Transcript of CS#108: Brother Guy Consolmagno The Heavens Proclaim

Transcript of Interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno about The Heavens Proclaim. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

The Heavens Proclaim at The Catholic Company.

http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1006007/Heavens-Proclaim-Astronomy-Vatican/

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Chris Cash: Welcome to Catholic Spotlight. This is the Catholic Spotlight, the show where we talk about what’s new, cool and exciting in the Catholic marketplace. I’m your host Chris Cash, director of E-Commerce from catholiccompany.com, your source for all your Catholic needs.

Today in the Catholic Spotlight, we have Brother Guy Consolmagno, you know I knew I was going to blow it, Brother Guy go for it tell them your name so that I don’t butcher it again.

Guy: Well I usually just go by Brother Guy for that very reason, but the full name is Brother Guy Consolmagno and you have to have a free hand to sort of make the Italian hand motions to get it all right.

Chris: Yeah you know we are kind of missing that here on the show but I even practiced what about four or five, six times and you know.

Guy: You were doing well before the microphone was turned on.

Chris: Well you know your brain just goes to spaghetti as soon as you hit the record button I guarantee you that. Brother Guy what is really exciting to me, Brother Guy is with the Vatican Observatory. Now I am talking with my hands all out the wazoo, because you know this is going back to my educational roots. For those of you who don’t know out on the spotlight. Before I started doing the marketing and such for the catholic company I used to be an electrical engineer with an emphasis in electromagnetics. So astronomy is just you know one minor step off that balcony into a slightly different field and it is just infinitely interesting to me as a topic, so I am so thrilled to have you on Brother Guy.

Guy: Well it is fun to be here.

Chris: So first off we got to get in absolutely the obligatory plug for the new book Brother Guy has, The Heavens Proclaim: Astronomy and the Vatican. So Brother Guy give us the low down on what is The Heavens Proclaim.

Guy: It is a coffee table book put out in honor of the international year of astronomy which is this year 2009 four hundred years after Galileo started using the telescope. What we wanted to show was the whole range of ways in which the Vatican has supported astronomy. Including a few historical chapters one on the history of the calendar which was even older than Galileo’s telescope. We have also got some just lovely photographs done by the Vatican Observatory astronomers. We have a series of articles by the astronomers on the different kinds of astronomy we do. Which ranges everywhere from the big bang to studying meteors and meteorites. You know things very far away and things very close to us. To my mind the most fun part of the book is at the end, where we have a series of speeches that popes have given about astronomy over the last hundred and twenty years or so. It shows in their words just how much the papacy has been supporting modern astronomy and modern science in general.

Chris: Now, when he says coffee table book, you know this thing is huge. When it first showed up at my door, my wife found the box and brought it up and she said who sent you this. I was just like wow this is a really big beautiful book you know if you are into astronomy and stars, galaxies and telescopes and just sweeping pictures of galactic landscape. This is definitely going to be something you want to have laying around your house. The photography is beautiful, the layout is exquisite and it tells some really neat progression. You know the book opens of course with Genesis right.

Guy: How else could you do it?

Chris: It has a beautiful description of the beginning of time and the stars in the Bible, stars in the heavens in the Bible. Then it goes into history of the observatory, history of the calendars and religion with astronomy. So you know it is a really great reference book and a really great book to just have lying around. I don’t typically give such glowing reviews.

Guy: Well you know since I can say this without being self congratulatory one of the reasons that the book is so beautiful, is we showed our original idea to the Vatican Press who sort of held our hands through all of this. So it is Our Sunday Visitor Press who finally produced it in the US. But it was with collaboration of the Vatican Press. When they saw the material they immediately hired on one of the book designers that they used for all of their art books and it shows. The design of the book the layout of the book is simply a work of art, it is breathtaking.

