Oh, I have been looking forward to this one.
Last time we were on our hands and knees in the hills of Tuscany, turning fossils over in the light, watching Niels Steno read the story of the Earth in layers of ancient stone. It was quiet work. Patient work. The kind of work that changes everything without making any noise about it.
Today I want to take you somewhere that is --- well. I'll be honest. It made me laugh. And I don't mean that unkindly. I mean that particular kind of laughter that bubbles up when reality turns out to be so much more interesting than the story people have been telling about it.
Because I have spent a very long time watching human beings assume they know what the Catholic Church thinks about science. And most of them are wrong. Not a little wrong. Substantially, entertainingly wrong.
So today we are going to set the record straight. We're going to visit some Jesuit priests who spend their nights on a mountaintop in the Arizona desert, pointing a telescope at the edge of the universe --- on behalf of the Pope.
And --- I still smile every time I think about this --- they have a podcast.
So do I.
I feel we would get along.
Come on. You're going to love this.
Picture a neighborhood near the University of Arizona in Tucson. Quiet streets. Modest houses. The kind of place where professors live, and graduate students, and people who work at the university and like to walk to campus in the morning.
There is a house on one of those streets that looks, from the outside, entirely unremarkable.
Inside, there is a photo of the Pope on the wall.
There is a small chapel off the living room.
And the men who live there --- who grocery shop and grade papers and argue about the best breakfast spot on Fourth Avenue just like everyone else in the neighborhood --- are Catholic priests. Jesuit priests, to be precise. And several evenings a week, they drive two and a half hours southeast into the desert, up into the Pinaleño Mountains, to a place called Mount Graham, where the air is thin and cold and the sky is so dark you feel like you could reach up and drag your fingers through the stars.
And there, at nearly eleven thousand feet above sea level, they open the dome of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope --- the VATT --- and they get to work.
Studying the universe. For the Pope.
I want to be clear that I am not making any of this up.
I was there, you know, when the idea first took shape --- when the skies over Rome grew too bright for serious observation and the Vatican astronomers began casting around for somewhere darker, somewhere the faint light of distant galaxies could still be gathered and measured and understood. I watched them follow the darkness across an ocean to the American Southwest. I thought --- yes. Of course. The pursuit of truth has always required people to leave the comfortable, well-lit places behind and go somewhere a little wilder.
Mount Graham is wilder. Magnificently so.
And on a clear night up there --- which is most nights --- you can see things that have been traveling toward you since before the Earth existed. Light from the edges of the observable universe, finally arriving after a journey of incomprehensible length, landing in the mirror of a telescope built by Jesuit priests on a mountain in Arizona.
I find that almost unbearably beautiful.
I suspect Father Corbally does too. He's been up there for forty years.
I want to tell you how this started. Because it delights me every time I think about it.
It started with eleven minutes.
Not a vision. Not a great spiritual awakening. Eleven minutes --- the tiny, stubborn error tucked inside the old Julian calendar, which miscalculated the length of the solar year by just that much. Eleven minutes per year sounds like nothing. But I watched those minutes accumulate across fifteen centuries, and by the late 1570s they had added up to ten full days of drift. The spring equinox --- and therefore Easter, and therefore the entire rhythm of the Christian year --- was sliding away from its proper place in the seasons like a slow, unstoppable tide.
Pope Gregory XIII needed astronomers. So he called in the Jesuits.
I was fond of those men. Careful, brilliant, wonderfully stubborn in their attention to detail. They bent over their calculations at the Roman College and they gave the world the Gregorian calendar in 1582. The one you used this morning. The one that has held the equinox in place ever since. The Vatican Observatory grew from that moment --- from the simple, gloriously unglamorous need to get the calendar right.
And then it just kept growing.
I watched Father Angelo Secchi take over the Roman College Observatory in 1850 and I remember thinking --- here is someone who is going to leave a mark. He was a Jesuit priest who happened to be one of the finest scientists of his age. He was the first to classify stars by their spectral fingerprints --- the unique patterns of light that reveal what a star is made of, how hot it burns, how fast it moves. He mapped Mars. He studied Jupiter. He connected the activity of the sun to magnetic storms on Earth with such precision that a NASA spacecraft instrument still carries his name today.
A Jesuit priest. I just want to let that sit there for a moment.
But Rome kept growing, and the lights kept multiplying, and the sky above the city grew brighter year by year until the faintest stars simply disappeared into the glow. I watched the astronomers squint upward with increasing frustration. Pope Pius XI moved the Observatory to Castel Gandolfo in the 1930s --- the papal summer residence in the hills outside Rome, where the skies were still dark enough for serious work.
For a while.
Then Castel Gandolfo brightened too. And here is the part I love most --- rather than surrender, they followed the darkness. Across an ocean, across a continent, all the way to the Pinaleño Mountains of southeastern Arizona, where the air is thin and cold and the night sky is still genuinely, magnificently dark.
