Professor Chris Graney, an astronomer on the staff of the Vatican’s astronomical observatory, received the 2021 Nelson H. Minnich prize from The Catholic Historical Review, which is The Catholic University of America Press’s century-old journal.
The prize is awarded yearly for the best article published in CHR. Graney’s paper, “Galileo between Jesuits: The Fault is in the Stars,” discussed the 17th-century work of Galileo Galilei, Father Christoph Scheiner and Father Andre Tacquet.
According to the award committee, “Graney brilliantly demonstrates that the Copernican view of the nature and size of the stars … led many scholars to reject heliocentrism. Thus, the church opposed Galileo not just on theological but on scientific grounds. Graney is to be commended for showing that there is more nuance to one of the most famous confrontations in the history of the church than scholars have hitherto supposed.”
