Page 35 - The Secret Museum

We decided to visit his lab, but to have a drink first. Over a delicious coffee,

which Brother Guy served in ‘Specola Vaticana’ cups, he told me how he had ended
up as curator of meteorites at the Vatican. He grew up in Detroit. He loved space and
saved up 16 books of stamps to swap for his first telescope. He joined the Jesuit
order and it was they who decided that this was the job for him. He says he would
have been just as happy serving soup, if that is what the Jesuits had decided, but he is
surely the perfect man for the job here at the Vatican.

Inside his lab, one surface is covered with microscopes and one weird instrument
that looks like a saucepan, used to suck water off meteorites. The rest of the room is

full of cupboards filled with drawers containing slices of meteorite. Propped up on a
cupboard is a painting of the planets, each one studded with jewels. No one really
knows who made it or how it ended up in in the lab, but it’s beautiful.

Brother Guy popped a 4.6-billion-year old meteorite into my hand. This was the
oldest in the collection and was found in France in 1810. Lots of locals saw it fall
from the sky and then had to convince sceptical scientists that it was space rock. It
has a handwritten label attached to it telling how it fell to earth in L’Aigle.

On the wall is a photograph of the current Pope looking into a microscope at a
section of meteorite. Brother Guy showed him two; one found near his hometown in

southern Germany; the other one in the Ukraine in 1866. Brother Guy showed me the
second slice. He took it out of its drawer and slid it under a microscope that shone
polarized light. ‘It’s like looking through a kaleidoscope,’ I said. Brother Guy turned
the slide in circles, and bright colours shifted into new patterns. It was bizarre that so
many shapes could appear from something that looked so bland and tiny on the slide.
‘All the meteorites do this under polarized light,’ Brother Guy added, ‘but this is the
prettiest of them all.’

Brother Guy made a Christmas card out of an image of the meteorite I was looking

at, because he thinks a pattern within it looks like Jesus in a manger. He gave me one
of the cards. On the back, it says, ‘The meteorite samples formed in the proto-solar
nebula around our sun, 4.56 billion years ago.’

This card is not your average Christmas card, and not one you’d expect to get from
the Vatican, at least, not unless you know about Brother Guy and the two Vatican
observatories.