Pope celebrates Apollo 11 anniversary with peek at the heavens, call to astronaut

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Peering at the sunlit skies through a Vatican-owned space telescope and calling the last surviving member of the Apollo 11 spaceflight mission was how Pope Leo XIV celebrated the anniversary of the first crewed moon landing.

U.S. astronaut Michael Collins flew the command module around the moon while Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin became the first humans to land and walk on the lunar surface.

Pope Leo, who would have been 13 years old when the lunar module, the Eagle, touched down, video-called the 95-year-old Aldrin late July 20, "sharing with him the memory of this historic achievement -- a testimony to human ingenuity," the Vatican press office said.

They reflected together on Psalm 8, the office said, which marvels at the limitless grandeur of God, the smallness of human beings in creation and the amazing dignity and power that God has graciously bestowed upon them.

During the return flight back to Earth, Aldrin, a Presbyterian, had read two verses of Psalm 8 from the King James Bible in a radio communication with NASA's mission control, saying, "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou has ordained; What is man that thou art mindful of him?"

Pope Leo and Aldrin together "reflected on the mystery of creation, its greatness and its fragility," the press office said July 20, releasing a photo of the pope and Aldrin with his wife, Anca Faur, taken during their video call.

Aldrin then posted on his X account, @TheRealBuzz: "Anca and I were grateful and touched to receive the highest blessing today, from His Holiness, Pope Leo XIV on the 56th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing."

"What an honor! We prayed for good health, long life, and prosperity for all humankind," the astronaut wrote.

The Vatican press office said Pope Leo blessed the astronaut, his family and his coworkers at the end of the call.

Earlier in the day, Pope Leo visited the Vatican Observatory, the headquarters of a team of Jesuit astronomers and scientists, located on the grounds of the papal summer villa in Castel Gandolfo.

The pope showed great interest in how the observatory's double astrograph telescope worked to take plate-glass photographs of the night sky, according to video clips released by the Vatican after the visit.

The pope also visited the observatory's refractor telescope. The pope, who has a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the Augustinian-run Villanova University near Philadelphia, asked U.S. Jesuit Father David Brown to position the massive instrument toward a particular spot for a look.

Father Brown, an astronomer specializing in stellar evolution, serves as caretaker of the telescopes in Castel Gandolfo, and he assiduously followed the pope's request, maneuvering the telescope and the mechanized platform they were standing on.

St. Paul VI also visited the observatory the night of July 20-21, 1969, looking at the moon through its Schmidt telescope before he watched the actual landing and the first moon walk on television at the papal summer villa.

Messages from religious leaders were among the artifacts collected to be flown on the lunar lander, and they remain there to this day for posterity. The messages include one personally handwritten by St. Paul alongside the printed text of Psalm 8.

St. Paul also sent a message honoring and blessing the three astronauts after they landed on the moon, calling them "conquerors of the moon, pale lamp of our nights and our dreams." He then met Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin at the Vatican Oct. 16, 1969.

The observatory traces its origins back to an observational tower erected in the Vatican Gardens by Pope Gregory XIII in 1578 so celestial studies could aid the reform of the Western calendar. Over time, a number of posts for celestial observation were set up along the Vatican walls and elsewhere in Rome.

Pope Leo XIII formally established the Vatican Observatory -- placed on a hillside behind the dome of St. Peter's Basilica -- in 1891 as a visible sign of the church's centuries-old support for science. He also let the Holy See take part in a decades-long international survey of the night sky called the "Carte du Ciel."

The Jesuits have been entrusted with the Vatican Observatory since 1935, when Pope Pius XI decided to move the observatory from the Tower of the Winds in the Vatican to the papal summer residence in Castel Gandolfo.

Two powerful telescopes were installed there in the 1930s under two separate domes located on the roof of the papal palace.

A separate building in the villa's gardens houses the historic Carte du Ciel telescope from 1891 and a Schmidt telescope from 1957 that Pope Pius XII purchased with his own money as a gift to the observatory. It also houses an exhibit showcasing historical scientific instruments, artifacts and meteorites from the observatory's collections.

The Jesuit observatory staff set up a second research center in Tucson, Arizona, in 1981 after Italian skies got too bright for nighttime observation. And in 1993, in collaboration with Steward Observatory, they completed the construction of the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope on Mount Graham -- considered one of the best astronomical sites in the continental United States.