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Pope tells astronomers to pack up their telescopes

Nobody expects a Vatican eviction

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The Pope has given the Vatican's Jesuit astronomers their marching orders, banishing them and their infernal instruments from his summer palace and billeting them in a disused convent instead.

The astronomers' eviction from the Castel Gandolfo has been put down to Benedict XVI's need for more space to receive visiting diplomats, according to The Independent.

According to the paper, the Jesuits who run the observatory are putting a brave face on their enforced removal, with the observatory's director Father Jose Funes, insisting: "It is not a downgrading of science in the Vatican."

However, observers will no doubt see this as a negative move in the Church's relationship with science, which dates back to that other troublesome astronomer, Galileo, and beyond. Benedict has been accused of looking to turn the clock back on his predecessor's embrace of science, to the extent of apparently endorsing intelligent design.

Alternatively, you could opt for the theory that the observatory’s main problem is that it’s largely run by Jesuits, another group that has a stormy relationship with the Holy See.

After their stint as the Pope's shock troops in the counter-reformation, the order was suppressed in the 18th century, before being restored in the 19th century. Nevertheless, some apparently feel that the Jesuits are too clever by half and, even worse, have developed a rather liberal tendency.

Earlier this year, Benedict welcomed attendees to the observatory’s summer school with the message: "The Vatican Observatory has sought to demonstrate the Church's desire to embrace, encourage, and promote scientific study, on the basis of her conviction that 'faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth'."

And, if after sufficient contemplation you still feel you can't get to the truth, the Vatican will be happy to supply it for you. ®

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Latest Comments

Wow

**Stalin was certainly not an exception.**

Theists not only have to take the blame for what people did in the past in the name of religion, but now must take the blame for what the atheists did as well. Wow!!

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Re: Purges and genocide...

> By Anonymous Coward

> Posted Monday 7th January 2008 07:56 GMT

>

> Yeah, but remember, most people aren't cold blooded executioners unless

> they believe that they have God on their side, which has of course been

> used extensively by the masterminds of most purges and genocides.

>

> Stalin's a notable exception, of course. He probably would've found it

> easier to use religion, though, but, on the plus side, now we have millions

> of potentially brilliant minds not inflicted by the crippling mental illness

> that is religion!

Stalin was certainly not an exception. Please read your George Orwell. A dictator like Stalin seeks to supplant religion, not suppress it. Orwell pointed this out in his journalism back in the 1930s. In the case of Stalin (and Mao, Kim, etc., etc.) Marxism became the state religion, with the leader as the Prophet (or maybe God incarnate). For the second coming and the final judgement, substitute the class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. For the suppression of the heliocentric model and the persecution of Galileo, substitute the imposition of the Lamarckian views of Trofim Lysenko and the imprisonment of genuine biologists and geneticists in the Gulag. Stalin did more to pervert science than any pope.

(I leave the working out of the parallels in the case of Hitler as an exercise for the reader.)

Karl Popper wrote in a similar vein in "The Poverty of Historicism".

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F.E.S. finally restrored

I guess this means good ol' Greg is planning to restore pre-Galilean doctrine.

Hang on everybody, the Earth is now flat again.

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