Summers can be hot in Rome, at the Vatican. Fortunately, the popes can escape the heat by grabbing the popemobile and bopping down to Castel Gandolfo, a nice little spot fifteen or so miles south of Rome. There they can get some R&R in, enjoying a mansion "which overlooks a volcanic lake and is surrounded by spectacular terraced gardens." And if the pope is scientifically inclined he can meander on over to the Vatican Observatory "which since its founding, in 1891, has been dedicated to the scientific study of the heavens."
The Catholic Church's interest in star gazing goes back to the papacy of Gregory XIII, who wanted to make sure that the Church could figure out, astronomically speaking, when Easter and other holy days that didn't have a permanent designation (as Christmas does) should be observed. On Gregory's watch, and observation tower was built and:
...a meridian line was installed in the Vatican to illustrate the need to reform the Julian calendar. A Jesuit, Christopher Clavius, helped propose that the Vatican adopt the Gregorian calendar, which it did in 1582. According to the historian Jonathan Wright’s book “The Jesuits,” when the realignment caused ten days to be subtracted from the year, mobs across Europe attacked Jesuit houses to protest the time stolen from them. (Source: The New Yorker)
Those were the days! Today, people piss and moan about Daylight Saving Time and a one-hour adjustment. Can you imagine if we had to whack 10 days off the calendar? It might work if they were all workdays, but, knowing how things work, it would be all weekends and holidays.
Rigorous science wasn't always the Church's thang, of course. Fast forward a few decades from the building of the Gregorian Tower, and there's the Church inquisitioning all over Galileo, who spent the last years of his life under house arrest. Slow forward a few centuries to 1992, when on Halloween, Pope Jonh Paul II admitted that the Inquisition had been wrong to condemn Galileo for having boldly asserted that the earth revolves around the sun.
But during those in between centuries, the Vatican set up a number of observatories and became one of the top astronomical institutions in the world. In the 1930s, due to smoke and light pollution in Rome, the Observatory was relocated from Rome to Castel Gandolfo.
Today, half of the Vatican Observatory's team (all Jesuits, all scientists) works out of Arizona, where:
In the early nineties, at the Mt. Graham International Observatory, near Tucson, the Vatican installed a powerful four-million-dollar telescope and an astrophysics facility, together known as the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, or VATT.
The current director of the Vatican Observatory is an American Jesuit Brother, Guy Consolmagno. (But not for long. He's retiring this coming Friday.)
Brother Guy is a serious scientist, with a PhD from the University of Arizona and post-doc work at Harvard and MIT. And the Observatory is a serious scientific outfit. I mean, they didn't invest $4M (30+ years ago) in a telescope so they could watch the man in the moon. Or the man on the moon. Pope Paul VI did watch the 1969 moon landing through a telescope at the Observatory.
[The organizations they've collaborated with] have included, in recent years, NASA, whose OSIRIS-REx mission (2016-23) collected samples from the Bennu asteroid, which measures a third of a mile across and has been calculated to have a not infinitesimal chance of colliding with Earth in the twenty-second century. Bob Macke, another Jesuit brother in Castel Gandolfo, has developed a specialty in documenting the properties of meteorites, and several years ago he was invited to join an international team analyzing the Bennu samples; in 2023, he built a device specifically adapted for carrying out these delicate measurements. “NASA needed help with a mission. The Vatican came to the rescue,” read one headline about the collaboration.
Glad that the Vatican Observatory is doing serious science. Not that putting a nuclear facility on the moon isn't serious. No siree, Bob. And it may well make sense. But I really don't trust this administration, which is better known for its pseudo science, witch-doctoring, and general scorn for and ignorance of the scientific method to be able to pull something off that doesn't end up, say, destroying the moon. Which would not be a particularly good thing, were it to happen.
Meanwhile, it's too bad that the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope wasn't around in the first century A.D./Common Era. They might have been able to observe Christ ascending into heaven, and Mary his mother being assumed into heaven. After all, Holy Seeing is believing!
Kidding/not kidding...
Anyway, I'm just as happy that the Church finally came around to exonerating Galileo.
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Image Source: Clerical Whispers
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