Chris: Oh yeah, I would absolutely agree with that. Now I guess starting off on the conversation here. You know one thing that is really hot in the news of course if Dan Brown and kind of his attacks on the church. One of the attacks, that tend to be brought up a lot, is well the Catholic Church they killed all the astronomers and people who were doing science. So I think; how do you respond when you hear people talking about things like that.

Guy: Well I point out that you can find all of Dan Brown’s books in the fiction section of your book store. Everything in there is fiction, including his description of places that are otherwise real. He doesn’t even get the shapes of the buildings right. So if you want to be entertained it is very entertaining stuff, but I hope one doesn’t think you can learn astronomy by you know watching Star Trek or learn history by reading Dan Brown. He is kind of a running joke because everything that he touches he gets wrong. So he is not just attacking the church. He is attacking scholarship of history of philosophy of just about everything and he gets it so wrong that it is amusing.

Chris: It would be much more amusing if it wasn’t doing some damage to the church at least. I wouldn’t say it is damaging the faithful as much as it is damaging the people who have been sitting on the fence looking for a good excuse to jump out.

Guy: Well you know the way I look at it, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Probably more people know that the Vatican has an observatory from reading his crazy book than from all of the books that we have produced. So even though he gets wrong I don’t worry about him. I only worry when we stop being attacked. You know when we become so irrelevant that nobody bothers attacking us anymore. Then I know we have done something wrong.

Chris: Now one of your job titles is the curator of the Vatican’s meteorite collection. How did you end up with such an interesting job?

Guy: It was sheer accident. My background is that I was an astronomer and working in the field of meteoritics, which is the study of these rocks that fall from the asteroid belt and hit the earth. I have been doing that for fifteen years before I decided to enter the Jesuits. When I got into the Jesuits you know I was about forty years old at that point I assumed I was going to be teaching at a Jesuit university. I had been teaching at a small college before then. Instead it turns out you know when you become a Jesuit you take these three vows poverty, chastity and obedience. Poverty and chastity I was used to, I had been a graduate student, but obedience was something new. While I was trying to find out what Jesuit University might want me. I was told don’t bother looking a letter just came from Rome signed by father general of the Jesuits himself, assigning you to the Vatican Observatory. So without any say on my part without any requests without any finagling, I suddenly found that I was ordered that I had to go to Rome and look at that boring scenery and eat all that boring food and gee wiz I had to take care of a collection of one thousand two hundred meteorites, but you know what could I do.

Chris: You have been stuck there ever since.

Guy: I took a vow of obedience.

Chris: It is a dead end job.

Guy: Gee what a shame and I have this now for fifteen, sixteen years, it has been great.

Chris: I can tell.

Guy: One of the joys too is when I dug in a little bit further. I realized that the person who assigned to the observatory did not know that I had a background in meteoritics. Did not know that the Vatican Observatory had a collection of meteorites and did not know that they were in desperate need of a curator at that point. So well, you could say it might be a bit of a divine coincidence.

Chris: So why were you assigned there?

Guy: You know in the mists and mysteries of how things happen in the Vatican. I think they just saw that I had a background in astronomy and assumed that would be a good place to keep me out of trouble.

Chris: Close enough, now over a thousand meteorites in the Vatican collection. Vatican City is not that big, where I assume most of them didn’t fall on Vatican City itself. Where are you finding and collecting most of these meteorites.

Guy: Well most of them actually came as the private collection of a French nobleman in the nineteenth century. The Marquis de Mauroy and he was a gentleman scientist as you would find the nineteenth century. You know back in the old days the only people who could do science were either noblemen or the clergy. Because you know they were the only people who had the education and the free time during the week to go out and collect meteorites and things like that. The Marquis collected them by basically hiring people to collect them for him or buying them from dealers. But he had put together this beautiful nineteenth century collection and when he died he had not heirs except his wife. So his widow donated the entire collection to the Vatican and the Vatican gave them all to the Vatican Observatory. Since then we have gotten a few other donors over the years who have given us other samples. Mostly out of the goodness of their heart and there are some wonderful samples we have been able to get over the years. So we have a number of large pieces of what are called the SNC meteorites they are either shergottites, Nakhlites or just Chassignites. These are the ones that are believed to come from planet mars. So we actually have pieces of what we are pretty sure are planet mars sitting in our collection and a couple of moon rocks.

