Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J.: Eyes Pointed Toward the Heavens With a Heart Rooted Firmly in the Classroom

Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J., has dedicated his professional life to studying the stars, glowing orbs of hydrogen and helium that Lord Byron called “the poetry of heaven.” Brother Consolmagno’s contributions to planetary science are extraordinary. He is an accomplished educator, researcher and author who has served at the Vatican Observatory twice – first as a staff astronomer and curator of its meteorite collection and later as its director. He is known in some circles as “the pope’s astronomer.” Highly respected by his peers, Brother Consolmagno is a Fellow of the Meteoritical Society and recipient of the American Astronomical Society’s prestigious Carl Sagan Medal. He even has an asteroid named in his honor, number 4597, a.k.a., Little Guy. 

When asked why he revels in turning his attention to the sky, Brother Consolmagno says it is simple. 

This fall Brother Consolmagno will bring his love of the planets to Le Moyne, where he will serve as a Jesuit Scientist in Residence and McDevitt Visiting Scholar. He will teach a course titled History of Planetary Science and deliver a public lecture. It will be a homecoming of sorts for Brother Consolmagno, who first arrived on the Le Moyne campus in 2009 as the Lanigan Chair in Science Medicine and Ethics. 

A Michigan native, Brother Consolmagno says that his faith and religious vocation inform his work as a scientist and an educator. When he entered the Society of Jesus in 1989, he had already accrued nearly two decades of experience as a planetary science researcher and university professor. Today when he stands at the front of a classroom, his approach is not merely to teach his students a string of facts about the stars and planets, but to help them understand what to do with that knowledge, and to consider how it affects their understanding of who they are and what their responsibility is to the world around them. Likewise, he believes that what people call critical thinking is “useless if they don’t have reliable data to assess, or a rigorous context of assumptions and goals to guide where they are trying to go with that thinking.”

“Even in a descriptive science like astronomy, the human element can never be forgotten,” he says. “And by observing ourselves as we learn, we can learn about how we learn and indeed how we come to know anything. That is the human philosophy behind the liberal arts and the tool we need to recognize and learn about our Creator.”

At the core of Brother Consolmagno’s instruction is his firm belief that a Jesuit education, in addition to being useful, must also nurture individuals to become men and women for others, individuals who are capable of growing into the people God created them to be.

“What I want to instill in students is joy: the joy of knowing, the joy of learning, and the joy of knowing how to learn more,” he says. “I know from many years of teaching and public speaking that the first lesson any listener takes away is the enthusiasm, or lack of enthusiasm, that the speaker has for the material being taught. You expose them to the love of the material and how each student can uniquely make that material their own.”

Dean of the Carroll College of Arts and Sciences Travis Newton, Ph.D., says that having this accomplished scientist and astronomer on campus, who is also deeply committed to Le Moyne’s Catholic, Jesuit mission, is a boon to the College and the surrounding community.

For his part, Christopher Bass, Ph.D., associate professor and chair of the Department of Physics, says that he is excited to see students interact with Brother Consolmagno as someone who “embodies scientific excellence and the Jesuit tradition” and possesses “a remarkable ability to communicate complex scientific ideas in ways that are accessible, engaging, and connected to broader connections of meaning and purpose.” Bass believes that Brother Consolmagno’s presence will “enrich conversations about science, faith, ethics and the role of curiosity in a liberal arts education.” What’s more, Bass says that the timing of Brother Consolmagno’s arrival on campus is fortuitous. He has observed a growing interest in astronomy among Le Moyne’s students, which he credits in part to the extraordinary discoveries over the past decade, including exoplanets, black holes, and the images and data coming from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Brother Consolmagno continues to be a student himself. He is particularly energized by things that have transformed the way human beings understand the planets. To that end, he finds it instructive and fun to look at our past history of revolutionary discoveries to see what we did right and wrong. More than anything else, he also finds it informative, and sacred, simply to turn his gaze to the night sky.