Are UFOs a New Religion? The Vatican Astronomer on Aliens, Space, and the Crisis of Meaning
Br. Guy Consolmagno on extraterrestrial life, UFO disclosure, Elon Musk, faith and science, and why humanity may be searching the cosmos for spiritual answers
Days after the U.S. government released a new trove of documents and images related to UFOs — or UAPs, “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” — Vatican astronomer Br. Guy Consolmagno sat down with Catholic News Service for a wide-ranging conversation about aliens, theology, science, and the modern search for meaning.
Consolmagno, a Jesuit brother, planetary scientist, and former director of the Vatican Observatory, argues that the public fascination with extraterrestrials is not fundamentally about physics or government secrecy, but about something deeper: humanity’s fear of being alone in the universe and the growing collapse of trust in institutions, religion, and truth itself.
In this conversation, we discuss:
Why Br. Guy remains deeply skeptical of modern UFO claims and government disclosures
Whether belief in aliens has become a substitute religion in modern secular culture
The Catholic theological implications of discovering extraterrestrial life
Why the Church does not see intelligent alien life as a threat to Christianity
Elon Musk, SpaceX, and the modern myth of the technological savior
How conspiracy culture, Gnosticism, and distrust of institutions shape the UFO phenomenon
Pope Leo XIV’s message to the Vatican Observatory about truth, science, and despair
Why young scientists and STEM students are increasingly returning to faith
The relationship between astronomy, climate change, AI, and the spiritual crisis of modernity
Why Consolmagno believes science and religion ultimately share the same goal: the pursuit of truth
This is a conversation about UFOs, faith, technology, the future of humanity and what the search for life in the cosmos reveals about ourselves.
Transcript
Intro: Days after the United States government declassified a new trove of documents and images related to UFOs, I sat down with one of the Vatican’s leading voices on the question of Catholic theology and extraterrestrial life. Br. Guy Consolmagno — former director of the Vatican Observatory and widely known as “the Pope’s astronomer” — is a planetary scientist, Jesuit brother, and one of the Catholic Church’s most recognizable advocates for the compatibility of faith and science. But increasingly, people want to know something else: What does the Church think about aliens? In this conversation with Catholic News Service, we discuss UFOs, the theology of extraterrestrial life, the modern obsession with space, the influence of figures like Elon Musk, and whether our growing awareness of the vastness of the cosmos weakens — or deepens — the credibility of religious belief.
Robert Duncan: Brother Guy Consolmagno, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: It’s a delight to be here, as always.
Robert Duncan: Well, I think the best way to start this conversation is with the Trump administration disclosing on Friday files related to UFOs, or as they are now called, UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. And this has been something in the zeitgeist since The New York Times ran a story in 2017 about these secret CIA programs that study these matters. Before I ask you a couple of particular questions about that, what do you make of the interest in the public at large in this subject?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, the interest in “are there aliens?” because really, that’s what’s driving it. If it turned out to be something really interesting in terms of physics, but nothing to do with aliens, I think people would get bored immediately. The interest is, are there aliens? And it’s got a long and fascinating history. It goes back to the Iliad and the Odyssey and the creatures that, you know, Ulysses runs into on his way home from the Trojan Wars. You can find things like this in scripture. And what it says is that we’re afraid of being alone. A friend of mine, Chris Graney, and a buddy of his have just published a book on multiple Earths and the history of it. And the fascinating thing they find is that even as science continually says it’s unlikely that there are places like Earth with life like Earth, nonetheless, people will grab onto any possibility that there might be life. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing to do, because oftentimes the science, best science of the day that said it was impossible, turns out to be wrong. And it’s a new best science of the day that shows it’s impossible. But the fact is, we still have not found evidence of any kind of life outside of Earth. I’m reminded of the old Pogo cartoon. If you remember, it was a talking animals cartoon from the ‘50s and ‘60s, comic strip in the newspapers. I don’t remember, but... it was sort of like Calvin and Hobbes 30 years earlier, beautifully drawn. The guy, Walt Kelly, who drew it, was involved in the Disney studio. And he has the main character talking to the porcupine, who’s the philosopher of the group. I love the image. And the porcupine says, “You know, there are some people who say that there are creatures in the universe smarter than humans. And there are other people who say that humans are the smartest creatures in the universe. Either way, it’s a sobering thought.” Which is true, because regardless of how it turns out, it’s kind of scary. Either we’re alone, which is scary, or there’s people out there who, in some ways, are going to be superior to us. I’m actually on the science advisory board of the SETI Institute. SETI stands for Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. The real reason they’re looking, you know, scanning radio waves from radio telescopes, looking for signs of intelligent signals, the reason they’re doing that is not so we can talk to these people, because if there was intelligent life 100 light years from us, which would be really close, you’d say, “Hello.” Two hundred years later, they’d say, “What?” And, you know, you could not have a conversation. It’s just the laws of physics. What would be exciting about finding intelligent life would be that we had found life, because we haven’t found life yet. And we won’t really know what life is until we see more than one kind of life.
Robert Duncan: So what you’re describing, I think, has been true for decades in terms of the—
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, it goes back to La Fontenelle and, you know, writing about this in the 1700s.
Robert Duncan: Okay, perfect. Your colleagues, writ large, Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote a guest essay May 6th in The New York Times saying, “Give us the Aliens.” And it doesn’t sound like, from the article, that he takes very seriously the possibility that the government is hiding anything.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: He’s saying he’s a real astronomer. He knows we’re incapable of hiding things.
Robert Duncan: Michio Kaku went on Fox News just in the wake of the Trump disclosures and said, “We are at a turning point. This is a big deal.” So specifically on these movements in government, what should—and by the way, I should also say a lot of the Catholic press, I’ve noticed, has not actually engaged in the subject since some of these so-called whistleblowers have come out. There hasn’t been a lot of apparent interest in the Catholic media until the Friday release. And then in Our Sunday Visitor, there was a big write-up about questions that you talk about a lot, extraterrestrial life. So is this a unique moment for people to show their cards if there is anything to these theories?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: No. Because 20 years from now, people will still be claiming that they found new discoveries, and other people will still be incredibly skeptical of it. We just look at the history of how people have reacted to these announcements in the past. And 99 percent of the time, the announcements turn out to be false. We’re always waiting for the 1 percent. I don’t think this is the 1 percent. You know, if these are the best images I’ve got, they’re no better than what we had in 1948. And there’s two real reasons why I’m extremely skeptical. And the first is the cell phone in your pocket. Nowadays, we’ve got machines that show us that cats can play the piano. We’ve got machines that show us that police brutality really happens. We’ve got ways of filming and photographing things, which incidentally, 10 years from now, AI replaces all of this. We won’t be able to believe anymore. But up to now, and we don’t have anything better than that yet.
