Chris Ganey Bags 2021 Nelson H. Minnich Prize for Galileo article

Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury’s Galileo before the Holy Office (1847) / null

For his work researching the complexities of the Galileo issue, Chris Ganey, an astronomer and historian of science at the Vatican Observatory, was just awarded the Nelson H. Minnich Prize for 2021.

The Minnich Prize is awarded for the best paper in the Catholic Historical Review, a quarterly publication published by the Catholic University of America Press.

The award was granted to Ganey, a public relations officer of the Vatican Observatory Foundation, for his piece “Galileo and the Jesuits: The Fault in the Stars.”

EWTN News Nightly recently spoke with Graney about the recognition.

“My research,” he explained, “is regarding Galileo Galilei … and some of his Jesuit astronomer critics.”

“My area of interest is Galileo and his opponents—the people who he was arguing with, what did they have to say? It turns out that what they have to say is a lot more interesting than than what we might think.  It’s a very complex and and dynamic argument.”

“It tells us something about how science works,” Ganey told EWTN News Nightly. “We see just how complicated it can be to answer even relatively simple scientific questions.”

According to the committee that awarded Ganey the Minnich Award, “​​Graney brilliantly demonstrates that the Copernican view of the nature and size of the stars, which was abandoned not long after Galileo’s death, led many scholars to reject heliocentrism.

Thus, the church opposed Galileo not just on theological but on scientific grounds. Graney is to be commended for showing that there is more nuance to one of the most famous confrontations in the history of the church than scholars have hitherto supposed.”

During his presentation on EWTN News Nightly, Ganey also covered other projects at the Vatican Observatory.

He mentioned a new model proposed by Fathers Gabriele Gionti S.J. and Matteo Galaverni, an astronomer and an associate astronomer, respectively, of the Vatican Observatory, which aims to describe how gravity would have worked in the midst of “cosmological inflation,” or the rapid expansion of the universe during and after the Big Bang, using mathematics.

“They discovered some problems with existing ideas about gravity at the very beginning of time when the universe was very compact,” Graney said, adding that they “have worked through the problems and proposed a new alternative.”

The Vatican Observatory, founded in 1582, is one of the world’s oldest operational astronomical observatories. Its headquarters are in Castel Gandolfo, a village just outside of Rome that also serves as the papal summer palace. The Vatican Observatory also manages the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, which is located 200 miles southeast of Phoenix in rural Arizona.