Into the Heavens
Several years ago when I was teaching at Cornell, I did what people do on big college campuses, I faked my way into a parking spot, this time at the Statler Inn valet parking, pretending to be attending some function in the ballroom with other guests. What I was really doing was avoiding a long uphill walk or bus ride to one of the distant parking lots at the expense of a few bucks of tip money to the valet. I was unexpectedly and richly rewarded for my scam by meeting a most unusual character outside the Statler’s entrance portico. He was a bearded man of perhaps fifty wearing a red windbreaker and he was sitting on the bench outside the valet entrance. I could tell he was not one of the valets though wearing a red jacket anywhere at Big Red Cornell was all a bit too much to pass up for a comment. I told him he should be careful wearing red on this campus since he would be mistaken for a Statler valet and get asked to go fetch someone’s car. He looked a bit startled at first and then understood that I was joking with him. I quickly asked him if he was a visitor to the University (a reasonable guess if someone is at the Statler valet park since I’m sure I am the only Cornellian who ever scammed a parking space from there…NOT.
He told me that he was there giving a guest lecture and I asked the topic, just to make conversation. He said he was speaking on some sort of celestial calculations about asteroids which all sounded very technical and very astronomical. I nodded and asked where he taught Astronomy and he said he didn’t. That made me kind of curious because I don’t think of Astronomy as a cottage industry that practitioners just do from their garage. He could see I was perplexed by his answer so he said he was the Vatican Astronomer. There are certainly magical references in life that make you sit up and take notice and one of them for me is clearly saying that you work for the Vatican. There is so much to unpack there, especially for someone like me that lived in Rome for three years and has been to the Vatican countless times. I won’t deny that I like to occasionally establish (a.k.a. show off) my worldly background, especially when it comes to Rome (a city that almost everyone admires for its antiquity and romantic status). So, I said, “Isn’t the Vatican Observatory up at Castel Gandolfo on Lago Albano, south of Rome (Knowing full well that it was)?”
The man replied that it was, and I then had to follow my all-knowing comment with something witty (I can be such a pompous ass at times…some would say even more often than that). I said, “Oh, I went up there with a seminarian from the American Seminary of Rome when he was teaching me ethics in high school, where I was taught by the Brothers of the Holy Cross…not quite a Jesuit education, but pretty close…” He paused to take this all in, realizing that I was telling him that I was well-travelled, that I had lived in Rome, that I knew where he worked, and that I was probably a Catholic and thus, perhaps a kindred spirit. He just said that he was, indeed, a Jesuit priest. Boom, stopped in my tracks.
He had politely disarmed me and my chatty banter and I just dropped all pretenses and asked him to explain. He said he was both a Jesuit priest and the Vatican Astronomer and that he lived and worked at the Pope’s summer residence at Castel Gandolfo, where the Vatican Observatory has been since the time of Galileo. This was when Pope Benedict had sought retirement refuge at Castel Gandolfo and Pope Francis was happy to leave that spot to the ex-pontif, but none of that came up in the discussion outside the Statler that night. What the man, who turned out to be Brother Guy Consolmagno (I Googled Vatican Observatory as soon as I got home that night), told me was that it was a dream job for him since it allowed him to pursue his scientific passion and his religious faith all in one of the holiest places on Earth. It was hard not to see the truth in that circumstance.
Today in the Saturday New York Times, I noticed one of the softer, more human interest pieces that the Times tends to publish on the weekends, about how the Vatican Astronomers were getting all these asteroids named after them. The article went on to explain how the Vatican Observatory operated and it highlighted an interview with its director, Brother Guy Consolmagno, my old pal from the valet stand at the Statler. It seems that one of the areas that the observatory focuses on is asteroids (hence the topic of Guy’s lecture back then) and it explained how he got the job as a result of his Jesuit vows. Jesuits are only asked three things to gain admission to the order. They are asked to make a vow of poverty, chastity and obedience. After graduate school, Guy said that the first two were easy for him and the third got easy when they told him that based on his doctoral studies in astrophysics, he was being assigned to the Vatican Observatory. Apparently, he done good there, because when the old director retired, his obedience extended to his assignment as the new director, right around the time I met him.
What I found interesting about the interview the Times did with Brother Consolmagno was that it delved into the intersection of science and religion, an arena that we all generally think embodies a great deal of tension, given the differences between the biblical history of the creation of the Universe and the scientific and cosmological interpretation of evolution. 100 years ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial, spearheaded by Williams Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow and memorialized in the 1955 movie Inherit the Wind with Frederic March and Spencer Tracy as the two legal combatants. Brother Consolmagno makes a very enlightened and compelling argument for why there is not so much tension between science and religion and that even the Bible can be interpreted in a way that makes sense in the context of scientific discovery and evolution. I found one of his most poignant observations the one that science has progressed to the point where we can see 13.8 billion light years out into space in every direction (presumably that is the extent of our technological visibility at this time) and we know that space goes on well beyond that, but we cannot fathom how far. His point is simply that science helps us explain what we can see and that faith helps us explain what we cannot. That seems to me to be a marvelous delineation of this age-old conundrum.
I would like to see a rematch between Bryan and Darrow in the setting of today’s world of divisiveness. While the Scopes Trial took place in Tennessee back n 1925, I’m thinking that the new version of that trial and all the implications that flow from that debate means that it should probably be held in Tallahassee this time with Bryan played by Ron DeSantis and Darrow played by Brother Consolmagno. If I have to cast the role of Judge Raulston, it would have to be with Donald Trump (I kinda love the tension that might create between his love for Evangelical voters and his hatred for Pudding Ron). That leaves the role of the anti-prosecution reporter H.L. Mencken to be filled by Rachel Maddow. I think the whole thing would soar into the heavens more unbelievably than any of the asteroid movies that seek to destroy the Earth.