On 18 September, Pope Francis appointed Jesuit brother Guy
Consolmagno as the new director of the Vatican Observatory, which
employs a dozen astronomers to study asteroids, meteorites, extrasolar
planets, stellar evolution, and cosmology.
The observatory is based at
the pope's summer residence south of Rome and operates a 1.8-meter
telescope in Arizona, where the skies are clearer.
Science Magazine
chatted with Consolmagno about a variety of topics, including whether God gets in the way of doing good astronomy.
Consolmagno said, "First of all, I want to provide space for other
astronomers to do their work.
And I also want to show the world that
religion supports astronomy. It is often religious people who most need
to see that; they need to know that astronomy is wonderful and that they
shouldn't be afraid of it.
I often quote John Paul II, when he said [of
evolution] that "truth cannot contradict truth.
" If you think you
already know everything about the world, you are not a good scientist,
and if you think you know all there is to know about God, then your
religious faith is at fault."
***
During most of the 16th and 17th centuries, fear of heretics
spreading teachings and opinions that contradicted the Bible dominated
the Catholic Church.
They persecuted scientists who formed theories the
Church deemed heretical and forbade people from reading any books on
those subjects by placing the books on the Index of Prohibited Books. A
type of war between science and religion was in play but there would be more casualties on the side of science.
Nicholas Copernicus and Galileo Galilei were two scientists who
printed books that later became banned.
Copernicus faced no persecution
when he was alive because he died shortly after publishing his book.
Galileo, on the other hand, was tried by the Inquisition after his book
was published.
Both scientists held the same theory that the Earth
revolved around the sun, a theory now known to be true.
However, the
Church disapproved of this theory because the Holy Scriptures state that
the Earth is at the center, not the Sun it was believed.
As the contents of the Bible were taken literally, the publishing of
these books proved, to the Church, that Copernicus and Galileo were
sinners; they preached, through their writing, that the Bible was wrong.
ROME, Oct. 30 1992—
More than 350 years after the Roman Catholic Church
condemned Galileo, Pope John Paul II is poised to rectify one of the
Church's most infamous wrongs -- the persecution of the Italian
astronomer and physicist for proving the Earth moves around the Sun.
With a formal statement at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on
Saturday, Vatican officials said the Pope will formally close a 13-year
investigation into the Church's condemnation of Galileo in 1633. The
condemnation, which forced the astronomer and physicist to recant his
discoveries, led to Galileo's house arrest for eight years before his
death in 1642 at the age of 77.
Galileo said, during his trial in 1633, that he did not believe what
he wrote, that he let his vanity influence his words and phrasing to
make him appear more intelligent to his readers but this plan failed
when his readers came to the conclusion that he believed the Copernican
hypothesis to be true because of his powerful phrasing.
The dispute between the Church and Galileo has long stood as one of
history's great emblems of conflict between reason and dogma, science
and faith.
The Vatican's formal acknowledgement of an error, moreover,
is a rarity in an institution built over centuries on the belief that
the Church is the final arbiter in matters of faith.
By the end of his trial, Galileo was forced to recant his own scientific
findings as "abjured, cursed and detested," a renunciation that caused
him great personal anguish but which saved him from being burned at the
stake.
Because of his advanced years, he was permitted house arrest in Siena.
Legend has it that as Galileo rose from kneeling before his inquisitors,
he murmured, "e pur, si muove" -- "even so, it does move."
"We today know that Galileo was right in adopting the Copernican
astronomical theory," Paul Cardinal Poupard, the head of the current
investigation, said in an interview published this week.
***
The 350 year old Alchemist wish list.