The Catholic Church has been showing unusual interest in artificial intelligence, leading some to speculate on whether the Vatican may be preparing to replace the traditionally human pope with some sort of Mecha Pope that would then go on to reconquer Europe in the name of the Lord and drive out all the Protestants, Muslims, furries, and Jews.

“The College of Cardinals has been strongly considering this for some time now,” a source deep within the Vatican has revealed to NPC Daily via snapchat. “God is divine, but mankind is fallible. There is much concern over what would happen if a pedo were inadvertently selected as Pope — or worse — a Trump supporter.”

But the Church does not yet possess the necessary technology to build an Artificial Pontiff to the desired specifications.

“The theological programming is simple enough — we’ve had one thousand, nine hundred and eighty-seven years to get that much right — but we are still struggling to overcome the inherent bias of such toxically cis-white technology. As we have seen time and time again, AI is massively racist.

Our source went on to suggest that while the long-term solution is indeed to emotionally blackmail more womxyzn of color into entering STEM, a short-term fix may be in order. Pope Francis recently contracted an unknown respiratory ailment that has left him somewhat indisposed, and the mainstream media remains baffled as to what this mysterious illness might be.

“If His Holiness should succumb to this… indisposition…” our source confided, “look to the Cardinals to nominate some random Japanese person.”

Despite these present shortfalls, the Vatican remains optimistic.

“Someday we shall realize our dream of building ourselves a non-binary, anti-racist killer robot Pope with which to take back Europe. But as I said before, we just aren’t there yet.”

“Diversity is divinity.” Anonymous Vatican source