Courtney McGrail“Up until recently, the women were no more than nameless nuns whose image has long been preserved in a black and white photograph… now their identities have been pulled out of obscurity”, writes Carol Glatz
Carol Glatz
Of the many momentous or menial tasks women religious perform, one of the better-kept secrets has been the role of four Sisters of the Holy Child Mary who were part of a global effort to make a complete map and catalogue of the starry skies.
Up until recently, 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 microscopes and a ledger.
But now their identities have been pulled out of obscurity by Jesuit Fr Sabino Maffeo, assistant to the director of the Vatican Observatory. He stumbled onto their names as he was going through the observatory archives, “putting papers in order”, he said.
Srs 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 Vatican’s part in an international survey of the night sky.
Top astronomers from around the world met in Paris in 1887 and again in 1889 to coordinate the creation of a photographic ‘Celestial Map’.
Italian astronomer and meteorologist, Fr Francesco Denza, 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 photograph, map and catalogue.
Fr Maffeo, an expert in the observatory’s history and its archivist, said Pope Leo saw the Vatican’s participation as a way to show the world that “the Church supported science” and “was not just concerned with theology and religion.”
But the project at the Vatican Observatory began to suffer after Fr 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 observatory and search for the best replacement.
In 1906, the archbishop found his man at Georgetown University in Washington DC, Jesuit Fr John Hagen. Though he had extensive experience in astronomy, Fr Hagen never did the kind of measurements and number crunching required for the astrographic catalogue.
“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 Fr Hagen that once the young women “were shown how to do it, they were very diligent,” Fr Maffeo said. When Fr Hagen wondered where he might be able to hire young women for the Vatican, “he immediately thought – nuns, and contacted the Sisters of the Holy Child Mary, who were located nearby, Fr Maffeo said. Coincidentally, Mary is often symbolised in Catholic Church tradition by a star.
Patient sisters: In a 1909 letter, to the superior general, Mother Angela Ghezzi, Archbishop Maffi said the Vatican Observatory “needs two sisters with normal vision, patience and a predisposition for methodical and mechanical work”.
Fr 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 nun to join the team. Two would sit in front of a microscope mounted on an inclined plane with a light shining under the plate-glass photograph of one section of the night sky.
The Vatican was one of about 10 observatories to complete its assigned slice of the sky. From 1910 to 1921, the nuns surveyed the brightness and positions of 481,215 stars off of hundreds of glass plates. 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, Fr Maffeo said. Pope Pius XI also received the “measuring nuns” eight years later, awarding them a silver medal.
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 volumes produced by 20 observatories 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.