I know it's not your official title, but it's a cook total.

Where does that come from?

I don't know where people started using that in the first place.

Kings had astronomers in the past.

Maybe that might be what it's about.

It's a shorthand way of saying that I'm not just in an astronomer, but I'm an astronomer with an interesting position, with an interesting job being the director of the observatory.

I'm only one of a dozen astronomers, but I'm the only one that's directly appointed by the pope.

The real thing, I think, is to remind people that astronomy is the kind of thing you can't make a living at unless you have a patron.

And in this case, my patron is the pope, and that shows the world that the church is interested in astronomy.

The nickname gives the impression that the pope would occasionally consult you on astronomical matters.

Has it ever happened?

Have you ever got a phone call from a pope?

Sang I was wondering about this or that the closest that ever came Waas Ah, when a pope that I won't even be more specific than that was going to be talking to astronauts, and you always have to have some prepared statement.

And could I prepare something for him to say, or even things that might be topic City?

You know, of course, what happens with all of these world leaders is that they meet so many people day in and day out.

They can't prepare their talks ahead of time.

So generally somebody says, Here is some talking points and I did that once when one of the pope's was talking to astronauts.

You've served under three Popes of what is your interaction with Popes?

Then it's actually very limited.

Um, you know, we don't run into each other in the hallway.

As the director, I'm part of the big audience of re Christmas with all the members of the Curia where you have a signed seedings and my seat is in the back row off from the quarter.

But you know, I'm in the room.

That's something that said the times when I have interacted when I've been in one of these audiences, it's kind of scary to say he knows who I am.

He knows my name, he knows my background, and I guess that means I can't hide.

But it's also, you know, it's an honor.

The three Popes that you have served under.

Do they have any interest in astronomy?

As far as you know, do they have much of a knowledge of astronomy?

It varied, of course, very from Pope's to Pope, the one that everybody concise have had a great interest in astronomy with pious the 12th.

He was himself something of an amateur astronomer and that would sometimes get him into trouble is he would make offhand comments about astronomy, that he had a 90% right and the 10% wrong.

Then you have to go on, Go on.

What's actually like this, I'll say, of the three that I worked with, John Paul, the second was an academic, and so he appreciated academic work and the value of academic work in and of itself.

On the other hand, the one time we showed him images we had made of Comet Shoemaker Levy, he sort of looked at him and said, I'll bless you.

Bless your comments, and that's about it.

When Benedict came to visit, he was full of questions about the meteorites about the work we did a very specific views and is a brilliant, brilliant man.

The other thing that everyone is surprised about Benedict.

He also has a wicked sense of humor, and he was able to trade jokes, academic kinds of jokes about orders of magnitude and things like that, which showed that he was definitely following.

I knew what was going on.

Francis has a background in chemistry.

He'd worked in chemistry before he became a Jesuit and as a judge what he's got the academic background.

So he's certainly well aware of what we're doing.

The thing that I think shows the depth of Francis's knowledge is laid out with See that in cyclical, he wrote, which not only gets the science right, but he gets what the science really is.

It's not just a listing of facts, it's not just this is the mechanism.

What does it mean?

What does it mean in the human sense?

What does it mean to us, who will always be a little bit wrong?

But we're always striving for the truth, so it gets past the absolutism of the science you learned in high school where you get the answer in the back of the book.

And that's what science is.

Well, no, it isn't.

And he gets that.

Why does the Vatican have an astronomical observatory?

There is a short answer and a long answer, and I'll give you something in between really astronomy, with one of those things that you studied in the medieval universities, along with geometry and arithmetic and music.

And it was a sense that you have to know how the universe works before you condemn, philosophizes about it or do theology about it.

One of the bizarre and wonderful things about the people of the book the Muslims, the Jews, the Christians is that, unlike a lot of religions, we think the physical universe was made by God, and therefore it's a good thing to study.

You know, the physical world is not a morass that's designed to trap you into evil.

Chocolate is not there to lure you into obesity.

Chocolate is a foretaste of the joy of heaven.

That's the least my theology.

And that means that studying the physical universe in particular cosmology or astronomy, is certainly a way of getting used to the way that God works.

There's also the practical side of things a lot of festivals, a lot of the Jewish holidays and then from them.

The Christian holy days were based on the calendar.

Easter was the first Sunday after Passover, Passover with based on the phase of the moon in the beginning of the year.

That, of course, is why the pope's hired astronomers back in the 15 80 used to reform the calendar.

The modern observatory dates from 18 91.

At that time, for the first time in almost 1000 years, the Vatican was faced with two very different problems.

The idea that somehow studying science, studying the physical universe was against religion instead of in favor of it, which was 1/19 century idea and which was being pushed by people who thought that, you know, science is going to solve all of our problems Steam engines and electricity and eugenics award.

The church wanted to say no, that's not what science is.

Science is not against religion, but they're certainly bad things you can do with technology.

Technology isn't the same thing of science.

Nobody doubts that atomic bombs work because of fusion of atomic particles.

But that doesn't mean we can't argue about with their atomic bombs.

They're a good idea.

The other problem the Vatican was faced with was that after 18 70 rather than having its own independent nation in the center of Italy, it was reduced to just that area around ST Peter's.

And the Italians didn't even recognize him as an independent nation, having a national observatory with a way of being recognized as a nation.

So it had this theological sense, and it also had this practical political sense.

