Polish priest-cosmologist wins prestigious Templeton Prize

Published: 2008-03-12

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- Father Michal Heller, 72, a Polish priest-cosmologist and a onetime associate of Archbishop Karol Wojtyla, the future pope, was named March 12 as the winner of the Templeton Prize. The prize, the world's largest annual monetary award given to an individual, is worth 820,000 pounds sterling (US$1.65 million). The award is given for progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities. Father Heller, a philosophy professor at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Krakow, Poland, was honored for 40-plus years of work developing "sharply focused and strikingly original concepts on the origin and cause of the universe," according to the announcement on the prize. The priest, who for much of his life worked under the strictures of communism, is an international figure among cosmologists and physicists. He has written more than 30 books and nearly 400 papers on such topics as the unification of general relativity and quantum mechanics. But he also has, through a "theology of science," placed the Christian view of the universe "within a broader cosmological context."

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