Chris: What do you know, and you have even been to Antarctica collecting meteorites.

Guy: That is unfortunately I don’t have any of those when you go to Antarctica. The program that pays you to go there also curates the meteorites themselves. If I had use for any of those meteorites or need for them I could apply and get permission to borrow them. But we don’t actually hold them ourselves. It is an annual program which the National Science Foundation funds and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will take care of the meteorites. We send them off to Houston where the moon rocks are processed and then after they have all been sorted and classified they are stored at the Smithsonian. So it is three different institutions all cooperating and they go down every year. Go to the Antarctic ice, basically you get onto a bunch of Skidoos you drive back and forth across the ice and you pick up anything that is not a piece of ice. Meteorites fall all over the world, evenly everywhere, but most of the time when they fall unless you are a real expert you wouldn’t recognize them from a typical ordinary rock. What is worst is that they are full of little bits of metallic iron which rust as soon as they hit the atmosphere. Except in Antarctica they stay frozen so they don’t rust and they are black whereas the ice is white. So they are real easy to find, it is just a matter of getting there.

Chris: Yeah, I think just a few days ago there was some boy. I can’t remember what country but a young man was hit in the hand by a meteorite.

Guy: That is a controversial claim, the version I am seeing in the newspapers cant quite be right but they could be another version that could be a just a little more complicated that they are making it out to be. At this point, all we know is that these things do happen all the time and it is certainly not without the range of possibility. People can get hit by them it is more likely to be hit by lightning.

Chris: Well yeah.

Guy: As I tell people if you are worried about being killed by a meteorite there is two things you should do. Wear your seat belt and stop smoking because they are much more likely to get you.

Chris: Too true, I am certainly not going to add that to my list of worries no.

Guy: No.

Chris: So why is it that the Vatican started their observatory in the first place?

Guy: Well it is kind of tricky to figure out when really was the starting point. The observatory that I belong to today was constituted in 1891 by Pope Leo 13th. His point then was to demonstrate to the world that the church supports science. Which was a new idea in the nineteenth century that people would think the church didn’t support science. Everybody nowadays talks as if this goes back to Galileo but it doesn’t. It goes back to the nineteenth century and a lot of the anti immigration in the US. A lot of anti catholic movement where they would bring out these, oh the Catholic Church must be anti science and therefore we can’t let these Catholics into the country. But really the observatory has much deeper roots than that.

There were astronomers being funded at the Vatican for hundred of years before then, sort of on and off. As any country would have astronomers there they would be there to you know keep track of the time, you would mark when the sun crosses the mid day point and mark off noon everyday. They were also there to help working out the shapes of maps so that you could locate objects. Indeed if you go to Europe you find a lot of cathedrals have what are called meridian lines. There is a little hole in the south part of the cathedral; the sun comes in makes a spot on the floor. By seeing where it crosses this line, you can work out the latitude of the cathedral to a very high accuracy. That is how maps were made, using cathedrals as a giant camera obscura observing the sun.

But even earlier than that the reform of the calendar in 1582, was when Pope Gregory the 13th hired a bunch of astronomers to fix the way that the calendar was calculating leap years and the way it was calculating the date of Easter. So that it could be calculated by anyone anywhere in the world in an unambiguous way. You wouldn’t have to wait to get a letter from Rome to tell you when Easter was going to be next year. You could figure it out for yourself. But even earlier than that in the medieval universities, astronomy was one of the seven subjects that everybody was expected to study before you could go on to become a doctor of philosophy. But even earlier than that, you can go back to Pope Sylvester the second, who was the pope right at the turn of the first millennium and was himself an astronomer.

