By Hilary White

ROME, August 25, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Vatican has appointed a Jesuit priest to head the Vatican Observatory, Argentine Fr. Jose Funes. The appointment follows the retirement of Fr. George Coyne, another Jesuit astronomer who had vehemently opposed the Catholic Church's stand on materialist Darwinism.

Father Funes, speaking to Catholic News Service, the official news outlet of the US Bishops Conference, denied that Fr. Coyne had been removed by the Vatican for his opposition to Catholic teaching. Funes put the change down to personnel changes being made by Pope Benedict XVI, a pope widely considered to be re-shuffling his staff and Papal Curia in keeping with a more conservative approach to Church governance.

Funes declined to speculate on why Fr. Coyne had been removed from his position at the Vatican Observatory where he had served throughout the duration of the papacy of the late John Paul II.

He did say however, that he would be restricting his own work to his field of expertise, which is disk galaxies and had no plans to make any statements on biology or Darwinian theory.