The Pope's Astrologer

In 1628, Pope Urban VIII sealed himself in a Vatican chamber with a Dominican friar to perform a ritual of astral magic. Three years later, he issued the harshest papal condemnation of astrology in Church history.

This is not a contradiction. This is the story almost no one has been told.

For more than a thousand years, the Catholic Church did not merely tolerate astrology-it used it.

Popes consulted astrologers for the timing of coronations. Cardinals published horoscopes. Universities paid professors to teach it. The Vatican itself commissioned the astronomical work that produced the Gregorian calendar we still use today. The heavens were God's creatures, and reading them was not heresy-it was science.

So what changed?

The Pope's Astrologer uncovers this forgotten tradition for the first time. Drawing on manuscript culture, university teaching, papal court records, and the eventual crackdown that sought to erase it, Ken Saunders traces how astrology moved from accepted intellectual discipline to forbidden art-and why it endured long after its official condemnation.

Inside you'll discover:

• Why the Magi following a star is the key to understanding everything that came after
• The crucial distinction Augustine and Aquinas drew-and the Church still holds today
• How medieval universities taught astrology alongside medicine and theology
• The cardinal-astrologers and pope-clients of the Renaissance
• The political crisis that triggered the crackdowns of 1586 and 1631
• The murdered abbot whose horoscope predicted the Pope's death
• Why the Jesuits became the Church's astronomers-and what that preserved
• What the 1992 Catechism actually condemns, and what it doesn't

A major work of historical synthesis. The first book of its kind.