He introduced a number of Arabic astronomical tools to the western world and also was the one who introduced the idea of the Arabic numbers the ones we use today, the one two, three, four, five. So there is a long history of the church supporting astronomy.

Chris: Well we are going to take a real short break here to hear from our sponsor but we will be back in just a minute to talk more with Brother Guy about The Heavens Proclaim and the Vatican Observatory. This is the catholic spotlight.

We are back on the catholic spotlight with Brother Guy talking about The Heavens Proclaim his new coffee table book from Our Sunday Visitor absolutely beautiful, absolutely awesome. You really want to at least see this thing if not pick it up and get a copy for yourself, but definitely seek this out and have a look through it. If you have got any inclination towards astronomy you are going to be really thrilled with what you see here. So Brother Guy we were just talking about the history, the history of the Vatican Observatory, now the Vatican Observatory the telescopes started off on the walls of the Vatican correct.

Guy: That would have been the modern observatory, first put their telescopes on the walls of the Vatican, there is a tower at the Vatican called the tower of the winds. If anybody goes to visit the Vatican museums you can see one of those towers sitting on top of where the library is now. There are some telescopes there going back into the sixteen, seventeen hundreds, but the Vatican Observatory when it was constituted in 1891 got a couple of telescopes. They put them on the towers built back in the year 800 to defend Rome against the barbarians coming in and they stayed there until the 1930s. By then the city lights around Rome made observing with those telescopes impossible.

So the observatory had its first move which was to leave the walls of the Vatican and go out to the Pope’s summer home in Castel Gandolfo. That is about thirty kilometers outside of Rome out in the hills right near Lake Albano which is this beautiful lake in the Alban hills around there. So four new telescopes were put up then and over the next fifty years or so, a lot of beautiful observing was done from there. The telescopes that were installed in the 1930s were these pre war Zeiss telescopes with the kind of optics you just don’t get anymore. But of course as good as you could get at that time, but even there the city lights began to make astronomy hard to do, the idea of light pollution is something that you know faces all of us and it is a real problem.

So the light pollution in the area around Castel Gandolfo meant the telescopes couldn’t be used anymore. They looked all over Italy for another place to build a telescope, but finally since a number of the people at the observatory back then this was in the year 1975-76-78-80. They had previous work in some connections with the University of Arizona which has a wonderful collection of telescopes. Now what do you need for a telescope. You need dark skies, you need very clear skies you need skies that are not going to have a whole lot of clouds. You would like to be in the desert and if you can you want to be on the top of a mountain so that you are above most of the water vapor and the air is a little bit thinner and hopefully a little more steady. You also want to be about as far south or I should say as close to the equator if you can so you can see more and more of the sky. The one place in continental US that matches all of that is Arizona. So there are a lot of telescopes in Arizona and the Vatican Observatory decided to join in with the University of Arizona and have a little outpost there where they could use the Arizona telescopes.

Funny thing though after a few years, a fellow at the University of Arizona invented a new way of making a telescope mirror. He made the first one by basically melting glass in an oven and then you spin the oven so the glass forms itself into this parabolic shape which is what you want for a telescope. He had this beautiful mirror that he made with this test system and offered it to the Vatican if we build a telescope around the mirror then we would share in the time.

Now the great thing is and this is the part that is hard to believe, the guy who invented this was named Roger Angel. So you can say that the Pope’s telescope in Arizona was made by an Angel.

Once that was put up in the early nineties we then had our observing going great guns. So we have the observing happening in southern Arizona. But all the other work of the observatory including our summer schools where we bring in kids from all over the world and my meteorite collection and a lot of history of astronomy work and simply stuff, all you need is a computer. That has been going in Castel Gandolfo. Now just this year 2009 part of the year of astronomy, the Pope has given us a new set of quarters within the gardens that are attached to Castel Gandolfo. Brand new offices in a converted monastery and they are just glorious. They are wonderful and so we are just busy moving in there right now, setting up our libraries and getting the computers all up and running.

