If one catches the Rev. George V. Coyne looking up at the night sky, it’s easy to assume that he’s prayerfully connecting to God.Though that may be the case, the Jesuit priest might simply be scanning the blackness of space for binary star systems with their sudden bursts of intense energy.
Rev. Coyne may wear a Roman collar, but he does know a thing or two about quasars, globular clusters, supernovas, dark matter and other objects contained within the cosmos.
After all, he served as director of the Vatican Observatory from 1978 until his retirement in 2006.
“One may have faith and still study science,” said Rev. Coyne, who was in Worcester last week to receive an honorary degree from the College of the Holy Cross.
The Vatican Observatory — one of the oldest astronomical institutes — is a research facility operated and funded by the Holy See. The Jesuits, because of their long interest in academic and scientific research, have been charged with managing the center.
The Vatican embraced astronomy when Pope Gregory XIII, in the late 16th century, sought to reform the church calendar.
The observatory’s telescopes are located at the papal summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.
The facility’s library contains about 22,000 volumes and includes a collection of rare works by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and the Rev. Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit researcher who was the first to classify stars by their spectra. It also has a 200-year-old meteorite collection.
The center, in collaboration with the Steward Observatory, also operates a telescope and ancillary facilities at Mount Graham, Ariz., which is considered to be one of the better astronomical sites in North America.
Rev. Coyne, who holds a doctorate in astronomy from Georgetown University, and who has an asteroid named after him, 14429-Coyne, said the Vatican Observatory is proof that the church values scientific research.
“The scriptures weren’t written as science,” said Rev. Coyne, a Baltimore native who applied to NASA’s astronaut program in the 1960s but was rejected because he didn’t have perfect eyesight. “Science merely seeks natural explanations. The church isn’t an ostrich with its head in the sand when it comes to understanding the value of science.”
Rev. Coyne admitted that the church, over its long history, has, from time to time, taken on science head on, the most infamous case being that of Galileo, who found himself targeted twice by the notorious Inquisition because of his belief that the Earth traveled around the sun.
Rev. Coyne was co-chairman of a special Pontifical Commission that studied the Galileo case. In 1992, Pope John Paul II proclaimed that the church was wrong in condemning Galileo, an admission that Rev. Coyne said was long overdue.
Rev. Coyne, who holds honorary degrees from Boston College, Jagiellonian University in Poland, Loyola University in Chicago, Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis., St. Peter’s College in New Jersey, and the University of Padua in Italy, said science helps better lives and it is wrong for strict conservatives and evangelicals to outright dismiss such hot button scientific issues as evolution.
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