9 ms·

Vatican Observatory

126 points by alexmolas 1y ago

pfdietz 1y ago
Brother Guy often showed (shows?) up at science fiction conventions in the Chicago area. Great fellow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno
- alexmolas 1y ago
  > Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it's turning God into a nature god I love this quote!
  - IncreasePosts 1y ago
    Jesuits love to play these motte and bailey mind games - ask him if he thinks Jesus actually performed his miracles or not.
    - abrenuntio 1y ago
      Would a true divine miracle be a suspension of order or a manifestation of it? Will it ever be possible to prove that some future human theory of reality is complete?
      - IncreasePosts 1y ago
        This is what I mean. Please let me know how a world with miracles is any different from creationism, which apparently religion needs to be protected from.
      - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
        A miracle, by definition, transcends the nature of the thing in question. The cause is not attributable to the power of the thing effected or anything in the world. If God is distinct from what is created, then a miracle cannot be said to be a manifestation of what is created. Pantheism, on the other hand, must deny miracles, because God and the universe are one, and so all apparent miracles are merely unaccounted for manifestations of reality and perhaps explainable by "some future human theory of reality". Since Jesuits (ostensibly) hold to a Catholic view in which God and the created order are distinct, they must therefore believe that miracles are not only possible, but do happen. The question is then largely whether a particular effect is miraculous or not.
  - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
    That quotes needs some unpacking, because many people have caricaturish notions of things like "faith" or "science" or "religion". > Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality To make this more comprehensible, I will render this as "Faith needs reason to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality" or "to make faith actually faith, not wishful thinking or superstition". That is the Catholic view. True faith, pace pop culture, is never blind. Faith concerns what is beyond what is knowable through reason. This is the reason for the parental analogies in the Bible. A child cannot understand why a parent is guiding him a certain way, but he trusts the parent to guide him well. By analogy, human reason cannot know certain things in its present condition, but some things have been revealed on authority established by other evidence or truths (hence why Christ argues from the Torah, etc. and performs thousands of miracles, with the resurrection at the pinnacle, to demonstrate his identity and his authority). So, faith is no substitute for reason; instead, reason puts faith in its place. In the beatific vision, faith is no longer necessary, analogously to how when a child becomes an adult, he no longer needs to trust his parents in the way he used to. He himself knows the things his parents did when he still did not. > to protect it from creationism I don't know what this means. Partly, this is because "creationism" is equivocal and means various things. The Catholic position accepts creatio ex nihilo, which is to say that the universe is created/kept in existence by God - the first cause - out of nothing, i.e., not as a mutation or transformation of some preexisting being. It has no official position on "evolution" per se (which is also equivocal), but it does reject evolutionism which is a metaphysical position. There is no official position about the details of how the first parents came to be, but it does hold that there were first parents from whom all other humans descend. The intellect and will (usually called the "soul") are taken to be the result of special acts of creation at each conception, and therefore not something generated by the parents. Catholics are permitted to believe in a range of evolutionary explanations (like adaptation and selection) and they are permitted to believe that the universe was created in 6 days (though blanket Biblical literalism is not traditional and rather modern; note that the Catholic Church compiled the diverse genres making up the Bible in the first place). Most Catholics probably accept the general prevailing cosmological view of an old universe, a figurative 6 days, evolutionary explanations in relation to the human body plan, etc. This may seem odd to those who come from certain American evangelical circles, which tend to get more attention in the American media. Those with a taste for speculation about how modern biology and Biblical accounts might be reconciled will find Ed Feser's posts [0][1] on the subject interesting. > which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it's turning God into a nature god This is interesting, because one thing that is characteristic of paganism is that the gods are of the world. They are beings like us, or personifications of natural phenomena. But God in the Catholic sense is not a being among many, but Being Itself by which all beings are. I'm not sure what Br. Guy's definition of "creationism" is here, though. A web search doesn't really give me a coherent picture of what he means either. I suspect he may be attacking a mechanistic metaphysics in which secondary causality doesn't really exist and God is some kind of cosmic occasionalist puppet master. In that sense, I you could argue it sounds more pagan - or pan(en)theistic - rather than Christian. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-original-sin-part-i.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-... [1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-original-sin-part-ii.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-...