Chris: Now do you run into the Pope often at his summer residence?

Guy: Well you see him out the window, but you know we don’t share the same hallways. There are a couple of funny stories where in fact they have run into each other sort of by accident. A few years ago when Pope John Paul 2nd was still in power and he was visiting a Polish friend of his the friend was staying in the department next to the Jesuit quarters and they shared a balcony. So one day the friend was there and the pope stepped out to take a view of the lake from the balcony, and there was a Jesuit also standing in the balcony. So the friend was saying this must be one of the Jesuit astronomers. Our astronomer turned to the pope and said in perfect Polish, yes I am Jesuit astronomer from Krakow. So the two of them had a great conversation in Polish about all the work we have been doing.

Chris: So aside from collecting meteorites and building telescopes what is it that the Vatican Observatory does in modem day science.

Guy: We do the same things that every other astronomical observatory does. We have got a dozen different Jesuits from four continents. North and South America, Europe and Africa with a possibility of an Asian joining us soon and you know seven or eight different countries. Simply doing whatever astronomy is interesting to each of these different people. You know we have all got backgrounds with degrees from the same major universities that everybody else studied at. We are studying the same problems and usually with the same colleagues that everyone else is working with. So for instance Bill Stoeger is our cosmologist. He’s got a degree from Cambridge University. Worked with Sir Martin Rees works today with George Ellis in South Africa and he is interested in working out the mathematics of what went on when the universe began.

We have got a couple of guys who are using the telescopes to take surveys of the Milky way to find out where are the young stars. Where are the old stars can you say something about how the Milky Way has grown and evolved as a galaxy on the basis of where the young stars and the old stars are. We have got other people our director who looks at galaxies and he compares the galaxies near by which we can see with our telescope and the galaxies from far away which is to say far away in time as well seen by the Hubble. In that way you can map out how galaxies have evolved over the age of the solar system.

Chris: So with all this work going on which some people would consider contrary to religion. How do you marry back the science with the understanding of religion.

Guy: It is very sad that anyone would think that studying God’s creation is somehow contrary to studying God. How else do we know about God, except through our senses and studying God’s creation? That is not just me saying that. You can find that in Saint Paul, you can find that in his letter to the Romans. Indeed as the title of our book says. The Heavens Proclaim that is not me coming up that line. That was in the Psalms. The simple answer which gets to the heart of it I think is simply that my religion tells me that God made the universe but my science tells me how he did it. There are so many different ways the universe could have been made. To see how it actually was made and how it actually does operate. Tells me something about God’s personality, for instance I could imagine a universe that was completely random and things just happened with no reason at all. But that is not how God created, God created with law, with order as we know from the beginning of Saint John’s gospel. In the beginning was the word, *** [0:26:07.4 logos. Logos is the Greek word and that really is the same word that we get logic from. You can equally translate that as in the beginning God made reason. God made logic, God made laws. This is what science is uncovering, the laws that God has made of the universe.

Chris: I have always loved the quote from Galileo the Bible killer as some people call him, but I have often had the quote from Galileo on my wall, that mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe.

Guy: Yeah, one of our mathematicians wrote a wonderful discussion of that in the book, and it is just a beautiful little essay on how mathematics in some ways also reflects the mind of God. It is funny people forget that Galileo was a good catholic. He was always a good catholic. He followed the dictates of the church. He obeyed what he was asked to do, all the things that are attributed to him are inventions of 19th century people who didn’t like the church and were trying to find some reason to beat up on it. Now it is also true that the church did not treat Galileo fairly and the church has admitted it and apologized many times as indeed it should have. Because the church is made of human beings and we make mistakes all the time, but Galileo himself was not a Bible killer. Galileo himself, he had two daughters they were both nuns.

