Vatican's new Secretary General has a passion for the stars

By Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, Director of the Vatican Observatory

The great excitement here in Rome is the appointment of Sister Raffaella Petrini as the new Secretary General of the “Governatorato”, the governing board, of the Vatican City State. She’s in a position that traditionally has been held by bishops; indeed, the previous Secretary General was appointed as the new President of the Governatorato in September.



How does this affect the work of the Vatican Observatory? It’s the Vatican City State that pays the bulk of our bills in Rome, and she will be the one we will need to deal with on a regular basis for all the administrative work that makes an observatory function. But it turns out, she knows us well. And therein lies a story...

Many years ago, a young American girl learned all about computers because her father worked for IBM in New York. She grew up to become Sister Judith, a sister in the order of the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist and was assigned to work at the Vatican. By the early 1990s, when I arrived here, she’d set up the first Vatican internet office. Famously, she named the mainframes after archangels… the computer that functioned as the mail server was Gabriel, the firewall was named Michael… When I first arrived at the Specola, back then, she was the person I went through to get the computer I needed at the Specola. And that was the beginning of a grand friendship.

In October of 2018, Sister Judith led a group of eight sisters from the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist in Rome visited us here in Rome… including Sister Raffaella. When I met with Sister Raffaella this week, she recalled with delight the things she had seen here… the space images and the meteorites and the telescopes. We have a fan in high places!