It's not as official as releasing a formal statement via the Holy See Press Office or some kind of encyclical. Made the headline feel a little misleading when I found out it was an op-ed.

Well, no, because it is not an official statement. It also does not change anything about the other points.

He is not an “envoy of AI matters”. He is an advisor to the pope on such questions.

The articles title is predictably uninformed, as the Church has not made any rebukes. It likely doesn’t have any special concern about Peter Thiel’s lectures; why should it, at least at this point? It’s not like we have a shortage of bad ideas in the world. And Benanti doesn’t have the authority to make pronouncements of that kind in the name of the Church.

The quotation is also odd, at least out of context:

“Thiel’s entire action can thus be read as a prolonged act of heresy against the liberal consensus: a challenge to the very foundations of civil coexistence, which he now considers outdated.”

Sure, he may very well be making statements that could fall under material heresy; I have not read them, because I don’t especially care about what Peter Thiel or much of the SV pseudo-intellectual class thinks. He may also be leaning into heretical ideas as a fulcrum against “liberalism”. However, the bit about liberal consensus admits a weird interpretation thus quoted. Anyone who knows anything about the Church knows that liberalism is not exactly held in high esteem by the Church, given that it is itself a Christian heresy. The Church has taken a stance of tolerance toward liberalism since it assumed dominance under the minimum condition that Catholics be allowed to practice their faith freely in fullness, but this is hardly an endorsement. It can acknowledge that the liberal order is less bad in many ways and relatively speaking than a host of other political orders, but it cannot give it principled support.

That being said, I am not criticizing Benanti’s critiques of Thiel, as I have no familiarity with them. I have heard mixed reactions to his views, but that’s about it. The issue I constantly have is the ridiculous pop-cultural caricatures of “the Vatican” that people seem to carry around in their heads. A papal advisor voices an (scholarly perhaps) opinion (that suits someone’s political aims, no less) and all of a sudden “THE VATICAN BORG CUBE” has made a pronouncement. Next we’ll hear that because the pope has said that the Chicago White Sox is the best baseball team, it is now a binding doctrine of the Church because of papal infallibility.