Chris: That says something right there, you know as a scientist myself in electromagnetics. I was always amazed at the fact that you could break down all of the electromagnetic equations out there into essentially two laws, two equations.

Guy: The fellow that came up with those basic equations was of course James Clark Maxwell who actually as it happens was a very devout Anglican.

Chris: But you know Maxwell’s equations for me as an engineer that was what everything I did was derived upon or based upon, and everything broke into those equations. Then you add two more equations in there and you have got the laws of all the forces in the universe.

Guy: It is astonishing the, but I think you know what I mean when I say that a sunset is beautiful, but also the equations that describe the sunset are beautiful and to me that tells you something about the nature of the creator.

Chris: For things to have been created so perfectly that you can just describe all force in the universe through four equations is just mind boggling.

Guy: It is and to me it is not a proof, science doesn’t deal in proofs. I hate people who try to use science to prove God. You don’t do that. God is bigger than a proof. But what you can say is by accepting that God creating this, you can see this beauty as a reflection of God’s beauty. I will put in a more personal way you know when I make some tiny discovery in the lab I have never discovered anything huge, but I have certainly made my share of little wonderful little things. You get a feeling of rightness a feeling of satisfaction and a little touch of joy, which to me is exactly the same joy that C.S. Lewis was talking about in the Surprised by Joy. It is that sense of joy that you get when you know you are in the presence of God. To me that is a personal reason why my science is a reflection of my faith in God.

Chris: Now you mentioned there making discoveries which is what all of science is about. As the Vatican Observatory as a whole what would you say is the biggest discovery that the Vatican Observatory has been part off.

Guy: Well it is hard to quantify these things. There are a couple of wonderful things that the Vatican Observatory has been involved or people who are associated with the observatory. One of our forbearers was father Angelo Secchi who had a telescope on the roof of St. Ignatius church in Rome and he was the first person to systematically measure the spectra of stars. Rather than just looking at a star through a telescope he put that light from the star through a prism, broke it into its colors and began to see the chemicals compositions of the stars. From that he was able to map out all the different types of stars, in its essence really began astrophysics.

In the twentieth century one of the more fun things I wouldn’t call it profound but it was certainly a lot of fun was the first published photographic record of something called the green flash. That wonderful phenomenon you get at certain times when the sun sets usually over an ocean and just as it is getting redder and redder and redder and going below the horizon there is a final flash of green. People were arguing was that just an optical illusion or was that real. He got it on a photographic plate. So he showed it was.

Chris: I think there is actually a photo of that hidden here somewhere.

Guy: There is a photo of that in the book, the original photos that he published. It actually got covered in life magazine in the 1950s. One of the other great things that the astronomical observatory did and this is the sort of thing that is hard to appreciate until you are in the science itself. For thirty years the Vatican Observatory ran a laboratory where they would take ultra pure metals boil the metals, have them emit light and then exactly and precisely measure which colors of light came of which metals.

Now it is very tedious work and very exacting work, but this is the kind of work that was absolutely necessary for other people to be able to interpret the spectra they were seeing from stars. In the process the people doing this work founded a journal spectrum Chimica Acta and helped publish it especially during the years after the war. When it hard to get scientific journals published. This I think is a lot of the kind of work that goes on the Vatican Observatory rather than making the one big spectacular breakthrough. What we tend to do is the work that may take years and years to accumulate a lot of data, out of which our colleagues can then interpret their data, so well.

Chris: It is like bearing the brunt of the grunt work.

Guy: Yeah, and in one sense the reason we can do that is that we don’t have to get a new grant renewed every three years. We don’t have to worry about getting tenure. We don’t have to worry about all the competition that our colleagues have to worry about when they are in the economic world. So we can do projects that take ten or fifteen years to go to completion and that is wonderful luxury that being at the Vatican allows us to do. It is interesting you know I was funded by NASA before I was Jesuit. When I joined the Vatican Observatory I had more freedom to do whatever kind of science I wanted to do more than I ever had when I was working for NASA. Because you know when I showed up at the observatory my instructions consisted of just this. I was told do good science period and it was up to me to figure out what would be the best science that I could do and the best way I could contribute to the scientific enterprise.

