The pope made global headlines when he met Eric Schmidt, then the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, at the Vatican in January 2016. He met Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg later that year. Then, in December 2017, the Vatican served as a venue for a tech competition among startups trying to address climate change. The 81-year-old pontiff has freely admitted he doesn’t know how to use a computer, yet he has embraced social media and clocked up well over 40 million Twitter followers. He’s spoken glowingly about the potential of technology to reshape the future—for example, in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si—but he’s also spoken critically, often in the same breath, about the risk of technological progress coming at the expense of human wellbeing. “How wonderful would it be if the growth of scientific and technological innovation would come along with more equality and social inclusion. How wonderful would it be, while we discover faraway planets, to rediscover the needs of the brothers and sisters orbiting around us,” the pope said in a TED Talk last year.

Czerny seemed to hint at this point of friction when he said, “The first Vatican hackathon has been a great opportunity to increase the platform on which the Church and high-tech can meet—not only to cooperate but also to be mutually honest and, if necessary, critical.” Nearby, Moe Sunami, a 19-year-old Japanese student who attends Harvey Mudd College in California, was designing a website to help teachers support students with disabilities. “I think the focus on doing things that are not necessarily for profit but for social good is what’s absolutely awesome about this event,” she said.

But if the Church is going to support technological progress only insofar as it dovetails with a Catholic view of moral or social good, won’t that hinder some of the profit-seeking entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley? “That’s definitely a tension between the two views,” Green said. “The Catholic Church is fine with capitalism as long as capitalism actually helps people—which is the exception, because capitalism obviously doesn’t always help people.”

Silicon Valley has its share of impact investors and other entrepreneurs who aim to generate a social good as well as financial benefit. Yet Green said that after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidency in November 2016, some of the tech giants have also been taking ethics more seriously. “Since the election, there’s been a lot of soul-searching in Silicon Valley,” he said. Both Twitter and Facebook have publicly grappled this month with the social harm their platforms have enabled, from fake news campaigns to abuse of user data. In the case of Facebook, the blow to the company’s reputation has come with a blow to its bottom line.

Stefano Marzani, a Catholic Italian entrepreneur who directs a company developing software for self-driving cars, agreed there is “no doubt” that Trump’s election changed the tech sector’s mindset. Now, Marzani said, many companies realize they have a lot to gain—reputationally and, ultimately, financially—from associating themselves with the Vatican and other spiritual institutions. “If you’re building a product and you don’t consider ethical values, this has an impact on people, and in the end there’s a very big negative effect,” he said. “We see this emerging here in Silicon Valley. The products are doing well, they have huge profit margins, but the image that these big companies start to have with people—who are feeling like their privacy is not respected—in the end it’s not positive for the companies. So working more on the ethical side of it, it’s a great benefit for the businesses.”