What's Happening

April 3, 2025, Adrian, Michigan – Religion and science are not opposed to each other since they are both involved in the search for truth. Despite the misunderstanding of many people, the Catholic Church is not anti-science but has been engaged in science for centuries. That was the core message that Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, Director of the Vatican Observatory, delivered to an audience that filled the auditorium of Weber Retreat and Conference Center on March 13, 2025. 

An accomplished astronomer – with a master’s degree in Earth and planetary science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in planetary science from the University of Arizona – Brother Guy began his talk with a focus on the stars. He noted that they have been a source of wonder for people through the ages, proclaimed as gods by some and hailed in Scripture – especially in the psalms – as signs of God’s glory. 

“The stars were made by a God who is outside of creation. God was already there, outside of space and time,” Brother Guy said. “If God made the universe, then the universe is worth studying.”

Brother Guy continued to note that, just as the stars are a creation of God, so are we human beings. “We’re a created people,” he said. “The angels are envious of us because we have bodies. We celebrate God-Made-Flesh who so loved this world that he became a created thing for the love of us. ...This sense of physical works is why there’s a Catholic science.”

A native of Harper Woods, Michigan, Brother Guy was fulfilling his role as Director of the Vatican Observatory even as he spoke to an audience close to his native home. “When Pope Leo XIII established the observatory, it was to show the world that the Church supports science,” Brother Guy said in an interview. “Now my job is showing the world. I’m the ambassador to the people in the pews. My goal isn’t to convert atheists into being Catholics, but I’m speaking to the Catholics to remind them that science is something the Church helped to invent … and that it is a glorious way to get to know the Creator.”

Founded in 1891, the Vatican Observatory was originally established at the Roman College in Rome but was moved to Castel Gandolfo, the pope’s summer residence, in 1935. With that move, Brother Guy said, the pope put the Jesuits in charge of directing and staffing it. The Observatory also supports an office in Tucson, Arizona, and the Mount Graham International Observatory on a mountain outside of Tucson.

Brother Guy began his fascination with astronomy as a student at Our Lady Queen of Martyrs School, where the Sisters of Charity fed his interest in math and science. Growing up at the time of Russia’s launching of Sputnik and the urgency of the United States to get into space also contributed to his interest. “This guaranteed a lot of boys would want to be astronomers,” he added.

Brother Guy spent five years doing post-doctoral research at MIT and Harvard when he faced a crisis: “I had this feeling that all of the astronomy I was doing was a waste of time” in light of people throughout the world who were starving, he recalled. 

He joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Kenya – not to work with poor people, as he had hoped, but to teach at a university. Every weekend, he visited his Peace Corps friends in the villages and brought his telescope. “Everybody in the village would see the moons of Saturn and go, ‘Wow!’ That’s when I realized why you do astronomy: that hunger to know who we are and what this universe is.”

After finishing his tour with the Peace Corps, Brother Guy taught astronomy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. His longtime connection with the Jesuits and an earlier realization that he was not called to the priesthood or married life ultimately led him to the decision to become a Jesuit brother. 

Brother Guy entered the Jesuits in 1989. After two years in the novitiate and two years of study, he expected to be assigned to teach at a small university – and was surprised by his assignment to do research at the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo. Pope Francis appointed him as director in September 2015. 

His years at the Vatican Observatory have taught Brother Guy even more than he gained through his research on meteorites. He also learned more about science and its place in human life.

“Science done correctly has some spiritual benefits, and the most surprising is that it teaches you humility,” Brother Guy said. “Science [involves] the answers we don’t know. It’s the pursuit of the answers, and you can only start by saying that you don’t know the answers.”

Science also lifts the souls of scientists and people who intrigued by it. We are called not only to feed the poor, but to feed their souls, Brother Guy said. “Is our goal in serving the poor to make them rich? Our goal ought to be to give everyone the opportunity to do what God calls us to do on Sunday – to contemplate the universe.”

Brother Guy sees Sunday – and other times of sabbath – as “a day when we can feed our souls: to look at the moon and say ‘wow,’ or to write a poem about it, or to dance. If you’re struggling every day to work and you don’t have that sabbath, that day of rest, you’re no better off than a wild animal in the woods looking for the next piece of food to grab.”

Art performs the same service as science in this area, Brother Guy said. “That’s why art is a high calling. That’s why science is in the School of Arts and Sciences. Science is an art.” Quoting a professor at Boston College, Brother Guy said, “There are science theories that are Mona Lisas and Picassos – and scientific theories that are Elvis painted on black canvas. It takes an artistic soul to see the difference.” 
 

Caption for above feature photo: Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, at the Zeiss Refractor, Castel Gandolfo
Photo by Marco Valentini, ESA, Courtesy of the Vatican Observatory