Chris: That is so awesome you know when you talk about the spectrum and coming up with what colors are coming from metals as they are being heated. You know it is like, this is kind of stuff that is in every science text book out there, when you get into upper level physics classes.

Guy: Absolutely, this is you know the basic data that everybody else is requiring and everybody else is relying on.

Chris: Everybody sees that, you know I can remember doing a lab in my sophomore year in college. Where we were depending on charts of that kind of data, so you know this is imminently important stuff for the rest of the scientific community.

Guy: You know you never do science on your own, you always do it as part of a community, and I think there is a lesson there on religion. That you are really, you never religion alone, you don’t depend on one mad scientist off in you know garage someplace. You have to do it as a team everybody checking each others work and encouraging each other to do the work and in the same way religion is not one crazed preacher off in the desert. But it is community of people and it is the church that is why we need a church.

Chris: Yeah, I mean if anybody was trying to do science on their own, you know imagine trying to start from first principles.

Guy: You will be wasting an awful lot of time that is for sure.

Chris: Yeah, you would never get past that one life time worth of work instead of standing on the shoulders of the giants that have come before you.

Guy: You know none of us for the most part are giants, but each of us can add a couple of building blocks to the edifice and help raise a wall here or there or put in a window there.

Chris: Well Brother Guy we are about out of time for our interview today. I am deeply saddened that it has come to an end. This has been a lot of fun to talk with you.

Guy: I am so happy that you had me on.

Chris: I really want to come and visit one of your observatories some day so.

Guy: There is a place if you want to see the telescope in Arizona, there is a park called Discovery Park in Safford Arizona and you sign up with them or look in their webpage and see the details of how you can see our telescope in Arizona.

Chris: Absolutely, that would be a ton of fun if I ever get down there someday. Was there anything you wanted to say to our listeners before we head off?

Guy: Well the one last thing that I think is the most important message of the Vatican Observatory too my fellow Catholics, is to remember what Pope John Paul the second said. Science does not contradict faith. If you are afraid of science then you have no faith, but if you embrace science and realize that the truths that sciences can tell us are truths that can tell us about the creator. Then you will never be afraid of what comes out of science. You will never try to suppress what comes out of science, because ultimately the truth will lead us to God.

Chris: Well said and I thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule of cataloguing meteorites and so forth to come and talk with us.

Guy: Well thanks for having me.

Chris: All you catholic spotlight listeners out there, hey in case I haven’t mentioned it before we have started up a Twitter account and this is something new for us. I know I have tried to keep people updated about what is going on our Facebook page and I have just, I have done a real poor job of that. So I am hoping that maybe Twitter will do the trick. Hopefully, I am going to be working more on posting those things that are going on, the upcoming interviews as we get them set up, as well as what is happening today and what is being posted today. So check out our new Twitter feed I will have a link to it over in the show notes, but it is catholicsplight. Couldn’t quite fit spotlight into the maximum number of characters there. It was a little too long, but catholicsplight is where you will find all information about our upcoming interviews as well as anything else interesting going on with our show. Also be sure to go over to Podcast Alley and vote for us there. I got a rogue phone ringing in here somewhere. Wish I knew where that was; took care of that. As I was saying, head on over to Podcast Alley and vote for us there on the monthly Podcast Alley. It helps us to get in front of more people and get out message out on a wider range. Everyone have a great day and God bless.

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Transcript of Interview with Brother Guy Consolmagno about The Heavens Proclaim. This interview and others like it can be found at http://www.catholicspotlight.com

Listen Now to the audio version of the show.

The Heavens Proclaim at The Catholic Company.

http://www.catholiccompany.com/catholic-books/1006007/Heavens-Proclaim-Astronomy-Vatican/