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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.

Bob Macke, another Jesuit brother in Castel Gandolfo, has developed a specialty in documenting the properties of meteorites, and several years ago he was invited to join an international team analyzing the Bennu samples; in 2023, he built a device specifically adapted for carrying out these delicate measurements. He enrolled at Boston College to study history, but wasn’t happy there: “It was a party school, and I didn’t like to party—it made me uncomfortable.” He transferred to M.I.T., lured in part by the science-fiction club’s impressive library, and switched his major to Earth and Planetary Science. In “God Is Not Great,” Hitchens, who died in 2011, wrote, “If you will devote a little time to studying the staggering photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, you will be scrutinizing things that are far more awesome and mysterious and beautiful—and more chaotic and overwhelming and forbidding—than any creation or ‘end of days’ story.” The New Atheists were revisiting debates from the nineteenth century, when influential critics, among them Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, sought to reëxamine established religions in the light of recent scientific discoveries.

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