The Catholic Weekly 17 October 2021

catholicweekly.com.au 25 17, October, 2021 HISTORY OF THE many momentous or menial tasks women reli- gious perform, one of the bet- ter-kept secrets has been the role of four Sisters of a congre- gation known as the Sisters of the Holy ChildMary whowere part of a global effort to make a complete map and cata- logue of the starry skies. Until a few years ago, the women were no more than nameless nuns whose image has long been preserved in a black and white photograph that showed them wearing impeccably ironed habits and leaning over special micro- scopes and a ledger. But now their identities have been pulled out of ob- scurity by Jesuit Father Sab- ino Maffeo, assistant to the director of the Vatican Ob- servatory. He stumbled onto their names as he was going through the observatory ar- chives, “putting papers in or- der.” Sisters Emilia Ponzoni, Regina Colombo, Concetta Finardi and Luigia Panceri, all born in the late 1800s and from the northern Lombardy region near Milan, helped map and catalogue nearly half a million stars for the Vati- can’s part in an international survey of the night sky. Top astronomers from around the world met in Par- is in 1887 and again in 1889 to coordinate the creation of a photographic “Celestial Map” (“Carte du Ciel”) and an “astrographic” catalogue pin- pointing the stars’ positions. Barnabite Father Frances- co Denza, an Italian astrono- mer and meteorologist, easily convinced Pope Leo XIII to let the Holy See take part in the initiative, which assigned participating observatories a specific slice of the sky to pho- tograph, map and catalogue. Father Maffeo, an expert in the observatory’s history and its archivist, said Pope Leo saw the Vatican’s partic- ipation as a way to show the world that “the church sup- ported science” and “was not just concerned with theology and religion.” The Vatican was one of about 18 observatories that spent the next several decades taking thousands of glass- plate photographs with their telescopes and cataloguing data for the massive project. But the project at the Vati- can Observatory began to suf- fer after Father Denza died in 1894. When Pope Pius X found out the new director wasn’t up to the job, he called on Archbishop Pietro Maffi of Pisa to reorganise the obser- vatory and search for the best replacement, Father Maffeo said. In 1906, the archbishop found his man at George- town University in Washing- ton, D.C. - Jesuit Father John Four religious were responsible for advancing science’s knowledge of the universe Mapping the stars Hagen who had been heading its observatory there since 1888 and was renowned for his research on “variable” stars, which have fluctuating brightness. Though he had extensive experience in astronomy, Fa- ther Hagen never did the kind of measurements and num- ber crunching required for the astrographic catalogue, Father Maffeo said. “So he went to Europe to see how they did it and saw that in some observatories there were women who read the (star) positions and wrote them in a book with precise coordinates,” the 93-year-old Jesuit priest said. The astronomers told Fa- ther Hagen that once the young women “were shown how to do it, they were very diligent,” Father Maffeo said. At the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, for example, they even were referred to as “lady computers” because of the skill needed to calculate the coordinates according to set formulae. When Father Hagen won- dered where he might be able to hire young women for the Vatican, “he imme- diately thought - nuns,” and contacted the Sisters of the Holy Child Mary, who were located nearby, Father Maffeo said. Coincidentally, Mary is often symbolised in Catholic Church tradition by a star. In a letter dated 13 July 1909, to the superior general, Mother Angela Ghezzi, Arch- bishop Maffi said the Vatican Observatory “needs two sis- ters with normal vision, pa- tience and a predisposition for methodical and mechani- cal work.” Father Maffeo said the sisters’ general council was not enthused “about wasting two nuns on a job that had nothing to do with charity.” However, Mother Ghezzi was “used to seeing God’s will in every request,” he said, and she let two sisters go to the observatory. Work for the sisters began in 1910, but soon required a third and later a fourth to join the team. Two would sit in front of a microscope mount- ed on an inclined plane with a light shining under the plate- glass photograph of one sec- tion of the night sky. The plates were overlaid with numbered grids and the sisters would measure and read out loud each star’s loca- tion on two axes and another would register the coordi- nates in a ledger. They would also check enlarged versions of the images on paper. The Vatican was one of about 10 observatories to complete its assigned slice of the sky. From 1910 to 1921, the nuns surveyed the bright- ness and positions of 481,215 stars from hundreds of glass plate negatives. Their painstaking work did not go unnoticed at the time. Pope Benedict XV received them in a private audience in 1920 and gave them a gold chalice, Father Maffeo said. Pope Pius XI also received the “measuring nuns” eight years later, awarding them a silver medal. The Vatican’s astrographic catalogue, which totalled 10 volumes, gave special men- tion to the sisters, noting their “alacrity and diligence,” uninterrupted labours and “zeal greater than any eulogy” could express at a task “so for- eign to their mission.” The international project to catalogue star positions and build a celestial map ended in 1966 and recorded nearly 5 million stars. The catalogue consists of more than 200 vol- umes produced by 20 obser- vatories and the unfinished map is made up of hundreds of sheets of paper - all work culled from more than 22,000 glass photographic plates of the sky. Father Maffeo said, “Never before had there been a pres- entation of the stars as vast as this.” While the project was quickly eclipsed by huge tech- nological developments in surveying stars, modern-day scientists eventually discov- ered that comparing the star positions recorded a century earlier with current satellite positions provided valuable information about star mo- tions for millions of stars. The project showed that even in a new era of satellites and software, quaint glass- plate photographs and “lady computers” weren’t wholly obsolete. - CNS ¾ Carol Glatz Members of the Sisters of the Holy Child Mary use microscopes to review glass plates as they measure star positions for a collaborative photography project the Vatican participated in to catalogue the stars. PHOTO: CNS PHOTO/COURTESY VATICAN OBSERVATORY The Carte du Ciel (Celestial Map) telescope at the papal villa at Castel Gandolfo, Italy. PHOTO: CNS/COURTESY VATICAN OBSERVATORY CLIMATE Parolin to be at climatemeeting The Vatican announced on 8 October that Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Secretary of State, will head a Vatican delegation to the UN climate-change con- ference in Glasgow later this month. The announcement seemed to indicate that Pope Francis will not attend. Although the Vatican has never announced plans for a papal trip to the Glasgow meeting, Pope Francis himself said in July, and repeated in November, that he planned to make the trip and speak at the conference. He said, however: “It all depends on how I feel at the time.” If the Pope does not make the trip, his absence will heighten speculation that he has not returned to full health after his 4 July intestinal surgery. FAITH RELATIONS Communityhosts faithgathering Thirty five years after the his- toric interreligious gathering in Assisi to pray for peace, the Community of Sant’Egidio is hosting “People as Brothers, Future Earth” in Rome. Speakers include the Ecu- menical Patriarch of Constan- tinople, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the President of the Conference of European Rabbis, the Al-Azhar Grand Imam’s Deputy, the Supreme Patriarch and Catholicos of All Armenians, and the head of Germany’s Lutheran church. Longtime German chancellor Angela Merkel and the chair- man of Moderna—as well as Pope Francis—are also sched- uled to address the gathering. INDIA Violence soars India saw a frightening outbreak of anti-Christian violence on 3 October, when 13 different assaults by Hindu mobs against Christian com- munities occurred on a single day. SOUTH SUDAN South Sudanese ‘slaughter’ The South Sudanese Civil War began in 2013 and officially ended in 2020, but fighting has recently intensified again. “People are slaughtering each other,” said Bishop Edward Hiiboro Kussala of Tombu- ra-Yambio. “The victims are civilians, many women and children. They run to the church, crying for assistance. So we are praying.” The nation of 10.6 million has also been ravaged by floods, and Pope Francis recently sent aid.