It is absurd that the freedom of science is defended by religious authority and not by secular institutions.

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It is noteworthy, and no less than disconcerting, that the clearest and most articulated defense of scientific freedom in a context of growing political pressure has not come from one of the great secular scientific institutions, but from an unsuspected voice: that of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences . The document released by the Academy is not limited to generic exhortations to the defense of knowledge, but directly and systemically addresses the current threats to the autonomy of science , tracing them back to a broader weakening of the fundamental principles on which modern knowledge is based : freedom of inquiry, transparency of the review process, the independence of academic institutions, the need for open peer discussion. All of these elements are not mere procedural details, but structural conditions for the very functioning of the scientific method and for the possibility that it produces reliable knowledge.

In comparison, the silence or excessive caution of large secular scientific organizations is striking, especially if one considers that many of them were born precisely for this: to defend science as a common good, as a rational infrastructure of collective decisions, as a public space of criticizable truth. An emblematic example is the InterAcademy Partnership (IAP), which I know well for having collaborated with it in the past. It is a global network that brings together over 140 national academies of science, medicine and engineering, including our own Lincei, and which explicitly aims to promote a unitary voice of the scientific community at a global level, capable of interacting with governments and multilateral institutions in the name of evidence and collective interest. In this function, the IAP is not a neutral technical body, but a political subject in the highest sense of the term: it represents, or should represent, the epistemic autonomy of scientific institutions in the face of political and economic power.

Yet, precisely in the months in which episodes of censorship, retroactive cuts to approved projects, ideological changes to funding criteria, and the intimidating use of administrative review to target unwelcome researchers have multiplied, the IAP has chosen not to intervene. Neither a public statement nor a shared position has been produced in response to events that, in terms of size and systematicity, represent one of the most serious attacks on scientific freedom in Western democracies in the last half century. The same absence has been recorded in many national academies that, despite boasting statutes and missions focused on the defense of science as the foundation of the open society, have preferred not to compromise themselves. In these cases, it is not a question of simple reticence, but of a deeper phenomenon: a misalignment between the institutional mandate and actual behavior, which reveals how vulnerable academic structures are today to external pressures, and how their public role is weakened by logics of political co-optation, financial dependence, or strategic self-censorship.

In this scenario, the fact that a clear position comes from an institution that is a direct emanation of a religious authority, and precisely from an academy hosted within a confessional State, takes on a meaning that is anything but paradoxical . It is precisely the Pontifical Academy, whose identity might suggest a subordination of science to theological ends, that reiterates with greater clarity what many secular institutions no longer dare to say: that science needs freedom, not only because it produces knowledge, but because it makes informed dissent possible, the correction of errors, the critical responsibility of decisions. In this sense, the secularity that the Academy expresses is not the formal one of independence from the State or from religions, but the substantial one of fidelity to the rational method, of adherence to the principle that no truth can be imposed from above, and that every statement must be subjected to public verification and discussion.

It is difficult not to see, in this reversal of roles, a broader lesson. The crisis of science does not consist only in the explicit attacks it suffers from political or economic power, but in the weakness of its internal defenses . When those who should speak are silent, when those who should guarantee autonomy fall into line, when those who should represent the voice of collective rationality prefer compromise, it is then that the space opens up for others, outside the traditional perimeter of institutionalized science, to defend its fundamental principles. That this role is now assumed by a religious voice may seem unexpected, but what is truly surprising is not who spoke, but who chose not to.

Do we really want the only voice that is raised clearly in defense of the secularism, independence and freedom of science to be that of those who for centuries have threatened to burn scientists at the stake?

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