Guy Consolmagno - Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Scientist

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AFTERWORD

A BOUT T HIS B OOK

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The Missing Mass Problem

The noise outside my window wakes me up even before the alarm has had a chance to go off. Workers happily shouting to each other in Ital ian are dragging a hundred chairs out into the courtyard below my room. In an hour, the chairs will be filled by a group of nuns from Poland, singing their hearts out at the Popes Mass. Grumbling at the noise, I stumble out of bed and into the shower.

Daily Mass for me is at 7 a.m. Our chapel here in the Jesuit community of the Vatican Observatory overlooks the courtyard where the Pope presides; we want to be finished before he starts, so that we dont have to compete with the singing that fills the whole palace. Most of the year, our quarters here in the Alban Hills south of Rome are quiet and almost deserted. But for 2 months, mid-July through September, theyre filled with activity as the Pope comes to escape the summer heat of Rome. Terms of Use

Mass is in Italian. Working in a foreign language, even the language of my great grandfather, is still a challenge for my American ears. But Im bilingual in another sense as well. Im an astronomer, with degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Arizona, and for 25 years Ive worked and conversed with fellow planetary astronomers. For the last 10 years, Ive also been a Jesuit brother, a student of the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, conversant with the termsand concernsof the theologians.

Some people are surprised that the Vatican supports an astronomical observatory. The Chicago Tribune (the same paper that declared Dewey Defeats Truman in 1948) once suggested we were the Popes astrologers who set the date of Easter every year. The Weekly World News thinks were training to be missionaries to Martians. A late-night radio talk show has suggested were behind the conspiracy to cover up the truth behind UFOs!

But, in fact, astronomy was part of the original seven subjects of the medieval universities, and those universities were themselves founded by the Church. The father of geology who first described and classified minerals was the Dominican monk known today as Albert the Great. The father of astrophysics who first classified stars by their spectra was a Jesuit, Angelo Secchi. The modern big bang theory originated with a twentieth-century priest, Georges Lematre.