Robert Duncan: Well, I was thinking even now it would be very difficult to believe in any image that —
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Certainly at this point. But more than that, the people who really know the sky the best, the amateur astronomers, the people who are actually outside with their small telescopes looking at the sky, they’re the ones who know what’s actually there and are not going to be fooled by Venus because they know what Venus looks like. And they’re not going to be fooled by interesting things that happen in the sky because they’ve seen them maybe once every five years, but they’ve seen them before and they know they have natural causes. These are the people who are the most skeptical. I mentioned the SETI Institute. The SETI Institute is exceedingly skeptical of these things. And you’d think they’d be the ones who would be the most desirous of this sort of thing happening. But I’ll go back to another point that Neil makes that I was making earlier. Astronomers sometimes are involved in projects where 50 or 100 scientists are going to be co-authors of a paper. When the paper is submitted, you are under a sort of promise that you won’t talk about it until the referees have gone through it and said, “Yes, we’ve checked the science,” and the editors have said, “Yes, this is worthy of publication.” You don’t want it to go out early, number one, because it may turn out that you’re wrong, and number two, because you don’t want to give other people the idea to go look for it too before you get there. Nonetheless, none of these people are able to keep a secret. By the time the paper has been, you know, saved—has been hidden on the last version of the paper, copies of it are already all across the internet because you’ve got any kind of interesting result. You can’t help but share it.
Robert Duncan: Just because people are asking in these days, there is alleged evidence, especially testimonies people have given. There are some weird images that the U.S. government has released. To what extent have you looked at this evidence and what do you make of what’s out there right now?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: There was a time, you know, when I was much younger, when I did look into it. I haven’t looked in the last 10 or 20 years. I’ve never heard from anybody I trust that this is stuff really worth looking into. I say that with some caution. I have some friends who are true believers. One of the things I’ve discovered is—you mentioned the Catholic press—there are very few religious believers who are UFO believers. It turns out to be a religion substitute for a lot of people. And I have a good friend who is a devout Catholic and a UFO—I wouldn’t say believer—is researcher. Here’s really how I put it. Back in the days when I was running the Vatican Observatory—I just retired—back in those days, if you had come to me with a research project that was a way of searching for life on other planets, and it looked like the kind of science that would give me interesting results even if you found nothing, which is what SETI is doing, I’d say, “Go for it.” Because even if the odds are small, we’d be crazy not to look. But I could be wrong. Maybe we really are alone. You know, the odds, at least to finding life the way we think of it, are getting smaller and smaller the more places we look. Though the oceans of Europa, maybe they’ve got fish or bacteria or something. I hope. I wrote a thesis about that 50 years ago, proposing that. I’d be delighted to find that. If you came to me and said you wanted to study UFOs, I would say, “I’m not going to do that.” I would say, “Forget it. It’s a dead end.” Worse than that, it has been so poisoned by the charlatans who are out there trying to sell you a bill of goods, you know, the Erich von Dänikens and the like. When you look into what they’re writing, you realize they’re faking their data, they’re cherry-picking their data, they desperately want to be the ones to discover. This goes to the deeper question of why do we do the science? Are we doing science so that I will be famous for the discovery I made and my textbooks in the future will have my name in them? Is that the kind of immortality I’m looking for? Or am I doing the science because truth gives me joy and the odds of finding truth in this particular research project are so appealing to me that I will have that little moment of God looking over my shoulder saying, “Wow, did you see what I did there? Isn’t that cool? Let’s look at the next one.” And there is a real issue, especially with the scientists you find on TV, of why are they doing it? Are they doing it because they want to be famous? Are they doing it because they want to sell books? Are they doing it because they’re in love with the truth? And it’s not a single, you know, because all of these things can feed into who you are and what you are.
Robert Duncan: Are you talking about maybe people like Avi Loeb at Harvard, who has been making a big splash about the importance of doing this kind of research?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: I don’t know him, and I’m not going to try to play, you know, guest psychologist trying to figure out what’s going on. I’ll tell you two people who I do know. I knew Carl Sagan pretty well, and I know Neil Tyson, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Both of them are good people. Both of them are real scientists. Both of them have changed, you know, would change their minds and change their opinions. I think when they were young, they were both much more ferocious about being anti-religious. And as they get older, they realize the evidence isn’t as simple as I thought. I think both of them did have a hunger to be known, which is why they would go on TV. And also both of them were subject to terrible criticism and jealousy from the people that didn’t get on the Johnny Carson Show or whatever. But both of them also were more interested in telling people about the stuff than in cooking the data to make themselves look good. So I have respect for those guys.
Robert Duncan: Monsignor Corrado Balducci used to speak publicly about extraterrestrial life and even UFOs. And one of the reasons he took it so seriously was because he said, “Our religion is based on eyewitness testimony. And if we don’t take seriously the eyewitness testimony of people who claim to have seen things in the skies, we have a problem.” What’s your reaction to that?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: That’s a really important point. And it is such a tangled mess. Any lawyer will tell you that eyewitness testimony is the worst kind of testimony because five people will see an accident and see five different things. But it works only if there are five different people observing it. It works only if there’s more than one line of evidence. This is the way science doesn’t prove things—science never proves—but creates more confidence in an idea. If it seems to fit many different ways of looking at it, we all come to the same conclusion. So yes, we should take people seriously, but we should also be aware that people will project onto what they see what they expect to see. Happens all the time in science. And that having seen something interesting, you want more. You want more evidence. You want the piece of alien technology that you’ve got in the lab that everybody can poke. You want three or four different kinds of infrared, ultraviolet, other sorts of images of varying clarity, of improving clarity that make you realize this is what I’m looking for. We’re not there. My fear is we’re never going to be there because what people are seeing could very well be something really interesting, but we’re interpreting it in terms of aliens because we can’t think of anything else that it might be, or because we want them to be aliens so much. When in fact, we have to take seriously the “U” in unidentified. As long as we recognize they’re unidentified, we’re not going to be there. But as soon as you leap to the conclusion that I already know what it is, that’s where the downfall occurs.