By the time of pious, the 11th in the 19 twenties and thirties, you find statements where studying astronomy will lead you to prayer and lead you to an appreciation of God.

By the time you get to John Paul the second, he sees science and religion as equal partners in the goal of looking for truth.

And suddenly, science has a very different role than just being a useful tool.

What Francis has done is to carry that one step further and to recognize that science is, ah, human activity.

It's not the universe.

It's how we humans try to understand the universe and what that does to us as humans.

You talk about having an observatory being useful because astronomy can help inform theology.

But it sounds like, you know, the pope's not picking up the phone and taking advantage of this resource that they have here.

They don't have tohave you today, Thio inform the theology.

Well, then it seems like a resource they're not utilizing.

If it was simply a one on one connection, that would be true.

But in fact it's two communities talking to each other.

It's the community of all theologians is community of all scientists, and we are along that boundary.

There's a dozen of us doing a dozen different things so that under John Paul the second, for instance, at his insistence, the Vatican Observatory began a series of conferences on the nature of divine action in the physical universe so that we began this collaboration with an institute in California called the Set of a Theology in the Natural Sciences, published a bunch of deep theological books that people are still referencing.

A lot of the stuff that I do is popularization.

I'm standing up here with a Roman collar and an M I t ring.

This is an M I t ring.

It's not a bishop's ring.

Don't kiss it I write articles for newspapers in Italy, in America, in England, and I show up on things like this at the end of the day by existing, we remind the scientists that religion is not their enemy, even Maur.

We remind the religious people that science is not their enemy.

Does that mean this department of astronomers that's here exists a lot because of public relations?

It's like a PR move as well.

Public relations is basically all of life.

My father was a public relations man, one of the founders of the Public Relations Society of America.

I grew up as a child knowing what public relations really is.

It's important toe have that boundary that blue between the institution that knows what it's trying to do and the people who have a way that they want to be able to refer to and communicate with that institution.

And so I'm very proud to say that's absolutely what we're doing.

Why astronomy?

Why isn't there a little math department or a chemistry department or genetics wise?

Why does the Vatican have an astronomy department?

First of all, the Vatican's a dinky place.

The entire annual budget of the Vatican would pay for one of the half Hollywood movies a year.

It's not very much, and our budget is 1/2 of 1% of that, so there's not a whole lot of money to do science.

Historically, there happened to be astronomers available when they thought they should have some kind of National scientific Institute and National Observatory's were the sorts of things that ah governments would support because nobody else would.

There is this inevitable gut connection between studying the sky and studying things outside of our mundane life.

And that means that by being in this science, we can both explain why we're not really studying the same thing because we're experts in both and we know the difference, but also to remind us that we do astronomy just as we pray for something bigger than to fill our stomach for something bigger than to get ourselves prestige, that we're doing it because we're hungry for something more than what goes into a stomach because we don't live by bread alone.

That's literally true.

I discovered that working in the Peace Corps in Africa that people who were hungry were also hungry for knowledge.

We also were hungry for respect were hungry for the opportunity to think and feed their imaginations in their knowledge.

Surely you must see some fundamental clashes between the very underlying principles of science and the very underlying principles of religion.

Like if you said to May Brady, tell me what religion is very quickly I would start talking about faith and then a belief in things that can't be seen or tested.

Cole's like electrons.

No, one of the times that we can't know because because black holes, even even when we can't see them, we refuse to believe they exist until we see them and we spend a lifetime trying to find proof of them and evidence of them an image them.

We don't do that to God like the aim of religion is not to spend the next 100 years trying to find evidence of God or image God or find a horizon around him.

We have to just accept he's there, where a science is all about saying I will not accept until I contest or look for Oh my goodness.

What you've described is exactly what religion is, and what you've described is exactly what science isn't.

I'll give you three accidents.

Every logical system has to believe in axioms.

You have to take as assumptions.

This is how the world works.

Before you condemn logic, it's it's girdles theory, and to believe in science, you have to believe the physical universe.

Israel.

Not every religion leaves that you know.

It's not just illusion that there's actually an underlying reality.

No matter how bad our senses are, you have to believe that it obeys laws.

Who was the first person to think that there were laws in science?

Well, what's the alternative?

Oh, the nature God's doing this and the nature God's doing that.

But Christianity doesn't take nature gods.

It says there are laws and you have to believe it's worth doing that Studying the physical universe, even if it's not going to make me rich is nonetheless, ah, worthwhile thing for grown ups to do.

Those are axiomatic.

If you don't accept them, you won't be in astronomer.

You have to take those on faith.

Likewise, religion only begins because you have experienced what is for lack of a better phrase of religious experience, something really happened whether it's holding a newborn for the first time, in your life dealing with the death of a loved one or just that walking down the street and suddenly you're out of nowhere hit and overwhelmed with, ah, feeling and emotion, a desire that you can't put your finger on, what that's about.

And then you say, OK, how do I deal with this?

How people dealt with it in the past?

What works, what does it and just like science, you don't want to try to make it all up on your own.

You don't want to have to reinvent the wheel.

You want to find out what has worked for other people in the past.

On awful lot of religion on Lee makes sense is you get older and you experienced something and you go, Ah, that's what they were talking about.

But the trouble is, so many people stop learning religion when they were 12 and don't carry that into their rest of their lives.

Just as too many people stop learning science when they were 12.

And they think that science is getting the answer in the back of the book when it's anything but that it is living with the mystery and continually understanding it so that you go.

Oh, that's what they mean by an electron.