This is the Vatican.
It’s located in Vatican City.
This is the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope.
It’s located in Graham Country, Arizona.
Now, if you’re a keen observer, you may have noticed that Graham County, Arizona is
not in Vatican City.
You may have also noticed that the Vatican is about churches and God and stuff, and that
telescopes, though tall and occasionally mysterious, are neither a church nor a god… which raises
the question: so, like, why do they have that?
Well, there are a few ways to answer that question.
The simple answer is calendars and light pollution.
You see, in order to know when to celebrate Easter and Christmas and stuff, you need calendars,
and calendars are fundamentally based on astronomy—a year isn’t just the period between Slurpee
Days, it’s also equal to one of Earth’s rotations around the sun.
The Gregorian calendar, which modified the leap year calculations of the Julian calendar
while keeping its classic hits such as “July” and “August,” was actually developed in
the mid-1500s by astronomers at the Jesuit-founded Collegio Romano, and popularized by Pope Gregory
XIII.
Because the Catholic Church needs to know exactly which days they should be judging
you extra hard for not going to church, the Church has long had observatories.
They had the Gregorian Tower in 1580, the Observatory of the Roman College in 1774,
the Specola Vaticana in 1787, then they decided having an observatory behind a giant dome
wasn’t the perfect idea they’d expected so they moved to the College Observatory,
then the Italian government said “actually that’s ours now,” so they made a new Specola
Vaticana in 1891, then Rome got too bright and smoky so they went to the Observatory
at Castel Gandolfo in the 1930s, then that got too bright and smoky, so in 1993 they
built a telescope, put it on a mountain in Arizona, and crossed their fingers that Tuscon
will never get too popular.
The telescope, by the way, is a 1.8 meter Gregorian telescope, meaning it uses mirrors,
not lenses, and it does it in this pattern, instead of any of these patterns.
Because it’s supported unconditionally by the Vatican, it doesn’t have to worry about
earning grants or funding, so it’s something of a workhouse in the astronomy world: it
does the less glamorous work like measuring meteorites that doesn’t win awards but that
provides useful data for the entire field.
So that’s the simple answer: the Vatican needed telescopes for calendars and stuff,
and now they have a big telescope in Arizona because that’s a good place for telescopes.
The longer answer delves into the relationship between the Catholic Church and science, which
is a long and complicated one that I’m sure won’t offend anyone by discussing.
Catholicism’s relationship to science is kind of like my relationship to the guy who
spammed our submissions page 100,000 times asking for a video about bricks: in some ways,
I created you.
In other ways, you’re my greatest enemy.
Some could argue that the Catholic Church, throughout history, has been the world’s
greatest supporter of science.
The Catholic Church created the first universities in Europe and were longstanding supporters
of engineering, which they used to build cathedrals with domes on them because for hundreds of
years people seemed to think the greatest way to honor God was curved ceilings—and
several of history’s greatest scientists were Catholic clergy—Nicolaus Copernicus,
Gregor Mendel, and others that aren’t the first two names listed on the Wikipedia page
for “List of Catholic clergy scientists,”—including several who helped develop the scientific
method.
On the other hand, the guy who actually invented the scientific method was put in jail by the
Church for saying the earth went around the sun.
So maybe keep that in mind the next time you consider spamming the suggestions form.
Today, the Catholic Church continues to oppose certain forms of stem cell research, and has
long banned some medical innovations, like birth control.
Yet, despite not providing some important forms of health care, the Catholic Church
is still today the world’s largest provider of medical care and research facilities in
the world.
The Church has slowly come to accept the theory of evolution and the Big Bang Theory—which
was partly developed by the Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre.
Most of the Church’s attitude towards science can be summed up in the Catholic catechism,
which argues that because God is truth, anything science convincingly manages to discern as
true basically has to line up with God.
It reads, “there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason.
Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason
on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth.
Peace be with you, and don’t forget to smash that subscribe button.”
I may have made up that last part, but the point is: the Catholic Church has a research
telescope because, counterintuitively, the Catholic Church is sometimes actually pretty
into science.
I’ll close by saying that I feel like this video ended up weirdly pro the Catholic Church,
so just to prove I’m not some sort of planted Vatican spon-con, uh, here are 95 theses about
why they suck, and one photo of the Pope that I photoshopped to look like when Mario is
short because he got hit by a Goomba.
If you enjoyed that picture of baby Pope, might I interest you in some other weird footage:
a person in a bear suit clapping at a business meeting, a baby doll with a nail through its
head getting gasoline poured on it, an orangutan with a cheeseburger.
All of these came from our sponsor Storyblocks, which by the way also had a lot of not-bizarre
and actually useful footage, including a lot of the footage of the Vatican that we used
in this video.
If you want to start creating video content, then trust me: you need Storyblocks.
I know because that’s exactly what I used when I made my first YouTube video back in
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Just go to Storyblocks.com/hai or click the button on the screen to sign up, and when
you do, you’ll be helping support HAI.