The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope opened on Mount Graham in 1993. Nearly eleven thousand feet above sea level. One of the finest astronomical sites in North America.
Chased by light pollution from Rome to the Arizona desert.
Still watching. Still looking up.
I have always admired that kind of devotion.
Now. I want to tell you about a question.
Because the Vatican Observatory has a podcast --- I have mentioned this, I know, but it still pleases me --- and on that podcast someone asked the question that I suspect most people would ask if they found themselves standing in front of a telescope on a mountaintop in Arizona, talking to a Jesuit priest who was about to spend the night mapping distant galaxies on behalf of the Pope.
The question was this: why do we spend money on this when there are poor to be fed?
It is a fair question. A genuinely fair one. And I want you to notice that they didn't dodge it. They didn't bristle or deflect or launch into an institutional defense. They answered it --- and the answer, when it came, was so simple and so beautiful that I have been turning it over ever since.
We feed the poor so that they may discover the beauty of God's creation.
That's it. That is the whole answer.
Sit with that for a moment. Because it is saying something quite extraordinary. It is saying that bread and wonder belong together. That a human life fully lived requires both. That when we feed someone --- when we address the immediate, urgent, material need --- we are not just keeping a body alive. We are preserving a person's capacity for awe. And awe, it turns out, is not a luxury. It is not something you earn after all the serious work is done. It is part of what makes the serious work worth doing at all.
And it goes the other direction too. The beauty of creation --- explored carefully, taught generously, shared openly --- gives meaning to the charitable work itself. The two are not in competition. They are in conversation. Always have been.
I found that answer quietly astonishing. Not because it was clever. Because it was true in the way that simple things are true --- not argued for, just stated, as though it had always been obvious to anyone paying attention.
And perhaps it should have been obvious. Because this is what the Vatican Observatory has been demonstrating, in one form or another, since those Jesuit mathematicians bent over their calendars in the Roman College in 1582. That the careful investigation of creation is not a distraction from faith. It is an expression of it. That to look honestly at the universe --- at the light arriving from the edges of what can be seen, at the spectral fingerprints of stars, at the ancient slow geometry of the heavens --- is to participate in something sacred.
Not instead of serving the poor. Alongside it. Because of it.
Pope Leo XIII understood this when he refounded the Observatory in 1891. He wasn't apologizing for anything. He was making a statement about what the Church actually believed --- that wonder and service are two expressions of the same love.
I think he was right.
Here is something I have noticed across a very long life of watching human beings argue about things.
The loudest arguments are rarely about what they claim to be about.
The supposed war between science and religion --- the one that gets rehearsed in comment sections and dinner table debates and documentary films with dramatic music --- is not really a war between two ways of knowing. It is a war between two kinds of overreach. Between the scientist who declares that only the measurable is real, and the believer who tries to answer questions that belong to the rocks. When those two voices are in the room, the noise can be considerable.
But I want to tell you what I have actually seen. Not the argument. The reality underneath it.
I have watched Jesuit priest-astronomers catalog half a million stars. I have watched four nuns spend years bent over photographic plates in the early twentieth century, mapping the sky with painstaking care, contributing to one of the great international astronomical surveys of the age. I have watched Father Secchi press his eye to a telescope and see things about the composition of stars that no human being had ever seen before. I have watched Brother Guy Consolmagno --- who directed the Vatican Observatory for ten years and has the particular gift of making astrophysics feel like a conversation between friends --- hold a meteorite in his hands with something that looked, to me, very much like reverence.
Thirty craters on the moon are named after Jesuit astronomers.
Thirty.
I find that number quietly wonderful. Not because it proves anything about the relationship between faith and science --- I don't think it needs to prove anything. But because it is a record. A long, patient, accumulated record of people who looked at the universe with rigorous honesty and sincere devotion simultaneously, and found no contradiction in doing so.
And what that record adds to the world's spiritual imagination is something I think we badly need.
It adds the living example. Not the argument --- the example. The actual human beings who got up every morning and were both things at once, without apology and without apparent strain. Who asked the hardest scientific questions they could find and brought to those questions the same humility and attention they brought to prayer. Who followed darkness across an ocean because the truth they were pursuing deserved the very best conditions they could find for it.
Steno did this in a dissecting room in Tuscany in 1666. These priests are doing it on a mountaintop in Arizona today. The centuries between them are full of others --- quiet, careful, devoted people who never accepted the false choice, who held both domains with steady hands and kept working.
That is a golden thread if I have ever seen one.
And I have seen quite a few.
I want to go back to those nuns.
Emilia Ponzoni. Regina Colombo. Concetta Finardi. Luigia Panceri.
I want you to know their names. Because the world has not always remembered them as well as it should, and I have a long memory and a certain stubbornness about these things.
