Annals of Inquiry

The Vatican Observatory Looks to the Heavens

It’s run by a Michigan-born Jesuit—and a meteorite expert—known as the Pope’s Astronomer.

By Rebecca Mead

July 28, 2025

When the late Pope Francis was elected, a dozen years ago, and famously declined the pomp and perquisites typically associated with the office, among his renunciations was the use of the papal summer residence—a seventeenth-century palazzo in Castel Gandolfo, about fifteen miles south of Rome. Generations of Popes had enjoyed the use of the mansion, which overlooks a volcanic lake and is surrounded by spectacular terraced gardens. The palazzo is now a museum where visitors can admire a gallery of papal portraits, of varying quality, and imagine the dreams that visited the successive occupants of the papal bedroom, with its narrow twin bed. Castel Gandolfo is also home to one of the Holy See’s more unexpected institutions: the Vatican Observatory, which since its founding, in 1891, has been dedicated to the scientific study of the heavens.

Guy Consolmagno, the director of the observatory, first came to Castel Gandolfo as a newly minted Jesuit brother, in 1993. When I met him outside the palazzo, early this spring, he gestured at a window overlooking the building’s courtyard. This was the location of his first, decidedly modest bedroom in the mansion. Consolmagno, who grew up in suburban Detroit and retains a buoyant, emphatic, Midwestern manner, told me, “The Pope then was John Paul II, and when he was first elected he had made a rookie mistake, as we say in America. Somebody, a journalist—one of those terriblejournalists—had asked him, ‘What’s your favorite hymn?’ And, being a fool, he actually gave the name of a hymn that he happened to like. So, every Sunday during the summertime, when he was living here, the doors would open at 10 a.m., and this place would be filled with two thousand Polish pilgrims singing that hymn underneath my window. I got totally sick of it.” Consolmagno never got sick, though, of being saluted by the Swiss Guards stationed at the palace gates.

Consolmagno, who has a prodigious white beard, wavy gray bangs, and dark, beetling eyebrows, is one of fifteen scientists who currently make up the scholarly staff of the Vatican Observatory—all Jesuits and, inevitably, all men. (Their meals, perhaps equally inevitably, are prepared by a local woman.) At any given moment, about half of the fraternity is in Castel Gandolfo, which has been the institution’s home since the nineteen-thirties—although, for the past fifteen-odd years, the staff’s living quarters have been situated in a former convent a short distance from the palace. The other half of the team is in Arizona, a state that offers a remote mountain environment more conducive to astronomical observation than the light-polluted suburbs of Rome do. In the early nineties, at the Mt. Graham International Observatory, near Tucson, the Vatican installed a powerful four-million-dollar telescope and an astrophysics facility, together known as the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, or vatt. Consolmagno, like many of his colleagues, shuttles frequently between Italy and Arizona, rarely spending more than a few months in one place

Guy Consolmagno, the head of the observatory, says of celestial revelations, “Even scientists who don’t believe in God have to believe in ‘Oh, my God.’ ”Photographs by Marta Giaccone for The New Yorker