The Vatican Observatory Appears to be like to the Heavens

When the late Pope Francis was elected, a dozen years in the past, and famously declined the pomp and perquisites usually related to the workplace, amongst his renunciations was using the papal summer time residence—a seventeenth-century palazzo in Castel Gandolfo, about fifteen miles south of Rome. Generations of Popes had loved using the mansion, which overlooks a volcanic lake and is surrounded by spectacular terraced gardens. The palazzo is now a museum the place guests can admire a gallery of papal portraits, of various high quality, and picture the desires that visited the successive occupants of the papal bed room, with its slender twin mattress. Castel Gandolfo can also be dwelling to one of many Holy See’s extra surprising establishments: the Vatican Observatory, which since its founding, in 1891, has been devoted to the scientific examine of the heavens.

Guy Consolmagno, the director of the observatory, first got here to Castel Gandolfo as a newly minted Jesuit brother, in 1993. When I met him exterior the palazzo, early this spring, he gestured at a window overlooking the constructing’s courtyard. This was the placement of his first, decidedly modest bed room within the mansion. Consolmagno, who grew up in suburban Detroit and retains a buoyant, emphatic, Midwestern method, instructed me, “The Pope then was John Paul II, and when he was first elected he had made a rookie mistake, as we say in America. Somebody, a journalist—one of those terrible journalists—had asked him, ‘What’s your favorite hymn?’ And, being a fool, he actually gave the name of a hymn that he happened to like. So, every Sunday during the summertime, when he was living here, the doors would open at 10 a.m., and this place would be filled with two thousand Polish pilgrims singing that hymn underneath my window. I got totally sick of it.” Consolmagno by no means bought sick, although, of being saluted by the Swiss Guards stationed on the palace gates.

Consolmagno, who has a prodigious white beard, wavy grey bangs, and darkish, beetling eyebrows, is considered one of fifteen scientists who presently make up the scholarly employees of the Vatican Observatory—all Jesuits and, inevitably, all males. (Their meals, maybe equally inevitably, are ready by a neighborhood lady.) At any given second, about half of the fraternity is in Castel Gandolfo, which has been the establishment’s dwelling for the reason that nineteen-thirties—though, for the previous fifteen-odd years, the employees’s residing quarters have been located in a former convent a brief distance from the palace. The different half of the crew is in Arizona, a state that gives a distant mountain atmosphere extra conducive to astronomical commentary than the light-polluted suburbs of Rome do. In the early nineties, on the Mt. Graham International Observatory, close to Tucson, the Vatican put in a robust four-million-dollar telescope and an astrophysics facility, collectively referred to as the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, or VATT. Consolmagno, like lots of his colleagues, shuttles incessantly between Italy and Arizona, not often spending various months in a single place.

Consolmagno likes to say that, when he arrived in Castel Gandolfo, the director on the time, Father George V. Coyne, instructed him that he had just one job: to do good science. At first, Consolmagno was engaged principally with taking painstaking measurements of specimens from one of many world’s preëminent collections of meteorites, which was bequeathed to the establishment, within the early twentieth century, by a French nobleman, the Marquis de Mauroy. Consolmagno and a number of other colleagues developed a brand new technique for measuring the density and porosity of meteorites. The method just isn’t 1,000,000 miles from the revelation delivered to Archimedes as he displaced water in his bathtub: the specimens are submerged in a vessel full of helium fuel, the molecules of that are sufficiently small to penetrate tiny nooks and crannies within the rocks; if the specimens are then submerged in a vessel full of glass beads which might be tiny however too giant to penetrate such areas, the distinction between the 2 volumes helps reveal the rock’s porosity. Sara Russell, a planetary scientist on the Natural History Museum in London—and a pal of Consolmagno’s for the reason that mid-nineties, after they met on a meteorite-hunting expedition in Antarctica—instructed me, “He started out making simple measurements, and over the years his method got more and more sophisticated, and managed to make fundamentally important observations.” Among different contributions, the Vatican Observatory has made obtainable to scientific researchers fragments of a uncommon meteorite, referred to as Chassigny, whose chemical composition means that it originated within the mantle of Mars.

Consolmagno holds a specimen from the meteorite Alfianello, which fell to Earth, in 1883, within the Italian province of Brescia. The Vatican Observatory has one of many world’s best collections of meteorites.