erk__ 1y ago
Brady Haran of Numberphile and a whole bunch of other channels visited the observatory some years back and made some videos and interviews. The Pope's Astronomer - Interview with Brother Guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0DAKaR16cY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0DAKaR16cY The Pope's Telescopes - A tour of the observatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccoGKAL6Qas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccoGKAL6Qas The Pope's Space Rocks - A look at their collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OI4wb2XIZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OI4wb2XIZc
- msabalau 1y ago
  I enjoyed the book he co-wrote: "Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?: ...and Other Questions from the Astronomers' In-box at the Vatican Observatory"
- throw0101a 1y ago
  > Brother Guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno
  - krick 1y ago
    It took me way too long to realize "brother" is not some postmodern hippie "them/it" kinda stuff.
qoez 1y ago
This was featured in Werner Herzogs movie "Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds"
rdtsc 1y ago
It’s also interesting that the idea of a Big Bang originated with Georges Lemaître — a Catholic priest and theoretical physicist. He called it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom” initially. The term itself was invented by his opponents who sort of ridiculed Georges initially.
- graemep 1y ago
  All radical new ideas seem to be ridiculed.
  - bombcar 1y ago
    If your idea can’t survive being ridiculed INGMI. What’s amusing is how often the ridiculous name sticks (big bang, yankee, etc).
  - Retric 1y ago
    Unfortunately that’s not a useful heuristic. Most radical new ideas are wildly incorrect, only a minuscule fraction are actually real advances.
  - rdtsc 1y ago
    Good point, but I think radical ideas that end up being eventually accepted, and also ending up taking the name the opponents give them, sometimes as ridicule, are notable.
theodorethomas 1y ago
Before smartphones we had https://www.cambridge.org/turnleft https://www.cambridge.org/turnleft
sega_sai 1y ago
They also do month-long astrophysics summer schools for students every two years or so. I was lucky to be part of the school ~20 years ago. We had classes in the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo and audience with John Paul II. It was a great opportunity.
pwil30 1y ago
Pleasantly surprised to see this on the HN homepage! Our agency (Longbeard) rebuilt this website a few years ago. It was fun working with the great people there, including Br. Guy who is a fantastic ambassador for the VO. As you can imagine the Castel Gandolfo telescopes are mainly historical at this point due to light pollution, so their VATT facility in Arizona (Mount Graham) is now where most of their actual astonomical work is conducted. Interestingly, the VATT in AZ is directly adjacent to the LBT facility on Mount Graham, which has a near-infrared instrument formerly named - believe it or not - LUCIFER (Large Binocular Telescope Near-infrared Spectroscopic Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research). This was changed to LUCI in 2012 as the name predictably caused some problems and confusion.
- antognini 1y ago
  Back when I was in grad school I observed at LBT (or maybe more accurately I was on a team that was observing at LBT). The Vatican's observatory down the road was affectionately referred to as the "Pope Scope."
- ImJamal 1y ago
  This is a very random question, but do you know why it isn't on the va TLD?
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    I think vaticanobservatory.org is run by the Vatican Observatory Foundation (a private foundation supporting some aspects of the VO's work) whereas vaticanobservatory.va is run by the Vatican Observatory in the strict sense (the government department of the State of Vatican City.)
    - pwil30 1y ago
      > I think vaticanobservatory.org is run by the Vatican Observatory Foundation (a private foundation supporting some aspects of the VO's work) whereas vaticanobservatory.va is run by the Vatican Observatory in the strict sense (the government department of the State of Vatican City.) This exactly. When our agency was working with them, there was some initial hope that we could consolidate the websites on the .va property, but we quickly realized that was not going to happen, primarily due to the separation required with the foundation wing. Also, it is in general very difficult for an outside vendor to get clearance to build on a .va domain, and you need someone internally to apply a lot of leverage to get the wheels spinning with Vatican IT. Our agency was able to do this with building out the migrants-refugees.va website, thanks to the help of (now Cardinal) Michael Czerny who ran the M&R Section at the time and was given a lot of direct executive power from Pope Francis, but boy, that was still not easy.
