‘Knowledge feeds our souls’

WE all have a favourite song, food, film star. But Brother Guy Consolmagno has a favourite meteorite.

“It’s called Nakhla, and it fell to earth in 1911 in Egypt. Research on it discovered it is actually a piece of Mars. It is an incredible feeling to hold a piece of Mars in your hand. We like to give it to the Pope to hold when he comes to visit,” he says.

Brother Guy is one of the Papal astronomers and he’s based at the Vatican Observatory just outside Rome.

Why, I ask, does the Vatican need an Observatory?

Brother Guy laughs. “There is an idea that science and religion are somehow at odds, but it’s simply not true. It’s a Victorian concept. In fact, the earliest scientists were often religious men, clergymen who would use telescopes to look at the sky and record what they saw.

“I feel it’s actually very important that the church has a visible presence in the scientific community to show that we support science. Most astronomers are very comfortable with people of faith.”

Guy was born in Detroit into a family with a rich Italian and Irish background. His family were religious and he describes them as ‘typical white collar who really valued education’.

“I bucked the social trend of the times by studying the classics in high school instead of science. I knew I wanted to go to university and ‘do everything’ as I had a real drive for knowledge, but I wasn’t sure how to pin it down.

“It was while I was studying history at Boston College that I felt the first inkling of a ‘call’. I asked the local Jesuit community if I was feeling a possible calling, and they said to go and pray on it. I did, but honestly, the priesthood just didn’t appeal. I just wasn’t drawn to ministering to a flock. Instead I felt a surprising call to the sciences.

“When I transferred to MIT, (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) I had a professor who was studying the geology of planets. I REALLY enjoyed his classes – all his talk about meteorites and rocks and space dust and so on. I had a very long-term interest in space – since I was a young child and would gaze at the sky – I was just fascinated with meteorites, little pieces of outer space that have travelled millions of miles and you can hold them in your hand! In a sense they’re like the Catholic Church’s relics – little fragments of saints that showed they were once real people.

“My undergraduate research at MIT was on the moons of Jupiter, in particular could you have oceans under the ice? Modern visits by recent space exploration has proved much of my research theories to have been correct.”

Guy completed his doctorate at the University of Arizona where he had access to the enormous telescopes based in Arizona that study space. Then, back to Boston as a researcher, Harvard and MIT again, but all the time there was still this itch….

“I couldn’t help asking myself why I was wasting my time on looking at the sky when there were people here on earth who were starving?” he says.

“My sister had been in the Peace Corps, so I joined them, hoping to build wells, houses, hospitals and really help people. I just wanted to be useful. I was sent to Kenya and then the University of Nairobi – to teach astronomy. I was a little dismayed, but gradually, from visiting different villages at the weekends, and hearing all the questions people asked me about space, it brought me to a deeper realisation. THAT curiosity, that’s what makes us human. We all have that same thirst to learn more about what and who are around us; we all want to know, to ask questions about life.

“If you deny someone the opportunity to ask these questions, you deny their humanity. Knowledge feeds our souls. The confidence to ask questions leads to the confidence to build nations, and quite honestly, my work there made me fall in love with teaching again.”

Guy happily admits he’s ‘a nerd’, but when he came back to the USA, he taught in a small college and loved it. But he’d never quite shrugged off that ‘call’.

“I approached the Jesuits again, and this time, instead of a Priest, they were happy to accept me as a brother, and allowed me to continue my research along with theology and philosophy.

“As soon as I entered the Jesuit novitiate, I felt an overwhelming sense of contentment.

“I took my vows in 1991 and the second set of final vows in 2006. One of the hardest things about giving up control of your own life is obedience. It’s really hard. I got a letter from Rome shortly after my final vows, expecting a posting somewhere where I could teach. Instead I was told I’d been assigned to work at the Vatican Observatory.”

Guy joined a core of a dozen Jesuit astronomers who live together as a community. They come from seven countries and four continents, and all are experts in their fields. All of them have Phds in some aspect of astronomy – cosmic dust and asteroids that pass close to earth; the earliest stages of the universe; galaxies; star clusters. Guy’s work is meteorites and other small bodies.

“ I feel it’s actually very important that the church has a visible presence in the scientific community to show that we support science.

“The really wonderful thing about our observatory is that we are not reliant on grants and three-year plans to do our research,” he said. “Academic research needs to constantly justify itself, to produce results quickly and always be looking for government grants. We have been able to continue our research without that. We can do the work continuously without those fears – some research has been going for over 20 years. In fact, due to our ability to do this long-standing work, much of the scientific community relies on our data.

“We work extensively with researchers all over the world. One of our dreams is to partner with one of the really big telescopes in Chile, though I think we would need to find a big donor for that.”

He says: “Remember, we are here to show the world that the church supports science.

“Some people are frightened of change; afraid of the modern world; afraid of science. We tend to be very good at exporting the worst of our ideas – especially when science ‘fans’ push science as the answer to everything.

“If we can find a way to communicate to the people in the pews that scientific research is an act of prayer; that we invented science – it came out of the main religions; that the universe is not some evil morass designed to tempt you, then we can move forward.”

Anyone who wishes to find out more about the Vatican Observatory can find it at www.vaticanobservatory.org