Robert Duncan: Is there a way of doing research on UFOs that could be responsible?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: It’s very, very difficult at this point because there have been so many people who have been trying to sell you bills of goods. And it’s sad. I can see 50 years from now people doing research on Mars, or we’ve got astronauts there, continually claiming to find life, and it turns out to be life just like life on Earth, and then we don’t know: was it Martian or was it contamination? The important thing to know is that no science is perfect. I’m not perfect. I could be totally wrong. I have to go on my gut of what is the most likely direction to do science, where I think there’s going to be an outcome that I can support. But when you get gray hair like mine, you’ve been around long enough to see theories that we thought were absolutely solid turn out to fall in the face of new evidence, and other theories that we just thought were maybe a possibility, and the new evidence goes, “You know what? That was right all along.” So you have to be prepared to be surprised.
Robert Duncan: So you’ve spoken in the course of these questions about how excited you would be, nevertheless, if we were to discover life. How would that change theology, or would it?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, it’s funny. There was a fellow named Ted Peters who works for the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. About 10 years ago, he did a survey of people of every religion, including no religion, to ask, you know, if we found intelligent aliens, how would that change your opinion of religion? And the universal answer—90 percent or more of every different religious group, from the evangelicals to the atheists—was, “It would show I was right all along.” And the fact that we haven’t found that evidence hasn’t stopped people from thinking they were right all along. So it’s not a critical experiment. What I think has happened is that in our heads, we’ve already—living in the world of science fiction, I got nothing against science fiction, I love science fiction—we’re so used to the concept that there ought to be aliens out there that if we did find them, the answer would be, “Well, it’s about time.” I think we’ve already built into the cosmology, the worldview that we happen to have in the West in the year 2026, we’ve got that built into our assumptions about how the universe works already that I don’t think it would change much. And the more scary thing that people kind of are afraid to look at is, what if we are unique?
Robert Duncan: They’re both troubling hypotheses.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Either way, it’s a sobering thought.
Robert Duncan: I don’t want to make too reductionistic of an argument in the sense of, well, if it’s not in the Bible... But if there were such a discovery—I mean, we’re not talking about necessarily amoebas—but it would seem like the Church was ignorant of something very important.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, here’s what’s in the Bible: discussions of the Nephilim in Genesis. Who the heck are the Nephilim? Frankly, I don’t know. And biblical scholars have— What I think is it’s the way of the author of Genesis trying to incorporate the cosmology of 2,500 years ago, which talked about monsters and creatures and strange beings like you find in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and especially the Odyssey. What you find are the Psalms or the Book of Job talking about when God created the stars and named them and called them by name and they sang to Him with joy, which is beautiful poetry. But it shows that the author of Scripture then was not afraid of the idea that God created more than just you and me. We’ve got in our theology the concept of angels, creatures made by God. They’re creatures. They’re not supernatural. They’re creatures, and different from human beings. It really was only the Enlightenment that wanted to paint humans at the top of the pyramid, not in the sense of the Psalms, “Oh my God, you’ve made us a little less than gods,” but in the exclusive—to the point where the Enlightenment scientists refused to believe that meteorites were rocks from outer space. That’s really a very modern idea of this superiority of “we are the pinnacle of creation.” We’re not the pinnacle of creation. We weren’t even made on the seventh day. The Sabbath was the pinnacle of creation. The weekend is the pinnacle of creation.
Robert Duncan: I agree.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: So the weekend, when wherever you are, if you’ve got intellect and free will, you can choose to contemplate creation and be amazed at the Creator and, incidentally, love the other creatures you find in creation.
Robert Duncan: Have you heard this quote that’s been attributed to St. John Paul II that a child had asked him about aliens and the Pope allegedly responded, “Remember that they are children of God,” in quite a positively formulated—
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, I think all he’s saying is really all I’ve been saying. If there’s a creature, which is to say something created, which is able to be aware of itself, aware of other creatures, and free to choose to love or withhold love, that’s, you know, according to Thomas Aquinas, the image and likeness of God. What makes them aliens? They’re our cousins. Or to refer to the way that G.K. Chesterton talked about creation in Orthodoxy, you know, the Earth is not our mother. The Earth is not something we can exploit, not any of those, but the Earth is our sister. And as he says, “a little dancing sister that you can laugh at as well as love.” All of these would be our siblings. And that includes if, you know, somehow we managed to make it out of silicon and wires in some kind of computer, which we’re a long ways from doing, but what the heck? Human beings have been creating such creatures since the first baby was born.
Robert Duncan: So I’d like to go back to something else that you said earlier about how imagining things about space, whether we’re talking about UFOs or aliens, is a substitute religion. Maybe you could unpack that a little bit for me. Like, what would the need for a substitute religion be in modernity, and why does it take that particular shape?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Great questions. And you probably need a sociologist more than me to ask that one. I’ll talk about, you know, the way my own experiences and temptations have run. I think people love to be in control, and we’re afraid of anything that we can’t control, we can’t deal with, we can’t— When I go on a trip, I think ahead of all the things that can go wrong. And what would I do if the trains are delayed, and what happens if the plane is diverted, and how would I—none of these things happen. And when they do happen, it never happens the way I expect it anyway. But that’s part of the goofiness of me as a traveler. People, for whatever reasons, are sometimes deathly afraid of God and the concept of God and the possibility of God. But only something outside of our creation can give creation meaning. When you reject God because you had a really bad confirmation teacher, or because you’re desperate to make yourself look like you’re smarter than all those sheep—hey, Jesus came for the sheep. We are the sheep, and I embrace my sheepness. I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a sheep. But people who, especially in our culture of crazy individualism, on the one hand we want to be so individual, and then we’re feeling lonely and wondering why that happened. So out of that loneliness, we then create a desire for something that is not only something that will replace the otherness of God to give my life meaning, but especially knowledge that the community—those scientists, those astronomers, those professors—they’re hiding it from us. They don’t want us to know. It’s secret knowledge.
Robert Duncan: They say that the Vatican’s hiding it too.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Yeah, absolutely. But if you go to this website, I will show you. If you eat this apple, you will become like gods and you’ll find out all the things that God’s been hiding from you. It’s a temptation as old as Adam and Eve. Gnosticism. It’s Gnosticism. It’s the desire for secret knowledge. All the people who think that they’re going to, you know, cure COVID or whatever the next virus is going to be by finding some cure on the internet that nobody else has found. If it’s on the internet, anybody can find it, but forget that. And what’s deeper than that? What’s deeper than that is this desire to think that me being smarter than you makes me better than you, as if smarter is better.
