1. Your Plenary Session marks an important moment in the life of the Academy, and We rejoice in this. For this Institute, remains highly significant: it can bring to our world appreciable help by the competency and universality of its testimony, and also provide a solid basis upon which believers can reflect for a fruitful dialogue with scientific thought. What roads have been travelled since the foundation of the Academy of "Lincei" in 1603, its revival by Pius IX, its enlargement under Leo XIII, and especially its reconstitution by the enlightened care of our great predecessor Pius XI, with the Motu Proprio of October 28, 1936, In multis solaciis, under the name of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, comprised of seventy Pontifical Academicians "a Senate of learned men, as it were, or a scientific Senate to promote the progress of the sciences", under the presidency of Father Agostino Gemelli of happy memory (See AAS, 28, 1936, pp. 423-424).

2. The very nature of your work prompts Us to underline two principles of which you are already convinced, and to which your own experience (We could say: your personality) bears witness every day. The fact that reason, however advanced it may be, is not and cannot be opposed to faith: "Science which is the true knowledge of things is never contradictory to the truths of Christian faith" (Motu proprio, In multis solaciis, loc. cit., p. 421).

Moreover, both faith and reason can be integrated in the unity of knowledge, while keeping their respective autonomy, as the first Vatican Council teaches: "Faith and reason ... are a mutual help to each other" (H. DENZINGER - A. SCHÖNMETZER, Enchiridion symbolorum, definitionum et declaration de rebus fidei et morum; 34th ed. Freiburg im Breisgau, 1967, no. 3019, 1799).

Understand Us well. According to the pastoral Constitution Gaudium et spes which "recalls the teaching of the first Vatican Council", the Church "affirms the legitimate autonomy of human culture and especially of the sciences", with "their own principles and their proper method, each in its own domain" (Gaudium et spes, 59, par. 3). But these sciences which can so well "elevate the human family to a more sublime understanding of truth, goodness and beauty, and to the formation of judgments which embody universal values" (ib., 57, par. 3), can also prepare man to discover and accept the whole truth, provided these sciences do not incorrectly consider "the methods of investigation which these sciences can use as the supreme rule for discovering the whole truth" (ib., par. 5).

It is the same God who has created the world with its laws which you scrutinize—"all things in heaven and on earth, everything visible and everything invisible" (Col 1: 16)—and who reveals Himself to men and brings them salvation in Jesus Christ. The same human spirit is capable of scrutinizing the secrets of creation and "of conquering the earth" (See Gn 1:28), and at the same time, of discovering and accepting "under the impulse of grace" the gift God makes of Himself to man, "The Word of God who, before He became flesh in order to save all things and to sum them up in Himself, 'He was in the world' already as the true light that enlightens every man' " (Jn 1: 9-10; see Gaudium et spes, 57, par. 4). How could the Church not encourage the investigation, the discovery, and the conquest of this universe which, with its marvellous and admirable riches, leads us, from the infinitely small to the infinitely great, towards the invisible which is the source of the visible? (See Rom 1:20).

In the background of these investigations, there is the problem of the very being of this cosmos, of this universe: the question of its existence. You remain, in fact, in scientific experimental observation, of a mathematical and cosmological order. But what prevents the mind, on philosophical grounds, from the possibility of ascending to the transcendent principle, to the Creator, "causa subsistendi et ratio intelligendi et ordo vivendi" (ST. AUGUSTINE, De Civ. Dei, 1, VII, C. IV)? Too often today, we doubt this power. "The more science, while perfecting its methods, subjugates the world to man, the more being, which in reaction does not let itself be subjugated, evades him ... then comes the temptation to agnosticism" (H. DE LUBAC, Sur les chemins de Dieu, Paris, Aubier 1956, p. 84). But we cannot maintain such an attitude. "The intelligence absolutely cannot abdicate; it cannot renounce its formal law, which is to judge, that is, always affirm" (ib.). For the human mind, it is like "an irrepressible need to possess, at every moment of its temporal experiment and in each state of its knowledge, an explanatory idea of the ensemble of things" (P. H. SIMON, Questions aux savant, Paris, Seuil 1969, p. 41).

