Today’s featured entry from the Vatican Observatory Faith and Science pages:
The Pope and the Comet. (CLICK HERE for it)
This brief article (published in 1908 in Popular Astronomy) by Fr. William F. Rigge, S. J., an astronomer at Creighton University, debunks the story that Pope Callixtus III invoked his papal authority against Halley’s comet. Rigge writes that “it seems that no article can be written on Halley’s comet without bringing in the oft-told story of the bull which Pope Callixtus III so ineffectually launched against it….” Today the story is generally recognized as a myth, but as recently as 1997 a NASA news release about comet Hale-Bopp noted that “Pope Callixtus III excommunicated Halley’s Comet in 1456 as an ‘instrument of the devil’…”
The Faith and Science pages (F&S) are a unique resource on the web. The material in F&S is stuff that you will find nowhere else (or at least not without a lot of digging). Featured areas on F&S include “History of Church and Science”; “Church and Science Today”; “Science and Scripture”; “Science, Religion & Society”; “Life in the Universe”; “Cosmology”; and more. The level of the F&S material ranges from being accessible to all audiences, with even some material oriented toward young readers, up to material for university specialists.
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