Robert Duncan: I think there’s an interesting way to segue into another question I wanted to ask you here, because what you’re describing has a lot to do with a loss of faith and trust in institutions. We can’t, right? We can’t trust the major institutions to tell us the truth. One way I’ve seen that maybe manifest in terms of space and space exploration is arguably the backseat that NASA has taken in the public sphere and the front seat that SpaceX has taken in terms of its capabilities, the sophistication of the rockets, the landings. Of course, Elon Musk is famous for promising free speech on the internet through his acquisition of X. So I guess what I’m asking you is, how do you see what you’re describing playing out in the domain of space today?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, you’ve got to remember, for all of SpaceX, it was still NASA that got back to the moon again. We have this mythology of the lone genius, whether it’s Doc Brown making the time machine in his garage. You find this in science fiction, the competent man that was the hero of all the classic stories, whether it’s Heinlein or any of the things that John Campbell would publish. A lot of that came, I think, in reaction against the realization that we can’t do it alone anymore. And we desperately would love to believe that Elon Musk built those rockets. I’m sorry, he didn’t. You know, he wouldn’t know how to make a slide rule work. We’d like to believe that, you know, a person who I actually think is a genius, a person who I actually admire, Steve Jobs—his vision made Apple. But he didn’t do the wiring. And even his buddy Steve Wozniak couldn’t eventually have done all the wiring. All of these accomplishments require institutions, which require bureaucracy, which require trusting each other.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: One of the great experiences I had at MIT was actually taking part in musical theater and other plays and seeing how a play only works if the actors trust the other actors rather than thinking they have to carry the entire show themselves. It’s the way that science and engineering works. And to be able to not suppress yourself, but give all of yourself alongside a team of everybody else giving all of themselves, that’s what makes a successful sports team. And you want to say that, oh, the superstar is going to come. Well, how many basketball teams have had one superstar and, you know, get knocked out in the first round of the playoffs because a team of five good players will beat one superstar and four not-so-goods? But people don’t want to hear that. They want to believe in the superstar.
Robert Duncan: The Messiah.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: The Messiah. And the Messiah, first thing he does is to collect 12 other guys. Not that as God He couldn’t, but as God He doesn’t want to do it all Himself. He wants us to participate in creation. He wants us to participate in salvation, which is the most incredible compliment that God can give us: make us little less than gods, to go back to Psalm 8.
Robert Duncan: I think another story that is current now as it relates to space writ large is maybe best exemplified or articulated by somebody like Eric Weinstein, who has said, “You know what? We’re going to blow ourselves up on this planet and we need to stop playing around with chemical rockets and we need to really do physics so that we can go colonize another part of the galaxy, really, and find another habitable planet because this one’s maybe doomed.” So on the one hand, there’s a great message of hope and optimism and encouragement to do really sort of inventive science, maybe science fiction. And on the other hand, there’s a very pessimistic view about what’s going to happen on this planet. So I think that story is something that a lot of people maybe buy into, and I wonder what your response is to it.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: What I do find, and I go around giving a lot of talks, especially to schools, high schools, and universities, is a deep pessimism in young people precisely from hearing this kind of stuff. And the pessimism has enough element of truth that you don’t want to tell people, “Don’t worry, it’s all going to fix itself,” because it’s not. And the longer we put off doing the things we need to do, the harder it’s going to be to recover. But again, that’s nothing new. If anybody had actually read Laudato Si’, rather than the press conference, you know, “Oh, it’s all about ecology.” Really, Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’ encyclical, is about original sin. And all of the crises that are occurring right now on the planet are the result of original sin. And the seven deadly sins—we’ve never invented an eighth one to come along—the selfishness, the greed, the really lack of faith in God and each other, it’s been the crisis since the beginning of time, going back to Adam and Eve. And the answers are not a technological fix, even though we need the technological fix. Because the technological fix will not fix everything and then we’ll have to say, “Got it done.” T.S. Eliot wrote a play 90 years ago called The Rock. And it has a series of poems in the middle of it. And one of them ends up with this marvelous phrase. He’s writing this in the ‘30s, when technocracy or fascism or all these different isms were going to solve everything. And he was talking about social systems, but I think it applies to physical systems. He has this phrase talking about people looking for systems so perfect that no one will need to be good. It doesn’t exist. Every techno-fix will fix what it was designed to fix and create a new problem further down the line. Two examples. The automobile has changed society. And yeah, a lot of bad things, but on the whole, probably for the better. But there’s an example of it solved the problem of transportation and created a bunch of new problems. And it would not have worked because the engines that they had in the 1920s weren’t powerful enough and no one had the bright idea of putting lead in the gasoline, which then created a whole new set of problems. Refrigeration has done fantastic things for allowing people to store food and feed themselves in a way that couldn’t have been done 120 years ago. But the original refrigerators required ammonia, which was incredibly dangerous. And you don’t want to have that in your household. Then somebody came up with this marvelous chemical that was completely chemically inert, chlorofluorocarbons, and only 50 years later we go, “Nope, that’s going to create problems too.”
Robert Duncan: Well, nuclear physics too. I mean, is there not an argument, a Christian theology-based anti-science argument in here that given the circumstances of Original Sin, we probably shouldn’t build more powerful tools?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: That argument could be made, and I find the counter to it in Scripture in a very interesting and odd place. The Book of Job has Job in this deep conversation with God, and Job thinks he’s a holy man and he thinks he’s a good man. And he says, okay, God takes everything. “The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.” What do I expect? Because God, you’re God, you’re so big, I can’t even contemplate You. And God’s answer to Job is, no, you missed the point. It’s not just that I’ve made all of these marvelous things, but you haven’t even taken the time to see how I made them. You see the light, you haven’t gone to the dwelling of light. You see the Earth, but you haven’t gone to the foundations of the Earth. It’s an invitation to actually learn more. God creates in the light. God wants us to know. God wants us to know, knowing that we will be tempted and we will fail, and God is bigger than all of that and will forgive us all the time, making us pay for the mistakes we’ve made because that’s part of the rules of the game. But I really do believe it’s two steps forward, one step back. At the end of the day, the two steps forward, one step back gets you one step forward. But we should never take a technology without asking ourselves what are the possible negative consequences, and without looking every step along the way for the negative consequences because they’re going to be there, and never give up the search for how do we make it better, and how do we make it better, because we’re never going to make it perfect. And we’ll never, because that’s the way we have to live our lives. I’m never going to be perfect. I’m going to continually sin. Either I fall into despair looking at the stupid things I’ve done, or I’m amazed that God still loves me, and not only loves me, but loves that guy over there who irritates the heck out of me. God loves that person too, and maybe time for me to start loving that person too, because that’s really how we grow. And usually we grow in directions different from the direction we thought we were facing because we don’t do it ourselves. We do it as a society that stumbles from one crisis to the next crisis to the next crisis, all in good faith, at the end of the day saying, you know, for all of its problems, the year 2026 was better than the year 1926, and a heck of a lot better than the year 1826.
