The 47-year-old Briton was included on a list of experts named to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, alongside Nobel prize-winning physicists Andrea Ghez and Didier Queloz.

Founded in 1603, the academy is the Vatican institution that deals with science, technology, medical ethics and philosophy. Its members are not chosen on religious grounds.

Pope Francis, 87, published a six-page message in December warning of the dangers of AI and calling for a global treaty to ensure the technology is used ethically.

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Hawking was an esteemed member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

St John Paul II named Hawking a member of the Academy in 1986. Its members are chosen on the basis of their academic credentials and professional expertise, not religious beliefs.

Hawking asserted that God had no role in creating the universe.

Yet his atheism did not keep him from engaging in dialogue and debate with the church.

The Vatican says the theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author helped foster a "fruitful dialogue" between science and faith.

"We are deeply saddened about the passing of our remarkable Academician Stephen Hawking who was so faithful to our Academy," tweeted the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Hawking was decorated by the Academy on 19 April 1975 with the Pius XI medal for his studies on "black holes".

He met four Popes in the course of his Academy work: Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Pope Francis.

"He told the 4 Popes he met that he wanted to advance the relationship between Faith and Scientific Reason. We pray the Lord to welcome him in his glory," @CasinaPioIV, the Academy, tweeted last week.

The Vatican observatory, @SpecolaVaticana, also expressed its condolences to Hawking's family.

"We value the enormous scientific contribution he has made to quantum cosmology and the courage he had in facing illness," the Observatory tweeted in Italian.

Hawking was 76 when he died. He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease at the age of 21.

His view on his illness and the way people should live may be summed up in the following statement he made:

"Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet.

"Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.

"And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.

"It matters that you don't just give up."

Source

• National Catholic Reporter
• Zenit
• Catholic Herald
• The Boston Pilot
• Image: Catholic News Agency

At an organ trafficking summit at the Vatican's Pontifical Academy of Sciences this week, Wang Haibo said global collaboration could start with sharing information and developing a coding system.

Wang, who is head of the China Organ Transplant Response System, suggested China's organ trading measures could be introduced at the World Health Organization (WHO).

China has been working on outlawing illegal organ trading for about a decade.

It criminalised unauthorised organ trading in 2011. The death penalty can be imposed on offenders in severe cases.

In 2015, China banned the use of organs from executed prisoners.

At the same time, it made voluntary donation the only legitimate source of transplanted organs.

In the 10 years from 2007 to 2017, a joint task force from China's top health and public security authorities arrested about 220 people for participating in organ trafficking.

Those arrested included 60 medical staff.

The task force also rescued about 100 victims during the same period.

Wang told the summit that China could also launch an alert system at customs checkpoints.

The system would notify authorities when foreign patients waiting for organ transplants enter China.

By law, no foreigners are allowed to receive organs from deceased donors in China.

WHO's adviser on organ transplants, Jose Nunez, says China's preventative measures against transplant tourism could work in other countries.

Nunez pointed to China's computerised organ allocation system which he suggested could be promoted, especially in deprived regions.

He said since 2015 China has "made big and great reforms ... and that's what we want to promote, to show that things can be changed,"

Nunez told the conference that WHO expects China to share its transparent and ethical model with other countries.

He noted China has set an example of an organ transplant model with trustworthy government involvement.

This is the second year in a row a Chinese delegate has taken part in a Vatican conference against organ trafficking.

Source

• Xinhuanet
• Global Times
• Image: South China Morning Post

Among those invited to the Vatican workshop were leading population control advocates, including Paul Ehrlich.

Ehrlich is well known for his forced abortion and mass sterilization beliefs.

His presentation was entitled "Why We Are in the Sixth Extinction and What It Means to Humanity".

"Thousands called on Pope Francis to ensure that a leading proponent of abortion and sterilization was not given a platform in the Vatican, but Ehrlich's speech has taken place nonetheless," said Maria Madise of Voice of the Family. "

Workshop organiser Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo said the Academy's aim for the workshop was to learn from world-renowned scientists.

In its pre-conference blurb the Academy said it was looking for "appropriate social conditions" to help prevent further biological extinction".

It warned that extinction of life-supporting species "will probably be the sin for which our descendants will be least likely to forgive us."

The Vatican says it will use the workshop learnings to comment effectively on political, social or economic policies.

Source

• National Catholic Register
• LifeSite News
• Image: Stanford News

However, said Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the beginning of the universe — "the transition from nothing to being" — is not a mutation, because God is the first cause of creation and being.

"In this first transcendent origin of the human being we should in fact admit the direct participation of God," he said.

In a statement before the meeting, Bishop Sanchez, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, and Henry de Lumley, the director of the Institute of Human Paleontology in Paris, sketched a timeline for the evolution of human beings.

"Two and a half million years ago, when hominids manufactured stone tools, converting the hand in the tool of tools, and appeared to acquire articulated language, they were already fully human and capable of conceptual thought and moral decisions," they said.

"Nine billion years went by between the Big Bang and the formation of a primitive lifeless ocean on planet Earth, then another 4 billion years passed by between this primitive ocean and Man, with 100 billion brain cells and the ability to question his role in the History of the Universe and of Life and to reconstruct his own history.

"This emerging quality of the human being becomes apparent in the progressive implementation and awareness of the differences between being and not being, good and evil, right and wrong, justice and injustice, love and hate; thus emerge the differences in the human practices that the philosopher attributes to the various theoretical, ethical and political sciences.

"Indeed," they said, "since man has become a human being (genus homo), there is a sphere of being that each man finds in himself right from his mother's womb and in himself and out of himself starting from birth."

Monsignor Fiorenzo Facchini, an anthropologist and paleontologist at the meeting, said that rather than picturing human evolution as humans descending from the apes, humans ascended or rose up from the animal kingdom to a higher level, thanks to the hand of God.

Sources:

Pontifical Academy of Sciences

Catholic News Service

Image: Truthnet