CU astrophysicist, Vatican reflect on Galileo

By Clint Talbott
When he teaches “Ancient Astronomies” at the University of Colorado, John Stocke tells students about Pope Gregory XIII, whose Tower of the Winds helped prove the Julian calendar wrong and the Gregorian calendar right. This fall, Stocke saw the tower for himself.

That’s a privilege, as the Tower of the Winds is in a part of the Vatican closed to the public.

Stocke, a CU professor of astrophysical and planetary sciences, went to the Vatican this fall to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy 2009.

Some might find it surprising that the Catholic Church, which persecuted Galileo for his scientific conclusions, would celebrate the anniversary of his signature invention.

But, Stocke says, the church wanted to honor the year of astronomy, which marks the 400^th anniversary of the invention of the telescope and whose genesis is Galileo.

That’s the same Galileo convicted of heresy and sentenced by the church to life in prison (commuted to life under house arrest) for embracing the Copernican view of the solar system—that the Earth revolves around the sun, not vice versa.

In 1992, Pope John Paul II formally apologized on behalf of the church for the error of condemning Galileo and in rejecting the Copernican model. His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, has drawn criticism for once quoting a philosopher who called Galileo’s trial “reasonable and just.”

But last fall, Pope Benedict XVI welcomed Stocke and the other astronomers and praised the Vatican Observatory, which, the Pope said, “is in a very real way linked to the figure of Galileo, the controversies which surrounded his research, and the church’s attempt to attain a correct and fruitful understanding of the relationship between science and religion.”

The Pope also called for reflection on the “complementarity of faith and reason in service of the integral understanding of man and his place in the universe.”

The Pope’s message was positive but “perhaps not as congenial as we might have hoped,” Stocke said. “But it was pleasing to see that he acknowledged Galileo and astronomy as well as the need for both reason and belief for better human understanding.”

Stocke is not Catholic and has no bias about the Catholic faith, but “I do share their desire to integrate faith and reason.”

His first contact with the Vatican Observatory came when he was a graduate student at the University of Arizona at Tuscon, the site of one of the Vatican’s observatories. There, Father George V. Coyne, director emeritus of the Vatican Observatory, was Stocke’s mentor.

They maintained a friendship, and when the observatory launched an astronomy school for students largely from Third World countries, Stocke became an instructor.

The school’s aim was to teach students whose home countries had insufficient resources to teach astronomy. “The whole idea of the school was so compelling,” Stocke says.

While at the Vatican over the years, Stocke has joined “great convocations” about cosmological topics including the possibility of life on other planets. “I don’t know how far this will go or how supportive this Pope will be,” Stocke says.

And though the observatory and its scientific inquiries could fall out of favor, Stocke doubts that would happen. Public statements by prominent Catholics seem to buttress that view.

Brother Guy Consolmagno, curator of meteorites at the Vatican Observatory, recently appeared on “The Colbert Report” and discussed the theological implications of extraterrestrial life. Consolmagno said intelligent life could exist on other planets.

“The people who wrote the Bible were not afraid of other intelligent creatures who were also worshipping God,” Consolmagno told Colbert.

He added, “The whole idea of having astronomers in the Vatican really got started with the (church’s) reform of the calendar back in the 1500s. And since then, just studying the universe is a great way to remind yourself that there are more important things in life than what’s for lunch.”

Colbert responded, “What is for lunch, by the way?”

Consolmagno and Coyne also appear in “Galileo’s Sons,” a documentary film about the Vatican Observatory.

In the film, Coyne emphasizes that he works hard to keep his astronomy schools focused on science, not faith. “We can make no meaningful contribution to things like the science-religion dialogue unless we’re doing good science,” he said.

A notable instance of such good science came in the mid-19^th century, when Father Angelo Secchi, who was the first to classify stars according to their spectra. At that point, Consolmagno said, “Astronomy had stopped being positional astronomy and had suddenly become astrophysics.”

“Galileo’s Sons” shows Coyne in class talking about cosmology. The universe is so big, with so many stars and planets, he says, life was bound to appear. “I cannot think of God as having predetermined and necessarily knowing that life would come to be.”

If this is heresy, the church isn’t saying so. And whatever the current Pope believes, neither Coyne nor Consolmagno shies away from offering an opinion on the church’s treatment of Galileo.

Coyne says it’s human to admit error and move on. “And the church did not,” he says. “It cut off a budding scientist in his career. And any time they do that, they’re wrong.”

Consolmagno expressed a similar view: “There are three things you have to remember about Galileo. He was a devout Catholic to the end of his days. Fundamentally he was right. And the third thing to remember is that the church was wrong, not for one argument or another argument or coming to the wrong decision in the trial, but in the fact that they went after Galileo with the power of religion over an issue that fundamentally was not religious.”