Brother Guy Consolmagno gets a lot of interesting looks and questions when he tells people he’s an astronomer for the Vatican Observatory.
“That’s the reason the Vatican has an observatory, precisely so people will get that puzzled look on their face,” jokes the affable American, who’s visiting Vancouver to help Catholics celebrate the 400th anniversary of the Jesuits’ arrival in Canada and to give public lectures about astronomy.
Consolmagno, who has a PhD in planetary science and has taught at Harvard College Observatory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the official curator of the Vatican’s collection of more than one thousand meteorites in Rome.
Bro. Guy, as he’s called, said it’s not unusual for scientists to be practitioners of various faiths but it’s religious people who have more resistance to the notion that they can’t be scientists without losing their faith, he said.
“The Bible tells me that God created the universe and science tells me how He did it,” said Guy, noting that evolution or the Big Bang theory aren’t at odds with religion.
The Catholic Church’s interest in astronomy dates back to the Middle Ages, when Pope Gregory needed help with setting dates, which led to the calendar used throughout the world and bears his name, the Gregorian calendar.
And astronomy was a large part of the teaching in medieval universities.
Guy said Galileo, a Catholic astronomer in the 1600s who was tried and kept under house arrest for years for insisting the earth revolved around the sun, has become shorthand for the Catholic Church’s anti-science stance, but he said his trial was more about politics than science, in a complicated explanation available on the Vatican Observatory website.
He said the truth about Galileo is not what people think but “the truth doesn’t make the Church look any better,” which is why Pope John Paul II apologized to him personally 20 years ago.
“Galileo was badly used by the Church,” he said.
The example of the Church mistreating Galileo is well-known because there aren’t a lot of examples of the Vatican opposing scientists, he said, noting that Charles Darwin in the mid-1800s wasn’t opposed.
Guy gives a talk Saturday evening at the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver called Pluto and the Vatican and will address how science and religion handle changes in our understanding of reality.
On Monday, he will deliver an academic talk, also open to the public, at the University of B.C.’s Hebb Theatre called Astronomical Ideas that were Almost Correct.
On Sunday, Bro. Guy will celebrate an 11 a.m. Mass at Holy Name parish in Vancouver to mark the four centuries of the Jesuits, the largest order of priests and brothers in the Catholic Church, in Canada and their work in education, including founding schools, colleges, universities and seminaries and intellectual research.