Robert Duncan: So we’ve been talking about technology and crises, and I think that’s maybe a good way to talk about what Pope Leo said to you today. So can you tell the audience why you met the Pope and what he said?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, this is why I’m in town in Rome today. I’m part of an outfit called the Vatican Observatory. I’m a scientist there. I used to be the director. We’ve got a telescope in Arizona, and to support the work of that telescope in Arizona, we formed a foundation which supports us—fundraising supports us—and also encouraging the work that we’re doing. Why is there a Vatican Observatory Foundation? Why is there a Vatican Observatory? To show the world that the Church supports science. So we’re having a meeting of the board this week. Among our board members is Sister Raffaella Petrini, the president of the Governorate of the Vatican, basically the mayor of Vatican City if you want to put it that way, or the president of the Vatican City State. And she arranged for us to get to meet Pope Leo. And the Pope addressed us, remembering that it was his predecessor, Leo XIII, who founded the observatory in 1891 to show the world that the Church supports science, to encourage us to do that because Church and science today are facing a common enemy of people who are despairing of ever knowing the truth and thinking, well, since we never know if anything’s true, or if anything is true, why even worry about it? And I’ll just live my life without worrying about consequences because consequences are only truth, and there is no truth. There’s only truthiness, the way that Stephen Colbert would have put it. And Leo was saying to us, thank God for the observatory. You are showing the world that even though we never expect to know the truth perfectly or completely, we do expect to know more. This actually goes back to something that John Paul II wrote in his Faith and Reason encyclical, which goes, “Faith and reason are the wings that lead us to the truth.” And it sounds very pretty until you realize the significance of that image. First of all, that faith and reason are equals because if one wing is stronger than the other, the bird falls over—and that neither faith nor reason—are the goals. The goal of my life is not to be a Catholic. The goal of evangelization is not to make everybody Catholics. The goal of my life as a scientist is not to be the best scientist I can be because science is the end in itself, much less to make everybody else scientists. The goal is truth. If I’m doing really clever science but it doesn’t lead to the truth, it’s not good science. If I have a really beautiful theology, very clever and glorious liturgies, but my interest ends with the liturgy, then it’s not leading me to God because God is truth. Which is, to put it another way, I worship truth. As a scientist, I have to worship truth. I would not be satisfied publishing a paper that got me the Nobel Prize even though I knew it was a lie. And that means that we are dedicating ourselves to this idea, to the proposition that we can come closer to truth, that we can come closer to God, and that our faith and our science are the tools that we have to bring us closer to the truth that is God.
Robert Duncan: It was interesting because it seemed to me that Pope Leo was saying that the Observatory had a role, even though your telescopes are pointed out, to promote the stewardship of creation.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: How does that work? Well, the Vatican is actually a very small place. There’s the old joke, “How many people work at the Vatican?” “About half.” How many people work at the Vatican is less than the number of people who work for your typical diocese. And the budget is less than the typical diocese. It can’t support all sorts of science. So, in a symbolic way, it supports astronomy as the one science that everybody can appreciate. We all can understand looking at the stars. But we do that using science and, in that way, validating science itself. And that goes back to the way that Pope Leo XIII set it up. We’re doing astronomy to show the world that the Church supports not astronomy only, but science in general. Now, the other cool thing about this is—and I’ve been around long enough to see this—the idea of climate change, that came from looking at Earth as if it were a planet. The idea goes back to the 19th century and a guy named Tyndall. The idea that climate change—we can learn about the Earth’s atmosphere by studying other planets’ atmospheres. Carl Sagan did that and looked at the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus and said, “Ah, that’s why Venus is so incredibly hot. And gee, might that have something to do with...” And that goes back to the 1960s. When I was a student at MIT, there were people working on that topic even then. And so our astronomy does, in fact, have a direct link to how we view the Earth, not as, you know, this pleasant peninsula of Italy that we’re on or the pleasant peninsula of Michigan that I came from, but an entire planet, an entire ecosystem, a science that shows that every nation’s pollution affects every other nation’s pollution. That ties both the astronomy we do with the immediate problems we have here on Earth.
Robert Duncan: Is there another more recent complication in terms of Laudato Si’ in terms of the amount of space junk that’s out there now and you have all these companies launching satellites for internet services like Starlink and others in China? There’s a question about the environmental impact, but it also makes your work more difficult, I think, right?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Yes, it does. There are so many satellites out there, and some—for all, you know, bashing Elon Musk—Starlink, those guys have gone to the effort of trying to make satellites that don’t reflect so much light so that you don’t just have a whole cascade of little dots going overhead, at least in the evening hours. And when they’re finally—you know, at midnight, the sun’s not going to be hitting them. But even though satellites are emitting infrared radiation so that infrared astronomers now have to deal with this glowing sphere of little objects, the problem’s even worse. If one satellite should run into another satellite and create debris, the debris then hits more satellites and you have a cascade of debris until all of the satellites are useless, which doesn’t do anybody any good. Back in 2018, there was the anniversary of the U.N. Treaty on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. The Vatican Observatory actually hosted a workshop out in Castel Gandolfo of a number of the astronomers and the space industry people and the diplomats where we just outlined that even in 2018, you know, nearly 10 years ago, 90 nations had departments of space. Even if you’re not launching satellites, you’re using the data that come from satellites. If you’re a third-world country and you can’t afford to explore and really map what’s going on in your country, you can view from above with a satellite, see where the deforestation is happening, see where the heat spots are. There were, at that time, 20 different entities capable of launching things into space. There’s probably more now. There is a law, but law only works when everybody agrees that it’s worth following. There’s nothing about a red light that will make you stop until you realize that if I don’t stop for the red light and expect the other guy to stop for the red light, I can’t get across the intersection. It’s for my benefit that I stop for the red light. I fear that it’s going to take a catastrophe in space of some sort before the people using space recognize that coming up with a system of regulating who gets what orbits and a way of enforcing that—it’s doable. It’s possible. But people are going to have to actually experience the need for it. Maybe we’ll be wise. The Starlink people, the SpaceX people, are wise enough to at least realize that having the astronomers mad at them was not good for their business. But having your satellites run into each other is also not good for your business. The only thing we can do is provide a place for these people to talk to each other, not labeling them as evil, not labeling them as, you know, “Oh my gosh, they’re the bad guys, I’m never going to deal with them,” but working with them out of love, out of appreciation of the good they can do and the better good we can do if we work out a way of cooperating.
