“Mr. Lorenz! What happens inside a black hole?”
I barely started answering his first question when he continued: “I heard that time slows down around a black hole…is that true? Why does it do that? How big is a black hole? Will the sun turn into a black hole, and will the Earth get sucked into it?”
The questions came from a 14-year-old student at Fordham Preparatory High School in the Bronx. After I spoke about the Vatican Observatory in four religion classes earlier in the day, the campus ministry office had arranged for me to host an after-school astronomy discussion over pizza and soft drinks. It quickly became clear that black holes were capturing his imagination as powerfully as they capture light and matter! The other students listened attentively as I outlined what we know and don’t know about black holes. Soon other hands began to shoot up: “If aliens exist, do they pray?” “Do you think there are ‘hidden’ planets in the solar system?” “Why did you decide to become a priest?”
Meanwhile, on the other side of the continent, a California prison inmate was writing me a letter that would eventually make its way to my office desk in Tucson, Arizona. He was one of about a hundred incarcerated men who had reached out to me requesting a 2026 Vatican Observatory Calendar. Upon receiving it, he wrote a touching thank-you note that read, in part: “This is the first gift I got from anyone in 30 years. These pictures of God’s creation are like a light of hope in my life, I look at them every day and remember there is good in the world.”
A week later, on a Vatican Observatory Zoom call to a third-grade class in Pennsylvania, the students’ eyes got wide with wonder when I showed them an ultraviolet satellite image of the sun. When I explained that the sun is actually a star, one girl shouted, “If the sun is a star, why does it look like a big circle in the picture?” (She was astonished to find out that stars in the sky don’t actually have pointy edges!)
And this past autumn, a group of Catholics from San Diego and San Bernardino met in the Mojave Desert of California to embark on a three-day Pilgrimage of Hope for Creation. As part of their commemoration of the 2025 Jubilee Year, the pilgrims prayed and walked together about ten miles each day through the beautiful desert landscape. The pilgrimage was their way of expressing their commitment to care for our common home. They asked a representative of the Vatican Observatory to accompany them and, on two of the evenings, to offer a reflection on the beauty of the night sky. I chose as my theme St. Ignatius’s “Contemplation to Attain Divine Love” in the Spiritual Exercises.
Although it was too cloudy to use a telescope, I asked them to consider that God has “labored” for all of us through the work of nuclear fusion in stars, which created the very elements that allow for our existence. Later in the evening, when a small hole in the clouds perfectly framed the five major stars of the constellation Cassiopeia, everyone pointed at them like they were seeing a celebrity! One woman remarked, “Knowing that stars are ‘element factories’ makes me see them as more than just points of light.”
These are all real stories from my experience as the Vatican Observatory outreach coordinator in the United States. What do the people in those stories have in common? For starters, very few of them initially knew that the Catholic Church has a research telescope, or that it’s in Arizona, USA! Most of them were also aware of the popular notion that religion and science are mutually contradictory. The Observatory exists to challenge that misconception.
As Pope Leo XIII wrote in 1891, the Observatory was created so that “everyone might see clearly that the Church and her Pastors are not opposed to true and solid science, whether human or divine, but that they embrace it, encourage it, and promote it with the fullest possible dedication.” Simply letting people know that the Church is committed to science is a form of evangelization! Hence the basic importance of outreach.
But on a deeper level, my outreach audiences are made up of human beings who all experience pain and brokenness somewhere in their lives. Elementary and high school students may live in poverty or struggle to fit in with their peers; prison inmates experience the sting of isolation and neglect; climate pilgrims are devastated to hear of the latest policies that cause harm to national parks and to the environment. People who yearn for better lives and a better world can often find themselves tempted to give in to despair.
In that context, the Vatican Observatory’s outreach efforts find new meaning in the wisdom of more recent popes. Shortly after his election in 2013, Pope Francis articulated his vision for the mission of the Church: “The thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle.” Echoing that sentiment was Leo XIV in his first remarks as pontiff, when he expressed his desire for “a Church that builds bridges (and) dialogue, always open to receive (people)… everyone, all those who need our charity, our presence, dialogue and love.”
The mission of the Church breathes life into the mission of the Vatican Observatory. When I give presentations, write letters, or answer questions about science and astronomy, I try to keep in mind that my task is not just to communicate scientific knowledge. Beneath a student’s questions about stars and black holes lies a yearning for order, relationship, and meaning. Perhaps our innate fascination with the night sky is an expression of hope that pain and brokenness will not have the final word. After all, if God can create such a vast and marvelous universe, surely we can trust that same God to heal and to make all things new. In its efforts to show that faith and science can be complementary, the Observatory invites people to glimpse the power of God’s love and mercy.
Perhaps the incarcerated man’s letter said it best: “Your calendar told me when the recent meteor shower was coming. I looked out my prison window and was able to see just one. Like God, it was awesome and beautiful.”
