Lecture and Discussant Text

Walter Kohn
Reflections of a Physicist after an Encounter with the Vatican and Pope John Paul II
3:00-5:00 PM Friday April 20

Discussant: James Langer, Department of Physics
Discussant: Rabbi Stephen Cohen, UCSB Hillel

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Lecture Text (©Walter Kohn)

When I was a 15-year-old high school student in Vienna, I was required to make a short presentation to my class. It was the only time that happened. I chose the Galileo story as my subject. Today, more than 60 years later, the Italian national telescope is named Galileo and I am, for the second time in my life, making a presentation on science and religion.

Certainly science, especially physics and chemistry, is a very important part of my identity. But I also consider myself a religious person, and in two senses: one, based on my liberal Jewish upbringing which I have passed on to my children; the other, a kind of non-denominational deism which springs from my awe of the world of our experiences and is heightened by my identity as a scientist. It also includes a conviction that science alone is an insufficient guide to life, leaving many deep questions unanswered and needs unfulfilled. Based on my reading of history, and especially my personal experience, I feel passionate about mutual tolerance and respect between different religions as well as agnosticism and atheism. Among contemporary religious leaders, the one I most admire is the Dalai Lama. Today I shall try to present to you a case history in which I was involved during the last 12 months or so, which bears in several ways on science, religion, and the human experience.

The religion in question is primarily the Catholic Church. At this point I want to say explicitly that I lack any significant expertise in Religious Studies or Theology, and I apologize in advance for misunderstandings and errors on my part. If time permits, I will also try and update you on the two most famous interactions of science and religion, namely, the Galileo and Darwin cases.

This story begins in February of 2000, and it starts with a letter I received from an Italian physicist, Giovanni Bachelet, from which I'd like to read you a few excerpts:

"Dear Walter,

I am writing you to inquire about your participation to the International Conference, Physics for the 21^st Century, to be held in Rome, Italy on September 6, 7, and 8. This conference is part of the celebration for the Great Jubilee of the Catholic Church and I was one of the consultants who contributed to the definition of its program....

I do not know what your feelings may be about churches, Popes, etc. My personal contribution to this program, as a Church member, was the attempt to have top speakers who can give a perspective of science rather than promoting a conference of 'Catholic scientists.'"

When I received this letter, I reacted to it with mixed feelings. First of all, you will see a kind of friendliness and warmth, which I immediately appreciated very much. However, the idea of attending a scientific conference under the auspices of the Catholic Church, I had very ambivalent feelings about it. Not only under the auspices of a church, whatever it was, it's a question of, is that a proper role of any church? Also, it was part of the 2000 Jubilee year that was proclaimed by Pope John Paul II, and I had great problems with that.

Of course we know the meaning of the word jubilee. It's jubilation, and, as somebody who has experienced most of the last century, I couldn't really see that it was appropriate for me to participate in a jubilation. That century which had been, in my view, the most spectacular, most golden age of science; in the area of human affairs, has quite possibly been the most dismal century.

I had some secondary problems. I have been, for decades now, very much involved in the issues of population and family planning; and I have been, and continue to be, very unhappy with the powerful role which the Vatican plays in that area. I also had a problem with the fact that one of the most controversial recent Popes, Pope Pius XII, who was Pope during the Second World War and during the Holocaust, and as far as available records tell us, remained very largely silent during this period about the horrors that occurred, and yet was, at that time a year ago, under consideration for beatification. I thought about this for a few days, and I replied to Giovanni Bachelet that I regret that I will not be coming, and I explained to him, as I did to you, what were my reasons.

Giovanni Bachelet wrote back to me another very nice letter, in which he obviously made it clear to me that he was truly very empathetic with my feelings. He told me that he had heard that there would be an unusual statement by the Pope on the sins of sons and daughters of the Church during the last two thousand years and also, that the Pope was going to make an historic visit to Israel.

That was such a warm and friendly letter, and this was new information, so I wrote back and said, "Thank you very much and I will wait until I hear about these developments."

What then happened, as many of you will know and remember, is that those two events did take place. The statement about the sins was, as Giovanni Bachelet somehow knew about in advance, postponed by a week because of difficulties in finding agreement within the Vatican on how to formulate it. But it did eventually come out. These were two very remarkable events, this statement about sins and the visit to Yad Vashem in Israel.