We often speak of the "death of God". But should we not rather speak of the death of man and of his thinking in its superior form? Without this recourse to God, the source of Being, man's thinking seems to become engulfed in the darkness and incomprehensibility of things, in the ignorance of a unity which presides over them, and of the finality of a mysterious order which is inseparable from them, leading to an absurdity which exists only in its own making. Perhaps you are better spared than others from what must be called a true sickness of the mind, you who scrutinize objectively the sciences of nature, of astrophysics, of physics? (See C. TRESMONTANT, Comment se pose aujourd'hui le problème de l'existence de Dieu, Paris, Seuil 1966, p. 349). For the intelligence, by its very activity, (if it does not remain in the external appearance of reality), rises to the level of its transcendental cause, the real Absolute, Who gives consistency not only to all creation but especially to the human spirit, without ever becoming identical with them. As it has been happily said, the intelligence is "necessarily a power of assimilation as well as a power of ascent ... It understands in all realities that by which realities are, that is, realities open towards the illumination of the act. And thus, it can be rightly said that the intelligence is the sense of the divine, the avid and skilful faculty of recognizing the traces of God" (See Ch. DE MORÉ-PONTGIBAUD, Du fini à l'infini. Introduction a l'étude de la connaissance de Dieu, Paris, Aubier 1957, p. 65).

Here you have, it must be repeated, a natural development of thought, in its fundamental logic, and not an unjustified leap as claimed by an antimetaphysical mentality improperly qualified as scientific. True science, far from arresting the thrust of thought, constitutes a springboard which enables it to rise, in this very thrust, towards the One who generously provides it with food. For, "the spirit itself is a road that travels ... We cannot get along without God" (H. DE LUBAC, op. cit., p. 78).

We are amazed, as We said before, in the presence of your studies on the nuclei of galaxies. The solar system already appeared so vast and so mysterious to our predecessors! But for all that, we are not disconcerted, knowing that "God prefers rather to create beings in their seed in order to lead them subsequently to their blossoming" (Card. JOURNET, L'Eglise du Verbe incarné, t. 3, Essai de théologie de l'histoire du salut, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1969, p. 114). Time and space, matter and form, can develop in a limitless way, indefinitely, as it were.

In our turn, we contemplate this mysterious beauty and goodness of creation. All these beings cry out to us, as they did to St. Augustine: we are not God, but it is God who made us. "Ecce caelum et terra clamant quod facta sint" (Confessions, I, XI, c. 4, no. 6; PL 32, 811 - Cf. In Joannem tract. 106, c. 17, no. 4; PL 35, 1910 - Cf. Sagesse, 13, 1 and 9). And Him we adore! The meeting with God is wrought before the quasi-limitless grandeur of his works (is it not a grace to be initiated in this grandeur?), in joy, in admiration, in prayer, in the adoration of the One who "in bestowing thousands of graces ... hurried through these forests, and while beholding them ... left them clothed with his beauty" (ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS, Spiritual Canticle, verse 5).

At the conclusion of this contemplation of the supreme realities of the cosmos in their meeting with the supreme truths of the human mind, We cannot silence our emotions, our admiration, our satisfaction which are those of the entire world for the happy ending—yes, happy, very happy, even if the main aim of the adventurous flight of Apollo 13 was not achieved. All of you have certainly followed, with apprehension and then with joy, the unfolding of this extraordinary undertaking. And you will undoubtedly make it a point to congratulate warmly with Us the valiant astronauts who have escaped the dangers of this grandiose flight, and to render homage to all those who, by their studies, their activity and their authority, have once again brought before the eyes of the world the limitless power of sciences and modern technology. You will also raise with Us an ardent hymn of gratitude to God, Creator of the universe and Father of men, who, by these paths also, wishes to be sought after and found by man, adored and loved by Him.

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