As the pope slept downstairs, Brother Guy Consolmagno maneuvered the viewing deck into position, stopping when he reached the massive telescope pointing heavenward through the open ceiling.
"Anyone see Mars?" he asked the four off-duty Swiss Guards standing around him. They strained to find the bright spot that had poked out from behind the clouds just moments before.
PHOTO: AP
"Ah, yes, perfect. There it is," Consolmagno said from behind the eyepiece. "Not bad, all in all."
PHOTO: AP
It was just before midnight on a Friday at Castel Gandolfo, Pope John Paul II's lakeside summer residence and the home of the Vatican Observatory. The Swiss Guards had the night off, and Consolmagno, a 50-year-old Jesuit astronomer from Detroit, had invited them up to the viewing deck to gaze at something they won't see again in their lifetime.
All this month, Mars is closer to Earth than at any time in the past 60,000 years, shining brighter than any other celestial body except the moon and Venus. On Wednesday, at its nearest, Mars will be 55.7 million kilometers from Earth -- and won't be that close again until Aug. 28, 2287.
All of which means lots of nighttime viewing activity for the pope's stargazers -- the Jesuits who run the Observatory and who have battled to correct the notion, spawned by the Galileo affair nearly 400 years ago, that the Roman Catholic Church is hostile to science.
The Vatican Observatory, founded by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, is one of their prime exhibits, generating top-notch research from its scientist-clerics and drawing academics to its meteorite collection, which includes bits of Mars and is considered one of the world's best.
"Simply by being an astronomer and a Jesuit, I'm saying all I need to say about science and religion," Consolmagno, a meteorite specialist, said. He wore a T-shirt with a star chart for his stargazing, but changed into clerical garb for an interview and photos.
"The fact that I exist means there is obviously no conflict. The fact that the Vatican is paying for this first-class research means they don't see any conflict."
But 400 years ago, there was plenty of conflict.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) made the first complete astronomical telescope and used it to gather evidence that the Earth revolved around the sun. Church teaching at the time placed Earth at the center of the universe.
The church denounced Galileo's theory as dangerous to the faith, but Galileo defied its warnings. Tried as a heretic in 1633 and forced to recant, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, later changed to house arrest.
The Galileo affair gained mythical proportions in the late 19th century when authors such as Andrew White, the first president of Cornell University, wrote about the "warfare" between theology and science, arguing that religion was an obstacle to the triumph of scientific progress.
In reality, the Catholic Church had a long history of supporting science, particularly astronomy, said the Reverend Sabino Maffeo, the retired director of the Castel Gandolfo observatory and author of In the Service of Nine Popes: 100 Years of the Vatican Observatory.
As early as the 1500s, Pope Gregory XIII and mathematicians made solar observations that confirmed predictions about the equinoxes in the Gregorian reform of the calendar, he wrote.
Starting in the 1700s, the papacy established three early observatories in and around Rome. In the mid-1800s, a Jesuit priest, the Reverend Angelo Secchi, became the first person to classify stars according to their spectra, the book says.
Pope John Paul II himself has been a keen supporter of the modern Vatican Observatory, although he hasn't been able to use the big telescopes for several years because of his infirmities, Consolmagno said.
A year after he became pontiff in 1978, John Paul created a commission to review Galileo's condemnation. After the commission reported back, John Paul declared in 1992 that the ruling against Galileo was an error resulting from "tragic mutual incomprehension."
A year later the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope was dedicated on Mount Graham, 120km east of Tucson, Arizona. It has been used for observations ranging from galaxy structure to stellar evolution.
Consolmagno says the Vatican has come a long way since the Galileo debacle, establishing first-rate science departments at Catholic universities and constantly updating its observatory, which for many years was in Vatican City itself.
In the 1930s, it moved to Castel Gandolfo, in the Alban Hills about 25km southeast of the capital, because Rome's city lights were getting too bright. It was an ironic choice of venue, considering that the papal villa was built by Urban VIII, during whose papacy Galileo was tried.
But eventually Rome's lights encroached on Castel Gandolfo, too, hence the choice of Arizona for the new telescope.
Some of the 12 scientists attached to the observatory work there, while others remain at Castel Gandolfo, doing research on the meteorites or processing data from the Arizona telescope.
"The perspective of the church is clearly changed since those times," said James Head III, a professor of planetary geoscience at Brown University. "It's not at all incongruous to be exploring the wonders of the cosmos as part of an official Vatican scientific thing," he said.
The Vatican scientists are "up there with world-class science and exploration," he said.
Head says he was particularly struck by the human perspective John Paul gave to space exploration when he received scientists, including Head, a non-Catholic, who were presenting their findings from NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter and its satellites.
The pope, Head recalled, spoke about "how further exploration really opens up beyond our simple views here to the wonders of the cosmos and what we don't know."
Indeed, Consolmagno says the hunger for the unknown that inspires astronomers is the same "transcendent yearning" for God that theologians speak about.
Today, Consolmagno says, the church's main challenge is not to convince scientists that there is nothing wrong with religion, but "to convince religious people that there's nothing wrong with science" -- a reference to the evolution debate in the US and elsewhere.
Such lofty issues were not on the minds of the Swiss Guards up on the viewing deck when they got a rare close-up look at Mars and its ice cap, as well as a magnified glimpse of the moon, pockmarks and all.
"I'll be able to tell my grandchildren I saw Mars," said one who declined, in keeping with Vatican rules, to give his name. "You could see the details. Molto bello."
On the Net:
Vatican Observatory:
http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
For many people, Bilingual Nation 2030 begins and ends in the classroom. Since the policy was launched in 2018, the debate has centered on students, teachers and the pressure placed on schools. Yet the policy was never solely about English education. The government’s official plan also calls for bilingualization in Taiwan’s government services, laws and regulations, and living environment. The goal is to make Taiwan more inclusive and accessible to international enterprises and talent and better prepared for global economic and trade conditions. After eight years, that grand vision is due for a pulse check. RULES THAT CAN BE READ For Harper Chen (陳虹宇), an adviser
Traditionally, indigenous people in Taiwan’s mountains practice swidden cultivation, or “slash and burn” agriculture, a practice common in human history. According to a 2016 research article in the International Journal of Environmental Sustainability, among the Atayal people, this began with a search for suitable forested slopeland. The trees are burnt for fertilizer and the land cleared of stones. The stones and wood are then piled up to make fences, while both dead and standing trees are retained on the plot. The fences are used to grow climbing crops like squash and beans. The plot itself supports farming for three years.
RSS