Robert Duncan: Did you say anything specific? I know you met Pope Leo last year. You probably met him multiple times. But on this occasion, did you say anything to him? Did he say anything to you?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Not me personally. That was not my place. Really, what I wanted to do was to introduce him to the Foundation. And, you know, we’ve raised a million dollars this past year to support the astronomy we’re doing in America.
Robert Duncan: Those are two questions. So one is, what is the specific science you’re doing? And the other is, who are these people that want to support faith and science through the Foundation?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, the work we’re doing with the astronomy, we’ve got a telescope in Arizona of a size that there aren’t too many anymore. It’s a two-meter telescope. It’s not one of these giant ones. But there are things that we can do that they can’t.
Robert Duncan: Such as?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Because it’s much more flexible. A big telescope is in such high demand that it’s got to be scheduled months in advance by people competing for their little tiny bit of time. A telescope like ours can be used to, “Oh my gosh, there’s something interesting. Let’s go look at that tonight.” And we’ll throw away whatever, you know, I was planning to use that telescope for. We’ve now automated it to the point where it can be used remotely, including by students. We’ve got a program now where students at Jesuit universities in America—a few at the moment, we hope to expand it—can actually use this research-level telescope in their classroom or as part of their research. The kind of research we’re doing would be recovering near-Earth asteroids to make their orbits better so we know if they’re going to hit us or not, or if they’re in a place where we can exploit them if we want to do that. Or simply to get an inventory of what’s out there because that tells us a little bit about how the solar system was formed and evolved. So there’s a lot of asteroid work being done with our telescope. There are people looking at stellar clusters, lots of stellar clusters over a long period of time because you need a large amassment of data to be able to see patterns. And these are long-term survey projects that NASA won’t fund because you’re not going to get an answer in three years. But we can do this over a period of 10 or 20 years. The one other thing the Foundation does is provides a place, a website, vaticanobservatory.org, where people can see not only the science we’re doing but the faith and science resources that we’ve put together. Because there are a lot of teachers who want to be able to say, “What about this topic?” And there’s a lot of junk on the internet, let’s face it, a lot of people trying to sell you stuff. Well, this is what we’re trying to sell you, except these are real scientists and people working for the Church who are saying, these are topics and locations and websites that we think you might find useful. So take a look at vaticanobservatory.org.
Robert Duncan: Is there anything specific that maybe you’ve discovered, either you personally or the observatory has discovered, that’s made an advance in our knowledge of the universe that people can wrap their heads around?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: One of the very first things we did with this telescope 30 years ago when we built it was to look at the Andromeda galaxy—people have looked at it a million times—but look for the tiny flashes of light that represented a star being occulted by a bit of dark matter that had been theorized called a MACHO, a Massive Compact Halo Object, in the halo of the Andromeda galaxy. And if there was enough of these dark matter MACHOs to account for the dark matter we see in Andromeda, then we should be seeing these flashes. We saw just enough of the flashes to know that we could observe them if they were there, and not nearly enough to show that MACHOs were the answer. It was a negative result, but it was a very important negative result that said that whatever the dark matter in the universe is, it’s not these guys. We have to go look at some of the other theories. That was a major breakthrough that came from our telescope. A project that I was involved in was to look at the objects out beyond Neptune. We call them trans-Neptunian objects. Pluto is the biggest and most wonderful of them. It’s not a planet.
Robert Duncan: Sometimes it is, right?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: If people who want to make Pluto a planet think that being a planet is better than being something else, you know, you’re guilty of planetism. Come on. Pluto is what Pluto is, which is glorious. But we looked at just doing a survey of the colors of a couple of hundred of these guys. And you get one a night, say five nights, you’ve got five of them. You’ve got to go back, you know, 20 or 30 more times. That took a 10-year research program. Nobody else had the time to do that. We showed not only that the colors were interesting, that there are two populations of colors, that the colors were related to the kinds of orbits that they had. And that gives us an idea of how their orbits evolved over time. And that tied into ideas of how the orbits of the solar system and how the formation of the solar system itself occurred. All of these are, you know, just little bricks in the cathedral. But they allow us to come up with a much more complete inventory of what’s out there and a sense of how it was all made. Now, the cute thing about the origin of the solar system is knowing this is not going to put any more food in your stomach. But it feeds your soul. It’s the kind of question that we just get joy out of seeing. “Oh, God did that? I wouldn’t—you’re right. And that is such a cool way of doing things.” That joy is universal among human beings. I found that when I was living in the poorest parts of Kenya, that people there wanted to look through the telescope and then ask questions. “What are those rings around Saturn? What have they found when they went to the moon?” Because this is the seventh day of creation. This is the Sabbath where we kick back and stop worrying about what’s for lunch for just one day and say, “Who is this God who made this and made me?”
Robert Duncan: Is part of the work of the Observatory, at least historically, a PR effort to undo the Church’s handling of the Galileo case?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: You’d think. That sounds like a very logical way of doing it. But you dig into the history and you find two really curious things. First of all, the Church was doing really good astronomy before there was an observatory. Here in Rome, there’s this marvelous church, the Church of St. Ignatius, famous for the dome that’s a fake dome. They ran out of money. They never built the dome. It’s just painted in perspective. But Angelo Secchi, an Italian Jesuit, used the pillars that were going to support that dome, and instead they used them to support his telescopes. And he invented astrophysics. And he made such a name for himself that it was Secchi’s assistant who went to the Pope: “Let’s have an observatory.” It’s a symbol of national—you know, where every nation had its own national observatory. There is no mention of Galileo and the idea that somehow the Church was embarrassed by Galileo in the founding documents. The whole idea that the Church and Galileo had a falling out because of science is a 19th-century creation. It comes out of the politics of the 19th century, the nationalism in Europe when they’re trying to build nation states, the anti-immigrant fervor in America when they wanted to keep Catholics out, like my grandfather. What the Church did with Galileo was wrong. But what was wrong was not Church being anti-science. It was Church going after Galileo for personal reasons or political reasons, but not scientific reasons. You can read the transcript of the Galileo trial, and they never discuss the science. They never debate the science. It’s not what people think. We have this tendency to look at things in the past through the lens of, well, if I was there, that’s what it would have been. But it turns out the motivations of people doing these things in the past were very different from what we would have thought. And part of the joy of history is to put yourself truly in what was going on rather than a glib and facile imagination of what was going on.
