A CatholicOS Hackathon Project by CatholicTech

Instrumentum Veritatis is an AI model designed to serve as a responsible and faithful assistant for exploring the Catholic Church’s teachings on moral, social, and economic issues.
It draws from official Church documents such as:

• Encyclicals and Apostolic Letters
• Papal Bulls and Councils
• Writings of the Church Fathers
• The Catechism of the Catholic Church

Our goal is not to replace theological reasoning, but to assist human understanding by organizing, summarizing, and providing accessible insights into the Church’s intellectual and moral tradition.

1. Corpus Building – We collect and structure Church documents (in .txt or .pdf format).
2. Text Embedding – Each document is processed into vector embeddings for semantic search.
3. Question Answering – A Large Language Model (LLM) retrieves relevant passages and provides an answer, citing sources transparently.
4. Interface – A simple web or Streamlit app for asking questions and viewing cited results.

• Python 3.12+
• OpenAI or local LLM (Llama/Mistral)
• LangChain / LlamaIndex for retrieval
• FAISS / ChromaDB for semantic search
• Streamlit or Flask for the front-end

“What does the Church teach about the dignity of work?”

→ Cites Laborem Exercens (John Paul II), Rerum Novarum (Leo XIII), and relevant Catechism sections.

“The human person, created in the image of God, is the measure of all technological progress.”
— Pontifical Academy for Life, Ethics in Artificial Intelligence (2020)

This project aims to embody that principle by ensuring AI is used to aid human wisdom, not replace it.