"Come, let us adore God the Creator."

I am not a city person by nature. Living in Rome is amazing, but every now and then the big city gets a little too claustrophobic for me. Saturday, I had the opportunity to get out of town for a while and visit the place where the Pope goes when he needs a break; Castel Gandolfo.

The city of Castel Gandolfo

One of the things I really wanted to see while I was there was the Vatican Observatory. Unfortunately, because Pope Benedict XVI was still at the residence, that was not going to happen.

Pope Benedict at Castel Gandolfo

It was not a wasted trip. The town was beautiful and because it is located in the hills above Lago Albano, the temperature was refreshingly cool.

I was content to just look from a distance at the papal palace and the observatory with its telescope on top.

As I looked at pictures of the observatory, I noticed that there is a plaque with an inscription on the side of the observatory. In Latin it says, Deum Creatorem Venite Adoremus. Meaning, "Come let us adore God the Creator."

This of course led me to look a little more into the phrase on the observatory and I encountered an article by one of the Jesuit priests who works at the observatory, Fr. David Brown, S.J. I am including the link to his article. It well worth reading the whole article, but for those who might not read it I will attempt to use some of his thoughts with some of mine as well.

Vatican Observatory

"As a Jesuit astronomer working for the Vatican’s observatory, the Specola Vaticana, I am often asked, 'Why does the Vatican have an astronomical observatory?' I offer three reasons for the Catholic Church’s patronage of such an institution:

1) for the sake of the truth;

2) in order to promote and to foster dialogue between the world of faith and the world of science, especially in an age when many people believe the two worlds to be fundamentally incompatible, and;

3) for the benefit of providing answers to people of faith who deserve substantive and sensible responses to the genuinely good questions that arise either through curiosity or from their interactions with others.

The second and third answers are certainly of paramount importance in these times, especially in light of challenges facing the Church in a scientific age, which include stereotypes often attached to it in the aftermath of the Galileo affair since the 1600s. However important these two reasons may be for providing a rationale for the continued involvement of the Church in the sciences, they are not the primary reason for why the Church founded the Specola (and its predecessors). From a historical point of view and with regard to its fundamental mission, the first answer -- for the sake of truth -- is the most important justification for the existence of the Specola: it reveals much about the Catholic Christian worldview and about its engagement with science." (Fr. David Brown. New Jesuit Review 2011 vol. 2, # 8)

To seek the truth is always the mission of the Church, but the popular misconception today is that the Church is standing in the way of truth and is an obstacle to science and progress. It is frustrating that many people have no concept of how much the Church has contributed to the development of science and how it continues to contribute to the search for truth. This link features a list of many of the clerics in the Church who made major contributions to science.

What is challenging to popular culture today is that the Church is asking the deeper questions of truth in a holistic context. The Church seeks the truth through faith and reason. It does not make the false choice between faith or reason, because it knows that both are necessary to know the truth about the world and about ourselves. Faith doesn't start where reason stops. They are like the two eyes of a person. With only one eye, a person's view of the world around them changes from three dimensions to two. What is lost is depth perception.

A person who insists on faith without reason or reason without faith lacks depth and the world becomes very shallow.

"Confronted by the majesty, intricacy, and vastness of the cosmos, the person becomes aware of being part of something that goes beyond him, of something which is greater than he, but of which he is intrinsically connected at some deep level...the pursuit of God’s truth involves everything, including something as humble as an observatory run from the Vatican." (Fr. David Brown, New Jesuit Review 2011 Vol. 2, # 8)