Like analysis establishments that aren’t staffed with those that have taken spiritual vows, the Vatican Observatory collaborates with scientific colleagues across the globe. These have included, in recent times, NASA, whose OSIRIS–REx mission (2016-23) collected samples from the Bennu asteroid, which measures a 3rd of a mile throughout and has been calculated to have a not infinitesimal likelihood of colliding with Earth within the twenty-second century. Bob Macke, one other Jesuit brother in Castel Gandolfo, has developed a specialty in documenting the properties of meteorites, and a number of other years in the past he was invited to hitch a world crew analyzing the Bennu samples; in 2023, he constructed a tool particularly tailored for finishing up these delicate measurements. “NASA needed help with a mission. The Vatican came to the rescue,” learn one headline in regards to the collaboration.

Although the Vatican Observatory produces a wealth of peer-reviewed science, its construction is way totally different than, say, an astronomy division at a college. The Arizona telescope’s every day operations are funded by personal donors to a not-for-profit basis, and the Jesuit employees’s administrative prices and salaries are lined by the Holy See. Scientists on the observatory are liberated from the secular scholar’s pursuit of tenure, grant cash, and industrial funding; furthermore, the Jesuits, having taken a vow of poverty, have extraordinarily low residing prices. Like the builders of a fourteenth-century cathedral, they can take the lengthy view. In Castel Gandolfo, Consolmagno defined that, practically two thousand years in the past, the positioning had been the placement of a palace belonging to the Emperor Domitian. (Some fragmentary ruins stay on the citadel grounds.) Christians had been exiled below his rule, “and now his gardens belong to the Pope,” Consolmagno mentioned as we walked beneath cypresses and umbrella pines, with evident satisfaction on the comeuppance.

As director, a publish he has held for the previous decade, Consolmagno spends far much less time peering by means of a telescope or a microscope than he as soon as did, and much more time explaining to the general public why doing these issues just isn’t incompatible with spiritual conviction. He is consistently on the street, all around the world, giving talks to non secular and secular audiences alike, typically billed as “the Pope’s Astronomer.” At these occasions, he fields such questions as whether or not there’s any recorded proof for an precise Star of Bethlehem. (There is nothing conclusive, however scientists have recognized varied suggestive celestial phenomena within the years across the delivery of Christ, together with alignments of planets which could, to the bare eye, appear like vibrant stars.) Consolmagno can also be well-known within the science-fiction group, of which he turned a religious member as a younger grownup. He nonetheless reveals up at sci-fi conventions at any time when he can. His most well-liked subgenre is the area opera, with its dramatic adventures and heroic plots; he confesses to studying such works on his telephone earlier than mattress, in violation of sleep-hygiene strictures. Patrick Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor Books, which publishes science fiction, and a pal of Consolmagno’s from the scene, instructed me, “He’s, like, the least proselytizing dude you could possibly imagine, given that he’s a Jesuit brother and it permeates his whole identity.” Nielsen Hayden, who characterizes himself as a “grumpy, reluctant, argumentative Catholic,” added that Consolmagno “has a tremendous capacity for affable friendship and civilized exchange with people from belief structures completely different from his own.” Consolmagno has written quite a few popular-science books for normal audiences, starting from a plainspoken credo, “Finding God in the Universe,” to the puckishly titled “Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial? . . . and Other Questions from the Astronomers’ In-Box at the Vatican Observatory,” which he wrote with Father Paul Mueller. (The brief reply to the extraterrestrial query: provided that the alien requested him to.)

Brother Guy, as he’s extensively identified, by no means means that science may supply a method to show the existence of God, and even to point a excessive likelihood of His existence. Consolmagno doesn’t subscribe to what’s referred to as the anthropic precept, which argues that the bodily properties of the universe are so fine-tuned throughout the terribly slender vary permitting for the emergence of clever life that the cosmos should have been made for us. Nor is he tempted by concordism—the concept that the discoveries of contemporary science can show that occasions described within the Bible are grounded in actuality. “Scripture was not written to tell you about the natural world,” Consolmagno instructed me. “It was to tell you about God.” The most egregious instance of concordism, he mentioned, was supplied by Pope Pius XII, who had studied science and was considering astronomy; in 1951, Pius XII gave a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences wherein he characterised the large bang as confirming the Book of Genesis by “bearing witness to the august instant of the Fiat Lux, when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation.” Pius XII stopped suggesting that the large bang required the orchestration of God after he had a convention with Georges Lemaître, the Belgian scientist and Catholic priest who had laid the groundwork for the idea together with his speculation that the universe had expanded from a “primeval atom.”

