On June 19, Pope Francis signed Sublimitas et Miseria Hominis [The Grandeur and Misery of Man], an apostolic letter marking the 400th anniversary of Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher and mathematician most remembered today for his Pensées [Thoughts].
Pope St. John Paul II had earlier cited Pascal’s work as a Christian philosopher in his 1998 encyclical Fides et Ratio (no. 76).