God gave me the gift of faith. I don't mean that in any miraculous sense, I mean through the parents who educated me, through the brothers and sisters I grew up with, the schools I went to, there was this influence upon me which was the faith, in the concrete. I accepted it, I questioned it, I grew up with it, and in the end, as a mature adult, I continue to accept it.

I hope I'm not giving the impression of an ivory tower science, but for me science is an attempt to understand, it's an attempt to understand the universe.

I think today the church faces a very real challenge in not repeating the errors of the past, in sort of a stand off, a fear of science.

However the great successes of science - Galileo's telescopic observations, Newton's law of gravity, etc - all of this great success caused people to sort of say, what if we could establish religion on that same successful basis? What if we could have a good rational foundation for religious belief. What if religion could be sort of like science. Of course, that can't be.

The Copernican revolution was actually a contribution to the life of the church, the development of our view of ourselves in terms of the Universe, and therefore our view of God, et cetera. But, that took centuries, and struggles, and conflicts before that happened.

Nothing we learn about the universe threatens our faith. It only enriches it.

As a religious priest I find it a very enriching experience to do my scientific research.