Heaven Kidnapped to Earth: An AI's Unexpected Gift to a Catholic Layman

The promulgation of Magnifica Humanitas, the papal encyclical on Artificial Intelligence, inspired me to introduce a project I've been working on for the past few months.

An analysis of Luisa Piccarreta's complete thirty-six-volume mystical diary, identifying — entry by entry — where its theological content finds correspondence in the Bible. The Book of Heaven is the thirty-six-volume mystical diary of the Servant of God, Luisa Piccarreta (1865–1947), a laywoman of Corato, Italy, who wrote under obedience to her confessor for more than forty years. Its subject is the Divine Will, the call to live entirely within God's own Will as the human person was originally created to do.

I started the Biblical Resonance Analysis (BRA) Project long before I learned about Pope Leo XIV's encyclical letter, signed on May 15, 2026, as reported by Christopher Hale:

Once I learned about the encyclical, I was excited to read it and learn what the Pope had to say on the topic. My anticipation was fueled by eight months of daily experience with Claude: learning what it could do that I'd find helpful, discovering what it could accomplish that I'd never have time to do myself, and coming to a better understanding of how it handles complex analytical tasks.

My BRA Project has been enlightening to me and I believe serves as a concrete example of the use of AI as a valuable assistant to human intellectual work, rather than a potential master seeking to control human thought and activity. This article is a token of my own gratitude to Pope Leo XIV for taking up the enormous topic of AI. His teaching on AI's proper role is something I hope the BRA Project models in practice.

The project was produced using Claude.ai. It is not a work of theology or traditional scholarship, and should not be understood as one. It is an application of AI to a specific analytical task: reading a large body of mystical text and identifying where its concepts and theological movements have counterparts in Scripture.

That task is what "resonance" means here. A passage in the Book of Heaven resonates with a scriptural passage when the two share the same underlying meaning or theological movement — not necessarily the same words, but the same substance. AI is well suited to this kind of work. It can hold the full breadth of the Bible in view while reading a dense mystical text, and it can identify those correspondences consistently across thousands of entries in a way that would be impractical to sustain manually.

The following is an excerpt from a portion of the February 3, 1929, entry found in Volume 25 of the Book of Heaven. Claude's analysis found that the passage resonated with several passages of scripture, including Acts 2:1–4, a fitting choice for this Pentecost Sunday. The format of each cited biblical passage is to quote the biblical text, then provide a brief explanation as to why the passage seems to have resonance, and categorize the type of resonance the passage represents (direct doctrinal, typological, etc.). Claude also broke out each entry into the different movements, or subject matter, contained in each entry as in the example below. Throughout the analysis Divine Will is often abbreviated as DW.

When I started the BRA project, my goal was simply to see if Claude could locate passages of scripture that had resonance with the diary entries presented to the AI.

The outcome exceeded my expectations. I should make it clear that I'm not a theologian, nor a scripture scholar. I'm a Catholic layman who discovered the writings of Luisa Piccarreta and found joy in reading the Book of Heaven. The journey hasn't been without trials, as misunderstandings about the writings and their actual status in the Church are fairly common. One of the earliest complaints I encountered while searching for cautions about reading the works was the lack of biblical references. The complaint was essentially that Piccarreta never cites scripture in any of the 36 volumes.

I came to understand that the complaint is only valid if you come to the writings expecting to find a quotation taken directly from Acts 2:1–4 or Ephesians 1:10, for example. Claude didn't analyze the diary entries looking for quotations; it looked for expressions of ideas, principles, and doctrines found in the Bible. The sample shared here is evidence that the writings have much deeper scriptural roots than might be expected.

A person deeply immersed in the Word would see many of the scriptural references identified by Claude. A person like me needs a little help — well, a lot of help. Claude lacks the ontological capacity to be deeply immersed in the Word like a person on fire with the love of God and His Holy Word. However, our ability as humans to conduct an analysis like the one produced by Claude in the example above is constrained by time, education, and mental bandwidth. Pope Leo has recognized that AI can and should serve humanity. The BRA Project is intended as a service, a presentation of scripture that can be taken up by the reader to ponder and follow up on where the Holy Spirit, the fire of the Divine Will, leads.