Today is the feast of the patron saint of scientists, St. Albert the Great. The Archdiocese of Louisville (Kentucky, USA, my hometown) is having a Gold Mass for science today at 10:00 AM at the church of St. Albert the Great in Louisville. The mass will be celebrated by our Archbishop, Shelton Fabre. This will be our fifth Gold Mass. This year we are celebrating a banner year for faith and science in our archdiocese. One of the things that has made 2025 a banner year was a hugely successful St. Albert Initiative in March (discussed previously here at Sacred Space Astronomy — click here). Another is the publication of our archdiocesan Faith and Science Resource Book.
Think of this Resource Book (its full title is Faith and Science: A Resource Book for the Archdiocese of Louisville) as something that is an outgrowth of both the Vatican Observatory and a local (arch)diocese. Not quite a decade ago, Br. Guy Consolmagno, S.J. and Bob Trembley here at the VO set up our Faith & Science Resource Center. Eventually, I became Resource Center editor. You see featured entries from the Resource Center here at Sacred Space Astronomy about twice each month.
Around the same time as the VO Resource Center was being put together, Louisville’s then-Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, with University of Louisville astronomer Dr. Gerry Williger, started what has become the Archdiocese of Louisville Faith and Science Dialogue Group. Its formation was prompted in part by the 2017 total solar eclipse that passed through Kentucky.
The Dialogue Group has brought about many good things. We introduced the Gold Masses to the archdiocese. We produce a science column for our archdiocesan newspaper, The Record. We took an historic telescope, owned by the rector of the Louisville Cathedral in the late 19th century, around to Catholic places to observe with it and share history, science, and faith.
Nevertheless, we kept finding ourselves discussing over and over the problem of misperceptions regarding the Church and science. One member of the group might encounter a fellow parishioner who opines that Catholics cannot be scientists. Another might talk to a student who graduated from a Catholic high school yet thinks that Catholics reject evolution. Another might know a priest or two, or maybe a Catholic high school teacher or two, who hold very dim views toward science.
And why wouldn’t people have such views, thoughts, and opinions? As I have discussed here at Sacred Space Astronomy all too recently, the bogus notion that there is some kind of war between Catholicism and science keeps showing up in even the most prominent of media outlets.
How could our Dialogue Group address this persistent misperception problem? How might our Group move beyond repeatedly discussing this problem and relaying stories to each other of the latest egregious examples of it? For this problem, resources like the Vatican Observatory Faith & Science Resource Center, or the Interdisciplinary Encyclopedia of Religion and Science, or resources from the Society of Catholic Scientists, are not much help. They are all good, but they are too large. That priest or teacher or student or parishioner with a certain view of science and faith is not going to dig through some big archive of material. Neither are they going to read the proceedings of faith and science symposia held far away, or watch in-depth videos from such symposia.
After yet another Dialogue Group convulsion of complaining and eye-rolling over the latest egregious example of the misperception problem, the Group, which is part of the archdiocesan Office of Faith Formation, decided to do something. We decided to put together this Faith and Science Resource Book using local resources. Such a book would not solve the problem altogether, but it would mean that we “had something” for the problem. The book would exist. People with the sorts of views, thoughts, and opinions mentioned above would at least hold them against a published local resource which they might be expected to have encountered, rather than hold them in understandable ignorance (thanks to the media). This would be especially true for educators (priests, teachers, parents seeking a Catholic education for their children) who have some responsibility to know about what, at least, their local church is doing.
I was confident that we had locally what we needed for this book. As a group, we had been dialoguing and column-writing and Gold-Mass-ing for eight years (with gaps for COVID and for Archbishop Kurtz getting ill). And hey, as editor of the VO Faith & Science Resource Center, I knew something about this stuff!
The Director of the Office of Faith Formation, Art Turner (also a member of the Dialogue Group) was supportive. Archbishop Fabre gave the OK to use his Gold Mass homily in the book (that homily is also a Faith & Science Resource Center item). So, we were off and running.
The book came together in a few months. Br. Guy, still VO Director at the time, wrote a foreword. To make print books available, we used the system we developed here at www.vaticanobservatory.org for producing some in-house Faith & Science Resource Center books for younger readers. Thus, print-on-demand hard copies of the Resource Book are available in fancy, normal, and economy versions. Even the economy version is nice, and priced under $6.00! The PDF version is available for free.
The book includes prayers, all four Louisville Gold Mass homilies to date (including homilies from two archbishops), Br. Guy’s foreword, science columns from The Record, my overview of the history of the Church and science that was published by Aleteia, and more. It is fewer than 100 pages in length — of LARGE PRINT. There is lots of white space.
The book is obviously not encyclopedic. We do not attempt to answer all the Big Questions that people can have about the Church and science. But it is manageable. And, it has sufficient material to address the persistent misperception problem.
The Archdiocese of Louisville now “has something” for that misperception problem. The Office of Faith Formation is already putting Faith and Science: A Resource Book for the Archdiocese of Louisville to use in their programs. And it is part of the Vatican Observatory Faith & Science Resource Center, available to anyone (click here to see). By no means is its usefulness limited to the Archdiocese of Louisville. In fact, Br. Guy just ordered up a batch of print copies for the upcoming ACME program in Tucson.
I want to emphasize the Vatican Observatory connection here. Notice how often the VO has been mentioned in this post. Note the links. It’s not just the contributions by Br. Guy and by me, or the book being available through the Resource Center. It is the fact that the VO and VO Foundation created the framework and infrastructure, the experience and expertise, to make a project like this possible.
Therefore, to those of you who are VO Foundation supporters: Thank you. The benefits of your support for the VO diffuse out to the diocesan level. No doubt St. Albert would approve.
