And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good. – Gen 1:16-18
The King James Bible has far more felicitous phrasing for the moon than lyrics from R.E.M. or Cat Power or other pop culture sources swirling in my Gen-X brain, part of the reason I chose the above rather than any of those, or Ralph Kramden threatening to send Alice to our celestial neighbor. When the crew of Apollo 8, the first manned craft to orbit the moon, sent holiday greetings back to Earth from space on Christmas Eve in 1968, they, too, chose to read the creation narrative from Genesis from the King James Bible. Why? Because there is something about seeing the moon up close—or seeing Earth from space—that activates all our religious impulses, that turns our thoughts to the divine.
Pope Leo XIV seems to agree. He called Buzz Aldrin, the second human to walk on the moon, on Sunday, the day after the 56th anniversary of that famous 1969 step onto lunar soil. “This evening, 56 years after the Apollo 11 moon landing, I spoke with the astronaut Buzz Aldrin,” the pope wrote on X. “Together we shared the memory of a historic feat, a testimony to human ingenuity, and we reflected on the mystery and greatness of Creation.” Pope Leo also strolled over to the Vatican Observatory (conveniently located on the grounds of his vacation home outside Rome, Castel Gandolfo) to take a peek through one of their telescopes.
If you’re a faithful reader of Scripture, you are going to encounter references to the moon more than 50 times, everywhere from the aforementioned creation narrative all the way to the end of the world in Revelation, when an enduring symbol of faithfulness and hope in the darkness turns to blood. Scientists, religious and not, have also studied the moon more so than any other celestial object. (As William Critchley-Menor, S.J., noted in America in 2019, there are 34 craters on the moon named after Jesuit scientists alone, and the Jesuits still run the Vatican Observatory in Rome and Tucson, Ariz.)
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first walked on the moon 56 years ago, the editors of America noted the religious significance of the moment along with the scientific achievement. A “thoroughgoing secularist,” they wrote, “might say that the moon walk is not in the least problematic to him, that science renders all clear and intelligible, and that if some problem of a suprasensory nature were to exist, he would not look for an answer from religion.” But that secularist, they wrote, is not alone:
But there remain others who more acutely sense the need to explore these technological wizardries for their religious values and justification. There are few more urgent tasks confronting the theological fraternity than to develop a structured response to the technological culture of our time. If the moon walk prompts our theological systems to read “go” on the latter project, the practical religious returns can be outstanding for space age man.
In other words, the space program didn’t just give us Spock and Velcro and Tang. Landing on the moon also gave a jolt to our theological imaginations. And indeed, the U.S. space program did inspire innovative efforts and questions about everything from architecture to missiology to ecclesiology, including a bold if fanciful proposal to build a chapel on the moon. Whatever became of space exploration, wrote the Rev. Clifford Stevens, a U.S. Air Force chaplain, in a 1967 special issue of Liturgical Arts, “the priest will be a part of it. He will inhabit his chapel on the edge of space and help to open the doors to a whole new dimension of human existence.”
The reasons were obvious to Father Stevens:
Priests stood with Columbus and Magellan on the journeys into the unknown, and with the Vikings, too, when they explored the unknown western ocean. Man stands now on the threshold of a far more breathtaking discovery, and so it is not unfitting for the theologian, symbolically or otherwise, to put on a space suit.
In 2019, Antonio De Loera-Brust wrote in America of the special significance of the moon landing for immigrants to the United States. Writing of his family’s Mexican heritage, he noted that “[i]f the frontier of the U.S.-Mexico border represents the America that would exclude me, space is the frontier that invites me. In a world full of grievance and hatred, a unifying purpose on a frontier freed from history, pioneering on to truly new worlds, is exactly what we need.”
What of the expense, though? How much of the Apollo program was simply an attempt to outspend and outrace the Soviet Union? Couldn’t the money have been better spent elsewhere? Perhaps, but there was something all-American about the effort. (Which may be why our first U.S.-born pope had it on his mind this weekend.) Even President John F. Kennedy, the driving force behind the initial push to go to the moon, was at first a “space skeptic,” according to Joe McAuley in a 2019 America review of Douglas Brinkley’s American Moonshot:
[L]ike many others, he wondered if the resources could have been put to better use in other fields. He slowly came to realize, though, that the space program could have unforeseen positive consequences, economically, scientifically, socially—and politically, given the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union. It appealed to Kennedy’s idealistic, historical and, frankly, romantic nature, because it was a challenge to be met, one that could be used for the benefit of mankind and for peace. Applying the nautical images he so loved, he viewed it as a “new sea” on which to set sail.
Looking back on the moon landing in 2022, Valerie Schultz wrote that “the space race gave us a jolt of the divine, of something far greater than us. Space was the final frontier but also the intimation of a closeness to the eternal, the ineffable.” For her generation, she noted, it meant more than the sum of its parts: “How much more of the unknowable could we know? Or was the appreciation of a much wider mystery enough? It may be a stretch to say that space made us believe in God, but the possibilities and potential of space shaped us.”
•••
Our poetry selection for this week is “Gibbous Moon,” by Alfred Nicol. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:
- The atomic nightmare turns 80
- Anne Carr, the ‘founding mother’ of Catholic feminism in academia
- David Tracy was more than a theologian
- The priest-detectives of American fiction
- Riley Hughes, an unsung literary jack of all trades
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