They attracted an enormous amount of attention, and the reaction was mixed. Some emphasized the great positive sides; some were disappointed by things they had expected and did not find. There was, for example, in the statement of the seven categories of sins, the categories (in case you wonder) are: against Christian unity; against the Jews; against respect for love, peace, and cultures; against the dignity of women and minorities; and against human rights. It was certainly a remarkable, completely unprecedented statement, and some people stressed primarily that aspect. Other people said, “Why was there no mention of any concrete examples? Why was there no mention of the Inquisition? Why was there no mention of the silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust?” So the reaction was mixed. And my own reaction was mixed.

And I thought about this for quite a while. But I also thought, and a very significant part of my thinking, was simply the warmth of the communications I'd had from Giovanni Bachelet. Well if I say, “I've changed my mind," what will that mean? If I say, "No I'm not coming," what will that mean? So finally, with Giovanni Bachelet in mind, I said, "I changed my mind and I will come."

Perhaps I should say a little more about this remarkable statement about the sins of the sons and daughters of the Church. This is - sometimes I feel it must be very difficult to be a Catholic. You cannot, particularly the Pope - the Church cannot have made a mistake. That's now a dogma. So what do you do when the Church does make mistakes? That's very hard. And I have real sympathy for the Pope. I don't think I could handle it.

Here I'm reading various reactions: By a rabbi, "The Pope ought to talk about the Holocaust." There's much concern about the fact that the Pope, clearly and very deliberately, never, never speaks about any mistakes of the Church itself. So how is one to think about organized sins like the Inquisition? It's a problem.

In any case, I finally decided, "Okay. I'm going, and I will see what I can do." I come now to the conference itself. I arrived in Rome, and I will show you a few slides.

(hyperlink: Slide of announcement.)

So that's the announcement. Here you see, it was part of a world meeting of University Professors. Eventually, at the end of all these conferences, there was a meeting within Vatican City in a very large meeting hall where participants in these meetings met, and were met by the Pope himself. There were about eight thousand people there, representing many different academic disciplines.

Now, I'll come back to that overall picture in a moment, but I'll first spend a few minutes talking about the Physics for the 21^st Century meeting, in which I participated.

(hyperlink: Slide of poster)

Particularly for the scientists in the audience, just glance over the list of speakers; and for the non-scientists, I will say that it is really an outstanding list. There are, among the eighteen speakers, five Nobel Prize winners. It was, and it's important to mention, it was religiously very diverse, so Giovanni Bachelet was successful in not allowing it to become a conference limited to Catholic scientists.

The program had several sessions and covered most of the main branches of Physics: Cosmology and Astrophysics; Elementary Particles; Nuclear Physics and Fundamental Interactions; Atomic and Condensed Matter Physics; a roundtable, The Physicist's View of the World; and then the last session, Physics and Complex Systems. That was the program that I got before the meeting actually opened.

When the meeting opened, there were various dignitaries there. The most memorable person for me was an unusual person for me to choose, Cardinal Poupard. Cardinal Poupard is one of the major figures within the Vatican. He is the President of the Pontifical Council of Culture. He gave the opening lecture in Italian. I have a slide; it's rather a nice document.

(hyperlink: Slide of Poupard document)

There it is, just the introductory greeting of Cardinal Poupard, "Physics for the 21^st Century," and somewhere hidden down here he says that this problematic is particularly important to him, because this theme - I can't read this very well here - On the 31^st of October, 1992, he was involved with what is described here as "the Case of Galileo," and I will come back to that. In fact, he was the person who coordinated the work of the Pontifical Academy in reaching what is the present, totally revised attitude of the Church towards Galileo.

(hyperlink: slide of Pontifical Academy of Sciences’ names)

This is a list of the members. I don't know whether it is a cumulative list, since it was established decades ago; but again I invite the scientists in the audience to run their eyes down this list, and I believe they will agree that it is, again, a very distinguished list; again, a religiously extremely diverse list. I am personally familiar with a whole bunch of these people and have the absolutely highest respect for all of them.

This conference proceeded and when my turn came, I did something that I previously arranged with Giovanni Bachelet. He himself had obtained approval for it from the Vatican and that was, that I would give an introduction in which I would explain why I had difficulty in making a decision to attend, and that I would also refer to the Holocaust, and the fact that there were many influential voices who should have been heard, but were not heard; and then I would dedicate my lecture to my former physics teacher, Emil Nohel, who himself was finally a victim of the Holocaust in the last months of the Holocaust, having voluntarily joined his sister in a transport to Auschwitz.

