Pope meets with participants in a conference promoted by the Vatican Observatory

Faith and science united in charity

“Faith and science can be united in charity, provided that science is put at the service of the men and woman of our time and not misused to harm or even destroy them. I encourage you, then, to press forward to the outer limits of human knowledge. For there, we can come to experience the God of love, who fulfils the deepest yearnings of the human heart”, Pope Francis said on Thursday morning, 20 June, to participants in the second international conference dedicated to Msgr. Georges Lemaître (1894-1966), the Belgian physicist who developed what is today known as the Big Bang theory.

Conference participants included, Cardinal Fernando Vérgez Alzaga, President of the Pontifical Commission of Vatican City State and President of the Governorate, Sister Raffaella Petrini, General Secretary and member of the Vatican Observatory Foundation, Jesuits Guy J. Consolmagno and Father Gabriele Gionti, Director of the Specola Vaticana and Vice Director of Castel Gandolfo’s Specola Vaticana respectively, Nobel laureates Adam Riess and Roger Penrose, cosmologists and theoretical physicists. Andrei Linde, Joseph Silk, Wendy Freedman, Licia Verde, Cumrun Vafa, and the winner of the Fields Medal, Edward Witten.

The conference, which explored the theme “Black Holes, Gravitational Waves and Space-Time Singularities”, was promoted by the Vatican Observatory, the scientific body of the Governorate, with the support of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (Infn) one of Italy’s most important public research institutes. It ended on 21 June in Castel Gandolfo.