NoSalt 1y ago
They have come a long way since convicting Galileo of "a strong suspicion of heresy".
- michaelsbradley 1y ago
  Well, science came a long way in general. There were a number of objections to Galileo's ideas that were not religiously motivated. See The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown, in 9 parts, a must read! Part 1: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Part 2: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-down-for.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Part 3: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-great.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Part 4: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-down-n.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Part 5: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-heres-mud.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Part 6: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/6-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-comet.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/6-great-ptolemaic-smackd... Part 7: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/7-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-time-and_29.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/7-great-ptolemaic-smackd... Part 8: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/8-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-trial-and.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/8-great-ptolemaic-smackd... Part 9: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/9-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-from.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/9-great-ptolemaic-smackd...
- lordleft 1y ago
  Galileo's treatment by the Church was abominable, but it's often forgotten that the Church not only drew the lines of permissible thought, but also served as the primary vehicle for advancing and enabling the life of the mind through its patronage of the university system. It was not merely an oppressor, nor just a benevolent enabler; it was somehow both.
  - TimTheTinker 1y ago
    When the church stopped being the arbiter of permissible thought, other arbiters rushed in to fill the void -- such is human nature. The question is not whether such institutions exist in society, but who they are at present.
impish9208 1y ago
I suspect a lot of non-Catholics would be surprised by the Vatican’s position on creation, cosmology, evolution, the literalness (or lack thereof) of Genesis etc. A Jesuit priest would probably be considered a heretic by the average American Evangelical.
- Neonlicht 1y ago
  Ask one of these famed Catholics how they feel about democracy or gender equality and they are just like all the other Christians. After all they get their orders from the same book.
  - dragonwriter 1y ago
    > Ask one of these famed Catholics how they feel about democracy "Other nations need to reform certain unjust structures, and in particular their political institutions, in order to replace corrupt, dictatorial and authoritarian forms of government by democratic and participatory ones." Encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis, Pope St. John Paul II (1987) "The Church values the democratic system inasmuch as it ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices, guarantees to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate. Thus she cannot encourage the formation of narrow ruling groups which usurp the power of the State for individual interests or for ideological ends." Encyclical Centesimus annus, Pope St. John Paul II (1991) "People sometimes complain of the slowness with which an authentic democracy progresses, yet it continues, if used well, to be the most effective historical instrument for ensuring its own future in a way befitting to human beings. [...] Democracy will attain its full actualization only when every person and each people have access to the primary goods (life, food, water, health care, education, work and the certainty of their rights) through an ordering of internal and international relations that assures each person of the possibility of participating in them." Address to members of the "Centesimus Annus" Foundation, Pope Benedict XVI (2006) "[...] we can think about the crisis of democracy as a wounded heart. That which limits participation is right before our eyes. If corruption and illegality reveal a 'heart attack', then different forms of social exclusion must also be a concern. Every time someone is marginalized, the whole social body suffers." Address at the pastoral visit to Trieste on the occasion of the 50th Social Week of Italian Catholics, Pope Francis (2024)
Animats 1y ago
Oh, an astronomical observatory, not the newspaper. The Vatican''s in-house newspaper is L'Osservatore Romano.[1] [1] https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en.html https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en.html
fennecbutt 1y ago
Galileo is rolling in his grave.
BobbyTables2 1y ago
I hope they look inward too…

