Pope John Paul II greets crowds at an outdoor mass, September 14, 2003 in Bratislava, Slovakia.
'He's very down-to-earth. For him there's no difference between a spiritualistic world of religion up here and the flesh and blood, down-to-earth world of cause and effect and science down here. This Pope loves science, he's got an inquiring mind. He has a group of scientists from around the world that he calls in every year. He's very much aware of theories of relativity and the Big Bang, and what science is doing in outer space.'
'His Vatican recently named 2001: A Space Odyssey as one of the most important movies of all time. We know that he sees no division between what science is saying and what his religion is saying. He often uses the quote from Jesus, "The truth will make you free," or, "It's the truth that makes us free." And...this is sort of the third corner of the triangle, if you will -- between his faith, his politics, and his science. They're all in the same world. The political story surrounding Jesus is very real to him. The ideas of trans-substantiation, of afterlife being mysterious, of how they might be illuminated by the theories of relativity, of what modern science is doing to figure out the mechanics of the Big Bang, of what Darwinian science is telling us about how our bodies evolved.'
-- Bill Blakemore, ABC's Vatican correspondent from 1978 to 1983, on America's PBS network
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