From Schoolboy Scholar to Jesuit Astronomer: Father Cortie in Letters and Notices
- Volunteer
- May 27
- 6 min read
Our latest blog post comes from volunteer Eleanor.
"We men are not incorporeal, and we require some sensible signs to effect grace for us."
These are the words of Father Aloysius Cortie, S.J., a celebrated Jesuit astronomer and educator, well-known amongst religious communities in Britain and beyond for his lectures and sermons during which he ‘proclaimed the word of God as a priest and a scientist.’ (L&N Vol 40, p. 210) As these words may suggest, Fr. Cortie used his well-regarded lectures to explore the ‘principle of design’, using his own experiences travelling the world to observe solar eclipses to argue in favour of the presence of God in science and nature. His argument above, though, did not originate in one of his sermons. Instead, they come from an answer to an exam question he wrote as a schoolboy at Stonyhurst College in Lancashire. (L&N Vol. 11, p. 348)
As a volunteer at the British Jesuit Archives I have been digitising Letters and Notices, the British Province’s quarterly newsletter, which was first published for circulation amongst Jesuits in 1863. The intent was to publish news from throughout the British province, and letters from its members, and to provide updates on the work of British Jesuits. The Archives are currently undertaking a digitisation project where volunteers have been scanning and compiling volumes of Letters and Notices to make them more accessible to researchers. As I discovered for myself while reading the newsletters that I digitised, and later while researching Fr. Cortie, Letters and Notices is a fantastic resource for historical and biographical research. The letters published cover almost every aspect of the lives and work of Jesuits, including the work of prison chaplains, and of Jesuits on evangelical missions in colonised countries across the world. They are also a useful historical source for researching contemporary beliefs, attitudes and values.
It was while digitising the issue from May 1876 that I came across a report on the First Inter-Collegiate Competition, an exam contest between British Jesuit schools. (L&N Vol. 11, pp. 34-47) The report published not only the format of the competition, and all the exam questions that participants answered, but also the results of the highest scoring students for each exam paper. In both the competition held in 1876, and the one the following year, Aloysius Cortie scored full marks on the Religious Knowledge portion of the exam, 200 marks and 100 marks respectively. (L&N Vol. 11, pp. 370-371) He was joined in this achievement in the second year by his classmate Bernard Partridge, but of the two of them only Cortie went on to become a Jesuit.
As Cortie scored highly in Religious Knowledge, Classical Composition, English Verse and Latin Oration across the two competitions, and did not score top marks in any of the mathematical exams, it may seem surprising that he went on to become a scientist. Cortie acknowledged this himself in his Little Life, a short autobiography written by Jesuits upon being received into the Society. He wrote, “Although I am a classicist rather than a mathematician yet I have a preference for mathematics & astronomy,” describing himself as having “a good knowledge of Latin and a fair knowledge of mathematics.” Fr. Cortie’s obituary in Letters and Notices describes how he pursued this preference by returning to Stonyhurst to teach; he trained in the observatory (which is still operational today) under Father Stephen Perry, whose biography Fr. Cortie later wrote, his only full-length published work.
Fr. Cortie’s obituary provided the perfect starting point for researching his life between his participation in the Inter-Collegiate Competitions in 1876-77, and his death from complications of influenza in 1925. By following the dates of his major life events recorded in his obituary, I was able to find mentions of, and writings by, Fr. Cortie in multiple preceding volumes of Letters and Notices. In order to find exact dates of Fr. Cortie’s travels to places such as Spain, California and Tonga, I was able to cross reference his obituary with his entry in the Province Register, a document which chronicles the important dates in the lives of Jesuits. Unusually, Fr. Cortie’s entry, written in 1914, is accompanied by a note from Fr. Cortie himself, describing, in his words, his ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ of travel to attend scientific conferences and observe solar eclipses, from 1905 to 1914.
In this period, though Fr. Cortie is frequently mentioned in the brief ‘notes’ section of Letters and Notices, only a handful of his own writings were published, all of them in relation to his astronomical work. A report printed in Letters and Notices Volume 28 (1905-1906), for example, narrates Fr. Cortie’s trip to Vinaroz in eastern Spain to observe and photograph a total solar eclipse, particularly the phenomenon known as the solar corona, or ‘aureole of glory’, where a halo of light is visible surrounding the moon. (L&N Vol 28, pp. 250-255) Another report by Fr. Cortie, that of the British Government solar eclipse expedition to Tonga in 1911, which he led, is not found in Letters and Notices. Instead, the ‘notes’ portion of the newsletter directs the reader to the Stonyhurst Magazine, the college’s own newsletter, a demonstration of the collaboration between Jesuit institutions and publications in this period. (L&N Vol 31, p. 208)
Fr. Cortie appeared more frequently in Letters and Notices in the 1920s, when several of his own letters were published. While his earlier contributions had been mostly scientific, his later letters focused more on his observations of international relations in religious and scientific communities following the First World War. When Fr. Cortie travelled through Belgium and Germany to an astronomy conference in Potsdam in 1921, he recorded the feelings of those he encountered about life after the war, making his letters a useful and interesting historical source. In the scientific community, he noted that Belgian astronomers seemed cautiously interested in reconciliation with German astronomers, while German astronomers in their turn had ‘no ill feeling against scientific men in England and are most anxious to re-establish relations with them.’ (L&N Vol. 37, pp. 334-336) Through his status as both a priest and an astronomer, Fr. Cortie was well-placed to observe the similarities and differences between the religious and scientific communities as well as their interactions. Though he often argued for a separation between ‘the methods of science’ and the ‘things of the spirit’, through his letters published in Letters and Notices it is clear that Fr. Cortie saw science and religion as important reconciliatory tools between the Allied powers and Germany, and more generally as uniting forces between people of different backgrounds.
This was a view he shared with prominent figures in both Catholic and scientific communities. In a letter included in the following volume of Letters and Notices, a delighted and reverent Fr. Cortie described two meetings with Pope Pius XI at the Vatican Observatory, during which the Pope seemed concerned about the exclusion of German astronomers from conferences, saying that ‘the stars are for everybody’ and that the exclusion was ‘not charity, not humanity, and not science’. (L&N Vol. 38, pp. 8-10) That the Pope’s view on post-war reconciliation can be gleaned from Letters and Notices is another demonstration of its value as a historical source even beyond its importance in Jesuit history.
Though Father Aloysius Cortie was a well-known figure in his time, more than a hundred years after his death I first learned of him by chance through the record of the First Inter-Colleagiate Competition in Letters and Notices. By using the newsletters to trace Fr. Cortie’s life from his days as a talented schoolboy to the legacy he left in the Stonyhurst College, Jesuit and astronomical communities, I have learnt for myself how invaluable they are as a resource for biographical and historical research. As a priest, a scientist, and a frequent world traveller, there is a strong potential for Fr. Cortie’s life and writings to be used for further research into any number of the communities he belonged to or came into contact with, but he also merits research as an individual, a man of many interests and talents, remembered amongst his contemporaries as a promoter of science, faith, and unity.