126 points by alexmolas 1y ago

Brother Guy often showed (shows?) up at science fiction conventions in the Chicago area. Great fellow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno

alexmolas 1y ago
> Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality, to protect it from creationism, which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it's turning God into a nature god I love this quote!
- IncreasePosts 1y ago
  Jesuits love to play these motte and bailey mind games - ask him if he thinks Jesus actually performed his miracles or not.
  - abrenuntio 1y ago
    Would a true divine miracle be a suspension of order or a manifestation of it? Will it ever be possible to prove that some future human theory of reality is complete?
    - IncreasePosts 1y ago
      This is what I mean. Please let me know how a world with miracles is any different from creationism, which apparently religion needs to be protected from.
    - lo_zamoyski 1y ago
      A miracle, by definition, transcends the nature of the thing in question. The cause is not attributable to the power of the thing effected or anything in the world. If God is distinct from what is created, then a miracle cannot be said to be a manifestation of what is created. Pantheism, on the other hand, must deny miracles, because God and the universe are one, and so all apparent miracles are merely unaccounted for manifestations of reality and perhaps explainable by "some future human theory of reality". Since Jesuits (ostensibly) hold to a Catholic view in which God and the created order are distinct, they must therefore believe that miracles are not only possible, but do happen. The question is then largely whether a particular effect is miraculous or not.
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  That quotes needs some unpacking, because many people have caricaturish notions of things like "faith" or "science" or "religion". > Religion needs science to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality To make this more comprehensible, I will render this as "Faith needs reason to keep it away from superstition and keep it close to reality" or "to make faith actually faith, not wishful thinking or superstition". That is the Catholic view. True faith, pace pop culture, is never blind. Faith concerns what is beyond what is knowable through reason. This is the reason for the parental analogies in the Bible. A child cannot understand why a parent is guiding him a certain way, but he trusts the parent to guide him well. By analogy, human reason cannot know certain things in its present condition, but some things have been revealed on authority established by other evidence or truths (hence why Christ argues from the Torah, etc. and performs thousands of miracles, with the resurrection at the pinnacle, to demonstrate his identity and his authority). So, faith is no substitute for reason; instead, reason puts faith in its place. In the beatific vision, faith is no longer necessary, analogously to how when a child becomes an adult, he no longer needs to trust his parents in the way he used to. He himself knows the things his parents did when he still did not. > to protect it from creationism I don't know what this means. Partly, this is because "creationism" is equivocal and means various things. The Catholic position accepts creatio ex nihilo, which is to say that the universe is created/kept in existence by God - the first cause - out of nothing, i.e., not as a mutation or transformation of some preexisting being. It has no official position on "evolution" per se (which is also equivocal), but it does reject evolutionism which is a metaphysical position. There is no official position about the details of how the first parents came to be, but it does hold that there were first parents from whom all other humans descend. The intellect and will (usually called the "soul") are taken to be the result of special acts of creation at each conception, and therefore not something generated by the parents. Catholics are permitted to believe in a range of evolutionary explanations (like adaptation and selection) and they are permitted to believe that the universe was created in 6 days (though blanket Biblical literalism is not traditional and rather modern; note that the Catholic Church compiled the diverse genres making up the Bible in the first place). Most Catholics probably accept the general prevailing cosmological view of an old universe, a figurative 6 days, evolutionary explanations in relation to the human body plan, etc. This may seem odd to those who come from certain American evangelical circles, which tend to get more attention in the American media. Those with a taste for speculation about how modern biology and Biblical accounts might be reconciled will find Ed Feser's posts [0][1] on the subject interesting. > which at the end of the day is a kind of paganism – it's turning God into a nature god This is interesting, because one thing that is characteristic of paganism is that the gods are of the world. They are beings like us, or personifications of natural phenomena. But God in the Catholic sense is not a being among many, but Being Itself by which all beings are. I'm not sure what Br. Guy's definition of "creationism" is here, though. A web search doesn't really give me a coherent picture of what he means either. I suspect he may be attacking a mechanistic metaphysics in which secondary causality doesn't really exist and God is some kind of cosmic occasionalist puppet master. In that sense, I you could argue it sounds more pagan - or pan(en)theistic - rather than Christian. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-original-sin-part-i.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-... [1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-original-sin-part-ii.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/modern-biology-and-...

