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Brother Guy Consolmagno occupies a small space of heaven. A Jesuit brother and astronomer for the Vatican Observatory, he works at the observatory’s headquarters at the pope’s summer palace in Castel Gandolfo, a 45-minute train ride from Rome.
Castel Gandolfo sits on the high ground of Italy’s Lazio region, perched above the exotic, sapphire-blue volcanic Lake Albano. The view you get is magical. “This is a good place for things like an occultation, like the transit of Venus in 2004,” Consolmagno says. “We observed the comet hitting Jupiter because the first events were visible only from this part of the world.”
Below the observatory’s domed chamber are the offices that make up the rest of the Vatican Observatory. One study has bookshelves filled with hardbound journals all the way to the high ceiling. Consolmagno pulls one off a shelf and reads aloud: “Account of a new telescope by Mr. Isaac Newton.” He shows me, then smiles. “I think he has a future,” he says.
The building also houses small labs and research areas where decades-long projects—like cataloging meteorites—are occurring. While this is the official home of the Vatican Observatory, a related facility, the Vatican Observatory Research Group, is set up in the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona. There, with greater access to high-tech equipment, the Vatican is conducting detailed research on dark matter, quasars, and the universe’s expansion.
“The idea that the universe is worth studying just because it’s worth studying is a religious idea,” Consolmagno says. “If you think the universe is fundamentally good and that it’s an expression of a good God, then studying how the universe works is a way of becoming intimate with the Creator. It’s a kind of worship. And that’s been a big motivation for doing any kind of science.”
As a scientist who is also a Jesuit brother, Consolmagno suggests that science poses philosophical questions that in turn spark religious inquiries.
“A hundred years ago we didn’t understand the Big Bang,” he says. “Now that we have the understanding of a universe that is big and expanding and changing, we can ask philosophical questions we would not have known to ask, like ‘What does it mean to have multiverses?’ These are wonderful questions. Science isn’t going to answer them, but science, by telling us what is there, causes us to ask these questions. It makes us go back to the seven days of creation—which is poetry, beautiful poetry, with a lesson underneath it—and say, ‘Oh, the seventh day is God resting as a way of reminding us that God doesn’t do everything.’ God built this universe but gave you and me the freedom to make choices within the universe.”
The lessons learned from the trial and condemnation of Galileo in the 1600s have guided an era of scientific caution and hesitancy within the Vatican. Today the Vatican’s approach to science is a complex undertaking involving nearly every facet of Church life. The Roman Curia—the Church’s governing body—includes a network of 5 pontifical academies and 11 pontifical councils, each of them charged with tasks ranging from the promotion of Christian unity to the cataloging of martyrs. To varying degrees, each of the 16 offices—and, of course, the independent Vatican Observatory—intersects with scientific issues, and they tend to rely on the efforts of one academy to provide clarity and consultation: the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Housed in a building several centuries old deep inside Vatican City, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences is a surprisingly nonreligious institution as well as one of the Vatican’s least understood.
Inside the Academy of Sciences
Though it is virtually unknown among laypeople, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences is an independent and remarkably influential body within the Holy See. Over the years its membership roster has read like a who’s who of 20th-century scientists (including Max Planck, Niels Bohr, and Erwin Schrödinger, to name a few), and it currently boasts more than 80 international academicians, many of them Nobel laureates and not all of them Catholic—including the playfully irreligious physicist Stephen Hawking.
Academy members are elected by the current membership. There are no religious, racial, or gender criteria. Candidates are chosen on the basis of their scientific achievements and their high moral standards. When a nomination for membership is made, the Vatican Secretariat of State is consulted in order to prevent the appointment of someone with a questionable history.
“We’re a group of people from all over the world—many religions and attitudes,” says physicist Charles Hard Townes, a Nobel laureate and an inventor of the laser. “It is essential for scientists to participate in this and try to help the Catholic Church, advise them on their policies. Many civilizations in the world are not directly affected by science and technology decision making, but they are affected by mandates and decisions of the Catholic Church.”
