Sept. 19 is my official retirement date as the director of the Vatican Observatory. After a delightful 10 years in the post, I am happy to turn the keys over to Richard D’Souza, S.J., a galactic astronomer of world renown. But as I depart, I thought I would pass along a few words of advice based on my experience.

1. Humility is power. When I became director, I had no experience dealing with the Vatican and its infamous bureaucracy. I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. So I dealt with it in a very American, straightforward way: total honesty.

Let’s say the frammis needs a new thingamabob. I would not go to the office of thingamabobs and demand a replacement. That would never work; I had no status with them. That would take months.

Instead, I would go to the director of frammises and humbly ask, “Please help me. I am a foolish American, and I don’t know what to do. But I think there is something wrong with the frammis.”

The director of frammises would then glance at the problem. “Ah,” he would say wisely. “I suggest you need a new thingamabob. Let me take care of that for you.” Being wise to the ways of the Vatican, he would have the thingamabob installed in days.

There is more going on here than simply asking rather than demanding. In Vatican culture, once someone does you a favor, you become their client, their protégé. You’ve given them status by putting yourself under their protection. Since their status depends on you, in a weird way you’ve made yourself important to them. Suddenly: You become an important person.

2. God answers prayers by sending people. When I first started running the observatory, I realized that we needed a good website to engage folks who might want to know about faith and science. But I had no idea how to set up such a site, and of course no time to do that, even if I knew how. One day I was visiting friends (whom I had met through science fiction conventions), and I passed on my dream of the great website. My friend Bob gave me a funny look before saying: “You realize, I do that for a living.” For the past 10 years he’s worked full time, at half-time pay, building and maintaining www.vaticanobservatory.org.

Another example: The Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope in Arizona was cutting-edge when it first saw light—30 years ago. It’s gotten a little less advanced since then, however. It desperately needed a complete overhaul, including the ability to be run remotely from anywhere in the world.

Turns out, the best outfit in the world to do that work is in the Czech Republic; they mostly automate breweries, so if the Czechs can trust their beer to these guys, we can trust our telescope. But could we explain the complicated details of our project over the barriers of distance and language? It just so happens that our observatory’s vice director in charge of the telescope in Arizona is Father Paul Gabor, a Jesuit from the Czech Republic. Right person, right place, right time.

There’s more: At just that time, a donor joined our foundation board with just the right connections to come up with the funding to pay for that upgrade. The work is now complete—on time, on budget.

Having a Jesuit astronomer on staff who speaks Czech seems rare enough. Finding more young Jesuits anywhere in the world with an interest and ability in astronomy and its related sciences would seem almost impossible. But actually there’s a remarkable list of young Jesuits in formation with advanced technical degrees, interested in joining us some day. (They include men from Australia, Canada, Congo, Indonesia and India, with others in the wings.) You might almost suspect that maybe God thinks this work is worth supporting.

Or maybe God just appreciates Czech beer.

3. Failure is not an option; it’s a requirement. One day, out of the blue, came an email about some translations from Latin of a 17th-century astronomy book. (Yawn.) It was from some guy who taught astronomy in a community college. (Right.) In Kentucky. (Right.) But we happened to both be in Chicago on a certain day, so I agreed to have a coffee with him.

Today? Alongside a series of articles in journals about the history of astronomy and a couple of scholarly books from Notre Dame Press that have completely revolutionized our understanding of Galileo and his rivals, my good friend Chris Graney and I have published our own take with Paulist Press on When Science Goes Wrong: The Desire and Search for the Truth. And he provides a lot of the content on that website I mentioned above.

But beyond being another person sent at the right time, Chris made me realize something about the science I do that is all the more relevant in these times of science denialism. In his research we came across a number of great stories in the history of astronomy where people were almost right—which is to say, they were wrong. Yet the science grew precisely because they were wrong.

Rather than worshiping science as the last word in truth, or beating it up when it’s less than perfect, we realized that science can only go right when it’s not afraid to go wrong. We learn by mistakes; indeed, that’s usually the way we learn.

4. Vaudeville will never die. I give about 50 public talks a year. Over the last 10 years, that’s 500 talks. And our annual report shows that the other dozen members of our staff are at least as busy giving tours and talks, at both our observatory sites in Rome and Tucson and in their home countries: India, Africa, Italy, Latin America. Our job at the observatory is to show the world that the church supports science; these guys are providing the science and showing the world.

I love giving these talks, but then, it’s in the blood. Several of my Italian grandmother’s brothers, my great uncles, were actually vaudeville performers 100 years ago. They passed their song-and-dance skills on to their children (including my dad), who passed them on to my brother (a musician) and me.

And in this day of YouTube and Zoom, it turns out there’s a great hunger for live entertainment. Who knew my family legacy would be in such demand?

5. Take a bow. You’ll get blamed for what you never did, so learn to modestly take credit where it’s equally unearned. I will merely point out that we have had two solar eclipses, for free, in North America during the time that I was director of the Vatican Observatory. Any clouds were not my fault.

This article appears in October 2025.

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