(hyperlink: slide of Nohel)

I showed this picture and I spoke about him. He was an extraordinary teacher and certainly, without him, I would not be standing here. This introduction was very warmly received by the audience. The meeting itself, I would rate, compared to the many meetings that I have attended, as an excellent meeting. Not perhaps the very best, but it was excellent. An interesting feature was a roundtable discussion about which I don't really remember too much. The person who was nominally in charge of it, who will be known to the Physicists here, namely David Mermin; and another interesting participant was a Polish Archbishop Zycinski, who, I was told, had a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics, and who participated as an archbishop. He spoke about science and faith. That has been a theme discussed frequently in the Vatican and written about very extensively in recent years. In Latin, it is not science and faith but fides et ratio. Obviously the order is inverted.

At the end of the meeting, a Russian journalist came up to me and said “Do I approve this kind of religious supervision of science?” That was the first moment that I had specifically asked myself that question, and I said, "No, I do not." I do not because, in this group and in any scientific meeting, you are likely to find people who, first of all, certainly do not belong to any particular religion; such as, in this case, Catholicism; and others, who are agnostics and who are atheists and who are perfectly fine scientists, and the ones that I know, perfectly fine human beings. I did not think it was appropriate to have them put under the aegis of religion, let alone a particular religion. On the other hand, I also said to her, that I very much like the idea of meetings devoted to the purpose of discussing science and religion. As Einstein said, those are the two great forces in society nowadays. This meeting is an example of the kind that I like; yes, I approve that. But in thinking back on that particular meeting, it was the theological presence that was not comfortable for me.

After that meeting ended, we were invited - I'm leaving out social events, some of which were absolutely on a grand scale. Through the connections with the Vatican, the main reception was in a palace of the kind I have never been in before, with fine paintings that were stacked four or five high. These were large paintings. But, coming back to the more serious part, when our meeting ended, all the meetings had ended, and so there was now this meeting in the Vatican.

(hyperlink: slide of Vatican)

The hall where this was held is a fairly modern hall. We all had badges of various kinds and were carefully ushered into our seats. The whole thing was extremely well-organized and the theme of this entire set of activities was The University for a New Humanism. The meeting itself in the Vatican took about three or four hours in the morning. It started with music and liturgy. There were general philosophical reports in many different languages from many different parts of the world. There were different areas of scholarship that were reported on, for example, the natural sciences, or another area was called The City of Man. Another area was called The Human Person. Another area was called Arts and Music.

Now I have here, I brought here something with me I'd like to consult and read you from about science.-.I cannot at the moment put my hands on it, so I'll just tell you about it. That particular report was given by a Croat by the name of Sunijc, whose work I happened to have read some decades ago, a very fine physicist, and clearly a very devout Catholic, and he reported this work in the spirit of this meeting which was, as I mentioned, The University for New Humanism.

There also was a very interesting African woman who somehow had been substituted at the last moment. And, as far as I could understand what she said, she was not very happy about being such a substitute.

Now you have, in the handout, the address of the Holy Father. At this point, I should perhaps go back a little bit and say that, very early in the proceedings, the Pope entered from the side. Visualize a very large, wide stage in the center of which was a simple chair, or throne, for the Pope. He entered and I found my throat tightening. It was extremely moving because here was this old gentleman - actually he is not that much different in age than I, but fortunately I have not had this terrible experience that you know about; namely this assassination attempt on the Pope, from which it appears he has never really fully recovered. Nevertheless, he had difficulty. He has a little Parkinson's disease. He had difficulty lifting his feet, but he strolled with a large Pope's staff – a simple, wooden staff. He strolled in with large steps and with a Cardinal, one on each side, and sat down and blessed the crowd as he moved across the stage. Then came these reports which were given to him, and then came his own speech of which you have a copy. I invite you to read it.

(hyperlink: slide of the Pope's speech)

(hyperlink: text of the Pope’s speech)

I consider it to be a very fine speech. After the speech, we'd all been shown our seats; I'd been shown a seat in the first row. I began to see that the ushers were doing things, and the people in the front row were moving towards the center, and then up some steps to meet the Pope himself. Many of you know there is a protocol for that, and the protocol is, that you kneel down and kiss the ring of the Pope. Well, this was something that I knew I could not do, but I also wanted to make sure that I didn't cause any bad feelings. At that point, fortunately, the Archbishop that had been at the meeting and who was walking around - this is a huge place and there were people in different shades of red - Cardinals, Archbishops meandering around - he meandered towards me and he said, "You know, if you feel like it, please go up, and if you want to say a few words, - and you certainly don't have to kneel down and kiss the Pope's ring. That's not necessary." So while we were sort of moving over, I had time to think about what I might say. And I did eventually reach the Pope...and let's see...Mary, I think we have a picture? Yes.

