Pope Francis’ approach to science and faith emphasized our duty to wield both with care

I woke to the news Monday morning that my boss — Pope Francis — had died.

I am a cradle Catholic who certainly looks to the pope as the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, but I also work for the Vatican as a scientist. I was appointed a scholar of the Vatican Observatory in 2016, delighted to be working as a researcher and chemist for a pope who himself had trained as a chemist.

The letter inviting me to join the observatory came in October 2015, on the very day Pope Francis was to celebrate Mass on the Parkway in Philadelphia. (To be honest, when I first opened it, I thought someone was pulling my leg.)

Laudato si’, Pope Francis’ clarion call to the entire world to care for the earth, our common home, had appeared a few months before. Politicians were calling for the pope to stay in his lane, stick to faith, and leave science to the scientists. But, I thought, he is a scientist.

Laudato si’ leaned on science from the start, the opening lines noting the same chemical elements that make up the earth make up our very bodies. Pope Francis did not shy away from walking onto the scientists’ terrain, cogently explaining the science behind the warming of the climate.

But what I most admired about Pope Francis’ approach to science was the wide view he took of science and faith — and our responsibility to wield both with care for the most vulnerable among us, a stance that was obvious from the first days of his pontificate.

Don’t get lost in your tidy formulas and forget to wonder, he exhorted.

A scant four months after his election to the papacy in 2013, his very first encyclical letter, Lumen fidei (The Light of Faith), addressed not only religious faith but the role of scientists. Science, he said, also brings light to the world around us. Science trusts there is an order to be discovered, and in seeking it, is drawn into an ever-deepening understanding of how the parts fit harmoniously into a whole.

He encouraged scientists to be open to the inexhaustible richness the universe contains, to stretch beyond their own research and realize its connections to the whole of creation. Don’t get lost in your tidy formulas and forget to wonder, he exhorted.

He would return to this theme again and again, most memorably in Laudato si’, where he quoted a ninth-century Sufi mystic, Ali al-Khawas, to remind us of the beauty and mystery contained in the natural world, from the buzzing of flies or the ways water behaves — a topic I have written about in my own research. He sounded it often in his messages to scientists visiting the Vatican, and I have often suspected it reflected his own deep interest in and delight at the workings of the universe.

For all the wonder, Francis had words of warning. Technology was not always the answer, advancement not the only goal. That wide view of his asked us to consider the difficult questions of who paid the price for our ingenuity — and who would suffer as a result.

He asked us to center the poor and those living on the margins in our work. See God not just in creation, but in the face of every person on the earth.

I met Pope Francis in 2016, at a private audience while I was at the Vatican Observatory for its summer school for young astronomers. I still remember the way his face lit up when he spoke with each of the students; they had his full attention.

I remember how he grasped both my hands and laughed with me about my mangled pronunciation of a word in Spanish. I felt as if I had his full attention, too. Most of all, I remember his words to us, that he hoped our research, even when it was sometimes frustrating and even tedious, would always be a source of deep joy, and that we might share this joy with the world.

I have the closing words of his message to the Vatican Observatory summer school in 2023 tacked up on the board over my desk: “May you never lose this sense of wonder, in your research and in your lives. May you be inspired always by the love for truth and awestruck by all that each fragment of the universe sets before you.”

I am grateful to Pope Francis for showing me the ways my faith and my science come together in joy and wonder. May we all, scientist or not, be awestruck by every fragment of creation and care for it as the precious gift it is.

Michelle Francl-Donnay is a professor of chemistry at Bryn Mawr College, an adjunct scholar at the Vatican Observatory, and a parishioner at Our Mother of Good Counsel in Bryn Mawr. Her two most recent books are “Prayer: Biblical Wisdom for Seeking God” and “Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea.”