Care and research are both “paths of the same calling” in the service of life, a responsibility that “unites ethics, science, and solidarity” in a place that stands out not only for its ‘yes’ to research, but also because it never says “no” to anyone and always finds a way to welcome those who come, even from distant places, especially if marked by poverty or conflict.

This is how Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Parolin summarized the mission of the Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital on Tuesday, October 28, in Rome. He was participating in a conference on the theme “Research for care” (“La ricerca X la cura”), to mark the 40th anniversary of the recognition of the “Pope’s hospital” as a Scientific Institute for Research, Hospitalization, and Healthcare in 1985.

These four decades, Cardinal Parolin said, have been characterized by “research and care, commitment, intelligence, and passion, during which science and humanity have walked together in the service of children and their families.”

Compassion in caring for the sick

The Secretary of State recalled how Leo XIV's recent apostolic exhortation, Dilexi te, insists on Christian compassion manifested over time in a particular in caring for the sick and those who suffer. The tradition of visiting and assisting the sick, comforting their pain, “is not only a gesture of philanthropy,” he clarified, “but an ecclesial mission, through which, in the sick, the Church touches the suffering flesh of Christ.”

A “legacy of care” that continues in Catholic hospitals, including the Bambino Gesù, where “the Christian presence alongside the sick reminds us that salvation is not an abstract idea but concrete action.” And, he added, this mission is also carried out through research.

On this topic, Cardinal Parolin reiterated what Pope Leo XIV said to participants to the Astrophysics Summer school of the Vatican Observatory in June regarding the importance of sharing knowledge, the basis of modern scientific research. He emphasized that great successes come “from teamwork, from technology used ethically” and from the multiplication of “traces of knowledge around us.”

The achievements of the Bambino Gesù Hospital 

The Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital has left many of such traces, starting with the first pediatric heart transplant in Italy in 1986, to the first gene therapy for solid tumors in 2018, passing through many milestones in many fields. This includes the gene therapy laboratory inaugurated on Tuesday, which represents an important step forward in the research and treatment of pediatric onco-hematological and immunological diseases.

At the end of the meeting, in fact, the participants were given a tour of this new 700-square-meter space, where genetically modified cell therapies are developed for production in the adjacent hospital workshop and applied in innovative clinical trials for various pediatric cancers.

The people behind the goals achieved

Behind every goal achieved, Cardinal Parolin noted, there are “people, stories, faces, children and families with new hopes, researchers and doctors who find solutions, disciplinary groups that have transformed treatment pathways.” The Secretary of State urged not to stop “in the face of the difficulties or questions posed by rare diseases or severe clinical conditions,” but to face them “with courage and tenacity, always seeking an answer.”

He then recalled the Gospel episode of the healing of the paralytic of Capernaum, who was lowered from the roof so that he could meet Jesus, as a metaphor for scientific research, capable of “seeking a path where there is none, finding a passage where others see a limit.”

Looking to St. Pier Giorgio Frassati

Cardinal Parolin also praised the pediatric hospital's ability to “stay close and accompany,” combining “science and charity, faith and intelligence, research and care,” to bear witness that every child, every suffering person, is “the face of Christ to be welcomed and loved.”

Finally, the Secretary of State entrusted the facility and its members to St. Pier Giorgio Frassati—a young man from Turin linked to the Salviati family who founded the hospital in 1869—to put “our health at the service of those who do not have it.”

Sustainability and universality

The president of the Bambino Gesù Hospital, Tiziano Onesti, spoke of wide-ranging “responsibility,” insisting on sustainability, “so that there is no waste,” and on universality, “so that care, without forgetting the roots of the city and the country, is offered to everyone.” The president explained that the hospital is currently hosting three young Palestinians and that “three more will arrive this week.” “In total, we have taken 31 under our care and are treating them,” he said.

These are "highly complex cases, because obviously in that area, in that theatre of war, there are no more hospitals or treatment. So, we are continuing to responsibly provide shelter not only to the children, but also to their families,” he continued. Without reducing everything “to numbers and services,“ the commitment is to ensure that research creates not only “exchanges of knowledge, but bridges of solidarity,” in a horizon capable of restoring ”dignity and trust."