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‘For 1,900 years, the smartest guy in every village was the parish priest. The difficulty is that a lot of the language the church uses, a lot of the symbolism it uses will not only not be understood: It will be misunderstood.’
– Brother Guy Consolmagno
February 22, 2018
Christina Gray
Most parish priests today are at a disadvantage in sharing matters of faith with scientists and engineers – a group culturally described as ‘techies’ – says the director of the Vatican Observatory.
“I’m not sure that today’s pastors know how to talk to these people,” Jesuit Brother Guy Consolmagno said at a Feb. 10 talk at the University of San Francisco.
Brother Consolmagno’s talk, “God’s Mechanics: The Religious Life of Techies,” grew out of his similarly titled 2008 book and his experiences as an astronomer, meteorist and self-described techie.
The talk was sponsored by Friends of St. Ignatius, a community cultivated by St. Ignatius Parish and composed of graduates of Jesuit institutions in the Bay Area and others shaped by Jesuit education and ministries.
Brother Guy described a techie as not just someone who is “really, really good at using a cell phone” or even someone who makes a living in a technical or scientific field.
“A techie is someone whose orientation to the universe is pragmatic, logical and functional,” he said.
A philosopher will look at the universe and ask “is it true?”An artist will ask “is it beautiful?”
“But a techie is going to look at the universe and ask, ‘how does it work?’” Brother Guy said. “That’s how they see things, as processes to be understood, jobs to be done and problems to be solved.”
Brother Guy was appointed director of La Specola Vaticana (the Vatican Observatory) by Pope Francis in 2014. He has undergraduate and master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate in Planetary Science. Along with more than 200 scientific publications, he has co-authored “Turn Left at Orion” (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and the self-published, “Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?” That book’s tongue-in-cheek name comes from the question Pope Francis famously asked in a sermon on acceptance in 2014.
Upon entering the Society of Jesus as a brother in 1989, he was assigned as an astronomer to the Vatican Observatory and curator of the Vatican meterorite collection.An asteroid – 4597 Consolmagno – was named after him in recognition of his work.
“There are a lot of technical occupations in our society where a rigid literalism is part of being able to do the job and people are trained to look at the world that way,” Brother Guy said.
“These are great people, these people are my friends, these people are making the toys I love to use,” he said.
But this literal mindset so common in this part of California, he said, poses a“deeper issue” for the church.
The Catholic Church in America 120 years ago was the “church of immigrants,” said Brother Guy. Immigrants would come to America with a certain shared background, in the culture and in the work they did. Pastors also came from that kind of background and knew how to talk to them, he said.
“But thanks to those terrible Jesuits who kept building schools like USF, their kids and their grandkids have gotten overeducated,” he teased educators in the room. “Now, their way of looking at the world is totally different from the way the immigrants looked at the world when my grandpa came here.
“For 1,900 years, the smartest guy in every village was the parish priest,” he said. “The difficulty is that a lot of the language the church uses, a lot of the symbolism it uses will not only not be understood: It will be misunderstood.”
After interviewing dozens of “techies” about religion, Brother Guy has learned that questions about the universe and the meaning of life are what attract them to religious belief and practice.
He also has found that the value of community and moral support may actually be more important than the search for religious answers or truth.
“I am trained as a scientist, and have grown up with and lived with ‘techies’ my entire life,” said Maggie Robbins of San Francisco after Brother Guy’s talk. “The observations he has about them were pretty spot-on.”