In the early twentieth century these four women sat down at the Vatican Observatory and began working through photographic plates of the night sky --- glass plates, each one a frozen moment of starlight, each one requiring patient, exacting, unhurried attention. They measured. They recorded. They catalogued. Plate after plate after plate. And when they were finished they had mapped and catalogued nearly half a million stars.
Half a million.
There were no headlines. No ceremonies that I recall with any particular fanfare. Just the work, done with extraordinary precision, contributing to one of the great international efforts to chart the visible sky. The kind of contribution that science is entirely built upon and almost never celebrates loudly enough.
Because here is the truth about science that the dramatic version of the story tends to leave out --- the eureka moment, the sudden flash of revelation, the lone genius at the chalkboard --- that is not most of what science actually is. Most of what science actually is looks like four women bent over photographic plates in a quiet room, doing the same careful thing ten thousand times in a row, trusting that the accumulation of small accurate observations will eventually add up to something that matters.
It always does.
And the Vatican Observatory has always known this. It has never been seduced by glamour. It has never chased the dramatic result at the expense of the careful one. It just keeps working, with the particular patience of an institution that is not afraid of the long view.
Which brings me to something that I think is genuinely remarkable about what the Observatory represents today.
Most scientific institutions operate under pressures that are, when you examine them honestly, somewhat at odds with the actual demands of good science. Funding cycles that require demonstrable results within a year or two. Quarterly targets. The constant need to justify existence to committees with limited patience for work whose importance may not be apparent for a decade. I understand why these pressures exist. But I also watch what they do --- how they quietly shape what questions get asked, which projects get pursued, what kind of science gets done.
The Vatican Observatory operates almost entirely outside those pressures. Its funding comes with no strings attached. Its astronomers choose their own research. And some of their most important work --- surveys of meteorite properties, studies of stellar clusters, investigations of distant galaxies --- takes ten, fifteen, twenty years to complete. They pursue it anyway. With the calm confidence of people who are not in a hurry because they know the truth will still be there when they arrive at it.
In a world of shrinking attention spans and urgent deliverables, that capacity is more precious than it has ever been. The willingness --- the institutional ability --- to do the slow, unglamorous, painstaking work that nobody else has the patience for anymore.
And I will tell you something else.
I don't know what they are going to find next. Neither do they, not exactly. But something is being observed right now on that mountain in Arizona --- some faint light that has been traveling toward us for longer than the Earth has existed, finally arriving at the mirror of that telescope in the thin cold air above the desert --- and one day it is going to matter very much.
I am waiting with genuine excitement to find out what it is.
The beauty of creation is still unfolding. And there are still people on a mountaintop, in the dark, watching for it.
That, I think, is exactly as it should be.
I want to ask you something.
Is there something you have dismissed --- an institution, a tradition, a community, a person --- because the reputation arrived before the reality did? Because someone handed you a story, and the story was so confidently told, and so widely shared, that you never quite got around to checking whether it was true?
I am not pointing fingers. I have watched this happen to the best and most careful people across a very long time. Reputations travel faster than truth. They always have. And once a story settles into the general understanding --- once it becomes the thing that everybody knows --- it takes a peculiar courage to stop and ask: but did I actually look?
Those nuns looked. Through photographic plates, through careful eyes, through ten thousand repetitions of the same patient act. They did not ask whether the work was glamorous. They asked whether it was true and whether it was worth doing. It was both. So they did it.
The priests on the mountain are still looking. Through a telescope pointed at the edge of the observable universe, night after night, in the thin cold dark. Not because anyone is watching. Not because the result is guaranteed. Because the beauty is real and the truth is worth the trouble.
I wonder sometimes what you might find if you looked again at something you had already decided about. Not dramatically. Not with any great fanfare. Just --- looked. With the same patient, honest attention that four women brought to half a million stars.
You might be surprised what has been there all along.
Next time I want to take you somewhere very different.
We are leaving the thin cold air of Arizona and traveling back --- a long way back --- to the banks of the Nile. To ancient Egypt, where someone believed so deeply that every human soul deserved guidance through the darkness that they wrote it all down. Carefully. Beautifully. On a scroll of gilded papyrus twenty-one feet long.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead has one of the most misunderstood names in all of human history. It is not a book about death. It is a book about what comes after. About the conviction --- held with extraordinary tenderness and specificity --- that no soul should have to navigate that journey alone.
I think you are going to find it surprising. And moving. And rather more familiar than you might expect.
But that is next time.
For now I want to sit here for just a moment with what we have shared today. We visited a house in Tucson with a photo of the Pope on the wall. We drove up a mountain in the Arizona desert. We met four women who counted half a million stars and never made the headlines. We heard an answer to a hard question that turned out to be one of the most beautiful things I have encountered in quite some time.
We feed the poor so that they may discover the beauty of God's creation.
I am still thinking about that.
I suspect you might be too.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.