Vatican City, Nov 20, 2005 / 22:00 pm
Earlier today, Pope Benedict visited the Vatican offices of the Pontifical Academies of Sciences and Social Sciences, where he told leaders that "human beings are part of nature and, yet, as free subjects who have moral and spiritual values… transcend nature."
The two academies, located in the Vatican Gardens, are headed, respectively, by Nicola Cabibbo and Mary Ann Glendon.
Before presenting a sculpture of the late Pope John Paul II, founder of the academies, Benedict specifically thanked the Academy of Social Sciences for their choice of "the concept of the person in social sciences" as the subject of its plenary assembly this year.
In his address, he said that the anthropological reality of humans being part of, and transcending nature "is an integral part of Christian thought, and responds directly to the attempts to abolish the boundary between human sciences and natural sciences, often proposed in contemporary society.