As all my readers know, I am a dedicated storyteller by nature. I’m not sure why storytelling appeals to me so much, but it does. I like the creativity of the process, I like the expository nature of the process. I like the performative aspects of the process. And, since I like hearing a good story almost as much as I like telling a good story, I think its fair to say that I enjoy the narrative of a good story. I used to think that I had missed my calling and that perhaps being a storyteller was what I was meant to be, but I have long since discarded that notion. Despite all the whining about the lack of or shortage of good fresh content, I have rarely found an open pathway to deploy my stories easily. Obviously, there are people who have made a good career and a good living out of storytelling. In my generation it was the Stephen Spielbergs, the Martin Scorsese’s and perhaps the James Camerons that were at the top of that heap. Before then it was the great novelists ranging from Shakespeare to Dickens to Ernest Hemingway. I’m sure we are building a repertoire of modern day storytellers who have taken up Marshall McLuhan’s mandate that the medium is the message and are finding the channels in the social media stream (Instagram, Podcasts, Snapchat, YouTube, TikTok, whatever…), which won’t reach me, but certainly reach millions of others. One of the constants in the storytelling realm are journalists and even though we all buy fewer magazines and newspapers, we all still read online stories on a daily basis even if they are curated and fed to us by aggregators like Apple News or Puck or whatever platforms we tend to find most interesting and helpful. This leads to an interesting story in and of itself.
About a decade ago I was in the midst of teaching at Cornell on a weekly basis while living in New York City. I did that for ten years for nine months of the year. As is the case with most big college campuses, one of the biggest challenges is always to find convenient parking. That is particularly so at Cornell, given the hills and gorges that help create the topography and bounds of the campus. Sage Hall, where I taught, is right in the center of campus, which is usually considered a big plus, but also makes for a more difficult parking situation. Sage is across the street from Statler Hall, which is where the hotel school resides and thus, is where the University’s hotel and most formal dining facilities are located. Cornell’s Hotel School is the premier hospitality school in the world by quite a distance, and I even taught hotel economics there back in the day as a TA (teaching assistant). As such, Statler has a full valet service which is supposed to be reserved for hotel guests, but can also include guests for dining functions that are being held. It is safe to say that Statler has a few different functions on the go every night of the week. Since I would teach from something like 4pm – 7pm, usually on Monday nights, I would sometimes opt for faking my way into the valet service. When one is accustomed to paying Manhattan parking rates, an Ithaca valet service seems like a bargain at twice the price. It’s a bit of a cheat, but I have never seen The Statler turn away a guest due to a full valet service, so my guilt in abusing that loophole was fairly minimal. In fact I only felt guilt due to my slightly Catholic upbringing.
One evening when I had used this parking trick, I went across to The Statler lobby when I had finished teaching. I had a four hour drive to NYC ahead of me, but I needed to come down off my three-hour teaching buzz, so I wasn’t in a particular rush. As I arrived at the portico of the hotel, I saw an older black-bearded gentleman sitting and waiting on one of the benches. He was wearing a red Cornell jacket. He was clearly not a valet and was waiting for his car, so I decided to engage him for fun by saying, “You know, you can’t sit around a valet station here at Cornell wearing a red jacket unless you want to be mistaken for a valet.” He chuckled and said he was, indeed, waiting for his car. I asked if he was guest lecturing (a fairly common occurrence on a campus of that size and breadth) and he said that he had been. I asked the subject of his lecture and he said something akin to “the mass density of meteorites and their impact on orbital trajectory…”. My obvious response was to say, “Oh, so you’re an astronomer…where do you teach?” He said he didn’t teach, other than this sort of guest lecture. I became curious and said, “so how are you an astronomer who doesn’t teach…where does one do astronomical work otherwise?” That’s when he leveled me by saying that he was the Vatican Astronomer. I was suddenly duly impressed and felt connected further to him given that I had visited the Vatican Observatory at Castel Gandolfo at its location about 15 miles due south of Rome. It was one of those notable places around Rome that was a fun place to ride a motorcycle during my high school days and the Observatory, with its aluminum domes, was hard to miss on its perch above Lake Albano. I introduced myself at that point and told him that I had grown up in Rome and had visited Castel Gandolfo many times. Always looking to bolster my connection with a new interesting acquaintance, I said something that seemed clever to me, that “I studied under the Brothers of the Holy Cross at Notre Dame Prep on the Via Aurelia…not quite a Jesuit education, but close…”. He then said, strangely enough, that he himself was a Jesuit priest, which made me feel embarrassed by my little smart-alecky comment. I was in awe and said that was very cool. He then said it was like a dream come true for him since his two passions were astronomy and being in the Jesuit priesthood. He explained that the four vows of a Jesuit are poverty, chastity, obedience and a special, higher form of obedience specifically to the Pope. So to him, being of service to the Church and living in the summer residence of the Pope and being in his proximity, was the best possible combination of fulfillments that were available for him. His car then arrived and I wished him well and stood there blown away by the encounter.
While I was waiting for my car, I Googled him and found that he (Guy Consolmagno) was, indeed, the Vatican Astronomer and a noted Jesuit priest. The name Consolmagno in Italian means a “consoler to the great”, so I imagine he has recognized that plumbing the depths of the heavens for the Papal See is a very fateful occupation for him. I have told this story many times since that encounter and I use it particularly to highlight one of the benefits of being associated with a world-class broad-based institution like Cornell.
Imagine my surprise this week when I opened my New Yorker magazine (8/4/25 edition…pg.20) and saw the story under the Annals of Inquiry heading of The Pope’s Astronomer. There he was, a decade later with his big now-white beard…Father Guy Consolmagno. The article tells the tale of his path from his Midwest American roots to Castel Gandolfo and of his challenges to find the intersection of faith and science for the most dominant conclave of faith in the history of mankind. He and Pope Leo XIV have a shared history and cultural basis, having grown up so close to one another in the Midwest. The article says that Father Consolmagno will serve his holiness as he wishes, but it is safe to say that the new Pope will follow the footsteps of his namesake, Pope Leo XIII, who founded the modern Vatican Observatory in 1891, and he will want to continue the search for knowledge and guidance from the heavens. You gotta love it when a story comes full circle like this.