Pope: Restoring the wings of science and faith to healthcare

Pope Benedict XVI called on faculty and staff at Rome’s Catholic Scared Heart University to restore the "wings" of science and faith to research and healthcare Thursday, as he marked the 50^th anniversary of the Faculty of Medicine at what is more popularly known by Romans as “Gemelli” hospital, after its founder Agostino Gemelli. Listen to Emer McCarthy's report:

The midmorning appointment outside a newly erected University Centre for Life, gave Pope Benedict the opportunity to return to one of the central themes of his 7 year pontificate: the unlikely couple of science and faith, and the deep bond between them.

The Holy Father told the authorities, professors, healthcare professionals and students gathered before him that theirs’ is no mere profession. Instead they have a mission to help modern society move beyond the reductionist view of science and medicine which excludes God and the transcendent and which has generated a dangerous imbalance between “what is technically possible and what is morally good” with risky and “unpredictable consequences”

Pope Benedict then developed his address around one, perhaps the most worrying, of these consequences: the loss of the meaning of things. This he said is a result of a progressive “weakening of thought and ethical impoverishment”.

To reverse this trend the Pope said “we must rediscover the wellspring that scientific research shares with the search for faith” upon which European culture and its value system were built, but now seems forgotten; the wellspring of creative Reason.

He said:“Science and faith have a fruitful reciprocity, an almost complementary requirement of intelligence of what is real. But, paradoxically, it is the positivist culture, in its exclusion of the question about God from the scientific debate, that is determining the decline of thought and the weakening of the capacity of intelligence for what is real”.

Pope Benedict continued “it is the love of God, which shines in Christ, that renders the eyes of research sharp and piercing and help grasp that which no study is capable of grasping”, the “face of Christ in the suffering”. Father Gemelli he said “brought the human person in his fragility and greatness back to the centre of attention” no less aware of the limits and the mystery of life

And he concluded, “Without love, even science loses its nobility. Only love guarantees the humanity of research”.