erk__ 1y ago

Brady Haran of Numberphile and a whole bunch of other channels visited the observatory some years back and made some videos and interviews. The Pope's Astronomer - Interview with Brother Guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0DAKaR16cY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0DAKaR16cY The Pope's Telescopes - A tour of the observatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccoGKAL6Qas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccoGKAL6Qas The Pope's Space Rocks - A look at their collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OI4wb2XIZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OI4wb2XIZc

msabalau 1y ago
I enjoyed the book he co-wrote: "Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?: ...and Other Questions from the Astronomers' In-box at the Vatican Observatory"
throw0101a 1y ago
> Brother Guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Consolmagno
- krick 1y ago
  It took me way too long to realize "brother" is not some postmodern hippie "them/it" kinda stuff.

qoez 1y ago

This was featured in Werner Herzogs movie "Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds"

rdtsc 1y ago

It’s also interesting that the idea of a Big Bang originated with Georges Lemaître — a Catholic priest and theoretical physicist. He called it the "hypothesis of the primeval atom” initially. The term itself was invented by his opponents who sort of ridiculed Georges initially.

graemep 1y ago
All radical new ideas seem to be ridiculed.
- bombcar 1y ago
  If your idea can’t survive being ridiculed INGMI. What’s amusing is how often the ridiculous name sticks (big bang, yankee, etc).
- Retric 1y ago
  Unfortunately that’s not a useful heuristic. Most radical new ideas are wildly incorrect, only a minuscule fraction are actually real advances.
- rdtsc 1y ago
  Good point, but I think radical ideas that end up being eventually accepted, and also ending up taking the name the opponents give them, sometimes as ridicule, are notable.

theodorethomas 1y ago

Before smartphones we had https://www.cambridge.org/turnleft https://www.cambridge.org/turnleft

sega_sai 1y ago

They also do month-long astrophysics summer schools for students every two years or so. I was lucky to be part of the school ~20 years ago. We had classes in the papal residence in Castel Gandolfo and audience with John Paul II. It was a great opportunity.

pwil30 1y ago

Pleasantly surprised to see this on the HN homepage! Our agency (Longbeard) rebuilt this website a few years ago. It was fun working with the great people there, including Br. Guy who is a fantastic ambassador for the VO. As you can imagine the Castel Gandolfo telescopes are mainly historical at this point due to light pollution, so their VATT facility in Arizona (Mount Graham) is now where most of their actual astonomical work is conducted. Interestingly, the VATT in AZ is directly adjacent to the LBT facility on Mount Graham, which has a near-infrared instrument formerly named - believe it or not - LUCIFER (Large Binocular Telescope Near-infrared Spectroscopic Utility with Camera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research). This was changed to LUCI in 2012 as the name predictably caused some problems and confusion.

antognini 1y ago
Back when I was in grad school I observed at LBT (or maybe more accurately I was on a team that was observing at LBT). The Vatican's observatory down the road was affectionately referred to as the "Pope Scope."
ImJamal 1y ago
This is a very random question, but do you know why it isn't on the va TLD?
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  I think vaticanobservatory.org is run by the Vatican Observatory Foundation (a private foundation supporting some aspects of the VO's work) whereas vaticanobservatory.va is run by the Vatican Observatory in the strict sense (the government department of the State of Vatican City.)
  - pwil30 1y ago
    > I think vaticanobservatory.org is run by the Vatican Observatory Foundation (a private foundation supporting some aspects of the VO's work) whereas vaticanobservatory.va is run by the Vatican Observatory in the strict sense (the government department of the State of Vatican City.) This exactly. When our agency was working with them, there was some initial hope that we could consolidate the websites on the .va property, but we quickly realized that was not going to happen, primarily due to the separation required with the foundation wing. Also, it is in general very difficult for an outside vendor to get clearance to build on a .va domain, and you need someone internally to apply a lot of leverage to get the wheels spinning with Vatican IT. Our agency was able to do this with building out the migrants-refugees.va website, thanks to the help of (now Cardinal) Michael Czerny who ran the M&R Section at the time and was given a lot of direct executive power from Pope Francis, but boy, that was still not easy.

