Vatican City (AsiaNews) - " Never succumb to the temptation to treat what's best for people by reducing it to a mere technical problem! The indifference of conscience to what is true and good, represents a dangerous threat to genuine scientific progress". This was the invitation of Benedict XVI to Catholic doctors and researchers around the world gathered in Rome for the XVIII General Assembly of the Pontifical Academy for Life. The meeting on "Diagnosis and treatment for infertility" started last February 23 and ended today with the papal audience in the Sala Clementina of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace.

In his speech, the pope praised the work of researchers who "face the problem of infertility in the couple, choose to recall and carefully consider the moral dimensions, searching ways for a correct diagnosis and a therapy that corrects the causes of infertility". According to the pontiff, " his approach is moved not only from the desire to gift the couple a child, but to restore fertility to couple and with it all the dignity of being responsible for their own reproductive choices, to be God's collaborators in the generation of a new human being".

"The human and Christian dignity of procreation - he said - consists not in a "product", but in its connection with the conjugal act, an expression of love of the spouses, their union which is not only biological but also spiritual".

Benedict XVI emphasized that "the legitimate parental aspirations of the couples facing a condition of infertility must therefore be found, with the help of science, an answer that fully respects their dignity as persons and as spouses. The humility and precision with which you study these issues, considered obsolete by some of your colleagues before the allure of the technology of artificial insemination, deserves encouragement and support. "

Quoting from his speech on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the encyclical Fides et Ratio, the Pope noted how "scientism and the logic of profit now seem to dominate the field of infertility and human procreation, to the point of limiting many other areas of research. "

The Pope said that "the Church pays great attention to the suffering of couples with infertility, she cares for them and, because of this, encourages medical research. Science, however, is not always able to respond to the desires of so many couples ".

To the spouses living condition of infertility, the pope recalled that they "by their very vocation of baptism and marriage, are called to cooperate with God in the creation of a new humanity." "The vocation to love - he emphasized - it is a vocation to the gift of self and this is a possibility that no organic condition can prevent. Where, then, science has not found an answer, the answer that gives light comes from Christ" .

Benedict XVI has invited those who work in a medical - scientific context where truth is blurred "to continue on their journey of a science that is intellectually honest and fascinated by the constant research for the good of man", not forgetting in this intellectual journey, the dialogue with faith. Citing his appeal expressed in the Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, Pope said that Faith enables reason to do its work more effectively and to see its proper object more clearly. "(n. 28). On the other hand, precisely the cultural matrix created by Christianity - rooted in the affirmation of the existence of truth and intelligibility of reality in the light of Supreme Truth - has made the development of in modern scientific knowledge possible in medieval Europe, a knowledge that in earlier cultures had remained but a seed".

In conclusion, the Pope renewed the hopes of Vatican II to the men of science, "" Happy are those who, while possessing the truth, continue to seek to renew it, deepen it, to give it to others "(Message to the Men of Thought and Science, December 8, 1965: AAS 58 [1966], 12).