Robert Duncan: I mean, I think that even if—and I’m sure you’re right about the politics of the day being the real explanation for what happened with Galileo—I think the symbol of Galileo for many people is that the Church had previously committed itself to a geocentric model of the universe, and it turned out that that was wrong. So the real case to make is that the Church had never committed itself to that model?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, here’s a little bit of the timeline. It’s 2026. Four hundred years ago, Galileo is writing this book that’s going to get him into trouble in 1626 based on stuff that he’d first written in 1610 or 1616. So he’s been around 16 years, and he won’t get in trouble for another six years. So this is, first of all, if the Church was going to be down on him, they took a long time. The theory that he’s talking about in 1610 or 1626 was a theory that went back to 1542, like World War II to us. It had been around for a real long time when Copernicus published his book. It was just a couple of years before the Council of Trent. Council of Trent spent 18 years looking for heresies all over the place, and they never talk about Copernicus. It’s not because they didn’t know about it. Everybody knew about it. The Copernican system didn’t work with what Galileo knew at the time. He didn’t have the goods. It turns out, in the long run, he was more right than the people against him. But it took 100 years of science before we finally figured out why it worked. The whole story is a lot more complicated, and it’s really a cautionary tale not of religion, “watch out about science,” but rather science, “watch out about being too sure that you know what’s right and what’s wrong.”
Robert Duncan: Do you think that the Church has ever, on this issue or on any issue—I don’t want to get into the technicalities of levels of authority—but has it ever committed itself to a scientific view or a claim that’s been proven wrong?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, it all depends what you mean by committed and what you mean by the Church. And it is those different levels that matter because in every epoch there will be people who will be saying, “Oh, I’m afraid of that. You can’t talk about that. Don’t say that.” And other people saying, “What do you mean? Of course we can talk about that. Of course we say that.” Because the Church is, if nothing, the world’s biggest debating society. It always has been. And it has never successfully spoken with one voice about anything beyond the Apostles’ Creed. And that’s okay, because we only learn by debating, and we only debate by me strongly taking a side and you disagreeing with me, and in the arguments we eventually discover that we’re probably arguing about the wrong thing.
Robert Duncan: Or we’re both wrong.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: We’re both wrong and both right. Right.
Robert Duncan: So, can we talk a bit about Pope Leo? He’s made a lot of statements in his various homilies. He’ll reference the trillions of stars. He seems to reference mathematics sometimes. Is this going to be a pope for whom science has a particular role in his teaching?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: We can only look and find out. After all, he was trained as a mathematician. He’s very comfortable with science. Villanova, where he came from, has a fantastic astronomy department, and I’m sure he had exposure to great astronomy from them. I hope so. The interesting thing that’s happening at this juncture in the history of the Church is—I’ll tell you what is new and different. Forget about UFOs. There’s some 1948, you know, come on. What is new and different are, first of all, the number of young men who are in STEM studying at universities and becoming active in the local Newman groups and going to daily Mass. I have been, in the last six months, going to lots of universities giving talks, and I’ve been blown away by the number of the very people who a generation ago you thought would have been disciples of Richard Dawkins going, “No, that doesn’t work. Why? Let me find something that does.” Maybe this came out of their experience of COVID and the isolation that came out of that and the realization that the glib—and maybe it won’t last and they’ll all leave the Church tomorrow. But the other thing I found as someone who talks faith and science is the questions I get now from the non-believers are not, “How can you believe in that stuff?” but, “Oh, how do you believe in that stuff?” It’s a very different kind of emphasis. It’s not, “Oh, you’re crazy too,” but, “Okay, there’s something going on here. I’m curious about this because I’ve been having these questions myself.”
Robert Duncan: Do you have specific technical questions that recur in terms of how, on the one hand, the Church says this, on the other hand, this is what we know about the world?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Well, it depends on the audience, but certainly these young people, the more technologically sophisticated ones know the answer to this one, but a lot of people will be surprised to find out that it was a Catholic priest who invented the Big Bang Theory, that it’s not something we’re afraid of, nor is it something that we lean on to say, “Aha, you see, the Bible was right all along.” Georges Lemaître, the father who came up with this, was the first to say no. The Big Bang is not about the creation of the universe. It’s what we think might have happened after the creation of the universe, but the creation was singularity different from what happens afterwards. We find a sophisticated difference between people who realize the science is one thing, the way you use the science is something else. If you say a nuclear bomb is bad, that’s not saying that Einstein’s theory of E equals MC squared is not true. It just means that you want to think before you actually employ some of these possibilities, and that’s not a bad thing to be able to say. Just because I can do it, do I really want to do it? Which goes to anything in life, you know, besides that. But more the kinds of people who in the past would have wanted to show that I’m smarter than everyone else now are not so hungry because I think the smarter scientists are the ones who are not afraid to say, “I don’t know.” Because without saying, “I don’t know,” you could never then say, “Let’s find out,” and you’ll never be doing any progress. You’ll be satisfied with what you think you know. Which incidentally is also true in a life of faith. If you think you’ve got God figured out and I do these five liturgical practices and God will have to let me into the great nightclub in the sky, that’s not a faith based on love.
Any more than saying, “Well, I know my friend, I know my spouse, got them figured out. I got the answers in the back of the book.” That’s not love. Love is always discovering new things. Love is always going, “Oh, I never noticed that. Oh, that’s what they were talking about.” And that’s the way we approach the universe through science. That’s the way we approach God through our religion.
