Fr Richard D’Souza with Pope Leo XIV. D’Souza has served as superior of the Jesuit community attached to Vatican Observatory since 2002
PANAJI: Physicist, astronomer, scientist, Indiana Jones. Not quite the words to describe a priest, let alone a 46-year-old Jesuit from Mapusa. But that is exactly what Fr Richard D’Souza is.At the Vatican Observatory in Castel Gandolfo, an ancient castle that once hosted pontiffs, D’Souza is piecing together the violent history of galactic cannibalism — the consumption of smaller galaxies by larger ones. “My work is basically to understand the histories of galaxies. I try to be a galactic archaeologist, so I put on this Indiana Jones cap and I try to see how galaxies grow to the massive size that they are,” he said.His breakthrough came in 2018, published in Nature Astronomy, when he and Eric Bell proposed that the Andromeda galaxy’s most significant merger — a violent collision that reshaped the Milky Way’s nearest galactic neighbour — occurred approximately 2 billion years ago.D’Souza’s own trajectory was less violent. Born in Pune in 1978, raised partly in Kuwait and partly in Goa, he entered the Society of Jesus, the formal name of the Jesuits, at 18. A Catholic order known for its intellectual pursuits, the society recognised in him something worth nurturing.“I used to go for camping trips while studying at St Britto’s, in the countryside, far away from the city lights where you could see the night sky. This was perhaps my first interest in the heavens, and this was confirmed a lot during my novitiate in Desur, Belagavi, which was a remote place where I could see the night sky,” said D’Souza.For his Jesuit formators, D’Souza’s path was neither straight nor predictable. After completing his physics degree at St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, he pursued a master’s degree in Heidelberg, working at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. Then came philosophy in Pune, as his Jesuit formation demanded, followed by theology. Then, a gravitational pull-back to physics through his doctoral work at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich.“I seriously started thinking of astronomy as a career when I started my master’s in physics at Heidelberg, where I did some small research project on astronomy, and it was this that really attracted me. I fell in love with the subject,” he said.Between philosophy and theology, he briefly veered towards social action in 2007 when he helped start St Paul’s Community College in Belagavi for school dropouts. This oscillation between the cosmic and the communal, between the spiritual and the celestial, should be debilitating. Not for him.“Our work at the observatory is basically doing scientific research with 80-90% of our time going in collecting and analysing data, and going for conferences. The remaining 10% of the time, we remind the Church that faith and science need to go together,” said D’Souza.Since 2022, D’Souza has served as superior of the Jesuit community attached to the Vatican Observatory. He is now director of the observatory itself, one of the oldest astronomical institutes in the world that dates back to 1774.Given that he straddles the two heavenly realms of theology and astronomy, he is often asked about extraterrestrial life. “I was waiting for this question and my response is, thank God I am not an expert on that,” he recently said at an event in Porvorim, blending humour with pragmatism.