NoSalt 1y ago

They have come a long way since convicting Galileo of "a strong suspicion of heresy".

michaelsbradley 1y ago
Well, science came a long way in general. There were a number of objections to Galileo's ideas that were not religiously motivated. See The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown, in 9 parts, a must read! Part 1: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Part 2: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-down-for.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Part 3: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-great.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Part 4: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-down-n.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Part 5: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-heres-mud.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-great-ptolemaic-smac... Part 6: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/6-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-comet.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/6-great-ptolemaic-smackd... Part 7: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/7-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-time-and_29.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/09/7-great-ptolemaic-smackd... Part 8: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/8-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-trial-and.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/8-great-ptolemaic-smackd... Part 9: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/9-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-from.html http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/9-great-ptolemaic-smackd...
lordleft 1y ago
Galileo's treatment by the Church was abominable, but it's often forgotten that the Church not only drew the lines of permissible thought, but also served as the primary vehicle for advancing and enabling the life of the mind through its patronage of the university system. It was not merely an oppressor, nor just a benevolent enabler; it was somehow both.
- TimTheTinker 1y ago
  When the church stopped being the arbiter of permissible thought, other arbiters rushed in to fill the void -- such is human nature. The question is not whether such institutions exist in society, but who they are at present.

impish9208 1y ago

I suspect a lot of non-Catholics would be surprised by the Vatican’s position on creation, cosmology, evolution, the literalness (or lack thereof) of Genesis etc. A Jesuit priest would probably be considered a heretic by the average American Evangelical.

Neonlicht 1y ago
Ask one of these famed Catholics how they feel about democracy or gender equality and they are just like all the other Christians. After all they get their orders from the same book.
- dragonwriter 1y ago
  > Ask one of these famed Catholics how they feel about democracy "Other nations need to reform certain unjust structures, and in particular their political institutions, in order to replace corrupt, dictatorial and authoritarian forms of government by democratic and participatory ones." Encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis, Pope St. John Paul II (1987) "The Church values the democratic system inasmuch as it ensures the participation of citizens in making political choices, guarantees to the governed the possibility both of electing and holding accountable those who govern them, and of replacing them through peaceful means when appropriate. Thus she cannot encourage the formation of narrow ruling groups which usurp the power of the State for individual interests or for ideological ends." Encyclical Centesimus annus, Pope St. John Paul II (1991) "People sometimes complain of the slowness with which an authentic democracy progresses, yet it continues, if used well, to be the most effective historical instrument for ensuring its own future in a way befitting to human beings. [...] Democracy will attain its full actualization only when every person and each people have access to the primary goods (life, food, water, health care, education, work and the certainty of their rights) through an ordering of internal and international relations that assures each person of the possibility of participating in them." Address to members of the "Centesimus Annus" Foundation, Pope Benedict XVI (2006) "[...] we can think about the crisis of democracy as a wounded heart. That which limits participation is right before our eyes. If corruption and illegality reveal a 'heart attack', then different forms of social exclusion must also be a concern. Every time someone is marginalized, the whole social body suffers." Address at the pastoral visit to Trieste on the occasion of the 50th Social Week of Italian Catholics, Pope Francis (2024)

Animats 1y ago

Oh, an astronomical observatory, not the newspaper. The Vatican''s in-house newspaper is L'Osservatore Romano.[1] [1] https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en.html https://www.osservatoreromano.va/en.html

fennecbutt 1y ago

Galileo is rolling in his grave.

BobbyTables2 1y ago

I hope they look inward too…