(hyperlink: Slide of Dr. Kohn with Pope)

Now I thought about various things I might say and I had very much in mind, the remarkable things the Pope had done in the previous months that I mentioned to you, the statement about the sins of the sons and daughters of the Church, and his visit to Yad Vashem where he said some wonderful things.

So finally what I said to him was, "Your Holiness, I thank you deeply for the courageous steps you have undertaken to improve the mutual understanding between Christians and Jews." And he said, "Thank you," but I wasn't quite finished. After all, I had prepared this carefully. And I finished by saying, "And I entreat you to continue further along this path." And he said, "Thank you very much." So that was my encounter with the Pope; it was an unforgettable experience.

The Pope himself, just to convey to you a little bit, the sort of personal impression I had at this moment - By the way, I had broken my wrist, you see something black. I told my surgeon later on that the Pope had shaken his splint. But you notice the Pope held my hand in a really very warm - enclosure, you might say. And he has these sparkling, bright eyes. It was a very wonderful personal encounter. I can't tell the shade of red in the picture, but behind him there is either a Cardinal or an Archbishop.

This was on a Saturday; on a Sunday there was the final end, there was a Holy Mass which I did not attend; I left on Saturday. I came home via Frankfurt. In Frankfurt I stopped and picked up some newspapers and I became aware that, while this conference was going on, a very important document had been issued by the Vatican. Its title is Dominus Iesus, and its author is Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This is the direct successor of the Inquisition. I read the newspaper account and it upset me very much. I have since read the entire document and it confirmed my original impression. I should perhaps say that, partly because of my experience during the war years and pre-war years in Europe, I have become very sensitive to a certain situation, a situation where something is done that does not seem to be a good thing, and many people are aware of it but ignore it. That, of course, was the tragedy during the Holocaust. And I have on several occasions said to myself, that's something that I should not do.

I found this statement extraordinarily intolerant. Intolerant, not only of other religions, or other non-Christian faiths which were described as having great defects, but very intolerant even of non-Catholic Christian religions. I read it and said, “My goodness this is really a shock. Maybe I can think of something that I personally can do about it.” Of course I have no delusions of grandeur, but I do think it's not a good excuse, and many people in Germany and Austria used that excuse, "Well, what can I do? There is this big machinery out there and so I can't do anything, so I better do something else."

When I came home I began to think that, maybe with my new friend Giovanni Bachelet, and with the help of the Archbishop who had been so kind to me, I might be able to perhaps write a letter to the Pope and have it actually reach the Pope. Giovanni Bachelet has an abbreviation - I don't know - it's an Italian abbreviation and it refers to the wastepaper basket of the Vatican. So he said, "Well, let's hope this doesn't reach this whatever a.b.c." And I did put such a letter together. It took me several months. I had wonderful help, and I will acknowledge that later. I sent that letter to Giovanni Bachelet, who sent it further to the Archbishop. And the Archbishop sent it to the Secretary of State of the Vatican with his own request that it be presented to the Pope, and you have in your handout the acknowledgment by the office of the Secretary of State. An acknowledgment that I was absolutely thrilled by because it was extremely friendly and had an extremely open-minded tone. And it explicitly said that the Pope has read your letter. My letter was a three page, single-spaced letter.

Giovanni Bachelet, in one of his letters sent to me, was also at least as upset as I by the Ratzinger statement Dominus Iesus, probably more upset; it affects him more directly. And then he sent me an absolutely wonderful quote from Vatican II on the same subject, which is just totally generous towards everybody as far as the possibility of salvation is concerned. The Ratzinger document says, and leaves no doubt about the interpretation, it says it three or four times, "the only Church through which one can go to Heaven, through which one can be saved, is the Catholic Church." Other churches that are very near it can, through their nearness to the Catholic Church, also, partially, offer salvation. Protestants absolutely not, and non-Christians absolutely, absolutely not.

A little later, in my letter to the archbishop I write, "May I invite you to compare the exclusionary tone of Dominus Iesus with the following radiantly generous excerpt concerning salvation from Gaudium et-Spes, Vatican Council II, 1965, kindly provided me by my good friend Professor Giovanni Bachelet. And then I quote from Vatican Council II, "...all this holds true” (speaking of salvation) “not only for Christians, but for all men of good will in whose hearts grace works in an unseen way...since the ultimate vocation of man is in fact one, and divine, we ought to believe that the Holy Spirit, in a manner known only to God, offers to every man the possibility of being associated with this Paschal mystery."

That is the end of the story about my letter to the Pope. I did send it, as I mentioned to you, through the Polish Archbishop and he decided to write me and he writes to me, again in an extremely friendly way, that he had read my letter to the Pope, in which I had expressed my dismay about the Ratzinger document; and the Archbishop replies to this in terms of an analogy with physics.

