No doubt you have heard a lot of “Eclipse 2024” stories. I think the best you will hear is that of the “Total Solar Eclipse Faith & Science Retreat” at the Mother of the Redeemer Retreat Center near Bloomington, Indiana. There were a lot of Sacred Space Astronomy folks there. Br. Guy was there. So was Fr. James. So was Dr. Brenda Frye. I was there too.
This retreat was located way off the beaten path, in the bucolic countryside of Indiana west of Bloomington. Indeed, it was sufficiently far off the beaten path that cell phone and internet was rather poor, to put it mildly — Br. Guy and I mooched bandwidth off of a total stranger (Guy’s friend’s cousin, who lives in Bloomington) in order to do a “Jesuit Eclipse” video interview with Fr. James Martin of America magazine (click here for that); those friendly folks did not just let us mooch bandwidth, they also served us moochers some really good donuts!
The retreat was attended by roughly a dozen priests and even a couple of bishops, but most of the attendees were ordinary laypeople. Most of those laypeople had no scientific training, or perhaps owned a small telescope and did some stargazing or astro-photography. Some had never even looked through a telescope before. Some were young parents, so there were a couple of 18-month-olds crawling around on the floor and occasionally making noise or trying to get up onto the speakers’ platform. Tech support was handled by a group of Franciscan friars whose community (The Franciscans of the Immaculate) is adjacent to the retreat center.
There was food, time for socializing, some stargazing, and even some live music. There was prayer, and at the Franciscans’ Sacred Heart Chapel there were masses, and even confessions and a Divine Mercy celebration. The grounds were spacious and lovely.
But this retreat included discussions of the absolute latest and best in scientific research from some leading scientists. You don’t find that everywhere! These scientists included Br. Guy, of course, but also Dr. Jeffrey Cooke, and Dr. Brenda Frye.
Dr. Cooke is a friend of Fr. Timothy Sauppé (himself a friend of the Vatican Observatory, an alumnus of the VO’s Astronomy for Catholics in Ministry and Education program, and pastor of St. Mary’s Church in Westville, Illinois) who organized the entire event. Cooke talked about his work in gravitational waves and trying to detect optical signals from merging neutron stars. He also engaged in a truly painful comedy (if you can call it that) routine with Fr. Sauppé, who was decked out in a wig as Albert Einstein’s great grand-nephew, or something like that, and who gave us a fusillade of Mel Brooks and Monty Python references. After the retreat, Cooke was going to go observe with the Keck telescope, one of the world’s largest.
Dr. Frye’s discussion (click here for it) was truly remarkable. She is an Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Arizona who studies the formation and evolution of galaxies. She is a frequent contributor to the Vatican Observatory’s work and on-line presence — click here, or here, or here for examples. She also leads an international team that works with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
Her team made a recent discovery of a distant supernova (an exploding star) in a galaxy far, far, far away — a galaxy whose light had been multiply bent and distorted by the gravitational field of a cluster of other galaxies such that multiple images of this exploding star were visible to the JWST. Her team’s discovery was so important that NASA decided to disrupt the JWST’s schedule, interrupting the previously planned JWST work, in order to go back and look again at the stuff Frye and her team had discovered.
That’s right, NASA stopped what the JWST was doing because Brenda Frye needed the telescope.
Frye and her team have derived from their work a new, direct measurement of the rate of expansion (also known as the “Hubble constant”) of the universe — the expansion that emerged from the “Big Bang” first theorized a century ago by Fr. George LeMaître, the Belgian priest and physicist. The Frye team has been cranking out multiple papers on this discovery that are being published by the leading scientific journals. Their first discovery paper was the first JWST result to be submitted for publication from a US team, and only the second worldwide.
She not only told the retreatants that this talk was the first time she had ever publicly enunciated the expansion rate she found (she’s put it in writing in a paper, but not verbally), but she also told us all that at one point she was so excited and nervous, with anticipation about whether NASA would really let her team commandeer the JWST, that she had to get her teenage son to read her e-mail to her aloud. Her husband was minding her crew of kids, all teens or older, while she was at the retreat for a few days.
All the talks at the retreat are available on a “playlist” from the Franciscans of the Immaculate — click here or on the image below for them all:
There is also a chaotic live-stream of the eclipse itself, and all the joyful hubbub surrounding it. As you can see (below), the weather was excellent.
The whole event was truly remarkable, and perhaps the sort of thing that people who hold to certain stereotypes about religious people and science might never imagine. What made the story “the best” was that the best of the science of astronomy was at this joyful Catholic retreat, all leading up to the magnificent eclipse in clear blue skies. This was “faith and science”.
A slightly different version of this post was carried by Aleteia.
