La Civiltà Cattolica, the Jesuit periodical that has been in publication since 1850, sports a special section on the front page of its website, dedicated to the Vatican Observatory. The special section is titled “A Riveder le Stelle: Novità dall’osservatorio astronomico vaticano”. That translates to “A Review of the Stars: News from the Vatican astronomical observatory”. More poetically, it is “To see the stars again: News from the Vatican astronomical observatory”.
Previously, this had all been available only in Italian. But now there is a “Vatican Observatory” section on the front page of the English version of the La Civiltà Cattolica website. The title is less poetic, but English articles are probably more accessible to readers of Sacred Space Astronomy.
The tagline on the English website says, “Reflecting the Mind of the Vatican since 1850”. It is good to see that astronomy is on the mind!
Click here for other articles from La Civiltà Cattolica.

The Coriolis effect and Jesuit scientists (September 7, 2023): CLICK HERE for Italian; CLICK HERE for English.
Two Vatican Observatory researchers have recently published works concerning the history of the interaction of the Society of Jesus with science and the history of humankind’s interaction with the idea of other worlds like our Earth.
The paper “Spin Off: The Surprising History of the Coriolis Effect and the Jesuits Who Investigated It”, by Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J. (Director of the Observatory) and Christopher M. Graney, appeared early this summer in The Catholic Historical Review, a journal published by the Catholic University of America Press. Today the Coriolis Effect, a consequence of the spin of the Earth, is understood to be the source of the rotation in hurricanes and other weather patterns. Consolmagno and Graney argue that while the effect bears the name of a nineteenth-century French scientist, historians of science have long overlooked how Jesuit astronomers in the seventeenth century were the first to conceive of it.
Ironically those astronomers, including Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Claude François Milliet Dechales, conceived of the effect as an argument against the ideas of Nicolaus Copernicus. They determined that such an effect must occur on a spinning world. Copernicus said Earth must spin. The effect had not been detected, however (indeed it is very hard to detect), and so these astronomers considered its absence to be an argument against Copernicus and in favor of Earth’s immobility.

The effect finally was demonstrated clearly in 1851, by the pendulum of Léon Foucault. A Jesuit astronomer of that era, Angelo Secchi, was quick to publicly replicate Foucault’s results using a pendulum he constructed in St. Ignatius Church in Rome. (“Foucault Pendulums” are now common in science museums.) In the early twentieth century the first Jesuit Director of the Vatican Observatory, Johann Georg Hagen, developed two further experiments to detect the effect. These experiments were built and performed within the Vatican itself.
Consolmagno and Graney show a long connection between Jesuit scientists and the Coriolis Effect. They also show that Jesuits who argued against Copernicus supported their position with innovative scientific arguments that were well ahead of their time, even if their final conclusion has not stood the test of time.
A second historical paper, “The Challenging History of other Earths”, by Graney, appeared later in the summer in The International Journal of Astrobiology, published by Cambridge University Press. Graney argues that from the Copernican revolution onward, the astronomical community and broader public have tended to embrace the idea that the universe is well-populated by other Earths, home to intelligent life, while tending to overlook strong scientific arguments against that idea.
Graney discusses how Johannes Kepler in the seventeenth century, Jacques Cassini in the eighteenth, and William Whewell in the nineteenth all argued that science did not support an abundance of other Earths. Kepler, for example, forcefully attacked Giordano Bruno’s advocacy of a universe full of stars that were other suns, all orbited by other Earths. Bruno’s ideas were contrary to simple observations, measurements and calculations, Kepler said.
The urge to see other worlds as essentially similar to our own Earth continues even to this day, and still tends to overlook science. We understand today that our sun is a star, but we also realize (as the Catholic science popularizer Agnes Mary Clerke pointed out in the late nineteenth century) that most stars are very different from our sun. The Earth is a planet; but despite thousands of planets discovered, we have yet to discover a planet like our Earth. Consolmagno and Graney discuss this same research, but in a style suitable for a broad audience, in an upcoming book available on September 15: When Science Goes Wrong: The Desire and Search for the Truth, published by Paulist Press.
The first 30 years of the VATT on Mount Graham (October 12, 2023): CLICK HERE for Italian; CLICK HERE for English.
The weekend of September 29-October 2 was a celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, or VATT, in Tucson, Arizona, USA.
A central part of the celebration was a gala dinner on the 29th, after which Major General Charles F. Bolden, Jr. discussed space, relationships, and faith with Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory. Bolden is a retired US Marine pilot and astronaut who served as the head of NASA from 2009 to 2017. He is also a man of faith, active in the Episcopal Church.
Consolmagno began the discussion by asking Bolden something that all those present at the dinner really wanted to know: “What’s it like to be in space?… the first time you got into space?”
For his first space flight in 1986, Bolden piloted US Space Shuttle Columbia. He described how he had been well-trained for his duties as a pilot; however, he said, he was not prepared emotionally for what he experienced. He described what he felt as the shuttle was passing over Africa, the land of his ancestral roots, about fifteen minutes into the flight:
When I looked out the window, the beauty and the magnificence of the planet was just breathtaking, and there were no lines or anything, and I literally cried. But immediately I said, “you know, all the stuff I have been taught all my life about differences in people, and about differences in countries, we created between this ear and that ear [gesturing to his head]. And I realized that, no, that’s not the way God intended it to be. This is the way that God created this planet.
Thus he decided that he would always work to urge people to recognize our common humanity. Bolden noted the deep roots of his family in the Presbyterian and Episcopal Churches, and commented on how, occasionally, he has been challenged by those who cling to the stereotype that faith and exploring the universe are incompatible—a stereotype refuted by the VATT, by Bolden, by Consolmagno, and by many other scientists and scientific endeavors over history.

The celebration weekend included a tour on September 30 of the VATT by benefactors and friends of the telescope, along with a visit to the VATT’s neighbor instrument at the Mount Graham International Observatory, the Large Binocular Telescope (one of the world’s largest, whose mirrors were built using technology first developed for the VATT). The tour was led by Fr. Chris Corbally, S.J., who served as the lead project scientist during the construction of the VATT, and Fr. Paul Gabor, S.J., Vice-Director of the Vatican Observatory in Tucson. Both Corbally and Gabor are involved in the continued maintenance and modernization of the VATT, including its ongoing robotization, which will be completed next year.
On Sunday, October 1, a Memorial Mass was held at Ss. Peter and Paul parish in Tucson for Fr. George Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 to 2006, who died in February 2020. Most Rev. Gerald F. Kicanas, Bishop Emeritus of Tucson, presided. Fr. Corbally offered the homily.
Fr. Coyne was the driving force behind the construction of the VATT. Until 1930, the Observatory’s telescope domes had been located on the walls of the Vatican itself. The growth of waste artificial lighting prompted a move to Castel Gandolfo. But by the middle of the century, even the skies there began to be excessively illuminated, prompting in 1980 a move to Arizona. A final event of the weekend was a public seminar at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. There, a dozen of the scientists and engineers who developed the VATT in the 1980s described the technical challenges and scientific achievements of this instrument.
Mt. Graham is a location far from major urban development, with a high elevation and clear desert skies. There the Vatican Observatory can continue to conduct astronomical research for decades to come.