Italian Physicist Antonino Zichichi, Key Figure in John Paul II’s Dialogue With Science, Dies at 96

A member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Zichichi combined world-class research in particle physics with a lifelong commitment to the moral and spiritual responsibility of scientific progress.

Italian physicist Antonino Zichichi (c) holds a Bible he just received from Pope Francis (l) as Italian football midfielder Nicolò Zaniolo (r) waits to receive his Bible during a Sunday of the Word of God Mass on Jan. 26, 2020, at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. (photo: VINCENZO PINTO / AFP via Getty Images)

Antonino “Nino” Zichichi, who has died at the age of 96, was not only one of Italy’s most distinguished experimental physicists, but also one of the Holy See’s most respected interlocutors in the challenging dialogue between science and faith.

Over many decades, and especially during the pontificate of Pope St. John Paul II, he helped the Vatican speak credibly to the scientific world, showing that rigorous physics and a robust Catholic faith can illuminate one another.

At the same time, he was not afraid to criticize theories, such as Darwinian evolution and anthropogenic climate change, which he believed lacked scientific rigor.

In a tribute posted online, Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni called him a “giant of our time” who “always claimed that reason and faith are not enemies, but allies — ‘two wings’ to use the words of Saint John Paul II, ‘with which the human spirit rises towards the contemplation of truth.’”

Born in the Sicilian town of Trapani on Oct. 15, 1929, young Nino read physics at the University of Palermo and soon moved into the emerging world of high-energy particle physics, working in the great laboratories of Europe and the United States.

In the 1960s, he worked at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva where scientists have studied the fundamental constituents of matter and the forces of the universe, and then at Fermilab, the American flagship national laboratory for particle physics, located west of Chicago. In 1965, he led a team that first spotted a tiny piece of antimatter made from two anti‑particles, the antimatter versions of the proton and the neutron.

“He was a great scientist and a devout Catholic,” Father Paul Haffner, author of The Tiara and the Test Tube. the Popes and Science from the Medieval Period to the Present, told the Register. “Many major projects in international physics are linked to his name.”

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