Your Excellencies,
Dear brothers and sisters,
Ladies and Gentlemen,

Before greeting you formally with my brief prepared address, I would just like to say that God, in his providence — and sometimes with a touch of humor — always reminds us that he is with us.  Many of you may not know that my mother was a librarian, and today I am here on my birthday specifically to greet all of you.

I thank the Archivist and Librarian of Holy Roman Church, Archbishop Pagazzi.  I greet the Prefects and Vice-Prefects of the Apostolic Library and the Apostolic Archives, together with the directors and all those who work there; the President of the Governorate; as well as the various friends and benefactors, to whom I express my heartfelt gratitude.

For the first time as Pope, I am visiting the Apostolic Library, following in the footsteps of my predecessors.  I would like this to be a sign of the Pope’s closeness to and appreciation for the mission of the Archives and Library, which are at the service of the development and spreading of culture, for the benefit of the Church and all humanity. In particular, as the Apostolic Constitution Praedicate Evangelium states, this mission involves “preserving and maintaining acts and documents concerning the government of the universal Church” and their study (No. 242), as well as “collecting and preserving a vast patrimony of learning and art and of making it available to scholars in search of truth” (No. 243).

When we think of a library, we imagine a quiet and peaceful place. Indeed, books are silent and ask for silence. Yet, if on the one hand a book brings calm, on the other it awakens a restlessness, feeding the desire and daring to search. Saint Augustine is an emblem of this dynamic.  Full of life, and tormented by powerful forces struggling within him, for years he “gave vent to desperate cries” (Confessions, VIII, 12, 28), as he himself writes, until he heard the voice of a child singing: “take and read, take and read.”  He immediately took a book from the hands of a friend, the Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans, and read it.   Then “a light, as it were, of certainty entered my heart and all the darkness of doubt fled away” (cf. Confessions, VIII, 12, 29).  The doubt was dispelled, but not the desire, which became even stronger, driving him to explore the breadth and depth of Sacred Scripture.  He himself speaks of this on several occasions, when he says that he carefully studied different manuscripts of the biblical books, bending over them like a question mark, in order to establish the best text (cf. In Hep. loc. 3, 6, 14 and 3, 6, 17; Enarr. Ps. 36, III, 6; Enarr. Ps. 138, 20).  The book of Scripture that reached Augustine was the same book that opened up his spirit. Dear friends, by preserving, studying and making available to scholars the books of the successor of Peter, you help the Church and humanity to reach the depths of desire.  Without it, everything withdraws from the living God, the source of truth and love.

How should we describe the Pope’s Library? I will use a metaphor: the Apostolic Library is a heart. A beating heart is a symbol of life, and it results from two opposing movements, systole and diastole: a contraction and a relaxation, a movement towards the center and another towards the periphery.  The Apostolic Library, too, stays alive insofar as it keeps its systole and its diastole.

The systole: may the Apostolic Library continue to be a place marked by discretion, quiet, respect and care.  Within the Vatican walls, may the almost monastic atmosphere of the Apostolic Library remind us each day of the Savior’s command: “If you have to build, if you have to fight, first sit down and study” (cf. Lk 14:28–32).  The inner life of the Apostolic Library also depends upon the unique, priceless treasure it preserves.  While on the one hand it is right to facilitate access to this treasure for study, including through digitization and online access, on the other it is also necessary to preserve and encourage the ancient practice of physically making one’s way to the Library.  For it is not merely a repository of books from which one can conveniently draw using a computer at home, but an atmosphere created by relationships, exchange and the sharing of ideas.

The heart, however, also lives through diastole, and so does our Library. We are in the Leonine Hall, dedicated to Pope Leo XIII.  He was a pastor capable of recognizing the most serious issues of his time, such as the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution.  He was also a Pope who presided over great cultural developments, such as the opening of the Vatican Archives to scholars from throughout the world and the expansion of access to the Library, to the point of transforming an old arms depot into this beautiful reading room.  The openness and breadth of vision of this Library are evident from its humanistic origins: not only works of theology, but also literature, philosophy, astronomy, physics, mathematics, geography, botany, zoology, medicine, history, law, art and economics.  There are not only European and Christian books, but also volumes written in other religious contexts and originating from every corner of the world.  All of this happened many centuries before this practice became a universally shared value.  Through this approach, the Apostolic Library bears witness to the Church’s ancient and ever-new cultural openness.  The cycle of exhibitions inaugurated today confirms this as well.  A sign of this cultural openness is also the gentle diplomacy that finds an open path among the documents and books of the Vatican Archives and Library, one of the “open pathways to reconciliation” of which the Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas speaks (No. 211). Therefore, please continue in this vein.  Be faithful to the past and faithful to the future, using the languages and means proper to your work, and keep finding new pathways towards reconciliation.

I conclude by drawing attention to an urgent need shared by the Apostolic Library and the Apostolic Archives: the need for new space. Just today I have given instructions to this effect, and I hope that they will help to meet this need.  I intend to continue along the path traced by my predecessors, who over the centuries have demonstrated the care the Apostolic See has for the institutions entrusted with preserving and promoting its cultural and administrative memory.  

Dear friends, I thank you all, and wish you every success in your work. I give you my heartfelt blessing and assure you of my prayers.  Thank you.