic AIs have a much more limited range of topics.
Since a large percentage of our young people in high school and beyond are already on secular AIs (particularly ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and several others whose numbers grow every day), and AI use among youth and adults continues to increase, it is incumbent on the Catholic Church to provide its own version of AI which can answer most questions at the confluence of sacred and secular disciplines — particularly natural science, philosophy, social science, history, and literature. In this way, students (as well as teachers, parents, catechists, clergy, parishioners, and searchers) do not have to depend on a secular AI to give them answers — in five critical areas — that may be replete with errors of omission and commission.
The five critical areas in which secular AI answers could be negatively life-changing are:
- Fundamental theology — belief in God, Jesus, creation, a transphysical soul, life after death, and the Catholic Church
- Catholic doctrinal teaching
- Catholic moral teaching
- Catholic social teaching
- The underlying principles and methods of philosophical transcendental realism
MagisAI can help our students, teachers, and parishioners identify errors of omission, misstatements of fact, secular skews, and secular interpretations of world events that could negatively affect their faith and morals. By training our students to use this app, we hope to help young people and adults maintain, defend, and evangelize their Catholic faith.
We also designed the app bot to engage in arguments about the Catholic answers it presents: “so what about this?” or “what about that?” This will allow the app to become an agent of learning so that students and others can get deeper answers to secular criticisms and to their own questions about faith in God, Jesus, and the Church by interactive dialogue with the bot.
MagisAI does not pretend to be a person, a friend, a confidant, or a counselor, and we have designed strict guardrails to align our answers to our primary database (the works of Fr. Spitzer, theistically inclined scientists, social-scientific justification of Catholic morality, etc.) and, if allowed to do so, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (which would become our secondary database).
We hope that students will take this app from high school into college and ultimately into their adult lives so that they can get answers to criticisms and their questions as soon as possible. It is not realistic to ask our students to refrain from using AI, because over the course of time, as data shows, they will be pulled into it. Therefore, the Church has to produce an AI that will provide an interface between sacred and secular disciplines — not only for students, but also for teachers, parents, catechists, and clergy — to help them maintain and defend their faith in this increasingly secular time with increasingly powerful technologies. MagisAI is the only Catholic AI that covers this huge range of secular and sacred questions and answers.
Acknowledgments
MagisAI is offered free of charge thanks to the generosity of the individuals and foundations who support the Magis Center’s mission. Meet our contributors.
- MagisAI Content Author
- Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D.
- Architect
- Michael R. Garcia
- Engineer
- Mathew V. Garcia
- Quality Control
- John Ryan
Fr. Robert Spitzer, S.J., Ph.D., the President and co-founder of the Magis Center of Reason and Faith, is a Catholic priest in the Society of Jesus and former President of Gonzaga University. The Magis Center provides comprehensive responses to restore, reconstruct, and revitalize belief in God, the transcendent dignity of every person, the significance of virtue, the higher levels of happiness, love, and freedom, and the Real Presence of Jesus Christ. The Center provides high school and middle school courses, confirmation and catechetical supplements, classes for university Catholic centers, and a host of digital materials — including the MagisAI app — to turn the rising tide of unbelief through science-based evidence.