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POPE-IDENTITY Jan-28-2008 (410 words) xxxi
Pope says science can't help people discover their true identity
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- While the sciences may help people live better in many ways, there is no way they can ever help people discover who they really are, Pope Benedict XVI said.
"No science can say who man is, where he came from or where he is going," the pope said Jan. 28 in a speech to participants in a conference sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Sciences.
The academies were discussing changing notions of human identity, a subject the pope said is inextricably tied to the question of human dignity "from the embryonic stage to natural death."
Human identity cannot be defined simply by looking at a person, studying his physical and intellectual abilities or by summarizing his experiences, the pope said.
The human person, he said, is a mystery "marked by otherness: a being created by God, a being in the image of God, a being that is loved and was made to love."
The ability to distinguish right from wrong and the freedom to act on those decisions makes the human person different from any other being, the pope said.
"In exercising his authentic freedom, the person realizes his vocation; he accomplishes it; he gives a form to his deepest identity," he said.
"In our age, when scientific developments attract and seduce because of the possibilities they offer, it is more important than ever to educate the consciences of our contemporaries so that science never becomes the criteria of goodness, and so that man is respected as the center of creation and does not become the object of ideological manipulation," the pope said.
In the end, Pope Benedict said, love is the truest guide to discovering human identity.
"Love leads one out of oneself to discover and recognize the other," he said. "Opening oneself to another also affirms the identity of the subject because the other reveals me to myself."
Christ gave the greatest example of love and the clearest lesson that it is precisely in loving others that one's identity is revealed, he said.
"In the act of giving his life for his brothers and sisters, of giving himself totally, he manifested his deepest identity and gave us the key for reading the unfathomable mystery of his being and his mission," he said.
END
Copyright (c) 2008 Catholic News Service/USCCB. All rights reserved.
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed.
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