Robert Duncan: I think talking about young people and what you’ve just said would make it a good time for me to ask you about how you became Brother Guy Consolmagno and how you came to marry these two worlds in faith and science.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: I was born at the right place in the right time. Being from a family, an incredibly loving family of college-educated parents, college-educated grandparents, so I was not the first in my family. And it was understood that I’d get a doctorate someday. Going to the Jesuit high school where they made me comfortable because I was surrounded by kids who were smarter than me. And that’s the first step of being able to grow. I had always a deep faith, and I always had a fascination with the universe and how things worked. And I was taught by nuns, the Sisters of Charity, back in Our Lady Queen of Martyrs in Birmingham, Michigan—Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Beverly, whatever town it’s in. It’s one of the northern suburbs of Detroit—who encouraged me in science because this was the ‘60s. And that fear that split the world into “you’ve got to believe science” or “you’ve got to believe religion” hadn’t infected us yet. I think it was the post-World War II sense of science won the war. It was really technology, but people had confused the two. And so I started kindergarten when Sputnik was launched. I was a senior in high school when people landed on the moon. Science and space was in the air. Science fiction was in the air. My best friend was going to MIT. When I visited him, I said, this is a cool place. This is where I’m finding joy. And yet, when I hit 30 and I got my doctorate from Arizona, I’d gotten through my MIT days. I was now an MIT postdoc. I realized that wasn’t enough. So I went off to the Peace Corps and then learned from the Africans the joy of discovering and how we’re hungry for more than bread. I got a job teaching at a little school in Pennsylvania called Lafayette College, and I loved that small-college teaching. I’d been dating somebody. It didn’t work out. We’re much happier not dating each other. Okay, this is God’s way of telling us. You try out different paths, and you find out which ones end in closed doors, which ones end in open doors. It occurred to me then that I was a nerd. I was not going to be great at helping out people with the kinds of problems that I had never experienced because I had such a privileged background, such a privileged life, loving parents, no addictions, none of the crazy things, mostly because liquor and drugs never appealed to me, that kind of thing. What did appeal to me was the academic life and a life that stood for something bigger than myself and this unbroken love of God and the Creator and my religion. I was a nerd about my religion. I was a fanatic about my science. And I realized as a brother, I could indulge these passions for knowing and representing the Church in the field of knowledge without having to deal with the lack I had. I’m great at listening to people. I’m terrible at giving them an idea of what to do because I don’t know, because I’ve never had to deal with that. As a brother, I could be part of the Church and take the unique skills that I had and not worry about all the unique skills I don’t have. A typical Jesuit has to be free to be assigned anywhere in the world that the Pope wants. This is what the fourth vow of the Jesuits is. I can’t take that vow because I’m not free, because there’s a whole range of jobs that I’d be worse than useless at. I’d be a terrible parish priest. But I can do this one job, which is doing astronomy. I thought I’d be doing it at a university when I entered as a brother. Instead, under obedience—I joke—they wouldn’t let me go to a university. They made me come to Rome and eat that terrible food. You look at that horrible scenery. Oh my gosh, I’ve got to deal with a thousand meteorites when meteorites happens to be my science. In other words, I wound up at the place where God could use my talents. And it wasn’t my choice and it wasn’t my plan, except that my choice and my plan was to go where God pushed me. And nothing is more delightful than to feel that you are in the place where God wants you to be.
Robert Duncan: Scientists often, correct me if I’m wrong, subject their own theories and hypotheses to rigorous tests. Have you done that with your faith? Have you experienced doubt or dark nights of the soul?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Only about once or twice a minute. Of course you do. If you’re not testing it that way, if you’re not wondering, you know, do I love enough? Do I love that neighbor who’s irritating me? Am I, you know—a dear friend dies and I accept it. Does that mean that I didn’t love that person? How am I dealing with this? What does this say about my relationship? And the only way you answer that really is to go back to prayer and to go back to be with God once again—and find out where are You and how do I deal with encountering You over and over again? A scientific paper that has never been proved incomplete is a scientific paper that nobody ever bothered to read. You write papers in the hope that they will be superseded someday, that they were useful to get people to that next step, but once you got to the next step, you can forget about— I mean, nobody reads the Principia as a way of learning Newton’s physics. You read it for the history of it because it launched the rocket. It’s not the location of where the rocket ends. No faith should be satisfied with where it is without being tested. And the test, I think, is always a test of love because that’s what faith is ultimately all about.
Robert Duncan: It’s interesting because when I asked you that question, I thought you might have something to say about the ontological argument of the existence of God. But the test that you subject your faith to is a test of charity.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Do I experience love? This really is—it turns out, like most bright ideas that you have, it turns out somebody else came up with it first. There was a philosopher, Raïssa Maritain, famous mostly for being Jacques Maritain’s wife, but herself a great philosopher. And she said the direction to God was the existence of good people. It’s the theodicy argument turned on its head. Instead of saying, “If God is good, why is there evil in the world?” you could say, “If there is no God, why is there good?” Where did this good come from? Or why is there something at all instead of nothing? Why does existence exist? Why is there a universe, much less a universe that I can understand, much less a universe that gives me joy and makes me encounter beauty when I understand it? That’s a universe that smacks me in the face every day with the face of the Creator. And yet, of course, you doubt. And yet, of course, your own inadequacies make you wonder, am I good enough for this? To which the answer is, of course not, but who cares?
Robert Duncan: You look into the sky and you see beauty and the wonder of God’s creation. Other people look into the sky and see emptiness and chaos and meaninglessness. I interviewed Jonathan Lunine, who holds Carl Sagan’s chair at Cornell University.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: He did. He’s now actually at Caltech.
Robert Duncan: Oh, he is?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Yes.
Robert Duncan: When did that change?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Oh, about a year ago.
Robert Duncan: Okay. Apologies for not keeping up. But in any case, he said that people look into outer space and they treat it like an inkblot test. In other words, we see a reflection in the cosmos of our own psychology. And I thought that was interesting. And you also have said that we look into space to know who we are. So, at the risk of being reductive, who are we? What do we learn about ourselves when we look into space?
Br. Guy Consolmagno: When we look into space, we realize that that cosmos also fits inside our head. We are the universe reflecting on itself, being able to look and be afraid or look and be amazed. We are the self-awareness of the universe. We are the locus of love or fear or hatred or amazement. These things which are real even though you can’t quantify them. And by “we,” I mean any entity in any place in any time that had that intellect and free will that we call the image and likeness of God. The breath of God that allows itself to be in this universe. And not only that, it is crystallized in the reality of Jesus Christ incarnate in this universe, the ultimate expression of God’s love and care for the creation. The fact that love and care itself can exist and does exist. And by the Incarnation, the universe has been made redeemed, cleansed. But St. Athanasius has this marvelous phrase on the Incarnation. The universe by the Incarnation is cleansed and quickened. By “quickened,” it’s made pregnant in its essence. There is now a possibility for more. And that’s why, in spite of all the horrible things we’re doing to planet Earth and all the reasons to despair, I don’t despair.
Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about this in his poem “God’s Grandeur,” that though you look in the black west and everything seems horrible, a universe where all is trod and trod and smeared with man’s smell—Nonetheless, ah, in the bright break eastward, the Holy Ghost is visible with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. We have hope in the face of hopelessness. Not to say that we don’t have to do something about it. Not to say that we can let God do everything. But that our efforts are united with God’s efforts, who has already redeemed the universe.
Robert Duncan: Brother Guy Consolmagno, thank you for sitting down with Catholic News Service.
Br. Guy Consolmagno: Thank you so much.