Benedict XVI: Vatican Library preserves Catholic openness to what is beautiful and good
The Vatican Apostolic Library “preserves from its origins the unmistakable truly Catholic, universal openness to all that is beautiful and good” that “humanity has produced over the centuries”, Pope Benedict XVI affirmed in a letter addressed to the Cardinal Raffaele Farina, Archivist and Librarian of the Holy Roman Church. In the letter, written on the occasion of the reopening of the Vatican Apostolic Library and the inauguration of the exhibition “Getting to know the Vatican Library: a history open to the future”, Benedict XVI affirms that this is not “a theological library or predominantly of a character religious”, but “faithful to its humanist origins, it is by vocation open to the human and thus serves culture”. “Nothing that is truly human is foreign to the Church, which is why it has always sought, collected and preserved, with a continuity that has few equals, the best results of human efforts to rise above the pure materiality of research, conscious or unconscious, of the Truth”, writes the Holy Father. Benedict XVI affirms that with the Vatican Library “the Church reproposes today, as it did five centuries ago, to serve all human beings, inserting this ministry into the broader framework of the ministry that is essential to make it Church: Church as a community that evangelizes and save”.