...However passionate and tenacious human research is, it is not capable of finding a safe harbour by its own means, because "man is not able to fully elucidate the strange shadow that hangs over the question of eternal realities ... God must take the initiative to encounter and speak to man "(J. Ratzinger, Benedict's Europe in the Crisis of Cultures, Ignatius Press). To restore reason its native, integral dimension we must rediscover the wellspring that scientific research shares with the search for faith, fides quaerens intellectum, according to the Anselmian intuition. 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 of what is real. But man’s quaerere Deum could loose itself in a tangle of roads if it were not met by a path of illumination and safe harbour, which is God who makes himself close to the man with great love: "In Jesus Christ God not only speaks to man but also seeks him out.... It is a search which begins in the heart of God and culminates in the Incarnation of the Word. "(John Paul II, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, 7).

Address  on occasion of the 50th anniversary of foundation of Policlinico “Agostino Gemelli”

Rome, Catholic Sacred Heart University, 3rd May 2012