Pope Francis, below whose papal reign Consolmagno was appointed head of the Vatican Observatory, was a Jesuit, the primary member of that order ever elected to the papacy. Although Francis didn’t have a specific curiosity in astronomy, he believed that scientific inquiry and the mission of the Church may meaningfully intersect: amongst his most vital statements was the encyclical “Laudato Si’,” which urged motion in opposition to international warming and environmental degradation. Consolmagno authorized of this intervention, and in addition admired Francis’s humility and spirit of mental openness. Unlike Lemaître, Consolmagno and his colleagues don’t advise the Vatican on celestial issues; they’re left to get on with their work, and don’t have anything to do with doctrine. Consolmagno not often goes to the Vatican correct; he’s too busy elsewhere. When I visited him in Castel Gandolfo, he instructed me it had in all probability been a decade since he had been inside St. Peter’s Basilica.

Consolmagno believes within the large bang, at the least as a provisional rationalization of the universe’s origins, and in addition in a creator God who exists earlier than and past the large bang. In his understanding, the spheres of science and faith don’t solely overlap. Rather, they “live together—the one doesn’t replace the other,” he instructed me. “Using science to prove religion would make science greater than religion. It would make your version of God subservient to your understanding of the universe. And not only does that make for a pretty weak God, but it is also crazy, because in a thousand years’ time the scientific questions that people ask are going to be very different. Science goes obsolete—it doesn’t progress otherwise.”

Among the analysis tasks to which the telescope in Arizona has contributed is a fifteen-year evaluation of objects within the Kuiper Belt, a band of ice-rich asteroids within the distant photo voltaic system. Many of the objects have been discovered to have curious orbits that, in accordance with some scientists, counsel they’re below the gravitational sway of a large planet—as but undiscovered—past Pluto. Other colleagues have used the VATT to watch near-Earth asteroids that will supply the potential for industrial exploitation. Consolmagno characterizes the Vatican Observatory as intentionally doing middle-of-the-road science and working towards middle-of-the-road faith. “If people think you have to be a weird kind of scientist to be religious, or a weird kind of religious to be a scientist, then we’ve missed the point,” he mentioned. “The point is that our faith—our ordinary faith—fits perfectly with our ordinary, but wonderful, delightful science.” Some years in the past, the International Astronomical Union named an asteroid in honor of his contributions to science. Somewhere between Mars and Jupiter, the asteroid 4597 Consolmagno continues its celestial course.

The Church’s examine of the celebrities dates again at the least so far as the late sixteenth century. Under the management of Pope Gregory XIII, a meridian line was put in within the Vatican as an instance the necessity to reform the Julian calendar. A Jesuit, Christopher Clavius, helped suggest that the Vatican undertake the Gregorian calendar, which it did in 1582. According to the historian Jonathan Wright’s ebook “The Jesuits,” when the realignment precipitated ten days to be subtracted from the yr, mobs throughout Europe attacked Jesuit homes to protest the time stolen from them.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, an observatory was constructed atop the Vatican Library and Museum, in what is called the Tower of the Winds. Eclipses had been noticed and meteorological measurements had been taken. The Vatican Observatory that exists as we speak was set in movement by Pope Leo XIII when, within the late nineteenth century, he devoted a second commentary tower within the Vatican to astronomical work. Fortuitously, this occurred across the time that a world group of astronomers, at a gathering in Paris, determined to embark on a collaborative challenge to make the primary photographic map of the sky. Responsibility for charting totally different zones of the heavens was assigned to totally different nationwide observatories; the Vatican was granted its personal share of the sky to map, and was thus in a position not solely to take part in cutting-edge science but in addition to say its identification as a sovereign nation, regardless of being lower than a fifth of a sq. mile. By the thirties, nevertheless, mild air pollution had made the middle of Rome inhospitable to the observatory, and the Pope—now Pius XI—supplied using Castel Gandolfo as a future base of operations. Two new telescopes had been constructed there, and the working of the observatory was formally taken over by the Society of Jesus, higher referred to as the Jesuits, the Church’s most intellectually highly effective division.

“Now say ‘Cheese’ for three minutes.”

Cartoon by Shannon Wheeler

During the Second World War, the papal property in Castel Gandolfo was impartial territory; two thousand folks displaced from native villages flooded into the palazzo’s gates to hunt shelter, sleeping in a grand corridor beforehand used for papal audiences or dwelling in a shantytown on the citadel grounds. In subsequent years, analysis as soon as once more flourished, with the development of one other new telescope within the papal gardens. It was by means of this machine that the Pope—now Pope Paul VI—peered on the moon on the night time of July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 made its historic touchdown. Afterward, he addressed the astronauts: “Honor, greetings, and blessings to you, conquerors of the Moon, pale lamp of our night and our dreams! Bring to her, with your living presence, the voice of the spirit, a hymn to God, our Creator and our Father.”