I appreciated that letter very much. I don't agree with it, and I replied to him at some length, hopefully, in the same friendly spirit as in his own letter. So that is really the story of my encounter with the Pope and what was connected with it, including my own thoughts, and other peoples thoughts and actions. And now I have a quick question; we are late. Shall I take five minutes to just summarize where the Galileo and the Evolution story stands? Okay, fine.

The Galileo story reached its most recent point in October, 1992, so it's really very recent. A young friend about whom I'll speak in a moment provided me with the following excerpt from the Los Angeles Times of October 31, 1992: "Vatican admits Galileo correct," Vatican City...I cannot help it, it's the LA Times lingo: "It's official: the earth revolves around the sun, even for the Vatican.”

Now to go back, I have the statement of the Pope on this, and I found it, all in all, an outstanding statement. It has fifteen sections or more. And I will read now just for very few minutes. Here is quoting the Pope on Galileo:

"From the Galileo affair we can learn the lesson which remains valid in relation to similar situations which occur today and may occur in the future. In Galileo's time, to depict the world as lacking an absolute physical reference point was, so to speak, inconceivable. And since the cosmos, as it was then known, was contained within the solar system alone, this reference point could only be situated in the Earth or in the Sun. Today after Einstein, within the perspective of contemporary cosmology, neither of these two reference points has the importance they once had."

This is, for just a graduate-level physicist, because from the point of view of Einstein's General Relativity Theory, there is no preferred center in the cosmos. So this is on the one hand a very sophisticated statement - another aside to the physicists here - but on the other hand, it's a bit misleading, right? We all know why.

But now listen to the generosity of the Pope's language:

"This observation, it goes without saying, is not directed against the validity of Galileo's position in the debate, it is only meant to show that often beyond two partial and contrasting perceptions, there exists a wider perception which includes them and goes beyond both of them." And skipping some lines,

"The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the Earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was in some way imposed by the literal sense of sacred scripture."

And then he quotes something in Latin. I like Latin, but I don't know too much about it. I checked it out with Professor Dunn in Classics, and he also had trouble with it. The best we could come up with, as a translation, is, namely that, "Faith teaches how to get to Heaven, not how Heaven moves."

Further down, Einstein is being quoted. It is a statement which was prepared under the coordination of Cardinal Poupard, who opened our conference and is the head of the Pontifical Council for Culture, by this distinguished group of people who constitute the Vatican Academy of Sciences. So there we are on Galileo and I think everybody can feel better about it.

On evolution, very briefly, the first important step was taken by Pius XII, whom I have mentioned in other contexts before, in 1950 and this is an excerpt from his writings,

"Some imprudently and indiscreetly hold that evolution explains the origin of all things. Communists gladly subscribe to this opinion so that when the souls of men have been deprived of every idea of a personal God they may the more efficaciously defend and propagate their dialectical materialism."

This Pope, as well as the present Pope, has had this tremendous hatred for Communism. On the issue of evolution, that this is centered on the issue of dialectical materialism is remarkable. But continuing, you will see there is now a considerable flexibility. Still Pius XII,

"The teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions on the part of men experienced in both fields take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter. For the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God."

So this is a position that says, “No problems with scientific research into evolution, but the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God."

And essentially that is the position today. It was reaffirmed but strengthened in a statement by the present Pope. The present Pope first quotes Pope Pius XII and says,

"Pope Pius XII added that this opinion for evolution should not be adopted as though it were a certain proven doctrine." And now this Pope speaking,

"Today, almost half a century after the publication of that paper, new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. This convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently, is in itself a significant argument in favor of the theory."

So it is an endorsement of the original position that says today “There's been so much additional scientific corroboration that the theory, always with the proviso that man has a soul, is entirely acceptable to the Catholic Church.” There is, of course, something that might be added about the teaching of evolution in Kansas and so on, but I have taken enough of your time. So before I close I do want to say a few personal words of thanks.

First of all, Giovanni Bachelet. Perhaps the most important personal outcome of all this, for me, has been that we have become very, very, good friends. There are few people with whom I can communicate as a kind of kindred spirit with as much fun and understanding, as with Giovanni Bachelet, so it's really something wonderful. I want to thank very much, Vince Biondo; a young man who is studying Religious Studies here, and who has very generously offered to do much of the library and web research on which this talk was based; so thank you very much, Vince. And I'd like to thank Mary Hicks, who is my secretary and who has, for the last three months or so, been involved in preparing this lecture. Thank you, very much.

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Commentary: James Langer

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