IT was a risky business in the 16th century to be a Catholic priest pondering myriad worlds beyond Earth and the farthest reaches of the Universe. Giordano Bruno learnt that the hard way; he was burnt alive. Nowadays the prospects are rather better. In fact, a modern-day Bruno might well find himself on the shortlist for a job in the Vatican's most unlikely department—its observatory.
The headquarters of the Vatican Observatory are found in the Pope's summer residence, in the town of Castel Gandolfo just southeast of Rome. Under its American director Father George Coyne, a staff of 10 Jesuit priests works at both the headquarters and a Vatican research centre at the Steward Observatory of the University of Arizona. They scan the skies for everything from fledgling stars with newborn planets to clues about the mysterious dark matter in the Universe, and even shape the theory of the big bang.
In fact, the Vatican Observatory seems little different from any other astronomical research institute. Its Web site proclaims that it is not scanning the heavens for signs from God. Nor is it out to convert. "It's not an institute that does anything other than scientific research," says Coyne. "We're not proselytising; we're not out to baptise atheist scientists."
So what's in it for the Vatican? Though Pope Pius XII (1939-58) was a keen amateur astronomer, the present Pope has no particularly astronomical bent. There are no scientists in the Vatican itself and, according to Coyne, the observatory's annual report always lies unread on the Vatican's shelves. So why fund this work at all? "For them it's a PR exercise, but in a more sophisticated sense," says Coyne. "They see it as contributing to the life of the Church, and showing that the Church has a wider interest in human culture."
The choice of an observatory—rather than a biological research centre, for instance—is simply a legacy of history, according to Coyne. The Catholic Church's involvement in astronomy dates back to the 1500s, when Pope Gregory XIII set Jesuit mathematicians and astronomers the task of gathering data to reform the Julian calendar, which had become hopelessly out of line with the seasons. Later, at the end of the 19th century, Pope Leo XIII decided to polish up the Church's intellectual profile. "The Church was being accused of obscurantism and anti-intellectualism—in some senses justly so," says Coyne.
Nettled, Leo XIII determined to show 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". But what kind of science to choose? Memories of the Church's infamous clashes with Bruno and Galileo were fading, but Darwin's evolutionary ideas were becoming a hotbed of controversy. So by then, astronomy seemed one of the least contentious subjects to choose.
The Vatican Observatory was duly built behind the dome of St Peter's. But in 1933, after the skies became obscured by light pollution, the observatory moved to Castel Gandolfo. In the 1960s, however, the skies there became impossible too. So when Coyne was made director in 1978, he set about finding an alternative observing site.
In collaboration with the University of Arizona, the Vatican Observatory built a 2-metre telescope called the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope—the first to use a thin, light mirror created in a rotating furnace. The VATT was built on Mount Graham in Arizona and completed in 1993. The Vatican's share of the funding needed to build and run it—$3 million—was well beyond its resources, but donations of about $1 million from two devout American Catholics helped to bridge the gap.
Cheap labour
Nowadays, life at the observatory is pretty much the same as life for astronomers anywhere. But because the Vatican wants its observatory to be clearly a Church institution, it has limited recruitment of astronomers to Jesuit priests. That's also because few others would be impressed by the salary. At Coyne's last count, the priests earned an average of $13 a day.
The Vatican's list of research projects, shaped by the interests of the Jesuit astronomers who arrive, includes classification of stars—to shed some light on the formation and evolution of the Galaxy—the evolution of binary stars through mass exchange, and the searches for gravitational lensing. Two of the astronomers have recently discovered the first possible candidates for MACHOs, heavy dark objects in the halo of our Galaxy.
There is one thing, though, that sets scientists at the observatory apart from their secular colleagues: part of their brief is to try to bridge the gap between science and religion. Many scientists would argue that if there is a gap, the Catholic Church created it. After all, it took until October this year for the Church to acknowledge evolution as more than mere hypothesis—114 years after Darwin's death. And it took 300 years for Galileo to be formally pardoned. At least, now, Coyne and his colleagues are making every effort to reconcile rigorous science with religion.
But the current vogue for "scientific theology"—such as Frank Tipler's
Equally bizarre to Coyne are Stephen Hawking's theological interpretations of his "no boundary condition" theory, outlined in
While he is impatient with these scientific attempts to take on theology, however, he is equally exasperated by attempts to over-interpret the Bible in terms of modern astronomical theory. He recalls how a Talmudic scholar who also had a PhD in physics was once puzzled by the fact that, according to Genesis, light was created before the stars. The student's explanation was that the "light" must have been the cosmic background radiation, the microwaves that today fill the Universe as a remnant of the big bang. "The cosmic background radiation—thought of in the 1920s, discovered in the 1950s, written about around 1000 years before Christ," Coyne says, drily. "That's really something."
Two cultures
But Coyne does believe that, provided the two cultures respect their differences, they can set up a useful dialogue. After all, if Aristotelian cosmology so profoundly influenced the Catholic faith for centuries, why can modern scientific views not shape an evolving theology?
Take, for instance, what Coyne describes as the "difficult problem of miracles". These biblical magic spells are contrary to his view that God created the Universe with a complete set of natural laws. For God to make an exception one day seems, to him, too fickle. But could quantum physics, chaos and complexity have anything to say about these events? Coyne suggests they show that not everything can be predicted with traditional Newtonian determinism. "The exceptions are there in nature itself," he says.
One aspect of the relationship between science and religion that Coyne is fed up with is the recent excitement about alien life, fuelled by the apparent discovery of fossil remnants in a Martian meteorite, and the rash of new planets that have been spotted circling alien stars. "I've had it up to here with extraterrestrial life," says Coyne. "Would they be free from original sin? Would we baptise them? I don't even know if they would be people. Let's just wait and see."
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