The uses to which the motif ends up being put, though, are less flattering than they probably sound at first scan. I reached out to Consolmagno about the return of The Sparrow but caught him as he was about to start a silent retreat. When we spoke earlier this year, though, about his work at the Observatory, he took a dim view of the micro-genre sometimes labeled “Jesuits in Space.”

“An awful lot of it,” he said then, “is that those stories are written by people who don’t have intimate knowledge of scientists in general, and certainly not of Jesuits.” Without my having to name titles, he criticized the classics. “The Arthur Clarke story, ‘The Star,’ you just scratch your head and go, ‘What is he thinking of?’ You look at A Case of Conscience and [its] theology isn’t only bad theology, it’s not Jesuit theology.”

“The Sparrow,” he added, “drives me nuts.”

The Church is hardly a monolith; these works also have Catholic fans. Still, the stories could reasonably drive a Jesuit scientist nuts. Take The Sparrow. It follows Father Emilio Sandoz, S.J., riding an asteroid toward a world first noticed from Earth because of its beautiful, musical broadcasts. For Sandoz, the discovery suggests a divine hand at work. His superiors agree. The Father General asks his secretary, “Have you noticed, Peter, that all the music that sounds most similar to the extraterrestrial music is sacred in nature?”

But Russell seems less optimistic. Chapters jump between the mission and its aftermath, which leaves Sandoz with flayed hands, scurvy, and a crisis of faith. He’s maimed and abused by the creatures he traveled to meet. Their songs are acoustic pornography, graphic ballads about sex and sexual assault; Sandoz, to his horror, ends up featuring in some of them. Ranting about the improbable chain of events that led him to that point, he fumes, “It was either blind, dumb, stupid luck from start to finish, in which case, we are all in the wrong business, gentlemen, or it was a God I cannot worship.”

The narrator of Clarke’s “The Star,” which won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1956, fares better. He doesn’t fare well. His discovery is a race wiped out by a supernova, seen from Earth as a star over Bethlehem. The black irony is a bit much for the Jesuit astrophysicist: “There comes a point when even the deepest faith must falter, and now, as I look at the calculations lying before me, I know I have reached that point at last.”

Of the three works, A Case of Conscience might be the most theologically grim. James Blish’s 1958 Hugo-Award-winning novel takes place on a paradise planet, Lithia, inhabited by a species unfamiliar with either evil or religion. In fact, to the Jesuit biologist Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, the entire world seems carefully constructed to put the lie to the Catholic tradition. On Lithia, good exists without any trace of God. On Lithia, alien reproductive cycles recreate macroevolution in miniature. Blish frames the experience as a sharp challenge to Ruiz-Sanchez’s faith. “The whole of Lithia,” he thinks, “and in particular the whole of the dominant, rational, entirely admirable race of Lithians, had been created by Evil, out of Its need to confront men with a new, specifically intellectual seduction.”