The Vatican searches for science
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Cardinal Giovanni Lejolo, representing the Pope and the Roman Catholic Church, this week visited the European Organisation for Nuclear Research otherwise known as CERN on the Swiss-French border. “True faith has no problems with science,” the cardinal commented.
Lajolo spoke to the press the day after he visited the laboratory where he received a crash course in particle physics to try to understand a little of what was going on there. Trying to explain Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics is not an easy matter.
CERN’s atom smasher, the world’s largest, is seen as pivotal in this quest. Physicists hope to soon to use the $10 billion machine after a setback last year put them behind a year. They want to smash protons from hydrogen atoms and crash them into each other at high energy speeds, record what particles are produced and gain a better idea of the universe and all that is in it.
“The Church never fears the truth of science because we are convinced that all truth comes from God,” said Cardinal Giovanni Lajolo, Vatican City’s governor. “Science will help our faith to purify itself. And faith at the same time will be able to broaden the horizons of man, who cannot just enclose himself in the horizons of science.”
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